Excuses and Explanations

To say that 2020 was a rough year is such an unimaginable understatement...

For our household, it started with a broken fridge. Then bigger things happened. Then the virus hit. We've been lucky on that front. No jobs lost, no one in the house or our little extended family sick, although we've been exposed and had to hunker down more than once. 

In March, I was on my way home from dropping my son off at work and hit deer. TWO deer, because it's 2020. Not long after, my daughter's husband hit a deer and shortly after that his parents hit a deer -- all on the same stretch of highway where none of us has seen deer in that area except for the ones that wrecked our cars.  

I started driving my daughter's little Subaru that she'd parked it in the barn for one of her brothers to grow into. By summer, I was driving with the heat on full and  the windows down to keep it from overheating, but the only places I could go were to dive my son to work and do some grocery shopping, so we kept muddling through.

There was a whole lot of "just muddling through" in 2020. 

Then there were the wildfires. We live beside the highway. The first day, it was nothing but horse trailers as people moved their livestock. The next day it was equipment, tractors and boats and classic cars...  Every neighbor we talked to was either packing up or heading out. We made plans for who was riding in which car. I had nightmares about what was going to happen if traffic on the Interstate was backed up and the Subaru, which couldn't idle in a drive through on its best days, overheated. 

That hypothetical "what would you grab in a fire" took on whole new meaning. I now know what I'd grab immediately.  And what I'd take in the second and  third loads as the fire was steadily burning in our direction. At its closest, the Holiday Farm fire was six or seven miles from our house. I made the mistake of looking at Google Earth and confirming that there was nothing between us and the fire but dry fields and timber.

It finally rained and we felt safe enough to return out belonging to the house. The Subaru reached its expected end and I now have a reliable car. Which is great, but I can't go much of anywhere.  Last week, the drama was flooding. Not enough to reach the house, but enough to make me seriously nervous as I watched the water rising towards the road.  I know what will happen when the stream floods, but the water has never gone over the road before. It didn't this time, either, but it was unnervingly close. 

I've been too stressed to stitch, too stressed to knit (seriously -- how is that even a thing?!) and definitely too stressed to write regular blog posts. I also realize that even with everything that did happen, we've been amazingly lucky. 

Over the past few weeks, I've tried to stitch and knit, but my nerves are absolutely shot. Yesterday was better. I spent a couple of happy hours stitching cheese and started a new project. There are actually three SALs I want to start in January and I've got a couple of other things in mind. If life cooperates, I'll be posting about them.