Sunflowers

I've interspersed some pictures of our sunflower garden throughout this blog entry. All of them are volunteers from the seeds that the birds dropped as they ransacked the seedheads last year. Amazing flowers, aren't they? I love sunflowers.

Yesterday was David's birthday, his second pandemic birthday. We had a quiet day--he had to work--but we had lots of good food including cake and ice cream and lots of presents, among them a mandolin and strings and a new synthesizer-ish instrument called an Artiphon Orba.

In the evening it rained and that was a good sign, hopefully, to start off a good year.

The rest of the day was also quiet for me. I did a little journaling and painting and watched a few episodes of Monk. I haven't been sleeping well, so I napped in the afternoon for awhile before making dinner (homemade mac'n'cheese and steamed broccoli, Dave's favored birthday dinner). 

 Over the weekend, I did a bit of sewing, making my brother a set of new masks to replace the old sewn ones that he's been wearing since last year. We're still in a pandemic, turns out, and still wearing masks despite the lifting of the (poorly enforced) mask mandates in the city. I'm wary of what the delta variant is doing as I've heard of many, many breakthrough covid infections among vaccinated people. Most of those who are dying from covid are unvaccinated, but most does not equal all. And there is some evidence that the vaccine's protections may last as little as six months. (I'm coming up on my six month anniversary of having been fully vaccinated.)

 Like everyone, I'm tired of Covid and I want everything to go back to whatever passed for normal before, but I'm not ready to sacrifice others to do so. So I still wear my mask whenever I'm around others and I still practice social distancing and I still do everything that I was doing before I was vaccinated pretty much. 

 Today I have to make a few phone calls. I have therapy in the afternoon. I need to do some exercise, mostly related to physical therapy (I cancelled last week because I had a sore throat--my Covid test was negative--so this week I'll return). I did not sleep well last night, of course, so I'll try to catch some zzz's this morning before all of that gets going.