Pandemic, Week 16 (The Rooms Where Little Happened)

The President held a fireworks display in advance of Independence Day at Mount Rushmore, despite environmental concerns. Sadly, his son couldn't attend as his fiance had just been diagnosed with COVID-19. Disney Plus released the filmed performance of Hamilton from 2016 with the original cast which we gathered on Mom Mom and Grandpa Don's porch to watch (Katherine is still in quarantine, post-Florida trip). Carl Reiner died. The Supreme Court ruled against limiting abortion access in Louisiana though also kind of explained how future states could get around that ruling. The Mississippi legislature finally voted to remove the confederate symbol from its state flag. Meanwhile Washington's football team has decided to undergo a thorough review of its name.

The new worldwide count of COVID-19 cases was 11.3 million and 531,000 deaths. The U.S. accounted for 2.9 million COVID-19 cases and 132,000 deaths. The governor of Texas has acknowledge that he probably shouldn't have opened bars so early.

On Sunday we celebrated Dave's 50th birthday via zoom. Monday we had Molly and Adam over for a socially distant backyard dinner and cello concert (Owen even got some applause from the alley). Tuesday Nora got her hair cut at Bravado. It was the first time any of us had ventured into a Phase 2 establishment for a service. Only Nora, myself, the stylist and a receptionist were in the salon, we all wore masks and we had our temperature taken prior to entry followed by some sanitizer. It was only about twenty minutes total (though I was anxious the whole time) and she looked pretty cute afterwards. Nora and her friend Sadie recorded two separate podcast episodes: Germs in the Bathroom and Trolls Under the Bridge (apparently the focus this week was prepositional phrases). Somewhere in there we also discovered the errant Easter egg John hid a little too well, met Katherine's latest pets (from a safe distance) and redecorated the kids rooms a bit (which just meant switching the space pictures to Nora's room and the U.S. map to Owen's). And we stayed up late on the Fourth (not voluntarily) watching (though mostly listening) to at least six separate neighborhood firework displays (that went off until around four in the morning).

But most importantly, we took the car in to be inspected in response to a recall. Unfortunately, the 2020 Pacifica Plug-In Hybrid may be prone to bursting into flames, and while there's no current fix for it, the manufacturer wanted to check to see how flammable ours was. It took a while for them to make a determination (two full business days and some aggressive prompting from Allen), but we have been cleared to drive it to Iowa.

But if there's no blog next week, you'll know why.

(To see this week's pictures, click here.)