Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

cattitude and I spent yesterday with a bunch of his relatives. The gathering was at his father's house in Niskayuna. We got a ride there and back from his sister Nancy and her husband, spent Friday and Saturday nights in a hotel, and left early this morning to get home before tropical storm Henri made landfall.

This wasn't a huge gathering by pre-pandemic standards; it started as five people (four of us and Cattitude's dad) and grew to about a dozen by late afternoon, spread out in two or three rooms. I was particularly pleased to see Peter and Trish (Cattitude's brother and his wife), who live in the California desert, and who we last saw when we were living in Seattle. We did get to talk some with C's father, before things got crowded (he doesn't hear as well as he used to). The other people there were Nancy's son (Steven) and his wife, and Peter and Trish's son. I'm glad we went this weekend, but a visit with just his father would also be good, and we might manage that sometime in the next few months.

I decided I wanted to do this enough to take the risks involved in unmasked socializing with (fully vaccinated) people from several different states, plus one dinner in a restaurant, and breakfast in the hotel yesterday. I discussed the risks with adrian_turtle, and she asked me to isolate for three days when I got back and then take a Covid test before seeing her again, so I'm doing that. I'd probably be staying home today even if Adrian hadn't asked me to, because I'm tired from the travel, and because beating the storm means we've been safely at home, with rain and high winds outside.

Small pleasure: when we made a pit stop at a highway rest stop, I noticed two white roses, and took my mask off to smell one. They were a strongly scented kind, which mostly blooms in June or early July (and there were a lot of rosehips on the bushes), and I thought I'd missed my chance to smell them this year because of when I was sick.