Month: March 2020

Cower in place 11: slap her, she’s French

– Dorn’s isolation journal day 11 (3/26/2020).

Nothing much happened today. The hours just seemed to drag on, especially compared to all the wild partying of the days before. To demonstrate how dull the day was, one of our most exciting moments came when Kathleen asked Siri, “what was that movie where the man went back in time and fell in love with a beautiful British woman with long hair?” Siri told her the movie was Slap Her, She’s French.

I think Siri is cracking from the pressure of cowering in place too. This movie seems to have abso­lutely nothing to do with time travel, or anything else Kathleen said. Variety called the movie a “relent­less­ly low­brow outing which plays like ‘Clueless Does South Fork’ with a side order of garlic”. That’s all I can tell you about it–it seems too uninteresting for me even to find out enough to recommend or pan it.

I realized today that sometime in the last couple of weeks I had stopped wearing my watch, no doubt because time doesn’t really matter any more, does it? Does time even exist any more? But I tracked down my watch and put it back on, not because I need to know what time it is, but because I need to know how many steps I’ve taken. My earlier resolve to work out on that elliptical monstrosity in our exercise room has proven, uh, irresolute, so I need to figure out a new plan to keep my body moving.

We did manage a walk or two up the street with Archie today. Saw some friends and neighbors on the way so got to chat a bit, although the “what have you been up to lately?” conversations had a kind of surreal sameness to them.

The weather was so nice that we decided it was time to get out, really get out, and we started plan­ning what would be our first sub­stan­tial emer­gence from our panic house in a couple of weeks: maybe to­morrow we’d take a jaunt over to near­by Jeffer­son Patter­son Park, to walk some of the trails there. To play it safe, we first called over to figure out the best time to go. We needed the hours it was open, but more importantly, we needed to know when all the stir-crazy parents would bring their high-energy children over to play there. Don’t get me wrong, I love kids, but they’ve got those symbiotic side deals going with cold and flu germs, that have been closing schools since time began. My hats off to all of you navigating this new landscape with kids underfoot!

The City of Ember.jpg

Planning our escape from the house for the joy of getting into the open air made me think of a children’s book I enjoyed: The City of Ember by Jeanne DePrau (2003). It’s about a small town that lives deep underground. It has done so for so long the inhabitants don’t know any other way, but a heroic boy and girl follow clues to discover the town’s history and dangerous fate! It won the 2006 Mark Twain award, and I think it’d be good reading for a 10-year-old or a family, or really anyone of any age stuck bored in the house longing to get back out into the outside world.

We made peanut butter and jelly cookies for dessert tonight, that was nice. Well, here’s hoping that tomorrow proves more exiting!

Thanks,
Dorn
3/26/2020

 

Day 10   Day 9   Day 8   Day 7   Day 6   
Day 5   Day 4   Day 3   Day 2   Day 1

Cower in place 10: happy returns

– Dorn’s self-isolation journal day 10 (3/25/2020).


he festivities continue today! It’s Kathleen’s birthday! We picked our wedding day to coincide with her birthday, so that no matter how long we were together, I would never have an excuse for forgetting either Important Date. (The reason our anniversary is off by one day from her birthday is itself an interesting story—for another day.)

I had some really good presents lined up for K’s big day, including a fancy restaurant meal, and a night at the opera. And not just a cheesy movie simulcast of an opera like I like so much, but a real, in-person opera at the Kennedy Center! And not just any opera, but Mozart’s Don Giovanni! You know the one, it’s where (spoiler alert) at the end, the devil drags the wicked Don down to hell, right onstage!

Great stuff, right? The virus put a kibosh on all those plans. Restaurants are shuttered, and the Kennedy Center canceled all performances for March. And unfortunately, I didn’t have a boffo backup plan.

So instead, we’re having a quiet day together enjoying each other’s company. And as anyone who’s been married over 40 years, and who since retiring a year ago has spent 24 hours a day in each other’s company, there’s just no pleasanter, more relaxing way to spend a day, especially if you’ve picked up a few tricks along the way (see my post on going deaf).

