Thus far, 2020 has delivered murder hornets and plague squirrels and of course The Virus, so it feels trite to bitch about the heat, but since I do so every year, I feel obligated. As I write this, we are well into the really damn hot part of summer. It’s been in the hundred degree range off and on for a bit now, and we probably have a good couple months of this to go. My plants are getting crispy, and the kids don’t want to play outside. We won’t take them to the public pool, and we really haven’t sussed out any good swimming holes that don’t run the risk of being overrun with people. Mostly, we have been hiding in the air conditioning, getting on each other’s nerves.

It’s been about a month since I last posted. Of course, we aren’t doing too much, so there’s not much to report around here. For the most part, Sean is the one who leaves the house and runs errands. We do curbside pickup for grocery stores and Target runs. We have our prescriptions delivered. Given the rapid rise in coronavirus cases, our state has dialed back on some of its operating policies and has issued a state-wide mandate to wear masks in public.

Ian did wind up getting to have his end of year dance recital via Zoom back in mid-June. He seemed to enjoy putting on his sparkly vest, tying back his ever-lengthening hair, and performing as well as his memory allowed for the crowd. Sean was in the midst of having a deeply unsettling vertigo episode, so he wound up sitting out on the couch, watching the kids via Zoom, which I think Ian was kind of tickled about. Ian followed up with a month-long, once a week Zoom dance class that he couldn’t ever quite seem to get into.

One of the kids’ rewards for doing their learning tasks and chores and whatnot has been to choose from a stack of art supplies I had purchased from Amazon earlier in the summer. The first thing they chose were these white masks that they could paint and decorate to their specifications. They have really been getting a lot of mileage out of coloring those masks with metallic paint and glitter glue and adding an extra dash of glued on glitter when the glitter glue didn’t sufficiently deliver on the pizzazz front. I think Maya considers all of hers to be different varieties of dragons.

The cicadas, harbingers of summer, are making lots of noise in the back yard. The kids and I happened to find one in our stone bed outside that had just molted! Maya, as is typical, exhibited zero hesitation in fishing the poor creature out of the rocks and carrying it around, petting it. Once Ian saw that she hadn’t died, he acquiesced to hold the cicada a bit as well. We also found a second one that appeared to be in the process of molting. Both of the bugs went into Maya’s bug house along with some twigs and leaves and little cups of water. We watched the one still in its shell climb the wall and begin to pop out of the old exoskeleton. Then everything stalled. We checked after the kids rested, and sadly, both cicadas had died. We are pretty sure they were Superb Green Cicadas. They didn’t have quite the right markings immediately after shedding their old skin, but as they darkened up, that’s the species they seemed to match.

Luckily, Sean’s weird vertigo episode had largely passed by Father’s Day. The kids and I made him “ear-savers” to pull his mask elastic away from his ears so it wouldn’t rub sore spots. (By this point, we’ve upgraded our mask inventory beyond the ones rigged with handkerchiefs and hair ties, so the ear savers aren’t quite as useful now.) We purchased some fancy local chocolate and also some art supplies so Dad could try his hand at making oil pastels the way Deepak does.

And I made a cake. That’s an understatement for this dessert, particularly since I don’t consider myself much of a baker. At Sean’s request, I made the pistachio cake from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook. This means that we had to source a few oddball ingredients and a couple of new tools from Amazon. I had to start making components about a week ahead of time so I could get everything done in time. I made a crumb, a curd, a cake, and an icing. I stacked it three layers deep. I froze it. I thawed it. It was crazy. It was also delicious. I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a tiny but towering slice of cake before. The kids wound up not liking it, so Sean and I worked our way through the entire cake over the next week. We’re already discussing how we can simplify the recipe so it doesn’t get relegated to special occasion status.

Coronavirus forced the cancellation of most of the big Independence Day fireworks celebrations, not that we’d having gone anyway given the situation. Given that, the weekend before fourth of July, we decided that we should really try to give the kids some kind of celebration anyway, so we drove to a fireworks stand and purchased a few (largely) city-allowed fireworks. Then for an extra-special super treat, we drove to Freddy’s. We figured if it was crowded, we’d get drive-through and eat in the car. We were lucky to find it completely empty, so we sat outside at a picnic table (which I wiped down) and enjoyed our first restaurant since March. Even luckier still, the kids found a big stick bug against the side of the building. It was all we could do to keep Maya from capturing it and taking it back to our house.

On the evening of July 1st, we noticed Hank, Maya’s cat, acting very strangely, looking panicky and trying to use the bathroom outside of the litter box. We had decided we’d need to see our vet the next morning, but when the next morning rolled around, I couldn’t even find the cat. Fearing that he had crawled away somewhere to die in peace, I searched high and low, hoping to locate him before the kids woke up. Eventually we found him hiding behind the fake logs in the back of our fireplace. Poor dude was covered in soot, and he whimpered in pain when we picked him up. I tried to get an appointment for him at his regular vet. When they couldn’t see him early enough, I tried our “usual” emergency vet. Their office near us was completely closed. Finally we got him into a different emergency vet a bit further from our house.

Sean took him while I stayed home, filled out all his intake forms online, and watched the kids. Thanks to COVID-19, It was a zero contact drop-off. They called us a bit later to let us know what was going on. Hank had a complete urinary blockage, which is apparently common in neutered male cats, but can be fatal. They kept him at the animal hospital for two nights, giving him a catheter and meds and fluids and monitoring his kidney values. HIs kidney values returned to normal range, but ever since Sean went to pick him up on the 4th of July (again, with no direct contact from staff), his recovery has been slow. He finally appears to be back to eating and drinking normally. We reintroduced him into the household yesterday afternoon, but thus far Hank-Nox relations have been … contentious.

