Easter weekend.  I had originally planned to be in Murchison kayaking this weekend, and the weather is AWESOME.  Jeremiah is being chipper about a “staycation,” but I’m not feeling the excitement.  Still, better fine weather than wet, and we did have a nice day today.

We went over to the local domain and strung up my slack line between two trees, even brought over my speaker and played cool music.

The kids got into the action in their own way.

Money is a great motivator for Milo. Jeremiah told him he’d pay him $1 for every window he washed, provided it passed inspection. He spent an industrious 45 minutes wiping the windows while he worked out his projected fortune over the ensuing month.

We’ve seen several yards with tents up in them, so Jeremiah helped the kids set up their tent this afternoon, and they’ve just cozied up inside.

Aw, even to my hardened mother heart they are cute.

I don’t think it’s lockdown cheating, really, to go to the skate park.  It’s not roped off after all, and the playground most certainly is. Still, there was almost no one else there….. My grandfather had a saying for these situations: “Don’t trouble trouble, until trouble troubles you.” We enjoyed the empty park, with the comforting knowledge that the full sun was going to kill all the germs we might shed onto that concrete anyway.

A little stilted and hesitant, perhaps, an adult concerned about cracking her knees on the concrete…..but the little swooping lift up the bottom of the bowl gets my vote for Delight of the Day.

If the kids chose a Delight today, I think it’d be these soap suds frothed up by the hose jet. They went giggling outdoors in their wet suits, shorts on top for some illogical reason.
I saw Naomi dash by with the dish soap, but decided the enjoyment they would get (and consequently the minutes of peace I’d savor) would be worth the squandering of that resource.

“Why don’t we have things that other people have?”  Naomi’s question came out of the blue, as I was preparing dinner in the kitchen.

“What things do you mean, hun?” I asked, wondering where this question was headed.

“Like a hot tub, or video games,” she informed me.  Ah, ok, this wasn’t going to be that difficult.  I just had to remember that whatever I said would likely be repeated to friends whose families DO have those things.

“Well, we spend our time and money on the things that we value.  Dad and I like doing active stuff more than we like sitting in warm water.  We also value creativity, and we think your creativity will grow more without spending lots of time on video games.  Other families have different values.”  There, hopefully that wasn’t too offensive.  Incredibly, she let the issue drop.

“What are these holes?” Naomi asked, her face inches from the dirt bank as she scrambled around the rock outcrop.  We were walking around the quarry rim….or, more accurately, I was trying coax her around while she was stopping at every excuse.  Well, that question wasn’t so treacherous; no value judgments involved, just bugs.  I love bugs.
“I’m not sure, but maybe bees live in there–some kinds of bees dig holes in banks.”

“Here, let’s see how deep the holes are,” I suggested, deciding to embrace the snail’s pace and curious myself to poke a piece of grass in to the openings. “Wow, look, this hole is at least 10 cm long!” (Delight of the Day:  fishing a grass stem surprisingly deep into a tiny insect hole).  We poked dry grass stems into the holes for a while, orangutan style, before we disturbed one of the insects in residence. An oblong beetle scuttled out, mottled pink and brown.  “We’ll have to look that one up in Milo’s insect book when we get home,” I suggested.  “Uh huh,” she nodded, obligingly.  Try as I might, I’m not having much success instilling a love of insects into my children.

There’s a quote from a distinguished British biologist, JBS Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians.  Feeling metaphysical, they asked him to reflect on what science had taught him about the mind of God.  Haldane answered “The Creator would appear to have an inordinate fondness for beetles.”  Apparently there are 300,000 species of beetles on earth (just beetles, not insects as a whole), compared to about 9,000 species of bird, and 10,000 species of mammals.  Go beetles!

These ones turned out to be common tiger beetles.  It’s their carnivorous grubs that live in those tunnels, ambushing insects which walk by for more than a year as they grow up.

Bubble life

New Zealand is at an Alert Level 4, which means, among other things, that “businesses are closed except for essential services (supermarkets, pharmacies, clinics and lifeline utilities).”  “Nonessential” businesses must close, unless they can operate completely without people interacting.

The day the government made the level 4 announcement was a confusing whirlwind of businesses trying to position themselves as “essential” so they could keep going during the lock down.  The Warehouse announced they were essential because they supply people with all the leftover containers and toasters and socks that they need for modern life….liquor stores were essential because they sold “food.”  But the government soon put a kabosh on most of those shenanigans.

