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I Must Agree, 2020 Is The Year That Isn't.

 I know there are many, many people feeling along those lines. 

Luckily, our area has yet to experience a large spike. Even in this rural area, the virus has made it here too. As mentioned before, most of the state cases are in the heavily populated south end of the state but there is still a count of over 38,000 positive and 451-deaths in the state. 

As of this post, there has been one confirmed death of a 70-year old male, and there are currently 56-cases in this county. The most recent cases are high school sports students as schools opened on September 8th and at the last minute decided to go back to all 'in-person' classes even with all the preparations of having 'hybrid' classes of 2-days a week at school, 2-days a week online, and rotating to keep the student count down to the advised numbers to limit exposure. Our area schools are all on a 4-day week and have been for many years. 

However, with those kids, are also over 65 other students who were identified with "contact tracing" and are also home for the 14-day home quarantine period. 

It will only go up from there, it can't NOT go anywhere, BUT up! 

Unfortunately for everyone, many of the area residents will not follow the 'safe and sane' suggested things to do to help keep the virus from becoming a highly fatal area spike.  

Many get as you have probably seen on TV stories, irrationally angry about the mask thing! Those believe wearing something that potentially saves their own lives as well as others, is nothing more than "stamping on their freedoms" (Bull S***!) and trump's old "fake news." 

Stacy and I will wear ours as requested at many of our area stores and public buildings, and I actually don't care if the others choose not to. Although many do, it's just the vocal "residents" that annoy the ones that really know this is real and care to do the best to protect ourselves and the people we know. 

Many of the vocal residents are also the ones with the giant trump flags at their homes or on their vehicles. 

In the summer of 2020, no travel, just stay at home. 

We have been very lucky, workwise, as I see millions of people that have been off work and are still off work since the spring. We were off work but still paid with just going to our office and checking phones and emails a couple of times a week for two months. Then it was back to regular work and shifts since.

Because our planned vacation was canceled since the Canadian border was, and still is, closed to almost all non-essential travel and since our traveling companions, our daughter and grand-daughters were locked down in California due to the high virus rate, we worked at home for our vacation this year. It was actually a better way to spend the time since we couldn't travel. We got a lot done and were pleased with all we did. Our son and his wife had a few weeks off from his Texas job site and came up and helped us get projects done too. 

The big jobs were taking down several very tall trees on our property. We helped friends with much more 'logging' experience safely take those trees down. Three of them were well over 100-feet tall so we also got a lot of firewood from those trees for the upcoming winter. 


Above and below: The tree down and then after Stacy and I delimbed it. 



Above: The same tree all cut up into large sections to dry a while. 


Above and below: After Sean and Brandy came up from Texas they jumped in and really helped with the wood jobs. Sean riding the quad pulling the log splitter and then below, Stacy showing Sean to safely use chainsaws, an important tool when you live with a lot of trees on your property!








We also repaired some sections of damage to the parking structures. Odds and ends of jobs that while big was necessary and taking the time time to get them done was a great thing. 

Then the fires.

Actually, this had been the first time in the last 4 or 5 years that our region wasn't 'smoked out' all summer long from regional and Canadian wildfires. 

That all changed in late August and early September when the winds changed and for well over a week we got a lot of the smoke from the massive fires from California to Washington, smoke that has now circled the earth. Even now, there's still smoke in the air, just not anywhere near as bad as it was then. 


Above and below:  Not fog, thick smoke even visible just towards the front of the property and then, looking at the Sun at 11:00 am. The smoke was so thick it was easy to see the Sun without any eye protection. 


Below: Less than quarter-mile visibility the smoke was so thick, cough, cough! 
Just looking at it again makes me recall the smell.  



Until next time, Tad



 

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