After our big fancy birthday foamy lattés, we breakfasted on leftovers. One of the leftovers was some buttered linguine that we mixed with leftover chicken soup. There was some compacted, oily linguine in the bottom of the container, that looked to me for all the world like folded ramen noodles before you cook them.

Brainstorm! I bet if I dried these in the oven, they would turn into ramen noodles, or a reasonable facsimile. (We already have a stockpile of ramen noodles in with our other stockpiled supplies so it’s not really a survival necessity, but still, the results might be interesting.) So I took the whole blob of congealed linguine and put it on a rack in the oven at low heat.

Figure 1. (before)

It was done in about an hour. And by “done”, I don’t mean that it was dried out into a perfect ramen-cake. I mean when I took the half-dried mess out of the oven to inspect it, I dropped it onto the floor, with a side stop on the way down all over my new suede slippers that Kathleen had given me for my birthday. Experiment over!

Figure 2. (after)

But a new experiment began (that’s the circle of life). The internets say that the way to clean oil stains off of suede is to bury the item in cornstarch, and leave it there until all the oil is absorbed into the starch (I forgot how long it says that takes). Then brush all the cornstarch off and the shoe is as good as new! The results of this experiment will be reported in some future post.

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Like many people, we have a few waste bins in the kitchen and around the house, and when these get full, we empty them into the big trash can in the back, which we pull down to the curb every Wednesday evening. Today, I went out and was surprised to see that in an entire week, we hadn’t put a single trashbag in the can. Nothing in there but yesterday’s pizza boxes!

This could mean (a) rising to the crisis, we’ve gotten all pioneery and waste-not-want-notty, and just aren’t generating much trash any more, or (b) we’ve gotten all bachelor-y and lord-of-the-fliesy and aren’t even bothering to put our trash in a bin.

Fearing there was more (b) than (a) in the answer, we said maybe we should hire someone to help us keep the place clean. The problem was that we were both scared to let anyone in, for fear of virus spread.

We decided we were much better off just sticking with our current help, Kathleen Jr., who you met here. In fact, we thought of a whole new advertising campaign for her and her sister robots: “Quarantined? Human contact denied? Lonely? Get a Roomba, and enjoy a friendly, sympathetic and efficient household helper! Now certified 100% non-corona-infected!”

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We debated whether to snap our fingers at danger and pop over to the local convenience store and get some birthday ice cream. We ultimately decided not to snap at danger. Instead, we made a rude gesture at indigestion, and cooked up mac & cheese for supper. Bold move, I know, especially after the pizza binge of yesterday!

We signed up for a free trial month of CBS All Access (or, as it should be known, the all Star Trek channel) and binge-watched some old and some new Star Trek episodes. Just the thing for a rainy day in front of the fire! Star Trek: Discovery seems more interest-holding than Star Trek: Picard, but so far we’ve only seen a couple of each, so maybe things will pick up.

Thanks! Birthday shoutout to Kathleen!
(Kathleen says “no need to shout, I’M not the deaf one”)
Dorn
3/25/2020

 

Day 9   Day 8   Day 7   Day 6   
Day 5   Day 4   Day 3   Day 2   Day 1

Cower in place 9: celebrate!

– Dorn’s isolation journal, day 9 (3/24/2020).

It’s our anniver­sary today! Kathleen and I are celebrating 25 bliss­ful years together! Not bad at all for a couple that’s been married over 40 years. (Ha ha, get it, what I did there? That’s an unhappily-married joke of the sort in vogue from a place called the Catskills that no longer exists in our universe, from an era long before you were born). Actually it’s our 41st anniversary, and we’re both pretty happy with ourselves about it. Even the cancellation of all the things we were going to do today isn’t really that much of a downer.

