Today we finished prepping the garden as a little family! The four of us took on different tasks from hoeing up weeds, to cutting White Claw cans in half for future potting purposes. There are four flower beds in our shared backyard that look like they haven’t been taken the best care of, so it’s a good thing we moved in! Gardening is one of the things we are most excited about (now that all of our big travel plans are on hold) this year!

It’s such a beautiful day out that we have to let the pets come play outside, even the cats! Tiger, Mali’s baby boy, generally roams the second level of our casa, while Gaia runs the first floor. Luckily we have a balcony upstairs that Tiger can lounge on, even though he quickly figured out that he can scurry across the roof and get on the neighbor’s balconies as well. So we lost him for the first time today. He actually went inside one of our neighbor’s houses. Oops! At least he’s cute?

Gaia, on the other hand, just straight up rolled in dirt all day. So I went from having a glowing, white princess cat to having a splotchy, brown alley cat in an afternoon. I guess it was worth it. This is the first time I’ve been able to let my cat play outside, which I think is really important!

In larger news, The Governor set a mandatory stay at home order for the entire state of Colorado today. So, in my best Kip Dynamite voice, “I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious”. Sadly, according to CNN we went from a total of 326 deaths in America on March 22nd, to a total of 928 today, March 25th due to COVID-19. The spread of the virus has gotten so serious in the U.S. that leaders have made exceptions to normal medical practices and rules so that the people in need can get the medical attention they truly need.

“In Texas, for instance, the state will allow medical facilities that are awaiting their licenses or those that have closed in the past 36 months to come online.
”By waiving these rules, we can quickly bring many of these facilities online to help Texas communities maximize their hospital capacity and provide care to Texans in need,” Gov. Greg Abbott said.”

— Eliott C. McLaughlin, Christina Maxouris and Steve Almasy, CNN

There is still hope. We can still pull in the reigns on this thing. Experts in the U.S. still believe that we can get ahead of the spread of the virus. WHO’s Margaret Harris claims that we have the “best public heath brains in the world” working on this issue. We need people to get tested. We need to identify who has come in contact with those infected. We need to get people treated! Lastly, we need to STFH!! Do the right thing, people. Let’s overcome this! We can’t stay at home forever.