Rolling Hills

I see after checking the themes for April, that this picture probably would have been more appropriate for any day except today, but since we are nowhere near a town, the theme for today, this is what I have. The lupins are carpeting the hills just behind where I stood to take this picture and I spotted a pipevine swallowtail as I walked through the field. The road at the top of the field behind our house is still moderately busy since a car is required for even the most essential of errands, but it is very quiet otherwise.... 

New county directives have been issued stopping all construction projects except fire rebuilds. This means that the fellow on the corner of our street has called a halt to his massive, and massively messy grading and drainage project. The little mini-grader is parked at the bottom of his driveway, the walls are half finished and the lawn has been torn out leaving a sea of mud and dirt. I would feel for him but for the fact that it has looked more or less like this (minus the grader) for several years and is not nuanced by the giant boat dry-docked in front of his garage.

The Stay at Home order has been extended through April. 
I'm grateful that we have some outdoor space to enjoy nature. It's sunny with a lingering chill in the air today. The bottlebrush plant was alive with hummingbirds...I counted four Annas and one Rufous from the living room window before a raptor, either a Coopers Hawk or a Peregrine Falcon swooped down out of the oak trees scattering the little birds in the blink of an eye....

It has been suggested that the next directive from on high will be to wear masks, but since there aren't even enough masks for essential health care workers who are having to reuse masks, or even make their own of dubious effectiveness, I don't see how it can be required of everyone. The message from the beginning has been that masks should only be used by those who are infected but what else can they say under the circumstances? 

A number of corporations are retooling to make masks, respirators and hospital scrubs, but that can't happen overnight. I don't expect that anybody could be expected to be prepared for an emergency of this magnitude, but this country had a grace period of at least a month which could have been used to ramp up production and distancing measures rather than calling it a hoax and a plot to bring down the government.* That had already been done by shutting down the office of emergency preparedness and gutting the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security of competent people.

Now I'm off to make dinner out of lentils and a salami that has been lurking at the back of the fridge since Christmas....

*see extra for today's political cartoon