I wanted to talk today about COVID again because it's reared its angry head in our lives again. I'm watching numbers that positivity rates have been going up in our area. My mom called me last night to tell me that she tested positive yesterday and I know that COVID isn't necessarily a big deal. Testing positive isn't necessarily a big deal. My parents are both triple vaccinated. My dad just had his, his second booster. But it just sucks when it, it comes close again. I had just seen my mom this weekend. We -- my parents live up, up north. And so we had actually driven up. And then up near them, drove back down with my parents to watch my son's soccer game and then drove back. So spent four hours in the car with my parents on Saturday. So now there's that anxiety again of exposure. Worrying about “I'm a little stuffy this morning. Is it allergies? Is it something more?” I know that I've been triple vaccinated as well, but haven't had COVID after being vaccinated. Makes -- still makes me feel more apprehensive. I know that most people -- that COVID is kind of here in that most people do just fine with it. But I've also had -- I think that I come from a biased spot that my experience with COVID was not great. That I still feel like a year later, I haven't returned to, to the level of health, to the level of fitness, the level of energy that I had before. And I'm sure there's many factors that go into that. And then the experience we had with my sister-in-law who was on a ventilator and on ECMO, and we didn't think was going to make it. It definitely makes me stress more with it. And I also feel like, maybe I've talked about it before, in the beginning there was a clear path. You knew what to do. Now I feel like, well, I've been exposed, but I don't think I'm supposed to do anything different, but I feel like I should do something different. That, you know, that was pretty direct exposure. And I know vaccinations decrease intensity of illness but they're not perfect in that certainly can still catch, catch it. And I don't want to expose anybody else but we also have to live our…

We planned to have a garden. It's a small space. We've had a garden in this space before, but it really needs to be fully tilled and turned over every year before planting. And we just have a tiny, little battery-operated rototiller for getting weeds. Not really to till a garden and so my husband was like, “Well, I've been looking for -- doing searches for people who till gardens and we can rent one but that's a hassle. You have to go get it and it’s expensive. And it takes time. And, you know, I just wish we knew somebody,” and I was kinda racking my brain, trying to think of anyone and hadn't come up with any names, either. And he was outside yesterday, getting the boat ready, actually, and he was in the yard and he hears a little tractor driving down the road in front of our house and looks up and sees it happens to have a little garden tiller on it. And so he ran kind of out toward the end of the driveway and sort of flagged the guy down. And the guy already been by the house, but he saw him and backed up, came and turned in the driveway and my husband asked him, “You know, hey, you got a tiller on that tractor. Would you be able to till my garden?” And he said, “Well, I'm actually just headed into our little town and gotta do a garden in there, but I'll probably be coming back this way in about an hour. If you wanna,” you know, he says, “maybe I'll be able to do it then.” And was asking how big it was and all that and sure enough, about an hour later, the guy came back and our little garden, it took him like four passes back and forth and it's all tilled up and ready to go. And my husband says, “Well, how much do we owe you?” And he said, “Twenty bucks’ll be great.” ‘Cause, like, he was already driving by our house to go do somebody else's garden, so it was just a little extra for him too. And we actually ended up giving him a dozen eggs from our chickens and a half gallon of maple syrup from our trees, which is probably the most valuable thing out of the whole transaction, but it…

But the biggest time I remember that I did this, it was, I think, my senior year in college. And I had an exam that day and I literally think I forgot to set my alarm. I do not think there was an alarm involved in this at all. And I remember, it was like this surreal, like, moment where I woke up and I looked at the clock and it -- I just sort of laid there and went, “What time is that? That's not right.” And then I went, “What time is my exam?” And I didn't panic. I just sort of, like, very methodically was like, “It's halfway through my exam, like, the final exam for this class!” And I got up and I got my -- I think I probably threw something on, probably half my pajamas were still on. Who knows? But I -- like I said, I wasn't panicked or anything. I wasn't racing and I walked into the room. And of course, like, everybody's, you know, again halfway through their exam and the professor kinda looks at me and he goes, “I wondered where you were.” And he let me sit down and take the exam and I did fine and I passed the class and I graduated and all of that. But I thought, “Man, could that have gone differently.” Like, if that professor had not been a nice guy, like, I could have missed taking that exam because I was not there the day that, you know, at the time when it started or whatever. Like, I just -- ugh, I was, I definitely was, I was very grateful that it, that it happened that way, and that I didn't have to, you know, do anything, do anything strange.

So it’s the summer of 2019 and my friend and I wanted to visit one of the parks in town that we've never been before. It was a lot of fun, we spent the whole day there. And then right as we’re about to get into our car, something, like, fuzzy brushed, like, by my ankle and I freaked out. And my friend was already in the car about to drive. I was like, “Wait.” I looked underneath the car and it was the most beautiful cat I've ever seen. Well, it was a kitten. It had bright blue eyes and it was different colors of black and gray and white. And we're like, “We can't just leave this cute cat in this park defenseless.” So we walked around -- the park was just about to close -- asking people, like, “Hey, have you lost a cat?” looking for the cat mom. And we concluded that this poor kitty was just abandoned. So we took it in with us and even though this cat was adorable -- I cannot emphasize that enough -- it was aggressive, a little feisty one. And we took it back to my friend's house because I'm a dog family and that couldn't mix, and she is a cat family. So it was perfect. So they had cat food and water, we put this kitten in a kiddie pool, fed him or her, and it was a lot of fun. It, like, obviously hadn't eaten in a while. But as I mentioned before, it was a feisty one. After it got the food and water, it popped the kiddie pool in efforts to escape and it was very successful in that. It ran into the woods area by my friend's house and we spent another half an hour trying to find this little one. After a while we got the kitty back and we put the cat back in our car and we called every shelter in town and no shelters were accepting cats at that moment. We contacted all our friends and eventually somebody picked up and was just like, “Hey, my past teacher so-and-so accepts cats.” And I'm like, “Oh, Mr. Blank?” I won't say any names. But they're like, “Yeah!” So we got to drive to one of my favorite teachers’ house, drop off the cutest kitty, and it finally had a good…

And because my cell phone had no signal in that area, I couldn't keep track of the weather, the radar, anything like that. So I started to head back. I got about maybe 100 yards, 200 yards, heading back on my journey, when I could see the rain just come across the fields and across the complex. And I’m like, “Oh no.” I've got, you know, $2,000 worth of camera equipment around my neck. There's no way I am going to get back to my car running into a downpour and not have my cameras ruined. So I had to look for shelter and near me was a block of unused porta potties. So I ran for one of the porta potties. The closest one happened to be an extra -- a big one. It was, like, a two-person -- well not, like, a two-seater, but, you know, where if -- it was a family one where, you know, if you had to take a small child in there, you could and have room to move around. It had one of those little sinks, you know, with the hand sanitizer type things, I guess you could call it a luxury porta potty. But I got to that just in time, I got in and the wind came up, the rain came down. So I actually had to stand in this porta potty with the door closed because the wind was so much that it was swirling around. And if I tried to open the door, I was getting rain and mist thrown into my face and onto my camera. So I would say for about 45 minutes to maybe close to an hour, maybe 50, 55 minutes, I was stuck in this porta potty during this downpour. I managed to get one bar of service and I was texting people I knew saying, “Hey, can you check the radar?” ‘Cause I didn't have enough signal to check the radar myself. “Can you check the radar to see how much longer I'm gonna be stuck in here?” Well nobody I was texting had much of a signal or they were busy or they couldn't check the radar themselves, I just had to wait it out. Turns out it was around 50, 55 minutes. It let up, I ran to a tent that was further west, maybe 50, 60 yards west, and…