Out of the house this beautiful morning just after nine, not quite 70 degrees and mostly sunny and not humid.
Stopped at a CVS for shaving supplies and at B&N for a giant iced coffee, then off to the Riverfront Park for a walk and some time refreshing myself on my Audubon bird book and equally large and beautiful tree book.
The two trees in the subject line are the types planted along the area where I always try to park, overlooking the boat launch and the Monongahela, just downstream from the Birmingham Bridge.
Canadian Geese are all over the place and bold as you please, very slow to get out of the way of a honking car.
Robins, starlings, and various sparrows were abundant.
Yesterday there was a female turkey (not a turkey vulture – the heads and necks are markedly different) and the day before there were numerous crows or ravens, not sure which.
I’ve never seen a deer in this park – probably too hard to get to with rail lines and highways and housing and the river cutting off the park in all directions – but there was a big doe this morning right across the street from the house on Cedar, munching on a neighbor’s shrub.
Home for brunch just after noon, I made some odd hash using parboiled potatoes fried in butter, a half strip of cooked bacon broken up to bits and maybe an eighth of a cup of chopped sweet onions with a couple leftover pieces of green pepper, nuked in a bit of butter and mixed with grated parmesan into an egg scrambled with water.
Seasonings for the potato butter and onion butter were salt, black pepper, garlic powder, and paprika.
Fry the potatoes in their butter and then turn off the heat and add everything else. The heat in the pan cooks the egg as you mix everything.
I feared it might be awful but it was great.
Add half a glass of skim milk on the side to take your vitamins with and it’s maybe 350 or so calories.
Supper tonight will be leftover curry chicken and chicken wings.
They’re Chinese delivery and the menu is silent on the calorie load.
A friend with whom I keep in daily touch is fine today.
She was a friend of my late wife's pretty much all her life, and lives alone as I have done since my wife passed, a week after Valentine's Day this year, and neither of us has anyone better suited left locally to notice if we fall over and can't get up, or drop dead.
When I called her just before noon from the park she had already taken a friend for a bone marrow test at an outpatient center that was called off because of anesthesia allergy issues.
The friend is as tall as Norma, maybe 5' 9" or 5' 10", she said, and weighs 90 pounds.
It’s not anorexia, it’s that eating is immediately followed by crippling, screaming stomach pain.
The friend is in her early sixties and the test was rescheduled for a hospital where they can use different anesthesia.
I don’t recall her name as Norma rarely mentions her and we've never met during all the years my wife was alive or since.
The poor woman has been in this sort of bad way, apparently, for decades.
Compared with that – or indeed with most things – being the fatso that I have again become, hovering around a blubbery 240 – is not so bad.
But not really good, either.
At the park, pretty much nobody wore a mask at all, and of those who did just under half were using them as chin or neck ornaments.
Bicyclists, walkers, runners, it didn't matter.
Even along Carson Street on the way home pretty much no one was wearing a mask.
Masks are mandatory wherever outdoors distancing can't be maintained but there has been and is absolutely no enforcement effort, mostly because the classe politique is bitterly divided on the matter.
We Americans would be half of us killed pretty soon by a virus as contagious as Covid-19 but as deadly as Ebola.
Our economy and social order would be utterly destroyed.
Maybe I'll watch Contagion, today or tonight.
Coronavirus: Los Angeles to shut off water and power to party houses
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