Another Ten Days of Mostly at Home due to Covid 19, OCT. 4 - 13, 2020

After seven months of mostly at home, I feel like I am starting to sound like a broken record.  However, there has been some change.  Halloween decorations are starting to appear.

Our decorations are nothing so intricate.  We have a real pumpkin by the mailbox, and our neighbor Lee gave us this shirt and pumpkin head which we have hung outside our front door.

Appropriate for Halloween, on one of my walks Sunday, I came across this friendly fellow in our very suburban development, only two blocks from our home.  You can see by comparing to my boot, he was about three inches across.

On my walks, I am seeing some fall foliage - although green is still the primary color because of all the pines and junipers and other coniferous trees.

We continue to bring Paulie to the rehab program at Kaibab Veterinarians.  Here she is as the water is flowing into the enclosure with the treadmill - this was the first time without a float to hold her up as she has been doing so well. At home, she now goes up the six stairs in the front hall for meals, snacks and when I take her out for walks - one time, Patty got her up five stairs beyond that, nearly one third of the way to the second floor.

I have started volunteering at Walnut Canyon National Monument.  All staff and volunteers wear masks, and we are outside all the time where we can keep distance between us and the visitors.  For October, my schedule is Thursday afternoons (after taking Paulie to the vet in the morning) and all day Saturdays.  Part of orientation included hiking out to the historic Ranger Cabin which dates back to 1904 and is the second oldest ranger cabin in the National Park system.

At the end of the day on Saturday the 10th, another volunteer and I "swept" the Island Trail, the one with 736 stairs (counting all the down and up stairs to get down to and back up from the cliff dwellings).  Our job includes looking for graffiti, making sure all guests have departed, picking up any trash and seeing if there was any damage.  One sign was loose and appears to have had some issues with erosion in front of it.

We still are not going to restaurants, movies, shows or anything inside other than brief shopping trips and that is most often first thing in the morning when the store opens.  No travel and only limited guests for Friday Happy Hour - always outside with at most 4 or 5 people and with at least six feet between us.  The news indicates that numbers of positive cases of Covid and hospitalizations are rising in much of the USA and most of Europe - with more people having to be inside more, I suspect it will be a rough winter.