We started the day with foamy lattés and home-made blueberry scones (which I overcooked a bit because I was too lazy to cook them the proper way, in the barbeque grill out back). Then, since we were feeling really perky, we decided that monthly schedule be damned! and we’d bathe and get out of our pajamas for the day!

ledo pizza
they never cut corners

We’re thinking of picking up a Ledo’s pizza, in honor of an anniversary date we had planned with another couple, before our plans were cut short by the (you know). We can ditch the box without bringing any virus germs into our house, but what about the pizza itself? We searched the internet in vain for a method to wash the pizza without making it all soggy and soap-tasting, until finally we had a great idea! If only we had a way, maybe a chamber, where we could heat the pizza up hot enough to kill all the virus molecules! That’d work, surely! Now we just have to figure out how to operationalize that brilliant concept, and we’ll be all set.

I got Kathleen a present of the kind every homemaker dreams about—a new top for our kitchen range. (This wasn’t intended to by my ONLY anniversary present, but (you know).) This wasn’t an easy score, because our Jenn-Air range/oven was old and discontinued, practically mythical, even when we moved in twenty years ago. Even the replacement parts got discontinued in 2007. Thank heaven for eBay, where no matter what piece of junk you’re in the market for, somebody is trying to sell it to you.

It came, as all the best presents do, as something of a kit. A big cardboard box was left at our door by a deliveryman too cautious of germs to even ring our doorbell, so we’re not sure exactly when it showed up. But we subjected it to our standard package quarantine protocol by not touching it for 24 hours, so it sat in the rain all day yesterday.

Today we broke it open (which wasn’t hard, as the packaging was now all soggy wet cardboard) and assembled it all on the top of our range. Very nice looking, and I’m sure our food will be even tastier from now on (except that Kathleen says our stove now looks way too nice to cook on, and we’ll have to keep all the old parts and put them back on the stove whenever we want to cook something).

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According to holidayinsights.com, there is an official gift category for the 41st anniversary: land. We bought ourselves some potting soil for the shrubs, flowers and aloe plants we want to plant or replant, so I think we’ll claim victory on that social obligation. (I can’t wait until the 44th anniversary, the “groceries” anniversary!)

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Eventually we figured out an ingenious way to heat-treat our pizza, so I put in an order to Ledo’s. Kathleen decided she wanted a Greek salad too. You heard right,

Safety-first
 Risk-averse
  Former nurse
Kathleen

(That’s a little anniversary poem I wrote for her.) Yes, Kathleen decided she wanted a raw, uncookable, un-washable, 95%-surface-area salad. Her justification? “They make the best Greek salad around!”

In a real good news/bad news twist to the story, Ledo’s told us that they had discontinued the Greek salad from their menu. Nooooooo! Sobbed Kathleen. On the bright side, she dodged certain death from having eaten that Greek Salad. 

Public Service Announcement

Eating salad from a restaurant does not cause certain death, even in these troubled times. But the experts do say that all things being equal, hot foods are more incompatible for the virus to lurk on than cold foods, so are a slightly better take-out bet.

Thanks!
Dorn
3/24/2020

 

Day 8   Day 7   Day 6   
Day 5   Day 4   Day 3   Day 2   Day 1

Cower in place 8: old man worry

– Dorn’s self-isolation journal day 8 (3/23/2020).

oday is a cold, wet, dreary day, and I find my mind turning to all the things I could be worried about. They say it helps to talk about it, so here goes. (I assume that means it helps ME to talk about it. I’m not so sure this will help YOU, gentle reader, so feel free to skip this whole post. I’ll probably be more chipper tomorrow.).

Over and above the new-normal everyday worry of me or Kathleen getting sick…

(1) Archie is running low on his pills. He’s about 75 dog-years old (as I calculated here), and takes almost as many pills as the humans in the family. The prescription has been waiting for him for about a week, but I’m not ready to go out yet and pick it up—I feel like I should wait until I have a lot of things I have to do out there before I brave the Dangerous Outer World.xxx

(2) I also didn’t drop off my Dad’s malfunctioning hearing aids at the repair place because of the same fears, despite my promise to do so. Instead, I just mailed them in, and forced the postman to assume my risk. Will they get there all in one piece?

