Month: April 2020

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? (April 6, 2020)

Good morning, friends – how are you holding up?  Everyone still healthy?  I hope so.  We’re hanging in there over here, doing our best.  The kids don’t really understand that they can’t just go running into the next-door neighbors’ house like they’ve been accustomed to doing.  And it’s not just them – it feels like half the neighborhood has recently discovered the bike path.  Anyway – another weekend in isolation here; I know you get it.  On Saturday we decided to have a big cleaning day – look at us go!  The house was starting to show the effects of several weeks of everyone being home 24/7.  I cleaned the downstairs bathroom and folded laundry, but my big project was the kitchen.  It got a full-on deep clean, and it is staying this way, dammit.  (A clean kitchen is essential to my well-being, and I almost never have one.)  In the afternoon, we escaped for a walk on the bike path.  Steve and I spent the walk dodging people who were not following social distancing guidelines; Peanut danced and skipped down the path, blissfully unaware of anyone else, belting out a song about nature and her “windblown and wild” hair; and Nugget followed in her footsteps, touching every stair railing and helpfully shouting out polite words like “POOP!” and “FART!”

Sunday was my big adventure day – are you ready for this?  I went to the grocery store.  And I wore a bandana face mask that I made with the help of YouTube videos.  (Still not convinced that does anything, but the CDC is now recommending that everyone wear “cloth face coverings” so I dutifully put it on.  More useful, I think: I also wore a pair of Steve’s disposable dishwashing gloves.)  Came home to find that the kids had strategically dismantled all of my hard work from Saturday.  The couch had been torn apart to make a “fort” and the kitchen was trashed… again.  So I rolled up my sleeves and cleaned it… again.  And as soon as it was sparkling, Peanut asked if we could bake a Victoria sponge.  And that’s our afternoon sorted.  As usual, the kids “helped” for a few minutes and then disappeared, leaving me to finish the baking project on my own; Steve was trying to work, and getting frustrated by the interruptions, so we ended up on the back patio, the kids digging in the sandbox and me sipping tea and attempting to read while listening to my stand mixer attempt to make whipped cream out of whole milk and yogurt (fail) and we ultimately ended up with something resembling a Victoria sponge.  I cut slices for the kids, waited until they weren’t looking, and passed half the cake over the back fence to our neighbor Robert (who deserves all the cake, because he is the person responsible for bringing our beloved Zoya into our lives).  Ended the weekend in our favorite way – FaceTiming with loved ones (first Grandma, and then Uncle Dan and Aunt Danielle immediately after).  And that, my friends, is a long writeup of a weekend in which we really did very little, so please accept my apologies.

Reading.  Pretty busy reading week around here.  I continue to surprise myself, because I’ve lost my commute reading time and am terribly distracted in the evenings, but still seem to knock out several books per week.  Not sure how that’s happening, but I’m not mad about it.  Over the early part of the week I blitzed through Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – my first Elizabeth Taylor (the Important British Writer one, not the Hollywood Starlet one) then picked up Heidi, a childhood favorite I’d never revisited as an adult.  It was as cozy as I remembered, and as fresh as the Alpine air.  I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Switzerland after finishing Heidi, so I stayed there a bit longer through the Switzerland issue of Lodestars Anthology.  (The travel cravings are strong.)  Finally, I spent the weekend in Elizabeth von Arnim’s German garden – re-reading Elizabeth and Her German Garden on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, then turning to The Solitary Summer on Sunday night.  Whew!

Watching.  A bit of this, a bit of that!  A little Star Wars here and there – Nugget was watching the original trilogy over the weekend and I tuned in for some of my favorite, Return of the Jedi.  On Saturday evening, Steve and I were craving nature, so we fired up the Rock the Park episode about the San Juan Islands – ugh, I miss the Salish Sea so much!  And we finished off the weekend on Sunday night with the first episode of season three of The Crown.

Listening.  Podcasts, just podcasts.  Some good escapist listening with The 46 of 46 Podcast – an hour and a half of geeking out about hiking gear.  (I want snowshoes!)  And for company on my runs, an episode of The Vegetarian Zen Podcast about healthy coping strategies in uncertain times (so needed) and The Crunchy Cocktail Hour about greening your bathroom products.

Moving.  Bringing back this category, because one of those healthy coping strategies I’ve been putting into place – and one that I hope to stick with after things go back to “normal” is making sure that I get my time for movement.  I made it out for three runs and several walks last week, and hit up two online barre3 classes.  Felt good to take that time for myself.

