The Pittmeister's COVID Chronicles

Yesterday, our governor extended the stay at home order for another 2 weeks; until May 15th. That means at least another 2 weeks of working remotely from home. It was about a 30min press conference that our department watched together during our afternoon department meeting. I can't think of much to write about this morning....

I took this photo of our county website's COVID-19 Information page yesterday. As you can see, more than half of the confirmed cases in the county have recovered.  Yesterday was a hard day for Wife and I. Neither of us had slept well the night before and a couple of times when I got up from my desk for a break, Wife was asleep in one of the living room chairs where she sits when she's working on making masks. I did not eat much yesterday. Wife made a breakfast bowl of rice, spinach, and left over korean beef called "marble".  Lunch was hot & spicy rice noodles with assorted vegetables in a green curry paste sauce & fruit. I didn't each much of the rice noodle dish because I was still full from breakfast and thought it too spicy I ate the remainder of my rice noodle dish for dinner (cold) and it was much less spicy. I also ate a banana and a small bowl of apple sauce.  I did not work out yesterday afternoon after work. I did not feel like I

I'm not feeling well this morning. For whatever reason, my allergies decided to act up last night as I was finishing rinsing out my hair for the second time. The resurgence of my allergies, which Wife attributed to eating more than our normal sugar intake yesterday but I think was caused by the stirring up of grass and dirt yesterday afternoon using a weed whacker, caused me to have very disrupted sleep. I don't think it was sugar, I think it was a combination of the nap I took yesterday coupled with the dust from using the weed whacker. I couldn't fall asleep until 11pm and I needed a melatonin pill to do so (1st time I have needed one in weeks). I took an Allegra this morning at 5am and slept until ~7am. Wife didn't sleep well either last night, which she also attributed to eating more than our regular intake of sugar. Yesterday was pretty mundane. Wife and I did more work on our front yard, which included trimming dead branches from one of the cedar juniper tre

I'm taking the day off from work today. I need to use 8 hours of personal leave before June 30th or else I would lose the time. I asked my director if what would be best so as not to inconvenience the department and was told to take it before registration opens on Friday. So I'm not working today. I guess that means more deferred yard work will be completed whenever Wife and I get up and get going this morning. April 26th Wife and I worked on the front yard yesterday. We cleaned up the area between our and our neighbor's house to the north of us. Wife cleaned out all these weeds and I did my best to trim a tree that grows between our properties.  I trimmed a pyracantha plant that grows in front of our front porch. We're not sure who planted it, but it wasn't us and it's a pain because it grows fast and has thorns. I've trimmed it back every year we've lived here and it still grows back to its old size every spring. Fun fact, a pyraca

April 25, 2020: Yard Work  This is our composting bed. We bury all of food cuttings, egg shells, and other organic material in it over the course of the year. I turned it over in February and turned it over again yesterday morning, then added manure and peat moss in the afternoon. This picture was taken this morning.  2 years ago, Wife planted a patch of green onions in the compost bed. Last year, I dug them all out and re-planted them in rows, but because the weeds & grasses took over the bed last September while we were visiting Wife's family in Japan, we weren't able to harvest them.  When I turned the soil over back in February, these grew voluntarily without planting. We pulled them out and Wife is going to use them in some way.  This is an iris plant that was growing in our back yard when we moved in. It was just 2 leaves sticking out of the ground and now 3 years later, with water and love, it has grown into this.  All for today...

As of this morning per our county's website, here are the COVID-19 statistics for our county:  The number of confirmed cases in our county has increased to 36.  23 of those cases are active cases.  13 have been released from isolation.  672 people have been tested In our state, there are 6,045 confirmed cases with 266 fatalities.  There are still no confirmed cases in our zip code per the AZDHS zip code map & there are still no reported cases in my parents' zip code, which is one county over.  Our governor held a press conference on Wednesday. Here's a video of it:  It's about an hour long, so it's okay if you do not wish to watch the entire thing... All for this morning. 

I am very good at making messes, usually of freshly cleaned things. I often spill food & beverages on myself or other freshly laundered items. If you have ever watched the movie "Super Troopers", my life is kind of the character of Farva. If you watch in the movie, he is always spilling something on himself or otherwise getting covered in something (this is pointed out on the DVD commentary). That's kind of my MO in life. I wasn't raised by wolves. I'm just messy.  Yesterday at lunch, Wife had put a freshly cleaned table cloth on the table. Actually, it was an old shower curtain that she converted into a table cloth, but it had been washed & hemmed, was unsoiled, and free of any stains. Wife had prepared a dip for lunch along with carrot & celery sticks. This dip included mayonnaise, tuna, and other Asian spice too many for me to list. Five minutes was all it took for me to get it dirty. I was standing next to the table, dipping a carrot or celery s

