Hello Spring

We've had a couple very nice spring days recently. Saturday and Sunday were glorious and I was outside the entire weekend. The sunshine really helped my mood.

Idaho currently has 1,802 confirmed cases of Covid-19. We're hanging in there, not increasing exponentially. We're still under a Stay at Home order until May 1st to slow the spread. We are expecting that things will not just go back to normal. We're going to be fighting this virus throughout this year and into the next until we have a vaccine. People are getting anxious and restless. Many people are in trouble financially.

The girls are not enjoying doing school online. It's boring and difficult to focus, and it's definitely not easier. If anything, it's more difficult. They will not be going back for the remainder of this school year. There are whisperings of universities not opening again until 2021.

It's easy to forget there is a pandemic going on when we don't live in town. We tend to be homebodies anyway, so weekends at least, are very normal for us. We're always working, working, working on the farm, and we tend to not drive into town unless we have to. The big difference for us is that we are now working from home.

We got out for our weekly hike, and this time we went to Craters of the Moon. It's closed to traffic, but you can hike four miles in on a paved road to get to the hiking trail Peanut Head picked.

We did.

Some spots were snow covered, but it was mostly passable. Not like last week.

Once we got to the trail, Baney and I said good-bye to our sweet family and hobbled back to the car.

I'm so glad I didn't go all the way with them. My portion of the hike was 8 miles and they went 13 miles. I went to bed at 8 p.m. that day.

Here's my secret to get Baney to look into the camera when I'm trying to get a selfie with him.

Here's another project I started at the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie Farm." We have wanted to do something about widening our driveway since we moved into this house because our driveway is not as wide as the garage. That means that when Peanut Head pulls in and out of his side of the garage, he has to drive on part of the lawn. The current driveway was the width of the old garage which is now our master bedroom. I think. I'm speculating, but all the clues point to that explanation. Sort of. There are a lot of things about this house that don't make any sense at all.

Peanut Head used the walking tractor to till most of the grass we need to remove, but we had to do the edges by hand. Well, with a shovel.

This picture is looking out of the garage from inside so you can really see how narrow the driveway is compared to the garage.

Peanut Head is going to level those red pavers as the new edge of the driveway, and we will fill the rest in with gravel. At some point we may cover it with asphalt or concrete, but for now we're going to do this because it's cheap and we already have the gravel.

We were also able to work in another planting area and round out the lawn with another mowing strip. I planted a rose bush for now, but I'd like to add some bulbs as well.

It's not finished, but I'm hoping it will be finished by the time I do my next post. That will depend largely on the weather. Stay tuned.