Earth Day ramblings

In the midst of all the bad news right now, I find comfort in the fact that all over the Earth, air pollution and carbon emissions are the lowest they've been in decades. To see stunning side by side photographs of the skyline of major cities around the world pre- and during the Covid 19 pandemic check out this link. If only people could learn from this and modify their behavior upon the return to "normal" life! I don't have much faith in that, though. People never do seem to learn, do they?

Our state Governor McMaster announced today that schools will be closed for the remainder of the school year. I'm not surprised, and it's the right decision to make. I expected to feel sad about it, but I've already felt that way in the last few weeks and have mostly gotten over it. Hopefully things will be safer in late July when teachers and staff are set to go back and begin a new school year. If someone had told me at the beginning of the year that I wouldn't work for over 4 months, I wouldn't have been able to imagine why (short of getting fired or something). I'm thankful to still have my regular salary coming to me. I'm also thrilled to say that our Superintendent pushed a vote through the school board to give every single employee in our district a $1000 bonus at the end of this month! That was a nice surprise and will certainly come in handy! Gregg isn't working much at all and we're still waiting on our $2400 stimulus payment to come through.

A few more odds and ends to finish off this post.

I went to the grocery store last night on one of my infrequent trips, and since I've started wearing a mask, I thought I ought to take a selfie of it for the archives:

While shopping a few minutes later, I saw toilet paper for the first time in 6 weeks!!! Score!

The only reason I found toilet paper was I hit the timing perfectly: a truck had just arrived and it was getting put out when I walked past the aisle. I'm sure the small shipment of it that they got was sold out within 20 minutes!

The week after Easter, I had a leftover ham bone with a lot of meat left on it. I decided to make ham and vegetable soup in the crock pot for freezing in meal sized portions.

I felt like I deserved a damn Housewife of the Year award when the last of that deliciousness was sealed away in Tupperware and frozen. My husband was thrilled with me for being so frugal--not only did I use the leftover hambone, but I had a half a bag of frozen mixed vegetables taking up space in the freezer and several cans of plum tomatoes sitting in the back of the pantry, too, so no additional money had to be spent. Now we have three nice suppers in the freezer made entirely of leftovers! I've been doing so much cooking from scratch lately that all the quick, convenience, and junk food on offer at the grocery store yesterday didn't look appealing at all. Homemade is so much better, and cheaper, and in a lot of cases it's probably healthier too (although granted I've gone through quite a bit of real butter lately).

We're hoping to learn to live with less waste than we have in the past after the danger from this virus is over, more frugally, and with less excess. I truly want to make this time mean something in my life going forward and I'd like to do better in a lot of ways. More about this later.

And one last thing that I should mention, as it's Earth Day plus all over the world the skies are clearer than usual: tonight the Lyrid meteor shower peaks! The best viewing is always predawn, but even if you don't get up early, all night long you're real likely to see shooting stars if you'll only look. Think of all the wishes you can make!

Have a good night, my friends.