(3) Our daughter and granddaughters arrived home last night from what felt to us like a suicidal Wyoming-to-Michigan road trip. She says they are all fine, and were extra careful for the entire trip. I’m relieved they got home safely, but I have set my mental counter to “day 1”, and for the next two weeks I’ll wait for periodic updates on how they’re feeling. Stressful!

(4) On Friday, NOAA reported that an employee at the building I used to work in had identified positive for the Covid-19 virus. He or she was last in the building two days before testing positive. On Saturday NOAA announced mandatory telework for all eligible employees in light of the situation. I don’t know who it is, or where in the building, or if this affects anyone I know there. It’s been over a year since I worked there, but I feel a kind of survivor’s guilt for clearing out well before the threat hit.

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That’s enough for now, I think. Thank you for listening to me count off my worries, you’re true friend (not like all those who DIDN’T read this post, they’re just fair-weather friends and we heap scorn in their general direction). Now I feel better.

As a reward of sorts, here’s Bing Crosby singing “Count Your Blessings” from the rather corny, rather camp movie White Christmas (1954), which was obviously made to cash in on the continued popularity of an earlier (and better) Bing Crosby flick, Holiday Inn (1942).

And as a reward for listening to that, here’s “I Put a Spell on You”, by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Thanks,
Dorn
3/23/2020

 

Day 7   Day 6   
Day 5   Day 4   Day 3   Day 2   Day 1

Cower in place 7: good intentions

– Dorn’s self-isolation journal day 7 (3/22/2020).

t’s getting harder to think of anything funny to write about each day. We’re pretty well stocked up, we’ve canceled all our upcoming doctor’s and other appointments, and are resigned to spending days or weeks here if needed. (We haven’t traveled anywhere dangerous lately, so this isn’t a quarantine that ends in 14 days. Our isolation is open-ended.)

Cabin fever is starting to set in, and from our window we watch the sporadic cars drive to the world beyond Long Beach Drive with envy, and not a little curiosity. What is so urgent that it’s forcing them to face the contagion of the big city? Medicines, food, just the need for physical proximity to other humans? But I’ve got to maintain my Safe Distance, so I don’t even have an opportunity wave them down and ask them. Especially without pants on. (Thanks for that coping tip, Scott!)

Our news comes from the TV and the internet, and they only seem to report on one topic now: the coronavirus. The news seems more dire each day. Even beyond the medical issues, this is going to have a terrible economic effect, especially among people who don’t have an adequate safety net.

We feel we should help, but how? Keep patronizing local places of work, maybe, so the businesses don’t have to lay off people, or worse, go under? But that’s near impossible when those workplaces are closing precisely because we must all social-distance! The same thoughts must be occurring to a lot of people, because internet stories on how you can help, even if fully quarantined, have started to pop up. Here’s one.

https://forge.medium.com/what-you-can-actually-do-to-help-right-now-91afb961cdca

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Fortunately (for this post), I checked in with my Dad this morning. He’s doing fine, but wanted to ask if he had missed Easter. He and I were both still plugged in enough to know today was Sunday, but beyond that I couldn’t help him. I suggested that if it really was Easter today, the TV would stop talking about the virus long enough to mention it, so it probably hadn’t happened yet.

I confessed that I couldn’t be sure, because my trips to the grocery store had become so rare that I couldn’t assess whether the jelly bean stocks had all been depleted, or if the remainder had gone on 75%-off sale yet. So not only did I not have any jelly beans, but I couldn’t gauge exactly where we were in the canonical cycle. He said that he had a huge store of jelly beans, of just the kind he liked best (jet black!).

“Hoarder!” I cried.
“No, no, it wasn’t me!” he pleaded. “My granddaughter A— bought them for me! SHE’S the hoarder!”

(note to self: don’t tell my Dad about any crimes I plan on committing.)

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    HOARD-O-METER:

               Good intentions    green

                  Toilet paper    green

                        Coffee    green
    
                       Pickles    yellow
    
      Concrete helpful actions    yellow

                   Jelly beans    red

                      Velveeta    red

Thanks,
Dorn
3/22/2020

Day 6   
Day 5   Day 4   Day 3   Day 2   Day 1