Making.  Lots of home cooking again this week.  In addition to regular food prep tasks, I served up an elaborate dinner of vegan sausages, sauteed cabbage, and mashed potatoes.  Yum.  And of course there was the Victoria sponge on Sunday, which came out pretty well if not perfect.  (In place of the whipped cream, I used clotted cream and it worked out fairly well.)

Blogging.  Bookish week coming for you – my March reading round-up on Wednesday (buckle in, it’s a long one) and then another Poetry Friday post on Friday.  Check in with me then!

Loving.  Another baby is in the world!  My friend Connie welcomed her little guy over the weekend.  He’s adorable and I am hating this pandemic even more, because I so want to go over to her house and cuddle him.  I’m settling for pictures for now.

Asking.  What are you reading this week?

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Poetry Friday: now(more near ourselves than we), by e.e. cummings

now(more near ourselves than we)
is a bird singing in a tree,
who never sings the same thing twice
and still that singing’s always his

eyes can feel but ears may see
there never lived a gayer he;
if earth and sky should break in two
he’d make them one(his song’s so true)

who sings for us for you for me
for each leaf newer than can be:
and for his own(his love)his dear
he sings till everywhere is here

~e.e. cummings

Happy National Poetry Month, friends!  We can use poetry now more than ever, in these weird and scary times, in which earth and sky are breaking in two and we are certainly more near ourselves than we.  I hope that you are finding joy wherever you are, and that you can hear a bird singing till everywhere is here.

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Bluebells on a Battlefield

While we are all holed up at home, spring is springing all over the place!  It’s been raining and gloomy here for most of the past couple of weeks, which has made the social distancing harder to handle – especially with two energetic kids in the house.  By Sunday we all had energy to burn, and even after last week’s crowded trails, we wanted to try hiking again.  I had some good intelligence that the famous Virginia bluebells were blooming, so we decided to check them out.

We normally hike the Bluebell Loop Trail at Bull Run Regional Park.  This year, with the pandemic raging, the park is open for “passive use” only – which means hiking YES, but parking NO.  The parking lots at Bull Run Regional Park were closed, and while parking outside park boundaries and hiking in to the Bluebell Loop Trail is perfectly fine, that would add 2.5 miles each way to our hike – just from the car to the trailhead and back.  Fine for adults-only parties, but when you have two little hikers, you have to maximize every step.  Bull Run Regional Park’s social media team was suggesting other options to folks who didn’t want to park more than two miles from the trailhead, so we decided to try one of the alternatives – Manassas National Battlefield Park.

Civil War buffs, this is the famous Bull Run battlefield.  Steve and I hiked the battlefield itself years ago – pre-small hikers – but had never been to this part of the park.  We made for the Stone Bridge parking area, lured by the promise of bluebells growing on the banks of the legendary Bull Run.

Crossed the bridge over Bull Run and saw…

That famous blue glory all over the forest floor!

We were a bit early – it’s always tough to time peak bloom for any flower show, especially when it’s not a flower that grows in the neighborhood (and can be monitored accordingly).  Local friends – if you want to hit the trail later this week or this coming weekend, I think you’ll be in for a good show.  As for us –

We had plenty of visual treats to enjoy!

The trail was a bit damp, but not too muddy.  Peanut made the best shoe choice, wearing her wellies.  Nugget decided on his Keen hiking boots, which worked well, but didn’t allow for puddle-stomping.

The wildflowers were growing all over the opposite bank of Bull Run, too.

We were careful to take precautions on the trail – we left as early as possible to avoid crowds (even so, there were definitely folks on the trail) and were cautious about touching anything.  We also leapt off the trail to give people distance, and most reciprocated by kindly and responsibly walking all the way on the other side of the wide trail, at least six feet away from us.  With the exception of two women who thoughtlessly breezed down the middle of the trail despite our attempting to give them plenty of space, everyone was responsible and considerate about personal distance.

I wait all year for this fabulous floral spectacle, and it definitely didn’t disappoint.  It was a lot of fun to check out a different spot – while I missed our usual stomp along the Bluebell Loop Trail, mixing it up is good, too.  And there’s a lot to explore out Manassas way – we really should make a point of getting here more often, and checking out some different scenery.

This weekly trail time is keeping my sanity intact – barely!  Missing our annual bluebell hike was unthinkable, so I’m glad we were able to take some precautions and make it happen.

What are your local spring spectacles?