Nothing much has changed. I'm struggling to remember anything that happened during the week, in fact.....I'm seeing fewer and fewer people wearing masks around town, and we're still only up to 29 cases (still only 472 tested). Working from home enters week 7 now, I think.....it was generally a cold, rainy, windy week, so not a lot going on outside either....the whole family did get out for a geocaching road trip today, we drove through the county roads around Plymouth and Bremen, finding 5 without a lot of searching. Mostly we just walked right to them. Ice cream afterwards.....Got some yard work done over the weekend when it warmed up. I got the backyard mowed and swept just before the lawn tractor quit. Dang, that's too familiar. The engine seems fine, it just won't move. And I found a plastic fan impeller on the ground underneath it when I pushed the tractor back to the garage. Not sure what it does or even for sure that it came off the tractor, but it looked worn. Hope it's not expensive to fix.....The battery in the truck also died this weekend. I hadn't driven it much, and on Friday I had to push it out of the garage to get the tractor out. It wouldn't even cycle the power locks. I couldn't jump it from the van. Dead dead dead. So, about $150 for a new one.....

Another boring week. But I have a feeling something is going to change. I get a general sense that people are tired of this and won't put up with it much longer, i.e., We've been doing the quarantine thing for over a month now and nobody's sick! We did all this for nothing! at which point they quit following the rules and the next wave happens. The county is up to something like 22 cases (although only about 300 tests have been run), and we've noticed that mask usage is way down lately. Missy and I went to Menard's to get some things for her room this weekend, and the place was packed like I've never seen, and almost nobody had a mask on. Same at the grocery store.....We finished up painting Missy's room this weekend, and got everything back up on the walls. The colors are so very close to the colors Beth and I had for the room when it was a nursery (but they're arranged differently). Missy's very happy with it.....We all went out to the Winona Lake trails today for something to do. Beth and Alex walked though the village and by the lake, Missy and I went for a hike in the woods. Missy and I got a little bit of geocaching done, but one cache was not there any more and one was a very easy find.....I signed us up for a free month of CBS:All Access this week so Beth and I could watch Star Trek Picard. We liked it a lot, but we probably won't keep the service after the free month is up.....We got official notification this week that Missy's EF Tours trip to Italy and Greece has been postponed, for 2 years. So we're hoping that everything will still be all right for her to go just after she graduates high school.....

Well, spring break is over, and it never really began. We continue to shelter in place. Which is getting really boring. Alex and Missy were on spring break this past week; we went nowhere, except out for ice cream a couple times and to the trails a couple times. It was nice in the middle of the week but it got lousy outside for the weekend, just to be nasty....I finished up a set of 2 cloth masks for everyone early last week from that pattern we found online. I also made one for each of the neighbor ladies, and ones for Judy and Neill. And since we usually have a spring break vacation, we all put our masks on and took a family selfie on the lawn in front of the house (our "vacation house").....Since that project is done, we've turned to painting Missy's bedroom. We've been telling her we're going to do it for a while now, so it seemed a good time. She picked out the colors, a pale yellow and an almost Carolina blue. It actually looks a lot like the nursery colors Beth and I did the room in when the kids were born, but we're not telling her that. Instead of blue on the lower half of the room and yellow on the upper, Missy picked a yellow accent wall (the wall with the window) and the rest of the walls all blue. It does look less little-girly than the pink and green that it was. Unfortunately the yellow does not cover the green very well so at this moment there are 3 coats and green still shows through a bit.....Beth and I have been doing a lot of cross-stitching this past week.....Virus-wise, things still aren't horrible here (I think we're up to 18 cases and 1 death in the county now) but still no sign that things will be back to normal any time soon. In fact, my company is trying hard to make sure nobody permanently loses their job due to this, but we're all being asked to take a 20% pay cut effective immediately, and the plant is going to do a 2-week shutdown starting Monday. The grocery stores seem to be getting back to normal-er, although I've been very surprised at how few people are wearing masks when they go out to the stores.

Another week of social distancing down. Who knows how many to go. We still can go to the grocery store or drive through for food or to Menard's or things like that, but the hours are curtailed and the virus has reached the county now, so going out is more uneasy. I'm still working from home so it's not like I have nothing to do all day, like a lot of people likely do. But it's getting very tedious, and everything is centered on the busy-work kind of stuff like training and change management. Aside from work, We continue to have church online, and we're meeting with our small group online as well. Alex and Missy have e-learning 3 times a week and they announced late this week that they will not be returning to school for the rest of this year - I'm glad Alex isn't a senior this year - and Missy's school trip to Greece/Italy is in serious doubt, verging on certainty that the trip will be cancelled. They're on spring break this week, no vacation this year. Natalie was on spring break last week. Beth and I weren't sure exactly what we were going to do for spring break since the kids have different break weeks, but that decision was made for us before we made any plans.....Trey set up a version of game lunch for the group on Friday, since we haven't been able to play in a few weeks; we played Jackbox together while we were all on a video conference call and he was sharing his computer screen. It worked well, and we had fun....for a weekend project, and since the CDC is now going back and saying maybe face masks would be a good idea after all, I found a good and simple pattern for a pleated face mask on the Joann Fabrics website and Beth and I spent the weekend sewing some up. They tie in the back of the head, and the pleats make it easy to cover your whole face, and they're washable! I made a couple for the ladies across the street as well and some for all of us.....we took a family walk together on the Beyer Farm trail Sunday since it finally warmed up some then..... otherwise, we were pretty much all home all the time. This next week is supposed to be a bad one.