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May 1, 2020

IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!

So ends another week or should I say another month and I hope everyone is weathering the storm. Things are pretty much like they were last week. I sure miss my aerobics classes and seeing all my friends.

To get away from all the boredom, Leslie and Jay drove down to see us on Sunday and stayed for dinner. They drove down in their new truck to pick up the freezer that we have no use for. Leslie has been working from home so she has had time to get a lot of projects done. She redid her guest bathroom and has been enjoying working from home. When this whole thing is finally over, it's going to be tough for her to go back to working in the office again.

Anna and Rigo have been down most of the week. He is painting the steamboat as well as working on a couple of cars that he brought down here. He is trying to exchange parts from one car to the other and essentially make one good car out of two bad ones. He is a pretty good mechanic, so he does know what he is doing but he has been having a heck of a time taking everything apart. We had to laugh when Rigo showed us what a portable chair looks like in Cuba. Surprisingly, it works pretty well, although I think it would be uncomfortable dragging a 4x4 around on your behind all day. Luis was down over the weekend and painted the floor in the upstairs of the church and did a couple of other things on our "to-do" list around here.

Anna made us a "Cuban" meal the other night with rice and beans, cooked yucca and a tomato, cucumber and onion salad. It was really good and Rigo was very happy because he is Cuban and misses his rice and beans every day. I try to fix them but it is not the same. He does not speak English so I am picking up a lot of Spanish words. I don't think I could ever carry on a conversation but with the use of the iPhone translator app we manage to understand each other.

I saw my first real yellow Goldfinch of the year yesterday. We have had Finches, but it's been too early for them to turn yellow or gold until now. They are probably my favorite backyard bird - those and the Chickadees. It's always a treat when they come back and I really love to see them around here.

I am still suffering from sciatica and so haven't felt like doing much outside. I got a few more annuals at the store and got them planted, but it is still much too cold to plant my vegetable garden. I still want to get my plot in the community garden planted, but the park has been closed because of CoVid19. Hopefully the city will let us in there to do some gardening before very long.

Speaking of the city, I made a call to the City Manager yesterday to see what it would take to make my plan for the church (I talked about it in last week's Journal) actually happen. It turns out that what I had been told about not being able to have a second dwelling on a single lot wasn't true and that it would be okay to construct a "mother-in-law" apartment in that space. That's just what I have drawn out, so I guess I'm one step closer to making it happen. It's going to be very expensive to do, so we may have to wait until we save up a few more pennies before we can actually get serious about the idea. Meanwhile, Luis took my drawing - made a few changes to it - and laid it all out in blue tape on the floor. That's the bathroom on the far side; the kitchen on the near side and the double line in front represents where the wall we're looking through will be moved. It gives me a lot clearer picture about what it would look like and what problems we may encounter.

Let's see, there isn't much else going on until they lift the "stay at home" order and this darn "mask-wearing" mandate.