Spring is progressing rapidly, the days have been warm (70s!) and the bees are buzzing ..
I found these blossoms on the river-side of 'our' hills, I think they're apple-blossoms. I couldn't remember if I'd seen apples on these trees last year, until I remembered that we were at Brust all summer and Fall, so I couldn't have anyways ..

                                                      

                                          Not a bee but a Spider wasp (I think)

A little further down the road I almost stepped on this caterpillar, munching away on some tender young leaves. It might be a White Ermine Moth, but I'm not sure.

                                          

Saturday morning we woke up with a whole herd of Whitetail Deer in the yard ..

    

They were skittish, but brave enough to come down and nibble on the fresh green grass that's coming up fast alongside the creek ..

And than Easter snug up on us once again this Sunday! With everything going on, it was a weird one of course.                            
People (mostly) staying at home and not visiting family, no Easter mass or other events going on, the Pope delivering his 'Urbi et Orbi' blessing over an empty St. Peter's square ..

                                         

Our day was nice and quiet and relaxed. We had nothing planned, it was to cold to golf, and we spend the day mostly inside where it was warm and cozy.
Of course we ate a little fancier .. 
I was going to make a braided Easter Bread or something equally appropriate, but I didn't feel like doing the whole kneading, rising and baking thing, so I settled for simple Easter Croissants ..

 

I came across them on some website and they couldn't be easier to make.
They're just your basic roll-up croissants from a can, which you fill with some raisins, cinnamon and a little dab of butter. (I put some purple, green and yellow sprinkles on them too, to make them a little 'Easter-y'). Delicious!

For lunch we nibbled on our traditional Deviled Eggs (spiced with curry of course) and I tried my hand on making a (cream)cheese ball, which came out OK-ish ..

After all that excitement, oh I forgot to mention the Key-lime pie with coffee, we went for a little drive in Sam's side-by-side, back into the canyon, and all the way up to the state forest at the top. 

                    

This is looking down at the house from about halfway up ..

         

These pretty blue Mountain Kittentails/toes (Synthyris missurica) were flowering everywhere, as well as an early clump of Arrowleaf Balsamroot.

It got pretty cold the further we went up the hill, and since the side-by-side doesn't have a front window the icy wind got us full in the face. Brrr!
The views were spectacular though .. that's Lucile there down below:

And these are the, still snow-covered, mountains of the Seven Devils Mountains wayyy in the distance ..
Eventually we hit snow, and mud, and we decided we had enough cold for tone day and turned around

Looking very 'gangsta' there my man! (In reality, he was freezing his ears off!)

And in between rain, frost, an earthquake, power outages and, oh yeah, a virus .. the roof is coming along, slow but sure ..
We have 3 guys working for us right now, there were 4, but Austin has torn his ankle ligaments (at home) and is out of the running (ha!) for a couple of weeks.

The funny thing is that we've been getting inquiries for work, now that several businesses further away in McCall and Grangeville have laid of their workers because of the virus.

These are the same guys that turned us down previously for various reasons, but now they need the work!

We're not taking anymore on though, more bodies means more chances for getting infected, unless we can find someone with experience, which very few have. 

Here in Idaho county we're still at only 3 cases and no deaths, let's hope it'll stay that way!

Let's see, anything else? Oh, yeah, look who-(who-hooo)'s back? The Screech Owls, that reared 2 chicks in the barn last year!
 

 

I'm pretty sure they're (he? she?) sitting on eggs, and they're not too happy we're there. They do stand their ground though, and seem to be determined to stay!
If looks could kill though ...

Meanwhile .. in Bangkok:

I know, this virus is not to make light or fun of, but these two are just too cute!

White Water-Crowfoot

Most of the first spring flowers are very small, but when you 'blow them up' they're always quite stunning ..

I find new ones everyday at the moment, probably due to the beautiful weather we're enjoying. Temperatures are as high as 70F and the winds not as bad as they used to be.

  

 Prairie Stars and Creeping Flox

I always have to touch these velvety soft leaves of the Wooly Mullein, soooo soft!

Wrens are so darn cute, I think this is a Canyon Wren ..

As far as the job goes, after much deliberation .. James has brought the guys back. 
It's been 10 days, everybody is still healthy and we still only have 2 cases in the county, so we'll take our chances!
They've all sworn to keep a low profile .. time will tell if this was a very dumb move ..

OK, let's see, this was about how I ended the last post, the whole place looking this kind of sickly green:

James biggest concern right now, is keeping the seeds moist so they'll germinate.
He has finagled (he's good at that) a sprinkler-system together:

 

He placed a water tank in the truck-bed and attached a sprinkler-system pump to it. With help of the generator this now pumps water either to a sprinkler-head attached to a water hose, or to a man-held hose (where the system can't reach). 

