11 May 2020 Monday. I, at last, got to sleep around 3:00 AM this morning. I stayed up until about 1:00 AM finishing up my blog for last week. After that I took a shower and toddled off to bed to toss and turn for an eternity. It was raining when I went to sleep and I woke up to continuing rain. Rain was a good thing today. The house work has been neglected because of all the work to be done outside. I know it isn’t my place to do so but I am worried about the American Economy. It is truly keeping me awake nights. I am afraid that this Corroded Virus shut down is destroying tens of thousands of small businesses permanently. These are businesses with very little operating capital and that will not come back ever. We are ripping the guts out of our country for no good reason. Yeah, people are dying. The problem is that in the U.S. over 500 people die everyday from all sorts of ailments or accidents. If you subtract that 500 from the current reported death rate and the C-Virus death rate goes down substantially. It is an absolute fact that many of those deaths are being attributed to the Corroded Virus rather than the true cause. At this point, we do not know how many people are, actually, dying from the virus. The truth is that most, if not all, of the viral related deaths can be attributed to serious underlying problems exacerbated by the virus. Many of these people that were already in the queue for assuming room temperature. That may seem insensitive, but at 75 years of age with high blood pressure, I am in that queue. You can argue that people without underlying health issues are dying and you could possibly be correct. Or it might be that these, apparently, healthy people had some undiagnosed ailment that was exacerbated by the virus. Hospitals are being paid substantially more for a virus death than a ‘natural causes’ death. This could be an incentive to label every death as C-Virus deaths. This would push the death rate far above the actual death rate. We may have “flattened the curve” by flat lining the economy. If we wait much longer the ability to resuscitate the economy is likely to have passed. Okay, I climbing down from my ‘soap box’.

Back to the house work being neglected. I am a clean freak and this current situation is driving me crazy. The house is and has been under construction. We are congregants at the Church of Our Lady of Constant Construction. Therefore, cleaning floors means cleaning the sub-floor. We’ve been waiting over a month for the hardwood flooring that we’ve ordered. Add to that when we do get the flooring, it will still have to be held in the house for several weeks to acclimate it to the environment. The walls cannot be cleaned as there is no covering on the walls. Only wall covering is the insulation stapled between the studs. The wall can’t be covered as the house is not yet level. Therefore, the cleaning consists of sweeping and vacuuming the floors, cleaning the temporary kitchen counters and loading the dishwasher. Of course, bathrooms have to be cleaned. Commodes, sinks and tubs are a dirty job but somebody has to do it. The entire process of cleaning the parts of the house that can be cleaned takes only a couple of hours. I didn’t have anything to do after completing these chores so I dragged them out a bit. The only other project for the day is taking out of the house stuff that we have brought in for temporary use and never removed when the need was over.

12 May 2020 Tuesday Today we almost finished the little half hoop house at the end of the big tent. We had driven in the metal rods into the ground on Sunday then Summer had to work on Monday and then it rained all day. This put us a day behind on the project. To further delay the project, today Summer had some town chores to do and I got the call that the dump truck was repaired and ready to go. Summer dropped me off and I got the dump truck and went next door to the materials yard and purchased 4 yards of top soil for Summer’s garden projects. Summer and I arrived home at about the same time. I backed the truck down as near as possible to the greenhouse and dumped the dirt. When we saw what landed on the ground we were a bit upset. There were huge hard clumps of dirt and very little usable loose dirt. A quick call to the materials yard got an explanation. These chunks were simply frozen chunks of the top soil. The little bit of moisture had caused it to freeze solid. We had a good laugh as it simply didn’t occur to us that these offending chunks were just frozen dirt. After that I started up the tractor (newly repaired) and dumped a bunch of the new dirt into the hoop house. We started our work day at about 10:00 AM and I quit at just after 8:00 PM. Summer had quit a little earlier to move her plants back inside and to prepare supper. As for the hoop house it is like my old friend, Bobby Cecil, used to say “All we lack is finishing.” What I lack is framing in the door and close up the door side of he hoop house. It’ll probably take me about and hour to finish it up.

I have to tell you that I’m scared silly. Not but the prospect of contracting the Corroded Virus but by the willful destruction of the American economy. I am appalled by the lack of backbone of the American citizens. We are cowering in our homes whilst the government, mostly Leftist Blue States, are crashing the economy. When I say we, I don’t mean me or Summer, I me all of you out there. The simple truths about the C-19 virus is that there is no cure, not likely to ever be a cure and it will only go away after just about everyone has had a bout of it. If you know these simple truths, why are you cowering in your home and accepting Dr Fauci’s gloom and doom predictions. Who runs this country? Do we run this country or do a bunch of unelected bureaucrats run it? I just read today that Los Angeles County has closed down until August. There will be no businesses to reopen by August. Even in Georgia, Florida and here in Alaska the government has been ignoring the three simple facts. The net result they have all but destroyed their economies even though they are ‘reopening”. If there is no cure, likely never going to be a cure and everyone is going to get it eventually, WHY ARE WE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY? While I will vote for President Trump in November, I am truly pissed off at him. He is allowing this Dr. Fauci character, a Lib/Prog/Democrat, to dictate the destruction of the American economy and the lives of millions of Americans. If we completely opened up the country it is likely that thousands of old farts like myself with some underlying health problem, for me high blood pressure, will be dying like flies. OR MAYBE NOT. There is no other option except to open the country. Even if some percentage of the elderly population is going to become very ill (including myself) and some of them will die there is simply no way we can continue on this crazy shutdown. Okay, I’m crawling down off my soap box yet again.

While were we working on the hoop house, a cow moose walked across the yard barely 50 feet from where we stood. The cow seemed to be disinterested and not bothered by the racket we were making in the construction process. She was big and bloated which is to say that she was very pregnant and likely due at any time. She wandered on down the hill and out of sight. After she was gone, Summer let the dogs out. Taco, the Chihuahua with a big dog attitude, climbed upon a dirt pile and was looking down the hill. I guess he could see where the cow bedded down. He made no effort to go down the hill to chase the moose. About two years ago, he learned a valuable lesson. A cow with two calves walked through the yard and he took up the chase. The cow and the calves ran for maybe fifty feet and then the cow turned around and began chasing Taco. In a full speed, all out retreat he was barely able to stay ahead of the cow. That day he learned a valuable lesson without paying any significant price. I wish that I had been so lucky to learn valuable lessons without having to suffer the price. Almost every lesson I’ve learned has had some price to be paid. Some of them had prices far steeper than I ever expected.

Tomorrow Summer has to go to work tomorrow and I’ll go get another load dirt. I’m looking forward to another day of progress on the homestead. See Ya.