Big day in the old Muddscape household. A big DIY day, that is.

When God gives you flour, salt, yeast and water, make bread. Wendy whipped up a loaf of her Rustic No-Knead Bread, and the house smelled just fabuloso all day!

When you live with a baker, who needs a supermarket! This stuff is really, really good just fresh out of the oven.

While that was going on, I responded to a call for volunteers published in the Seattle Times. The Greater Seattle Coronovirus Assessment Network, SCAN for short, was asking for volunteers to self-test for the virus so that they could develop more accurate models for the penetration of the virus into our communities. They were looking for young, old, sick, well, homeless, living in a home, anybody types so they could get a good cross-section of our populace for the data.

The website is scanpublichealth.org, and you can volunteer by filling in a short survey and submitting your application. They will select about 300 people a day, the number of self-test kits available at present. If you are accepted, they will courier over the test kit (mine arrived in about 3 1/2 hours), it takes about 2 minutes to conduct the test and package it back up, and they give you a pre-paid Priority Mail envelope to return it. The results are available in a couple of days, and if you are positive, they will put you on a list for further medical assistance if needed. If negative, you get a letter telling you so. In any event, it’s good to know. They will only test one person per household, since it’s pretty well accepted that if one is positive, very probably all are positive. And vice versa.

The test involved putting a swab up my nose about 1.5 inches or so, rotating it 5 times, then sealing it up in a tube, which went into a bag, which was sealed and put into a box, then sealed into a mailer. Very mild discomfort, not at all like the news outlets have been reporting. And off to the Post Office it goes! Easy peasy! Glad to do my part. For her part, Wendy has joined a network of seamstresses that will be making fabric masks for our first responders and medical professionals to help and stretch the supply of N95 masks needed for critical situations.

Tippy is always doing his part.