Shelter-in-Place Day 17

I spent a good part of today trying to clean up the dumping ground that was the area just outside our back window, along the house in the back yard. We'd gone through the rice straw bale we use as bedding for the chickens, as well as the pressed wood logs we use for the fireplace when we don't have enough of the hard oak cut. So a trip to Rivertown for both things was my essential outing for the day (as well as a walk with the dog).

I also managed to check both bee hives, briefly, and replace a splitting super for the Mountain colony, which appears to be doing beautifully. The Shakespeare hive is still huge and still busy, but I'm concerned by the large number of bees they're pulling out each morning, dead, and by the even larger number of bees I see walking on the ground near the hive. I can't see that they have deformed wings or mites, so maybe pesticide, or something else? Some do seem to fly after walking around quite a bit. The colony has always had a strong hygienic habits, so I suppose it could be something else going on with the newest bees. Just not sure.

After the hive inspections, determined to find a better way to store the rice straw bale than up against the house for mice to tunnel under, I thought of setting it up on top of something. A simple enough idea, but to make it work and clean up all the unnecessary clutter took hours, for some reason. I moved make-shift nesting boxes created with old dresser drawers, but now abandoned by the hens. I moved buckets of sand and BBQ briquettes and wood that still needs to be split and dilapidated seed starting trays, and it only now occurs to me as I write this that only the nesting boxes were my idea. The rest was, as it were, imposed on me by the erstwhile projects of other family members. If that sounded bitter, it was only a tiny bit so. There are moments, especially during this shelter-in-place, when I feel as though I do nothing but clean up after everyone else. Which is ridiculous to admit because meanwhile, people are dying and losing their jobs, and my family members do help me, sometimes, and oh, yeah, again: people are dying.

The number of diagnosed cases world-wide, or at least admitted (because who knows how many really died in China), has exceeded one million. And Dr. Anthony Fauci has had to have increased personal security because of death threats from conspiracy theorists. I think Fauci (head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) knows his stuff and has helped save countless lives with his ability to stand firm and tell the truth while the person next to him at the podium vacillates between one ego-driven declaration and another. [Insert deep breath here, to avoid expressing my real - heated - opinion of said person.]

The day ended with D. and I watching an episode of MST3000 together, although I fell asleep before it finished, having had too much red wine and too much sugar during a zoom celebration of a friend's birthday. Is seeing the faces of my girlfriends on a screen instead of around a table in person the new normal? Some think so.