“The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine” is a quote from Nurse Ratched from the theatrical play and then the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  This is Day 40 as I write this, and to be truthful, I had hoped that it would have been over, as I am sure that everyone else feels the same way too.  We have created an artificial routine that has helped to keep our sanity and it has worked so far, as it has been good here.  We still split the household duties, which basically has been the same since we married.  We get up in the morning and do our morning routines, then my Bride has breakfast and goes to work, her office is at the moment the dining room table, so that she can spread every thing out and have a couple of monitors in operation at the same time, lunch, more work, then dinner and then she relaxes with a hobby or a some television.  Whereas after breakfast, I read the paper, do some computer time, lunch, do some writing and some projects, dinner and then after words, some Social Media; as a side we also either take our daily walk at lunch time or before dinner and we are actually enjoying some sun, for a while, we were actually walking in the wind, snow and or rain or a combination of all three. 

Meals are the saving grace these days, and in spite of the fact that some days she is trying to make me healthy with altered recipes from Weight Watchers, all is good.  With all of the food we have purchased prior to this newest bug, as a normal policy, I still have seen no real contraction of the shelfs in the refrigerators and freezers, and this way is good, because we haven’t had to fight the maddening crowds and witness the empty shelves as if we are in a Third World nation.  That is not to say that we have not bought some additional food, but have bought around what we have.  Some dishes are not what I would order at a restaurant, but some of the food is what she might have made for herself, if I was out and she was eating alone for the night.  We had Tilapia, and it is a catch-all name for a group of about a hundred different species of fresh water fish.  It is a white, flaky and bland fish that requires spices and creativity to give it some zest.  Tilapia is actually the fourth largest selling fish in America.  With a salad, potatoes and vegetables, one has quite the meal.  I have not attempted to step on a scale, because I normally only do, when I see my physician, but my Bride has achieved her desired goal and it holding and she is very happy. 

As I have stated a couple of times, our dinners are designed so that we can have at least a second dinner, if not a third or sometimes as a lunch.  It finally got to the point where we had used up all of the partially opened bottles of red wine and all of the white wine that there as a go-to, emergency wine, though I think that there are still a couple of bottles of sparkling still waiting to be grabbed.  One of my self-appointed projects is to rearrange the wine cellar and I have been finding some strays that I have liberated from my raids and we have been having some wines out of the ordinary.  Two wines that I knew we had, but I wasn’t quite sure where I had placed them were a couple of splits of German wines and I thought it would be perfect to try them on two different nights with the same dinner. These were also gifts brought from Germany by The Wine Raconteur, Jr.  The reason the bottles were off by themselves is that they were in the historic “bocksbeutal” bottles that look like a flask, a kind of short and squat bottle.  The first bottle is Weingut Geiger and Sohne Muller-Thurgau Kabinett Halbtrocken 2016. Weingut Geiger and Sohne was founded in 1850 and is the oldest winery in Thungersheim am Main. One of the unique differences about Franconian wines is that Riesling is not the leading grape of choice. As one can tell from the label the grape varietal is Muller-Thurgau, which is now the leading grape of the area. This wine has the Pradikat of Kabinett, which means that the proprietor feels that this wine is better than the basic wine, but it is not a late harvest pick like a Spatlese, and that this wine will have even more nuance and traits of what they feel is true for them. The wine is also “semi-dry” or “half-dry” as the label indicates “Halbtrocken.” I could not find any production notes on this wine, but this wine was delightful with just a touch of sweetness and some acidity that was very refreshing with the meal.  The second half-bottle is Burgerspital Wurzburg Silvaner Trocken 2015. Burgerspital is one of Germany’s oldest charitable foundations that owns a wine estate, and this wine comes from Wurzburg, probably the most known and important village of the area. This wine is made from the Silvaner grape, which used to be the leading varietal for Franconia. This wine is listed as “dry” from the notation “Trocken,” and some writers have likened the wines of Franconia to be more like a French white wine compared to the “classic” German white wines.  This wine suffered from being compared to the first wine as it was very understated and was not exciting, and in hind-sight I should have probably served this wine the first night.  We are trying to make the most of it.