I don't have a master plan

Some bloggers do. Yorkshire Pudding, for instance, tries to post every single day and his titles always consist of one word. Not the same word. That would be silly. He goes on long walks through the English countryside and he always takes his camera with him, and his readers are the happy recipients of his ambulatory proclivities and his photographic skills.

Not so with me. I never know what I'm going to write about. Sometimes I'll publish several posts close together and sometimes I'll go a week or more between postings. I am nothing if not inconsistent.

It's what makes me so endearing.

I am endearing, you know. To whom is debatable. We won't go there. It could get ugly.

Today is another of those days when I have no idea what to write about. Maybe the lockdown.

What saddened me most about the lockdown was not being able to be with our children or grandchildren, but things took a turn for the better around Memorial Day and now the restraints on socializing seem to have lessened. I think I told you already that just as things began easing up, I was told by two different eye specialists that I should stop driving because of my poor vision. Even with corrective lenses, I'm currently seeing about 20/70 or 20/80, and that is downright scary. Not driving will be more of a permanent lifestyle change than any three-month pandemic-caused sheltering-in-place could cause.

One person said the wife can drive, then.

Well, no, my wife gave up driving about four years ago. So at the moment our car is just sitting in the garage and I'm having to rely on family and friends for EVERYTHING. We live out in the country, and the nearest shopping areas are four miles in one direction and five miles in another. Too far to walk or carry things at my age. I don't own a bicycle. In fact, I never learned to ride a bicycle. Roller skates are out (I'm being ridiculous now). Family are willing, but let's face it, they all work and have jobs. One son lives 12 miles away and the other about 30, and in metro Atlanta you can just about double what you think the drive time would be, so I really don't want to have to inconvenience them more than is absolutely necessary. My daughter, as some of you know, lives about three hours away in east central Alabama, which might as well be another country now.

Let's change subjects.

Bonnie's last post was about how busy June is for celebrations in her family. In our family there are 14 people (the 2 of us, the 3 children, the 3 children's spouses, and the 6 grandchildren), and our celebrations are spread all over the calendar: 2 birthdays in January, 2 in February, 2 in March, 2 in May, 2 in July, 1 in August, 2 in September, and 1 in December. There are four anniversaries: 2 in May, 1 in November, and 1 in December. When all six grands are married that will add 6 more birthdays and 6 more anniversaries. I may have to take out a federal loan to pay for all the celebrating!

Graham Edwards posted a picture of what midnight on the longest day of the year looked like on the Isle of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides of western Scotland, where he lives. You can see it by clicking here . I do hope you will avail yourself of the opportunity and look at Graham's photograph because it is a sight worth seeing. One forgets that Graham lives so far north, about 525 miles from London and almost due west of Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden. I'm sure it seems normal to him, but it is truly a phenomenon for those of us who live much farther south.

Well, I've managed to waste another perfectly good few minutes of your day, so my work here is nearly done.

It's okay to be done, as long as we're not done for.

I will close by telling you that this is my 1,865th post (since September 2007). 1865 is the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and the Civil War ended in the United States, although you would never believe it by events of the last couple of weeks. I read that in California and Oregon, statues of Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Junipero Serra, and Francis Scott Key have all been torn down in the past week by what the American major media outlets call "peaceful protesters".

I said at the beginning that I do not have a master plan. John Wilkes Booth had a master plan, and look where it got him.