Purple Prairie Clover

We had a little scare yesterday. After our morning walk, Anne was not feeling well. She had a headache along with a general feeling of unwellness. I of course suspected the worse, but she laid down on the couch and later ate something, so that by evening, she was feeling better. This morning she is fine. We of course begged off on our planned Saturday night happy hour engagement and will try to reschedule it for later. Fortunately though, she didn’t have the Rona after all.

It was scary not knowing. Your mind races towards all sorts of what ifs and none of them are all that appealing. Trying to do your own contact tracing only makes it worse. Where did it come from? Who did she catch it from? Then you think, what about me? We’ve been quarantining, but certainly not from each other. As it turned out, it was all for naught, a tempest in a teapot, hypochondria induced psychoses. We try to be careful, but with 50,000 people a day now coming down with it, how much longer can I expect to avoid it? I should just hangout in a bar.

We walked the neighborhood, both yesterday and today. Yesterday, we got out early and beat the heat and the crowds too. Today, we tried to do the same, but weather got in the way. It started before four, when a crack of thunder woke me up. Awake, the sprinkler kicked on and ran for half-an-hour. I gave up trying to go back to sleep when dawn’s early light began streaming through the bedroom window. We launched under a darkening sky. A line of thunderstorms was sliding by, but looked like they would miss us and pass by to the north. We got only a couple of houses, before the rumble of thunder to the north made us turn tail and scurry back home. I whipped up some eggs and bacon for breakfast. Yesterday, I went to make bacon, only to find that the leftover bacon had gone bad. What a shame, wasted bacon. The new bacon was some of Oscar Mayer’s thick cut variety. I only fried up four pieces of bacon for the two of us, but each piece was easily twice as big as a normal slice. There were only ten pieces to the pack. Afterwards, we did get our walk in, but by then it had gotten hot.

June is wildflower month in Missouri and although most of the flowers that we see are cultivated that doesn’t diminish their beauty. The trick with flowers isn’t taking their picture, they’re not going anywhere, but being able to identify them afterwards. Anne usually has an idea which family a particular flower is from, but my go to identifier is a website called Plant ID. I use it regularly and it has only failed me once. You just upload the photo and it does the rest. I find it way more satisfying to actually name a flower rather than calling it a purple flower.