Zealandia, being involved in food production, could continue with commercial veg transplant production during the lock down, but no pansy seeding, and no philodendron transplanting.  Ornamentals aren’t essential, while food is.  I spent my last day at work making up big containers of surface sterilizer (H2O2), and writing instructions to staff on how we must now operate in order to avoid virus transmission….and pass our MPI inspection.

I walked past my boss’s window to clock out on March 25^th, and he waved me over.  “Stay home tomorrow,” he said.

Bugger.  Zealandia might be essential, but I’m nonessential.

I’ve come to hate that word.

It means that my efforts, my skills, and my intelligence are nonessential.  Not needed….unimportant…..  More ornamental than nutritional.

That’s a deflating realization.

…particularly when Jeremiah’s work, bridge design, is classed as an “Essential Service,” and Monday – Friday 7:30-5:30 he disappears into the bedroom to maintain his career.  This past week that work has involved a surprising number of light-hearted teleconference conversations, trivia quizzes, and remotely conducted social hours replete with beersies.  To be honest, it has also involved hard conversations about pay cuts and (I’m sure) many hours of actual work.  But still, I’m jealous.  Non-essential and jealous.  In comparison, next week I’ll continue to do nonessential tasks around the house….wipe pee off the toilet seat, bake cinnamon rolls, restrict the kids’ screen time, vainly try to make Milo into a kinder person.

It probably niggles because it gets down to the thorny question of “what’s my purpose in life?”  I don’t want to be ornamental.  It’s a big existential question which I haven’t answered for myself, clearly, or I’d be happier cooling my heals at home…..provided whatever purpose I chose can be lived out without actually doing anything…..

When today is certain to be the same as yesterday, there’s no reason to get up early. I’ve been a bit crook and haven’t been sleeping that great, so a sleep-in was welcome. But 9:22? That’s definitely a record for me.  However, my delight of the day didn’t involve sleeping.  

These buttery yellow crocuses stopped in my tracks–they are glorious. Crocuses are one of my favorite flowers, and a glance starts the flash reminiscences…my mom’s Saratoga garden in spring, the patch of early spring crocuses in the grass at the end of the suspension bridge at Cornell, the tangled brilliant yellow strands of saffron in a clear plastic cube.

Crocuses are ridiculously optimistic, starting up in the end of the winter, undaunted by snow, one of the first hopes of spring.  I don’t know why they’re blooming now in Christchurch, when it’s fall, but they make a nice connection between the hemispheres–they’re probably blooming in parks in NYC right now.  I’m not going to draw any inferences about hope and the end of winter and all that poetical nonsense; our crocuses are blooming in autumn after all.

Today I made a pumpkin bread, a recipe from a dear Owego friend (Barb!).  “Bread” is a bit of a euphemism; it’s truly a cake.

It’s not the first time I’ve made it in NZ, but it’s the first time since I’ve had my bundt pan, one of the items we shipped from the states.

There’s something infinitely more satisfying when this bread is baked in a bundt pan. I checked it at about an hour and it was close, but the next time I checked it it had puffed up nice and round, with the oozy middle bit splitting open the already baked crust. Just delightful.

Good thing the day of the week is displayed on my watch, otherwise I wouldn’t know.  “Maybe this is what it’s like to be retired” I wondered as I jogged around the block.  “It doesn’t matter what day it is; tomorrow is going to be the same as today anyway.”

“Snow Day” was the SCWBI DrawThis prompt for February, and as I put the final snowflakes on my picture today I reflected, pessimistically, that the snowflakes could be virus particles and the picture could be titled “Isolation.”

I did, however, listen to an interesting podcast or two today while I was gluing my snowflakes.  NPR’s Planet Money had one titled “The Race to Make Ventilators,” featuring a small company that typically makes 200 ventilators/month, and how the whole game changes when a huge company like a car manufacturer gets their supply chains mobilized.  It seems like a wonderfully American response to a problem.  While we’re hiding in our homes to prevent infection, America is wallowing in infectious crowds, and gearing up to deal with the fall-out by mass producing ventilators.  I’ve also read little news blurps about Johns Hopkins reviving an old medical technique of sharing blood antibodies from recovered patients with the uninfected to temporarily boost their immunity, with the wry commentary that with this disease, there will at least be plenty of people with antibodies.  In America, we fix our problems with ingenuity, technology, and economies of scale!

On a more serious note, it’s like we’re inadvertently part of a huge global trial.  Which country’s strategy will end up better in the end?