Well, the aliens tried to warn us about 2020, but we wouldn’t listen!  We thought it was just a joke about our latest eye exam.  Here’s a picture of Cathy trying to figure out what sort of green thing is signaling to us while riding a cow across the open range!  At any rate, we are stuck with the virus in our collective memories.  Here’s our part of it (so far):

            As Christmas 2019 approached, it looked like Cathy and I were going to have a couples-night for the big feast, but at the last moment, our son Greg invited us to come over to San Antonio and stay a day or two, and we had a great time.  He even spent real money to fire up the heater on their swimming pool!

            When we got back to Las Cruces, we decided to give ourselves a Christmas present by getting the leak in our swimming pool fixed.  We found a universally recommended guy to do it, and hired another set of folks to do some pruning and cleaning up of decades of previously ignored yard trimmings.  All in all, it looked like it was going to be a nice spring followed by another month-long vacation in the early summer or fall.

            In early March, Cathy drove over to San Antonio to visit with our granddaughter Kirstin while Greg and Rebekah went on a short vacation to celebrate Rebekah’s promotion to Senior Master Sergeant.  I stayed home to babysit the various work projects.  Then they started talking about a virus on the news.  At first, it was just a lot of verbiage with no real directions, so just in case, Cathy cut her visit short and headed home, getting here just as the first of a series of “voluntary quarantines” began.  I can’t even remember the sequence of events leading up to and during this epidemic, and have to look up what happened and when.  Does anyone else remember it that way?  Doesn’t it seem like the virus has been with us forever, and that no one really knows what we should be doing?  Even with the vaccines now lighting up the end of the tunnel, does anyone really feel like it’s almost over?  The one thing Cathy and I can say is that we’ve followed the guidance for the most part and we haven’t been infected.  My sister, Kerry, who lives just down the road, is equally serious and so we don’t even visit each other, but we do check on each other every day by text or phone. 

            Our son Eric is in an assisted care facility too, and so we can’t visit or be visited.  But his girlfriend has Facebook and we are able to video visit now, and they are well and if not happy - at least they are together.  If you remember, my Mom lives in a “memory unit” for dementia patients, just 2 miles from our house.  We were very worried about her, but the staff where she lives has taken the virus very seriously from the very beginning, and none of their residents have tested positive in all this time - no New York fiasco here!  Of course that also means that we’ve been unable to visit face to face with Mom since March, but we can talk by phone, which in her condition is probably just as good as a visit.

            The pool repairs finished up in May, but then the pool cover came off the tracks and we had to wait until July to get it fixed.  The freelancer who did it is typical of most of the local guys, working for cash and willing to build/fix/remove anything, so we had them remove and replace the old slatted sun-shade the wisteria had taken over, and saving the wisteria too.  And we decided to hire the landscape guys to mow the lawn and clean up generally every other week.  All of them did/do good jobs, and they all need the work in this pandemic and thankfully they are considered “essential workers”.  I’m not sure how that was calculated, but I’m glad they are, because my hips are shot and I can’t do even minor yard work.

            We’ve actually had sets of guests driving through in their RVs.  It was kind of awkward at first, sniffing each other out, but we finally decided that if we could go shopping for groceries at Walmart, we could handle visitors as serious about staying healthy as we are!  Our youngest son, Greg, also stopped by in September to celebrate his retirement from the USAF as a Senior Master Sergeant.

            In October, Cathy’s brother Tim had some serious heart problems, and Cathy decided to go see him at his new home in Ohio.  Tim’s daughter Tina flew out to visit and be Cathy’s co-pilot to drive back East.  We had a great visit with her, and since we can drive around to relieve cabin fever, we went to Hatch to get some chilis, and to Cloudcroft to see the Aspens turning.  Unfortunately, by the time they got to Tina’s home in Tennessee, Tim had come down with COVID, and although he eventually recovered, Cathy couldn’t see him and so she turned around and drove home.  Quite an adventure in this age.

            One of the local feral cats abandoned a kitten in the back yard last spring.  She was only a couple weeks old and so we had to bottle feed her, but she sure has made a difference in our lives - good or bad we haven’t figured out yet - although I tend to think of her as my emotional support cat!

            Our Grandson Geoffrey graduated from Stuttgart high school in June, and we were able to watch the ceremony streaming on line - ain’t technology wonderful!  Of course by then the virus had screwed up all the normal college entrance procedures, so he’s decided to stay at home there in Germany and get a degree on line.  Meanwhile, he’s an intern at the Public Affairs office.  Our other grandson, Connor, is a senior this year and says he’ll probably stay home too.  Chris continues to be the Lodging Manager there, and Janna is the Assistant Director of the Child Development Center on base.  They are surviving the virus restrictions over there in Germany, which sound to me to be much more stringent than here.

            Greg has decided to retire completely, so he’s the house-husband as Rebekah works most days from home.  Kirstin is deep into volley ball.  In school, she was the only 9th grader to qualify for the JV, and has now taken up Sand Volley Ball, playing in a tournament almost every weekend and has earned a spot for the next Junior Olympics.  She is doing great in academics too, and describes herself as a “student-athlete”, and doesn’t have time for foolishness.

            I was told (again) that I’m getting old - the VA turned down my medical disability claims saying my problems are just those of every other old fart.  Meanwhile, Cathy and I have done without on a bunch of routine in-person medical stuff and switched to teleconferencing.  I wish they’d had it for the last six decades instead of having to spend all that time sitting in waiting rooms!

            Overall, Cathy and I are kept busy with the animals and all the TV streaming services.  We are also experts on ordering stuff on line.  And then there was the election.  No sense talking about that - it just gets folks mad.