Blending Back Into The Community
Todd Swank's Diary Entry for May 31, 2020
All seemed pretty calm in Prior Lake on Saturday, even though 30 miles away in Minneapolis this week has seen some of the worst riots in our nation's history. 2020 has definitely become one of the craziest years of my lifetime.
Mystic Lake re-opened this week which was another step back to normal. They are limiting guests in the casino, so it took me 3 attempts to go there before I could actually walk in the door. They have a bunch of rules for safety including temperature checks at the door, a mask requirement, and chairs removed from the slot machines and blackjack tables to attempt to force people into social distancing. I was a bit surprised to see how there was very little enforcement once people got past the entrance, though. Quite a few people removed their masks or pulled it down off their face once they were inside. Personally, I'm torn a bit. I like that many people seem to have confidence that this virus won't affect them, but I also hope we don't see a big new resurgence in cases as our re-opening progresses. I guess we will see what happens.
Grandma Linda stopped by for another one of her porch visits. We still don't let her in the house. It has nothing to do with the virus, though. She gets really rowdy once inside and it gets to be a challenge to keep her calm and not start breaking things. We're working on it.
We were very excited to witness the historic space launch yesterday when SpaceX transported 2 astronauts to the space station. I really loved watching it, but my family became upset when they kept asking me to move out of the way of the TV. This was history, though, and I wanted a good view!
On Saturday night, we made a visit to see our friends, Jen & Dan Walters. We were pretty sure they invited us, but they seemed very surprised to see us when we arrived.
I've been much more aggressive than Miss Sheri at re-connecting with people again. She really keeps insisting on maintaining the 6 feet of social distancing barriers in place at all times. She's getting better, though. Although sometimes she feels the need to drag the dog by the collar to push him closer to people as a kind of a canary in the coalmine type of test. The dog seemed fine, though, so all was good!
The Walters live on a big plot of land, so there's always a bunch of wildlife in the vicinity. We were pretty tickled when a flock of deer suddenly ran nearby our group while we sat at the bonfire.
Miss Sheri grabbed the camera and ran after them. Unfortunately because it was right after sundown, the lighting outside was terrible so catching good pictures was a challenge. I thought this one turned out pretty neat however.
You may remember my story last week about a fish being dropped on my car. Several people expressed disbelief on our theory that a large bird must have flown over with it and dropped it for some reason. Well I was able to secure another piece of evidence by a bizarre coincidence. I was telling the fish story to my neighbor and she told me that this bald eagle has been flying over our street all week. As a matter of fact, right after she took this picture she noticed our car stopped on the street but had no idea what we were doing. I've zoomed in on this picture to see if he was holding a fish in his talons, but due to the lighting it's impossible to tell. Crazy amount of coincidences on this one, though.
We also get a lot of ducks in the neighborhood, but none have dropped any of their food on us yet as far as I know.
We have a couple of ears of corn hanging on a bungee cord on our porch. While eating supper today, we noticed these three intently staring at them, but for some reason were hesitant to make their move. Made for a cute picture, though.
