Here in Wisconsin, visits to state parks and forests have increased significantly since last March. It wasn't all good, as the DNR had to briefly close some facilities due to people leaving their trash around. Come on people! Still, my hope is there will be a renewed (and sustained) interest in getting back to nature. Every January several of our friends get together and have a "Living Room Adventure," where we show pictures and talk about the places we visited the past year. Due to Covid, it was done via Zoom last month. Normally these annual get togethers center around far away places some of us have visited. This year the theme was overwhelmingly centered on places closer to home...in some cases our back yard or local woods. I see this as a positive. :)

I thought I would update. My brother in law is finally out of the hospital and doing quite a bit better. His oxygen numbers are more normal. He has more strength. He lost quite a bit of weight. We are so thankful and happy. My sister is positive too and was finally able to get some medication that is helping her. She has not been in the hospital. Hopefully she will be able to handle it at home. One of my high school classmates was in the same hospital as my brother in law. Unfortunately he didn't make it. He passed away a couple of days ago. He was a very nice guy, extremely giving, always willing to help anyone. We were good friends, we both lived out in the country near each other and we rode the same schoolbus for years. So unfortunate. He had made it through heart surgery a few years ago and he was doing great. I feel bad for his family.

Larry, You're welcome. I have cured it, and it didn't mold in the cracks, but you'll have to watch for that because the mold could happen. We're usually very hot and very dry when it is squash-curing time here and have low dewpoints, so I can get away with curing cracked squash, but you have more rain, more humidity and higher dewpoints there most of the time than I have here, so you might have mold happen. This week we don't have the moisture but we have the high dewpoints and the high heat indices that go with them, but I don't have anything drying or curing so I guess it doesn't affect me. I've store an excess crop of winter squash in the garage and it has kept out there for up to 18 months without spoiling. Most years I just lined them up on top of boards laid on the floor (to allow for a little air flow around the bottoms of the squash) but one year I put them on shelves and they were fine. Our garage is detached from the house and not heated, but it is very well insulated. The squash survived outdoor temperatures of around 15-18 degrees but it probably was a bit warmer than that inside the building. Other years I've stored them in a single layer in shallow boxes underneath the beds in the spare bedrooms or on my light shelf (minus the use of the lights since I wasn't starting seeds) in the spare room. Or, some years I've stored some of them on the floor along the back wall of the walk-in pantry. You can put them anywhere like that as long as you don't have rodents that might chew on them. Your mind is not feeble and I'm sure you're thinking of Dana, who lives in or near Harrah or at least she did back then. I don't know if she still is gardening but you might search for her on FB under Dana Pattison Garcia or Dana Garcia and see if she still has a FB account. The pumpkins she gave you sound a lot like George's Old Timey Cornfield Pumpkin or maybe Long Island Cheese Pumpkin, both of which are C. moschata types that produce large fruit and are highly productive. Kim, I never have, but know that you can make jelly out of virtually anything that qualifies as edible fruit (including turk's cap and roselle, which itself is made from the flower calyces) as long as you have pectin and sugar. In our climate turk's cap ily plants can bloom on and off all summer, so I assume a person would have to collect and freeze the fruit all along until they had enough for a batch. Texas Jelly Making undoubtedly has a recipe for just such a product and I'll find it and link it here. Turk's Cap Jelly Nancy, I'd love to have a weed torch, but our grassland area we live in is perpetually too hot, too dry and has a tendency to burn any time any one gets near it with flame and we spend far too much time at grass fires without me being out there accidentally setting the grass or mulch on fire with a weed torch, so I'm never going to have one. I think they're a great tool in the right setting though. Heat and butterflies were all we had going for us yesterday too, and it was excessive heat at that, making it a long, hot, horrible miserable day. Today will be the same. Jennifer, I'm sorry work is so demanding. It is hard enough in general to work with children and now y'all are doing it with all the added demands made necessary by Covid-19. Hang in there. I had a salt lamp and threw it away after reading about dogs and cats licking them to get the salt and then becoming ill and even dying of salt poisoning. That made me paranoid, even though I'd never seen our dogs or cats near the salt