Playing Catch-up With Myself: October Arrives With a Whimper

 

October. What can you say about the first half it it? The weather was enough to make you weep, and we stayed closed to home. I was juuust starting to throw off the virus, and hoping to get out, get moving, but what you don't want to do is be halfway well and head out into sheets of freezing rain! 

So we didn't do much of anything for the first couple of weeks. I slogged around the house, walking aimlessly to get the legs moving, lifting embarrassing flea-weights, doing Qigong, when and if my body would allow it; and sometimes it wouldn't. 

Still, by the mid-point of the month we were able to brave the conditions and head south for a blustery afternoon. This, above, is Second Valley. Looks like the dead of winter, but in fact, we were six weeks since the beginning of spring, and I'd started to fret that the summer heat would hit us without warning, with no appreciable spring to speak of. (It sorta, kinda did, but not quite as suddenly or as hard as I'd worried).

The high point of that afternoon was the Singing Honey Eater who came to check out the picnic bags we'd put on the mosaiced concrete table near the jetty. And just to prove it was spring ... the pink version of the Raging Fumitory was in full bloom. The pink one seems to bloom well after the white one ... oh yes, this was spring -- though you wouldn't have known it at the time!

Still, onward and upward. Time to make plans to go somewhere, do something. And what we had in mind was a daytrip over to Yorke Peninsula. Now, BC (Before Covid), we'd have done it over two days and stayed overnight at a nice cabin in a caravan park somewhere on the south tip of the Yorke --

After Covid? Nope. How can you know for sure that the last people staying there weren't riddled with Covid, coughing and sneezing all over the cabin, then vacating it and handing it to you?! You can't. And since we know the virus can live for 72 hours on fabrics, and it's transmitted via touch, Dave and I long ago made the decision to stay out of accommodations until/unless a proper vaccine comes along that cures this thing. I mean CURES it, not just lessens the effect while your brain turns to glue wi8th repeated infections.

So -- the Yorke Peninsula daytrip was on, and planned, and we did it on October 20. This will be the next of my Catching-Up With Myself journal entries, and I'll get into it tomorrow. 

Yes, you could be assured that it was spring, grey skies notwithstanding, because --

I'm going to congratulate myself on this last photo: Yay! I managed to rescue "Fire and Ice," which I'd once thought was so dead, it was due to be transferred to the bin. Let this be a lesson: never give up, not if there's one spark of life left. Fire and Ice is now one of the most beautiful bushes in the garden!