Because we had just gotten Hank home and he took a bit more care than we had anticipated, our celebration on the 4th was a harried affair. I blew up the pool so the kids could play for a while. We filled some water balloons. We spent some time in the early evening watching ash “snakes” blossom and smoke bombs spew. The kids threw poppers around on the ground, many of which failed to explode on initial impact, and so I was startled by random pops as I accidentally stepped on unexploded ordnance over the next couple days.

We went in to dry off, eat, and let it get a bit darker out. Earlier that day, I had taken a crack at smoking a pork shoulder on my regular old kettle grill in hopes of having pulled pork sandwiches for our dinner. Maya doesn’t like smoke, and Ian doesn’t like pulled pork. So it goes. (For those who are curious, I could never quite get the smoking temperature in the right range using the grill, so after maybe a couple hours, I took the shoulder inside, wrapped it in foil, and finished it in a 225-degree oven. Much yum.)

Maya, fearsome tooth-puller that she is, has now extracted the teeth on either side of her two front teeth. It’s a wonder she can still eat!

Remember how we were going to see Hamilton? In New York City? For our 20th anniversary? On a vacation without our children in tow for the first since they were born? That plan was corona-ed, but luckily the movie version of Hamilton is now streaming on Disney. Of course it isn’t at all like seeing a production live, but I did finally get to watch the show whose music has been such a source of joy over the past few months. And I’m normally not that into musicals. Who knew?

One of the kids’ hard-won art supplies was a package of origami paper. Maya especially has been trying really hard to fold some basic swans and bubbles and cranes and frogs on her own. Ian tries to follow along as well. I sometimes help a bit when they struggle with the harder parts. Generally though, their care and accuracy in folding is improving. Maya asked Sean if he could help her fold a dinosaur. Fool that he is, he blindly agreed without really checking into it. And that’s the story of how Sean and the kids spent probably a good 90 minutes over the course of a couple evenings folding three tiny little T-Rexes. Maya proclaimed Sean the *best* Dad. Sean, I think, may have proclaimed himself done with origami forever.

On one evening, as Sean and the kids were folding at the kitchen table, and the outside light was dwindling but the inside light had not yet been turned on, Maya exclaimed in her nervous/excited voice, “Guys? There’s something out there!”

Sure enough, a small roughly dog-shaped creature was nibbling seeds and nuts out of the ground feeder we had installed for the backyard birds and squirrels. We looked it up and think that it was a little Gray Fox. Evidently, they’re very common in Texas and reports of them visiting suburban backyards are more frequent than one might expect. They’re considered harmless to humans, and so we decided to just not worry about it.

The Woods’ Wild Kingdom that is our yard has brought us a lot of joy this year. Given Maya’s bird-love, we put in a hopper feeder earlier in the year. It has garnered a lot of attention from the birds and squirrels. We don’t really mind the squirrels so much except that they tend to knock the pole that holds the feeder sideways when they jump on it. Then Sean found a little ground feeder, and we installed one of those hoping it would entice the squirrels to spend less time at the bird feeder. This past weekend, we installed a big pole in another part of the yard that holds a tube feeder, a suet feeder, and a little platform feeder. Sean added a bell / baffle thing in hopes of deterring the squirrels. So far, the animals, birds included, all seem to prefer the ease of the hopper feeder over the other stuff, but we’ll see how it plays out over time.

We have seen a number of birds this year. Of course, you already know about the Bewick’s Wren family that hatched their babies in Maya’s bird house. We also have a pair of cardinals that hang out back there. They must have a nest nearby too, because we now see the couple with a handful of juvenile cardinals. We even got to observe the dad feeding them early on. In addition to that, we have now seen: White-winged Doves, Mourning Doves, Black-chinned Hummingbirds, possibly Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, Carolina Chickadees, House Sparrows, and what we think are Tufted Titmice. Maya is pretty convinced that she’s also seen a Blue Jay, an Eastern Bluebird, some kind of owl, and some kind of hawk. I’m torn. On one hand, she certainly spots things more quickly than I do. But I think sometimes wishful thinking clouds her judgement a little.

Our non-bird visitors include green anoles (we think), Texas spiny lizards, fox squirrels, rock squirrels, that one gray fox, and a little fawn we found hiding in our overgrown shrubs in the front yard. We think a raccoon may occasionally be cleaning out the ground feeder at night because on some mornings, the bird bath water is very dirty, as if something has been washing its food in it.

As of Tuesday evening, our school district decided on all-distance learning for the first three weeks of the school year (starting August 18th). After that, unless things change, we can choose whether we will do 100% in-person learning or 100% distance learning. We are choosing the latter for the foreseeable future. Yes, we are very lucky to be able to make this choice; however, that doesn’t mean the school year is going to be easy for us. We will have two smaller kids who will be expected to follow a teacher they’ve likely never met on a screen they can all-too-easily ignore. And it’s still preferable to sending them into the petri dish that is elementary school. Our kids, just like everyone else’s I’m sure, want to go back to school, would benefit from the social interaction they have at school, learn best from a teacher who is physically present. Understand that we want our kids to go back to school, but not like this and not right now.

The virus has ramped up so precipitously in Texas, I almost don’t even want to post comparative numbers this time. Here they are from the last time I posted as compared to this past Sunday. Travis County – 6/7 3,697 cases and 97 deaths – 7/12 14,788 cases and 169 deaths. Texas – 6/7 75,408 cases and 1,841 deaths – 7/12 262,762 cases and 3,216 deaths. United States – 6/7 1,977,899 cases and 112,054 deaths – 7/12 3,304,878 cases and 135,203 deaths. The World – 6/7 6,799,713 cases and 397,388 deaths – 7/12 12,878,325 cases and 568,530 deaths.