Hunkering Down Update & Graham County NC

As the Yoshino Cherry blossoms fade, the Kwanzan's are in full bloom and Romeo loves to help me mow.

We have now completed our first 10 days of staying put and we are only interfacing regularly with our close neighbors but we have had two carefully controlled visitors from the outside.  We are getting some things done around the place including fertilizing the lawn and planting some new grass.  According to the reaction of my new hip muscles, I overdid it one day pushing the lawn spreader around, but I was happy to be able to do it – obviously continued home therapy is in order.

As you can tell from my recent posts, we have been eating well and can continue to do so for many more weeks so we’re okay with the new federal guidelines to stay put another month even though we will run out of some things.  A recent meal, enjoyed on the patio, of grilled salmon and steak for SIL, Pat (not a salmon eater) along with fresh hot homemade bread.

Several of you have posted shots of your well organized pantries and that will be one of my upcoming projects.

Our local county now has 8 reported Covid-19 cases and the nearest counties to our house have 28 & 8 cases respectively while the further away but still adjacent Knox County has 78 cases.

Serious About Containing Covid-19
One of the North Carolina counties just across the border from us has gotten very serious about controlling the spread of the virus in their county.  Graham county with a population of around 9000 and no hospital has implemented strict control of movement in and out of the county and, so far, has no reported cases of Covid-19.  It will be interesting to see how this works for them to see if this was the way the whole county should have behaved.

“According to a press release sent on March 21, the following highways will be closed or have restricted access in order to control traffic into Graham County:

Cherohala Skyway is closed to all traffic.

Highways US 129 and NC 28 at Deals Gap will be restricted to local resident traffic and commercial traffic.

US 129 at Topton will be restricted to pass through detour traffic and local resident traffic only. Once the US 74 detour is ended then US 129 will be restricted to local traffic and commercial traffic only.

NC Highway 28 going east from Stecoah will be restricted to local and detour traffic only and commercial traffic. Once the detour is ended NC 28 will be restricted to local and commercial traffic only.”

We hope you are making it fine through this very difficult time for America and I’m so glad we don’t live in a large city.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them and the blue words are links.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

4/2/20 event date