I'm getting pretty good at making my own gin cocktails at home, and TCG will make them too now.

As I'm the only one in the office, I kind of keep tabs on what's going on. I reported that the pest control people came in and left something under our kitchen sink. One person - who is TERRIFIED of mice - responded asking if I'd seen a mouse. I was able to assure her that I had not, that the men came in as a preventive measure. (Out of the goodness of my heart, I've never told her about the grasshopper mouse ... also known as the werewolf mouse.)

You know how there are stories about animals showing up in places where humans aren't? One of the other sides of that is that vermin are also, well, not getting bolder so much as more desperate, since all those dumpsters and office kitchen trash cans, et cetera et cetera are not getting filled up any more.

Stuff that most people haven't seen for example: crows and seagulls remembering that they're predatory birds.

So, honestly, the mouse traps may be a preventative measure, for sure.

Restaurants in my county can open for dine in next week. I don't know how to react to that.

My reaction would be to stay at home...

With most of the restaurants closed, I've been seeing reports of rats, shall we say, expanding their territories. They're also eating hoses and such from car engines, since people aren't driving as much.

A side effect of people not driving as much is that there's been a drop in the number of accidents involving bicyclists and pedestrians. However, the drivers that are going out are driving faster and more aggressively, so there seems to have been an uptick in the number of car accidents.

Restaurants in my county can open for dine in next week. I don't know how to react to that.

And apparently they're defying the governor's order. So... yeah, I'd stay home.

the drivers that are going out are driving faster and more aggressively

I've definitely seem this on the freeways here in Texas. Even more than Texas baseline, I mean.

Something else recent: I take a walk around the apartment complex for exercise after dark, and mostly I've been seeing feral cats, with the occaisional bat. Last couple weeks I've seen an opossum at least every other night.

Yes, people are seeing possums and other wild animals. There were the usual duckling parades - ducks make nests, lay their eggs and hatch their babies in less than friendly places, so they get an escort to some water. The reflecting pool is popular ... and some places, they have ramps so the little ones can get in and out.

And right near the zoo, people in an apartment building notices that one of the hawks (from a nest in a tree just outside) had gotten tangled in something and was hanging from a tree and couldn't get loose. He turned out to have been tangled in a length of monofilament; a crew from a tree company came by, one climbed the tree, got the hawk, he was sent off to a raptor rehabilitation center. They cut him loose, rehydrated him, made sure he was OK and he was released near his nest. yay!

However, the drivers that are going out are driving faster and more aggressively, so there seems to have been an uptick in the number of car accidents.

Yeah, at the rate I'm going I feel more likely to be killed by a car than by the covid.

I've come across cars in lawns (not parked!) twice this past week on the Alameda. Much less traffic, tons more stupid driving.