Olivier/Olivia

I don't believe I have ever seen a hummingbird sit still for as long as this one did. Olivier comes to our Grevillea regularly but seems to have a sixth sense about taking off the minute I raise my camera. He has been joined by a mate, and by the look of her, this is Olivia, for she lacks an iridescent red throat. I was sitting on the front porch and she quite fearlessly flew back and forth and finally came to rest right in front of me.

We had our every ten day or so food acquisition adventures today. John rose at 5:30 and went to the store for the designated 'seniors' hour. They only let a few people in the store at a time because the aisles are quite narrow, and, wouldn't you know it? Everybody made a beeline for the toilet paper shelves which were, even at 6am, totally empty. There were also no beans, no sugar, and no flour. 

John was armed with a very painstakingly composed and mapped out list, designed to get him in and out of the store in record time. He wore a mask and gloves and sanitized everything in sight as soon as he got back in the car, and was home before I am usually out of bed. I stood ready, however to receive the bags, wipe the package surfaces with Clorox wipes, trim and soak the veggies in water empty the contents of the plastic containers into other plastic containers and dispose of enough paper and plastic to make up for all the stuff I have tried to keep out of the landfill for the last few years. I will say that the refrigerator has never looked more orderly or more sparkling, (except perhaps for the three times I had to throw everything out during power shutdowns and after fire evacuations)

It seems as if each crisis requires a new set of draconian and frankly medieval rules. I was just getting used to not keeping a lot of food in the fridge and shopping more often in case the power was shut off. Now we're trying to shop for weeks at a time.

 I can't even begin to think about what happens if we're still locked up/down when fire season rolls around. We were stopped midway through the process of installing a backup storage battery for our solar panels because the permit is lost in the county offices which are shut down....

My neighbor, a retired Air Force officer told me a great joke this morning. I will try to share...

An airplane is going down with five passengers: Putin, the Pope, Trump Boris Yeltsin and an 11 year old boy. There are only four parachutes. Putin says, "Well I'm the important leader of a great Communist country" Grabs a parachute and jumps out of the plane. The Pope says, "I'm the spiritual leader of the world's Catholics. My people need me" He grabs a parachute and jumps. Trump says, "I'm the very smart leader of the free world' He takes a parachute and jumps. Yeltsin turns to the boy says, I'm an old man. I've lived a good life. You're young and have your life ahead of you. You take the last parachute." The boy says, “There are two parachutes left. The smartest man in the world just put on my backpack and jumped out of the plane....”

Have a good weekend...Not that it is materially different than any other day of the week for a lot of us....