Dick Tracy My Fitbit is Ringing in Everyday Ramblings

If you look carefully here, you can see a secret staircase.

Mrs. Sherlock and I walked up into the West Hills on Friday. I wanted to show her the French garden, the Castle House, and the burned house. The big burned house from the barbeque. I got kind of lost because I was blending recent trips with Charity and the walk with my student; but we figured it all out. One of the big confusing things was that the house that was burned is already being rebuilt. They took the whole roof off and the garage is down and started over. That’s what money will do for you.

There is a private road up there that someone told us a few years back it was OK to walk through, a resident on the road told us that, and it makes it easier to do a big loop. We walked that road on Friday, and we were talking about the fact that we were two non-threatening old ladies with a poodle and how if one of us were non-white this would be a problem. It made us sad.

My birthday was last month and as I mentioned I bought a new Fitbit as a gift for myself. It is an Ionic. And I like it because the GPS has built in and I don’t have to carry my phone if I don’t want so I can track my walk. But one of the other things that it does, which is very disconcerting, is that it picks up my phone calls and my texts. I get my texts on my Fitbit on my wrist.

A few times when I have been teaching on Zoom, just after class starts, my Fitbit will start vibrating and if I look discreetly, (I wear the face on the inside of my wrist) it is one of my students trying to tell me they can’t get into the class. I finally had to tell them in an email that they need to try to log on early to see if we have any problems because I can’t stop the class to get them in. But it is frustrating because of course I want them to participate in the class. It is just one of the new things to get used to… here in the modern world of the future.

Too bad the cats can’t act as assistants.

The CDC put out clearer guidelines this last week in the U.S. about who is more vulnerable for a bad outcome with Covid-19. There is a list of underlying conditions where they say you are at risk for a bad outcome and there is a list that says you might be at risk.

I have one of the “you are at risk” conditions darn it all.

This means no Farmer’s Market right now until the case counts go down again. If the case counts go down and more people get comfortable with masks I could go for tomatoes later in the summer but I may see if someone can pick up some berries for me before then. This is such a problem of privilege.

I haven’t been inside another building in a month.

Of course, the Farmer’s Market is outside, and they are metering people but still…

It is all about spending into my risk budget and this next week there is a plan to walk with both Charity and Mrs. Sherlock together to our big very popular Rose Garden. I have a hunch in two weeks after this holiday weekend here we will see the case counts climbing again and they are already at record highs.

Four months in…sigh. At least the death rates are staying steady but there is so much trouble in the mix with job loss, hunger, business failures and people needed to scramble to survive. And the demonstrations. They had to take down this big iconic statue of an elk in our core downtown area last week because the base was being weakened and the city didn’t have the resources to keep cleaning up the graffiti.

Thank goodness, here in this incredibly culpable white supremisist state, the local folks named the streets after Union Army generals. I would love to know how that decision was made.

Our Historical Society is reopening on a limited basis next week.

You would have been so proud of me yesterday; I used my stepladder with handles to get on my knees on the kitchen counter to pop out the screen on the big double-glazed kitchen window. I had this spider web driving me crazy between the window and the screen. And now both sides of the windows are clean the spider has been liberated and I have become even more aware than I was before of how stiff I am these days.

Good thing my inner pony is still extant and there is hardly anyone over on the track just after sunrise.

Last updated July 05, 2020