From a retirement perspective, "sheltering in place" does not present an onerous hardship. True, our usual routine of tennis, pickleball, dog park, kayaking, and dining out with various groups are all on hold (except kayaking for Jill). We are simply doing more reading and streaming while taking Yaz for distant dog adventures in the golf cart. However, two new activities have arisen. Since Jill's gardening activities were curtailed at an assigned plot within the community garden area, Jill ordered and has been attending to a hydroponic contraption that grows leafy vegetables at a rapid rate. Our first harvest yielded a delicious, fresh salad to accompany the dinners we get from the Hello Fresh delivery of dinner components that we take turns preparing at a ratio of three meals made by Jill to the one made by Dud.The first salads computed to $300 per serving, but the second was only $150, and tonight the price plunges to $75. It's rather fun and so far free of pests, though it strikes me as a perfect deer feeder, should a herd ever find it. See Jill's handiwork in the first evidence of growth and then the output one week later.
To keep our senior minds from going butter knife dull, we decided to undertake jigsaw puzzles. First off, we discovered they were almost as hard to find as Purell or Charmin. Apparently our new hobby had been taken up by others. We completed a 300-piece puzzle too quickly, so we skipped 500 and went directly to the 1000-piece challenge. It has been fun - more fun than the driveway bingo that some friends have taken up - and Jill has developed her own system for solving the puzzle piece order. In the pictures we are 75% done with one that has taken a week, Yaz can be seen showing his enthusiasm for an activity that does not involve him. Also evident is the result of my first spousal haircut, something accomplished after Jill sat through half of an introductory YouTube video from the Lizzie Borden Tonsorial Institute. To be fair, this was taken after a windy dog walk with no prep for the selfie. She actually did a pretty decent job, so Yaz running to hide under the bed was just his silly dog joke, a real howler.
Anyway, we are safe, healthy, and far from bored. We get our pandemic advice from Drs. Fauci and Elias while avoiding the White House briefings. In our nearly 9000-home community, there was one reported case, and she recovered, and a rumor of two others. In all of Beaufort County, which includes Hilton Head, there have been 11 COVID-related deaths, all but one by very elderly persons (where 'elderly" means older than us).
We also Zoom with family members and had a very fun evening playing Scattergories. Both of my kids have managed to retain their jobs as "essential employees, and the same holds true for Jill's two kids. That's a blessing.
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