The 21st Century Matriarch

Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

Browsing Life Magazines from 1939. I’ve been working my way through the scanned issues of Life Magazine available on Internet Archive. 1939 was before the US entered the World War II but the pages of the magazine are full of pictures of Europe…of the wreckage in Warsaw and Hermann Göring….along with ads for Studebakers. The pictures are snippets of history – what people were seeing as ‘news’ at the time.

Digiscoping. My husband bought a gizmo to hold a cell phone to the eye piece of our birding scope….allowing a capture of images through the optics of the scope. I did a test on a cold, breezy morning – through the window (a French door in our breakfast area).

The maples were looking very golden…with samaras and new leaves.

We reconfigured the tripod a bit…took the carrying case off the spotting scope…before I tried some pictures of the tulip poplar. The flowers (tulip like!) are beginning to open. The leaves are large enough to see their distinctive shape.

Overall, it was a good experiment. My husband thinks another mount will work better for us…and trying again on a day that isn’t so breezy would be easier too. Eventually we might even get good enough to photograph some birds back in our woods.

Making chili. We got a large package of ground beef in our last grocery delivery, so I suggested that we make chili to use 2 pounds of it…and then freeze the rest of it in 1-pound packages. I had beans that I had cooked early in the ‘stay at home as much as possible’ regime in the freezer. My husband orders a supply of our preferred chili mix – so we had that on hand. The only thing we were missing was a can of tomato sauce. We substituted spaghetti sauce! When the chili was done, he had his in tortillas (i.e. a chili soft taco) and I had mine over bulgur wheat. We have a lot of leftovers!

Finding a forgotten pair of jeans. I reorganized my closet about a month ago to work my way though all my pairs of jeans/slacks while I am at home…and discovered a pair of jeans I had completely forgotten about. And they fit! My plan had been to discover things that needed to go in the ‘give away’ pile. So far – I haven’t found anything in that category.

Seeing a goldfinch ‘sheltering’ on the screen near the birdfeeder. I noticed a goldfinch under the eve on the screen of our covered deck in the morning. It seemed very intent on whatever it was doing. Then it flew to the feeder to get some seed and look around a bit…then went back to the screen. It appeared to be eating the seed it had gotten from the feeder. I wonder if there was some kind of drama earlier that made the finch leery of our feeder.