Well, I had a bit of a scare earlier today when an update to the code behind my website meant all of my journal entries were throwing error pages and I couldn’t log in to the site to see why that might be. For a while, I was thinking I might have to start over from a fresh WordPress install (I do have backups of the text of all my posts, so it wasn’t going to be a complete disaster from that perspective). But I kept poking at it and logged into an email address that I hadn’t checked in ages that was apparently the admin contact for my journal and there was a clue in an email there that was triggered by some diagnostics run automatically after the update. More poking and tweaking and now things seem to be working again. Whew.

Mr. Karen and I have been weathering social distancing pretty well. When the Idaho governor put a stay at home order in place on the 25th, we didn’t have to change anything we were doing. We were already staying at home and avoiding other people as much as possible, shopping in town only for groceries and only when we were running out of a fair few things. Some of the folks around here are still to this day driving an hour and half south to Costco to shop, bringing back who knows what germs. Our county got its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on the 29th, around the time Idaho had its first deaths from the virus. So far Mr. and I are both fine and hoping to stay that way.

The stay at home order allows for outdoor recreation near one’s home with member of one’s household. We’re fortunate to live up here in a recreational paradise, so were able to go snowshoeing a few days ago on a favorite trail.

>

We walk down to the village to the mailbox most days. Before the stay at home order, the bar in the village was still open in the afternoons, and there were sometimes an alarming number of folks sitting alarmingly close to each other there, but now that’s not an issue. There’s a skeleton crew working at the resort, so depending on when we’re there we might see one or two of them from a distance. We sometimes see neighbors out walking and wave to them from well over six feet away. So far not a lot of people from other areas have shown up to stay in their vacations homes, so it’s pretty quiet. It’s like the usual time after ski season ends, just with an underlying current of worry and no options to go hang out with friends in Spokane or take a trip to escape for a while as we would normally do. Such is life for now.

And we apparently missed a scare this afternoon. After we walked down to get the mail, we shoveled the driveway (the plows don’t come as reliably after ski season and we’ve had maybe half a foot of snow over the past several days). When we came in after that hour or so, I checked Facebook to find there’d been a 6.3 or 6.4 earthquake in southern Idaho that some folks had felt up here in town. We felt nothing. Maybe the mountain was less affected than town.