Sylvia's Journal

Today is an important day for us, as a couple, and yet it was such a non-event. No Easter egg hunt, no peeps, no baskets, no chocolate Easter eggs. The ones Ankie had brought were long gone and, since many of the agencies like MSH were in lock down because of Pastor Jones, we couldn’t invite friends from across town.

It was a work-at-home day for me, a welcome chance to get some serious reading and reviewing done. I also planned tomorrow’s session about our annual performance review process and dug deeper down in my mailbox, giving some people belated replies to questions they had posed weeks ago.

Axel spent the morning boning up on the science of reading, syllables, vowels and consonants and the afternoon at SOLA explaining all this to students.

At the end of the afternoon Axel prepared us our traditional Happy Easter Bloody Mary, at about the same time we would have had one in Manchester. We had to improvise a bit because we don’t have all the ingredients for making the Ritz Carlton/Naples/FL Bloody Maries – a staple of our Easter Party. We toasted to all our friends near and far. We missed very much today.

We had some intent to play Scrabble but got hooked into the Doha debates on BBC about whether the Arab countries should lead actions against wayward presidents in their neck of the wood. While watching I did a final quality check of the Quaker (cross-stitch) sampler that I started in Holland in January, added a few stitches here and there and considered it done and ready for washing, drying, and framing.

Axel retired early to bed, coughing and sputtering, with too much fine dust in his lungs. It is visible on all surfaces in our house. It’s even visible on Axel’s chest X-ray.