One of the guys will be on sprinkler-duty for 2 weeks, moving the heads and spraying by hand. It takes 2 days to do a full go-around, and than you start all over again.

It would help of course if it would rain. Unfortunately there's not much in the forecast, but we're keeping our fingers crossed.

The seeds should germ in about 4-7 days. We'll see ..

The rest of the crew worked on getting the last of the framing done to get the roof ready for sheeting .. 

We were very surprised (but elated), to find out that the Grangeville Country and Golf Club opened as scheduled on the first of April!

Apparently golf is an outdoor activity permitted by the self isolation order, if done in compliance with Social Distancing Requirements

Unlike in Boise, where they closed all golf courses, they decided to open and see how it goes ..

The restaurant is closed and you pay by putting the green fees through the slot of a mailbox that they nailed on the tree at the first tee.
You're not supposed to touch the flag, as in, not pulling it out, and they put a little piece of foam in the hole, so you don't need to dig deep for your ball and touch anything.

They had planned to bring a food truck on the premises this year, and of course in the current circumstances that has turned out to be a perfect move, since food trucks are exempt from the restaurant closures.
This one serves hamburgers, hot dogs and, best of all, street Tacos!
Guess what we're having next time?

And that was another week in this strange new world of Covid-19. Like I said, not much has changed for us but places like New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans are being hit hard and fast. 

So many deaths .. it's mind-boggling ..

A nice full rainbow .. apparently they're symbols of hope .. how appropriate!

Well, we're still here, the end hasn't come yet! It's a strange world though, getting stranger by the day. 
There are some hopeful sounds from Holland that they feel the curve is 'flattening', but here in America we're still very much in the 'accelerating' phase of the disease. 
New York had it's highest death-toll over the last 24hrs today, a scary 950! That's just for the city!

We're a week into the stay-at-home order now, and for us nothing much has changed yet. Austin is still working for us and we're all doing and feeling well.
We're actually thinking that we might bring some guys back so James can work on the roof. We feel it might be possible to stay away from each other far enough to make work possible, especially since they all will be outside. We'll see..

I've been diligent to go for my daily walks, getting some fresh air in my lungs and trying to build up some muscle and most importantly, some overall resistance!

It's fairly sunny lately but the winds are bad and often very cold!

When the sun is out more and more insects are starting to buzz around ..

I came across this beautiful hawk the other day. Too far away to get a really sharp shot but nice enough ..

                           

                              Harlan's Red-tail Hawk

I'm trying to keep busy and to not check the news or social media too often, but it's hard to not want to know what's going on all the time.
My mind also just doesn't want to focus on anything too long, it jumps all over the place ..
I do a lot of puzzling and reading (a lot of blogs of course) and spend quite some time cooking and baking.

I've made these little mini apple pies before, they're very nice, apples, sugar, cinnamon .. comfort food!
I have to start watching what I eat though, I'm 'comforting' myself a little too much ..

The new house now has water. It is being pumped up from the tank below (next to the old house), somebody came out to install the pumps and everything that goes with it.

But the most exciting thing that happened this week was the arrival of the grass-seed!
The hydro-seeding company from Boise was still doing business as usual, although I doubt they fall under 'essential' services, and showed up early Thursday morning with a big truck and a whole bunch of seed!

It had to be filled with water on arrival, so the guys here had connected the sprinkler system from the well up above, down to the meadows below, and James had found the correct parts to connect it to the truck's in/outlet.

There was a little hiccup when the system stopped working after only 30 minutes into the job, but it turned out it was out of gas (duhhh ..) so a trip to Riggins solved that problem and fortunately they could proceed ..

What a cool system! It goes so fast!
     

They sprayed everything from the barn up above all the way down to the shop below, and unto the area in the front, the back and below the new house.
Most was done with the 'big gun' that was mounted on the truck, but some of the more detailed work was done with a hose and by hand.

They used different nozzles on the gun to spray up close and for far off.

Who on earth came up with that terrible color green though, god only knows ..

They also did the area around the old house where the tank had been placed, as well as where they'd taken out the trees before and had created a path to the new house.

Even our new and improved 'run-way', that we'll use when we leave here in October, got a shot!

They only had just enough seed, in fact they were a little short (I actually thought they were a little 'heavy-handed' at times), but the most important areas are done. 
Hopefully we'll get some spring-rains in the coming weeks, but just in case that will not happen (which of course is 'Murphy's Law), we're going to bring the old fire-truck, that's sitting at Brust, down the hill for the duration. 

At least, that's the plan, now if it only would stop snowing!