lamp, so I just got rid of it. I'm not indoors with them all the time so it could have happened and I would have been so upset if it did. Everything about weddings, including the showers, are such big productions nowadays. I was so happy that Jana and Chris didn't want all of that, but I am sure that if it had been their choice, we'd have helped the two of them pay for everything (because her family lacks the means to fund a big wedding or even a shower). They 'eloped' to the courthouse with just Tim and I and the girls and it was fairly casual, very relaxed and just perfect for them, and then we celebrating by going to one of their favorite Mexican restaurants (a little hole in the wall type place I'd never even heard of, but the food was great). I loved how low-key and relaxed it was. My sister's stepdaughter just got married in a big outdoor wedding at a winery in Texas on the first weekend in August and it was a gorgeous wedding, but we didn't go (we watched it on FB Live) because it occurred during the big summer virus resurgence in TX. I hated missing it, but we have avoided crowds all year and will continue to do so until the worst of the Covid-19 crap is over. In a sense, I understand what the wedding venue woman is worried about. I recently read about a wedding in the northeast that the same occurred the very same weekend as my sister's stepdaughter's wedding, and from that northeastern wedding (must have been an indoors wedding/reception because I don't remember reading it was outdoors) about 18 people who attended that wedding almost immediately came down with Covid-19 and spread it to others, so the "effect" of that event was 55 new cases of Covid-19, at least some of which resulted in hospitalization. I haven't heard of any similar thing happen wingith Maddie's recent outdoors wedding in Texas, thankfully, so I'm not saying it will happen to y'all either....just that it happened to the people at that one wedding, and surely that news and other similar news like it makes other wedding venue operators extremely nervous and worried about their legal liability. However, if she isn't willing to let y'all fully use the facilities, she ought to refund every penny and let y'all cancel. I believe the virus is very real (almost 25 million cases worldwide and around 880,000 or so deaths, and that is not fake) but is being exploited by various political groups for their own purposes, especially here in the USA, and I try hard to ignore the politics of it all and just focus on what the researchers are learning about the virus, how it spreads and how it affects people. We know it kills some people, and not just old sick ones---every now and then you read about a young person in so-called perfect health dying from it. We know it is leaving a certain percentage of people who had it with long-term, debilitating side effects similar to chronic fatigue syndrome or Lyme's disease that could affect them for the rest of their lives, and some people have had to have lung transplants and organ transplants after the virus damaged them so badly that they couldn't function. Some have lost limbs due to pervasive virus-related blood clotting. So, while most people seem to have a fairly mild case, those who have a more serious case and survive can have their lives changed forever. That is the part that bothers me because no one knows how it will affect them until they get it. With different strains in circulation and some people barely being affected while others die or suffer from serious, permanent side effects, it seems like it will take researchers a very long time to understand this virus. I wonder about the differences in it in some places---in New York City, for example, the death rate was especially high. There even were spots in Texas where the death rate was exceptionally high, but others where it wasn't. Why there and not here? That must be the question each community asks if they see it having a mild effect in their community compared to a much more serious effect in some other community. It is mind-boggling. It would be easier to ignore it and carry on with life as usual if it were consistently affecting everyone in the milder way, but it is just so variable. The schools are in a no-win situation. Two of our county's 4 school systems are shut down due to multiple cases, the third one has remained open and just sent home for quarantine the folks who contact tracing indicate might be in danger of coming down with it after being exposed to the ones who tested positive, and the fourth, a very small school, hasn't reported any cases. The third school is the largest school district in our county and I think they'll try to stay open as long as they possibly can, but imagine they must have some number in mind that would be 'too much' and would cause them to shut down the school if they reach that point. I'd hate to be the superintendent faced with deciding what action is best for their local school district, and you know that there are going to be upset parents on one side or the other no matter what the superintendent decides to do. Whether we like to think of schools