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Ensie has been working from the van in the back yard recently. It is about 200 feet from the house. Except for one weekend in November shortly after we got it, this is the first time it has all water systems working: (Hot & Cold) Kitchen & bath sink, toilet, shower, outside nozzle. It’s hooked up to regular house power from a nearby barn. The cell booster works now. We get an irregular 0.5-1 mbps without the booster, and 8 with.

We are planning to camp a few nights in it soon – maybe this weekend – right where it sits. Incidentally, we are expecting about an inch of snow Saturday night into Sunday morning.

I hope you all are staying safe!

There have been some technical problems with the blog including the comments section. Comments weren’t being saved for some reason. I think I have it fixed, but please let me know if you have problems leaving comments, or with anything else on the blog. (Thanks Phyllis!)

This guy was hard to photograph because he was one of a pair of fighting males who wouldn’t spend more than 5 seconds in any one location.

We live on 10 acres in a rural area. We can go for a half mile walk to the end of our property and back, and stretch it out to a mile or more by walking on some of our trails. My son and daughter-in-law also live in a rural area and have neighbors more distant than ours. My daughter and her fiancé live in an apartment with a room mate, and they are in a common area just outside their door. The degree and method by which we isolate varies greatly.

One seemingly nice thing about living in an urban area like my daughter is that you can have fresh things and delivered same or next day. Unfortunately, many deliveries come to her apartment complex’s unstaffed common area in a different building, and one must go through many parcels to find your own. Not so nice.

We get our fresh produce now from Walmart, where I can order online and drive there – a 20ish mile round trip where I see rivers, cliffs, eagles, deer and turkeys on a regular basis. We stay in the vehicle and pop the back hatch. The food is loaded and we push the button to close the hatch. When we get home, I throw out some of the outer packaging and wipe a few things that either were likely handled and/or will be handled a lot during use before bringing stuff inside. I do the same for any deliveries.

My son and daughter-in-law work for a school district, as a network technician and a teacher respectively. Teaching is now done from teacher’s home to student’s home by some convoluted system that seems to concentrate more on assuring standardization over quality of curriculum. My son can not work from home, so he goes in to the school district every day. He is the only one in our family who still does this. And one of his tasks is to repair Chromebooks brought in by the district’s students.

Ensie’s work from home essentially hasn’t changed for years, except that now she no longer tries to go to the office once a week. She has begun sewing masks in her spare time and we are sending our first batch to a Chicago police woman with whom Ensie went to college.

That’s all for now. Please share anything you like about your special routines. Stay safe out there!