Life in Silly Valley

Woodblock print by ThingOne The frog arrived!  I've never seen ThingOne quite so happy. The frog is a beautiful little thing, delicate, tiny for now, about two inches across. Hard to believe he will grow into an eight inch behemoth!  But first Ziggy has to eat.  [By the way - quick pronoun clarification - we won't know for a while if Ziggy is male or female. But we're all saying 'he' for now.] We had ordered a bunch of various wriggly things with names like nightcrawlers and wax worms and black soldier fly larvae. Everything showed up in the morning via FedEx, the frog and its food, dropped at our doorstep by our incredibly grumpy FedEx delivery guy. Tall, stooped, FedEx guy has a permanent scowl no doubt protesting the ridiculous state of affairs where he has to risk his life delivering packages during a pandemic, packages that he would like to think contain essential things like medicines or PPE but he knows, he just knows, he is transporting things ...

The weeks are blurring together. If I didn't take the odd note I really couldn't remember what happened from one week to the next. This blurriness seems to add a dullness to events. Things that would have been very dramatic in pre-pandemic days - like a bomb scare - seem a bit mundane. Yep, a bomb scare. We were walking one evening along the railroad tracks that run just south of our neighbourhood when we saw flashing blue lights and several fire trucks. The trail gets pretty busy in the evenings and a police officer with a megaphone was telling everyone to turn around, the trail was closed. Later, online, we discovered that someone had found two grenades and a mortar shell while digging in a garden. Bizarrely, it turned out this was the second incident that same day, with another gardener finding a grenade a little way north up in Oakland! Later I received an alert on my phone telling me to 'shelter-in-place' while the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office bomb sq...

Some sort of malaise has definitely set in. I've seen it called quarantine fatigue - usually in the context of a headline along the lines of 'How to beat quarantine fatigue'. The concern is that people suffering from quarantine will break the stay-home orders. Data is showing that people are on the move . In the US there were 30% more trips last week even in states that had not eased up on restrictions. Rather than itching to get out and do stuff, the symptoms of quarantine fatigue in our family seem to be literally fatigue - everyone is running on empty.  So that is excuse #1 for why I haven't been writing Silly Valley. The second excuse is that I have actually been writing - just not Silly Valley. ThingTwo had a big writing assignment due May 4 - the culmination of months of learning about the American Revolution. She had to write a ~20 page four-chapter book. One chapter summarizing the war, one explaining an event of her choice in detail, one chapter was a stor...