Welcome, @PumpkinPatchScarecrow, and thanks for sharing your gardening news. I do most of my gardening on our second story deck, as the deer will eat almost anything within reach. I'm in an area of New York called the Hudson Highlands. I can't normally start any new plants until April or May.
Sue, I'm so sorry to hear that you lost your pup in December. Our cats are quite elderly and I'm not looking forward to their medical decline. One of them, the orange/ginger boy, just has a checkup and is losing weight.
It has not been a good week for me. I woke up on Tuesday with pain in my right maxillary sinus. It's never drained well, and I get an infection there almost every winter. So I booked an appointment with my Nurse Practitioner for Wednesday afternoon, knowing I'd need antibiotics. Wednesday morning, I woke up with cold or flu like symptoms - coughing, headache, stuffy sinuses,etc. So I took my temp with an old Exergen temporal thermometer. It showed my temp as below normal, so I thought it must be just a cold.
They took my temp at the doctors office, and it was 38.3 C, so I was running a fever. They swabbed my nostrils for an in office test and confirmed that I have influenza A. I left with scripts for Augmentin and tamiflu and have been home sick ever since. The tamiflu is helping a lot. I binned the old thermometer and got a new one from Amazon that does tympanic readings, which I find easier and are more accurate. I was still running a fever yesterday, but none today so far.
The painter is here finishing up, and a bloke from the town building department came out to inspect the gas hookup for the stove.
As I was leaving Wednesday morning to go to work, I spotted four large turkey toms in the front yard. They then approached the front door like a gang of Nottingham knockers. I hope I didn't infect anyone at work on Wednesday.