Good Morning! I have noticed a marked increase in the daily visits and readership of this blog. Yesterday I recorded 34 hits, so to whomever is reading this, I thank you and I hope you find what I am writing to be entertaining, informative, or perhaps simply a welcome distraction from whatever is going on in your daily lives where-ever you might reside in this world.  In our little southeastern Arizona county as of this morning, we remain at 30 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus. 21 of those are active cases and 9 have been released from isolation. 5 cases have required hospitalization with 1 requiring admission to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). No deaths have been reported in the county In our state, as of this this morning, there are 5,460 confirmed cases and 229 virus related deaths. _____________________________________________________________ Yesterday's meal log when something like this:  Breakfast - Asian oatmeal with seaweed Lunch - Left over chick

We are up to 30 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in our county.  21 cases are still active with 9 having been released from isolation. 607 people have been tested. For our state, there have been 5, 250 confirmed cases & 208 virus related deaths. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nothing much happened yesterday. Wife made roasted chicken leg quarters with instant mashed potatoes and spinach salad for lunch. We finished the crayfish stew for dinner. Wife had a little meltdown yesterday. A woman from our church had asked her to make 2 masks and identified the fabric she wanted. However, when Wife finished them and I delivered them, the woman came over to complain about it. This caused Wife a fair of amount of stress on top of what she's already dealing with. She went back through her text message history with the woman and found that her requests for which fabric were very vague and d

I worked from 8a-4:30pm yesterday. I feel like I'm busier now than when I'm working at the office. At one point, I felt like I was being pulled in 4 different directions.  Wife made spaghetti with meat sauce for lunch....yummy! After work, I did squats, lunge walks through the living room and into the kitchen (8-12 steps each time), shoulder presses with my 1-gallon bottle of water,  scissor leg lifts on the floor of our bedroom, & donkey kicks to shape the buttocks. I also did 2, 3-minutes of the Harvard Step Test for 30 minutes, then did 30 minutes on the spin bike.  I don't feel any soreness this morning and I could feel that my legs have gotten stronger since starting muscle training last week. My squats are deeper and I feel that I have better balance in my lunges. Just starting out. No reason to get over confident.  A neighbor brought us some food yesterday after at 4pm. He made Crayfish stew. Here's a picture:  All that was missing (acc

Okay, so maybe our Sunday was not that lazy, but we certainly were not as ambitious as we were on Saturday, or at least it did not feel that way. We did complete some house cleaning yesterday. Wife vacuumed and mopped the hard wood floors in the living room and kitchen while I vacuumed the carpet in our bedroom, hallway, and office. I also tidied up my desk that become quite cluttered after 3 weeks of working remotely from home. Around 12pm, a friend of ours, for whom we had purchased 2 dozen eggs, came buy and picked them up. She even reimbursed us the $5 the 2 dozen eggs had cost. I had told her don't worry about it, but she insisted. In the afternoon & evening, Wife rested and vegged out on the computer watching Japanese dramas on the computer & from 4pm-9pm, I made 3 batches of tomato sauce from a box of tomatoes we had gotten from our pastor on Saturday. So you can see why I called a Lazy Sunday. All for this morning.

COVID-19 Case Update for our County As of this morning, there are 24 confirmed cases in our county with over 540 people having been tested. Not a poor ratio in my opinion.  4 people have been admitted to the hospital, & 2 of those admitted to ICU (per the county website).  Per the AZDHS website, our county seems to be doubling every 12 days. I think that's a slow rate, but the fact that cases continue to increase is worrisome for Wife and I.  Yesterday, Wife and I did work in our backyard. Our backyard is our proverbial "red-headed step-child". It's ignored...a lot! Our tasks included fixing and re-attaching boards on our fence and gate. Whomever built the fence that surrounds our backyard did a really poor job of attaching the picket boards. They used these staples that rust easily and due to strong winds, the boards often fall off the fence. So, yesterday, I reattached several boards that had fallen off and reinforced several that were weak

I had been craving hamburgers for awhile now because they are a comfort food for me in these stressful & uncertain times, hence the reason I sneaked off to  BK  a couple of weeks ago. Wife is trying to avoid gluten in her diet, so having traditional hamburger buns is not a healthy option for her. So last night we compromised and we made hamburgers with rice buns. I got the idea from a  Tasty  recipe video titled  Japanese-style Fried Chicken Rice Burger  and adapted it for burgers. We defrosted about ~3/4 of a pound of hamburger meat and I finely chopped a 1/4 of a large onion to mix in with the meat.  After mixing in the onion by hand, I made a ball of meat about the size of a baseball (1/4lb) for each burger patty and pressed the ball into the burger press.  We used a plastic hamburger press that we had purchased from Amazon (click  here  for the product description) to form the patties for the hamburger and the rice patty buns.  The hamburger patties were covered light