as a form of day care or not, in essence they are, and when the schools shut down, a lot of parents have to miss work (and risk losing their jobs) to stay home and do the distance learning routine with their kids. What a mess it is. I think the superintendents must think hard about that too---what happens to the families if the schools shut down, if a parent loses their job because they have to stay home with the kids, etc. So many people are unemployed now and are being affected by this virus in ways we cannot imagine if our jobs have remained and our bank accounts aren't suffering because of the virus. I know that churches and food banks near us and across the river in Texas are giving out tons more food than usual, and every time they have a drive-through food giveaway, enormous numbers of people show up and line up early and line up endlessly and then they run out of food before they can get to everyone. That is sad. We always try to have a year's worth of food on hand and stored away, so we could go a long time on that stored supply if the virus hit Tim's job, but that seems unlikely to occur in his line of work (they are busier than ever now). I do like knowing that if there is a serious resurgence of illness during the standard flu season, which I guess this year will be the flu + COVID season, then I can skip going to the store and we can get by on what we have. I've been more diligent this year about replacing food as we use it since we don't know if we'll see a repeat of last Spring's supply chain disruptions. Since I generally preserve food on a three year rotation (I try to can, freeze and dehydrate three years' worth of home-grown food when we having a bountiful harvest), we still have home-canned food from the last big canning year, but I'll have to grow enough to restock all that preserved food next growing season because this winter we'll finish using up what we have from a couple of years ago. Well, except for the roselle jelly and syrup. I did make that last fall and what we have in the pantry will last a good while yet because I made a lot more than we would eat in one year. I have stocked up more on seeds in advance of next year's gardening season, having learned from the 2008-2009 economic downtown which led to huge seed shortages that it is better to get them early and have them than to have to worry about seed shortages or slow filling of seed orders caused by the increased demand from millions of new gardeners needing seeds. It is hard for seed companies to predict when an economic downturn will occur and will cause a sudden huge surge in demand. It was hot yesterday---we hit 104 and our max heat index was a whopping 116, and yes, it felt as bad as it sounds. Today is expected to be virtually identical, so the NWS upgraded our Heat Advisory to an Excessive Heat Warning. It is going to be too hot to do anything today. I did go outdoors a couple of times yesterday and pour ice cubes into the animals' water bowls so the feral kittens and chickens had cooler water to drink. I didn't let our pet cats go out at all and the dogs only went out briefly. We're all just trying to stay cool and get through this latest heat wave. I did not hear an excessive number of medical calls on the fire radio that sounded heat-related, so I think folks here heeded the warning to stay indoors, stay in the shade while outdoors and to stay hydrated. The high schools down here had their first football games last night, and the heat indices were over 100 degrees when the games started---now that is ridiculous and I bet it felt miserable out there. Fall weather cannot get here quickly enough. I hope September brings it! Dawn

It's frustrating to me as a teacher that we are not doing more to make schools safe and prepared to meet this challenge and the next one that comes along. People need socialization, which is why we should have right from the get-go jumped on this like General Marshall did on the reconstruction of Europe after WWII. They knew if they didn't act at a massive scale, the misery of the war would undermine democracy and we'd just be back where it all started in another 30 years. I think its the same with this virus, infectious diseases are going to make a comeback, it has been predicted for decades by scientists aware of how the conditions present in the world would inevitably lead to that. I'm sure you all have concerns about your local schools, but mine were in tough shape even before this. In some cases, we teachers just make do no matter what, but now that our lives are at risk, it's sort of at the breaking point. So many teachers I knew were getting out of the profession even before this, due to lack of community support. Some schools will manage this better than others, and the weakest schools will of course have the most trouble, just as some people will have a lot of trouble surviving the virus while others not so much . . . Edited to add that I wish I could get my husband involved in the "pretend" or even real shopping for a truck to pull a camper. He keeps talking about it but is hesitant to do it due to the financial uncertainty . . .