After working yesterday, I worked out for about an hour. I did a series of circuits that involved shoulder presses, dumb bell squats, push-ups, lunges, sit ups, and crunches. The "weight" I used was a 1-gallon jug of water that formerly contained vinegar. 1-gall of water weighs ~8lbs, so it's not a heavy weight, but when you are shoulder pressing it for 20x per set, muscle fatigue is a real thing. I did muscle training for about 30 minutes and then 30 minutes on my spin bike. The time on the spin bike was not high intensity as its purpose is for fat-burning, which requires a lower intensity workout.  Wife didn't want to cook dinner last night. I can't say that I blame her. I think both of us are experiencing what I'm calling "cooking fatigue", which means we're running out of fresh ideas for meals. Since drive-thru restaurants are still open, I suggested we drive into the Sierra Vista and get some drive thru Mexican food at a local place that

We are up to 19 cases in our Arizona county. If you would like to follow the growth or decline of the COVID-19 virus in our county, you can visit  https://covid-cochisehealth.hub.arcgis.com/ For lunch yesterday, Wife made chashu-don again, even though she said it would not be an everyday or regular food. We also had baby spinach leaves. For dinner we made our dinner. I had 1-cup of macaroni & cheese, 3 ribs, and Modelo beer.  Wife had her Zoom choir rehearsal last night and I needed to help her understand some emails that were sent to her by the instructor. Wife experienced frustration due to the verboseness of the emails she received and the oft-repeated, but subtle difference in instructions at that times contradict something that was previously stated or understood.  After her rehearsal was over, she came out and made herself dinner. I went out for a drive in one of the cars since I had not left the house since last Wednesday when I drove to Sierra Vista for the purpo

My day started out later. I got up around 6:30am. I am usually up around 5-5:30am, but I felt more tired than usual this morning. Wife made a breakfast soup she called "Korean Oatmeal". It included oatmeal (obviously!), egg, and the Korean paste called "kochujan" (I don't think I spelled that correctly). It was more like soup than oatmeal & in order for me to eat, I had to think of it like that way. Work started at 8am. We finished up our work project by 9:15-930, so now it's back to our regular duties. We ate lunch at 12:30. Wife made a Korean chicken stir-fry. Went back to work at 1pm and worked until 4:30pm, then I got off the computer. I did some stretching, some pus-ups, sit-ups, and lat pulls with 1-gallon water bottles. I also did a couple of 3-minute step exercises. After I was done working for the day, Wife took over the computer to watch her Japanese dramas on the D-Library website and left with a drained iPad battery so I wasn't

Wife has been nagging me to start muscle training to improve the shape and size of my upper thigh region. So today, after finishing my shift, I changed and did some lunges, some squats, and other traditional leg exercises...Now I can't sit down without experiencing pain. Damn it! I hope she's happy. Work project continues. We're calling all the students. ALL OF THEM! Most students don't even answer because we're calling using our personal cell phones and using *67 to block the number. Some don't have their voicemail boxes set up so we can't leave messages, and some numbers are disconnected.  My favorites are the ones that say, "this line uses Robo Killers. You can leave a message, but don't expect a call back". Lunch today was leftover pork & potatoes. Dinner was a new invention we called "chashu-don". It was a donburi of Chashu and sliced boiled eggs. Very good. All for today.

It is Easter Sunday here in the U.S. and due to the Stay at Home orders of our governor, we are unable to gather together this morning. A cousin of mine, who lives in Ohio and who is married to a UMC pastor, hosted a live viewing party of her congregation's Easter Sunday Service and I was able to watch her husband preach on the topic. My parent's congregation in Patagonia has been broadcasting recorded worship services over a local radio station for the past couple of weeks. I will probably tune into that at 10 as well. My overall general feeling today is that I don't wanna to do anything, I don't wanna call anybody, and I don't wanna do anything. I simply want to sit in my office and be on computer. I currently have the 2004 National Championship game cued up on YouTube. I didn't get a chance to watch it when it was originally played because I was living in Japan at the time. Today might be a good day to catch up on some history. Perhaps I'm feeling a b

It's been about 10 days since my last post. Apologies to those who may be reading this. I have not kept up with documenting our meals. They have gotten less glamorous and more simple. Here are some stories that have happened since my last post: Sneaking out to Burger King Last Wednesday night, April 1st, while wife was having her school choir practice via zoom, I said was going "out on patrol", which is her code word for driving around aimlessly with no real purpose. While this was my intent, I let my stressful eating habits resume and my first stop was the local Burger King drive-thru. I ate 2 spicy chicken sandwiches and a double cheeseburger in the car while driving around our small town "on patrol". Unfortunately, I paid for my deception the next day by having one of the worse cases of fast-food diarrhea I've ever had and Wife found out about my deception thanks to some Facebook Messenger messages between a co-worker and I (who loves fast food) t