– In which Dorn tells a non-covid story, for a change.
oday I got to do a job that had nothing to do with the coronavirus. We’re well into spring, with the new life appearing and buds budding and birds singing, blah, blah. For me, one of the harbingers of this fertile season is that the lawn starts to need mowing again.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like mowing the lawn, especially now I’m retired. I find it to be kind of like walking meditation. I bought one of those old-timey push mowers, which means that you can smell the grass when you cut it instead of gasolene, and you can hear the wind and birds around you instead of engine noise, or, if you feel like it, you can hear the inspirational audiobook you’ve plugged your head into.
But today is not the day for the push mower. Before the first mow of the season, the lawn is always pocked with overgrowths of grass and weeds. Some of these have grown into tufts a foot or more high. I suspect these are where a dog peed once, and ever after every dog who wandered by felt it must pee in the same place. For a lawn this feral, I had to break out the old electric mower. With luck, and if I am conscientious, maybe this will be the only time this season I have to use it.
I wore my respirator. Not a covid respirator, but my normal, Ace hardware-model dust and (more importantly) pollen-stopper. I have grass allergies that can get me to sneezing so bad I throw my back out, and even with the daily doses of Singulair, I dare not tackle a lawn mowing job without my respirator and a preventative dose of Benedryl on top. It makes me sleepy afterward, but what greater pleasure is there in summer than taking a nap after you cut the grass?
It was pleasantly cool and breezy today, and even with the power mower noise, it was a fun workout to tackle the growths that had invaded our yard since last fall. I think I did the job without thinking about coronavirus even once. What a vacation from the covid lockdown!
And the lawn looks so nice once it’s done. One of the things I like best about our new-mown lawn is that when it is cut short enough, the weeds (which make up at least 60% of our yard’s ecosystem) look just like the grass that I can never get to grow in their place.
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I’ve finally thought of a good pen name! Long-time readers might recall my search (here) and (here) for a decent pen name, thwarted when I found that my brilliant inspirations had already been appropriated by quicker thinkers than me, or I realized they were cognates of old-person memes.
But my new nom de plume is great—it’s edgy, classic and yet of-the-moment, and has that sort of familiar ring to it that makes it feel just right. And as far as I know, no one else is using it yet. You heard it here first!
Thanks for reading, Trentin Quarantino 4/10/2020
Next time: does coronavirus make a good sourdough starter?
Social isolation is an obvious subject these days. As I write, I am on day 25 of social isolation. I feel especially sorry for the extroverts, and have sometimes thought that the situation is easier for me, who, even in normal times is somewhat socially isolated. But I miss people! Remember places? I miss places!!! Maybe we will appreciate everything more when this is all over.
I found this a hard painting to complete, despite the familiar subject matter. Just focusing can be difficult when there is low level anxiety going on. Somehow my brushes all seem crappy, too, even though they were the same ones I was using before! But, in the interests of normalcy, I am calling this done and posting it so I can move forward. Stay safe, everyone!!!
ike many people these days, Kathleen and I are trying our hand at making face masks. It has finally vindicated our hoarding tendencies.
I’m not talking about the now-popular plague hoarding of toilet paper and hand-san, I’m talking about what’s been our habit for years now, that just recently we’ve decided to stop.
But maybe not just yet! We had fabric to sew into masks, and some elastic (some big hair scrunchies if nothing else works), but I didn’t know where we’d find the flexible piece of metal that shapes the mask around one’s nose.
Aha! A few years ago, I was replacing a worn out windshield wiper on our car. As you may have noticed, some windshield wiper blades have a thin piece of metal maybe 1/8 of an inch wide, sitting immediately behind the rubber squeegee part to stiffen it. That metal piece is called, apparently, the flexor. “I wonder if this metal would ever be useful for anything,” I mused at the time. “I’d better save it, just in case.”
And sure enough, five years and one zombie apocalypse later, I really did have a need for that thin metal strip. I had another source too, from another hoarding action. You know those metal reinforcers that are glued inside hanging file folders? Well, we didn’t hoard those reinforcers (that would be bizarre), but Kathleen and I both hoarded a bunch of work files from jobs we had 10 or 15 years ago, and by golly some of those files were in folders, and some of those folders had those metal reinforcing strips. Pay dirt! Proof that “Hoarders Always Prosper”, if you wait long enough.
I’ve made a couple of masks now, but they’re not much good. I’m still relearning how to follow sewing directions and patterns (I used to be quite facile at it, back in my hippie, make-it-yourself days in the distant past.)
Kathleen and I wear face masks when we take Archie for his walks. I know they say that face masks are primarily to protect other people from your contaminated body fluids, and not to protect you from them, but I don’t buy that. I can think of four ways that wearing a face mask will reduce your risk of catching the coronavirus.
(1) Even a simple cloth mask or bandana does afford some protection, stopping maybe half of the airborne particles that would otherwise collide with your face. And a 50% reduction in risk from this particular pathway is (ahem) nothing to sneeze at.
(2) A face mask makes it harder to touch your face. You have to really work to get to your nose or mouth, so you’re not going to do it without thinking, and if you think about it, you’ll probably decide not to do it.
(3) A face mask, like a uniform, is a form of wordless communication—it transmits a message about you to other people. “I’m taking this whole virus thing seriously,” it says. “Keep your poxy self six feet away!”
(4) Wearing a face mask can exert peer pressure on others to also wear their face masks (and that’s where the real protection to you comes in!). We live in a semi-rural, semi-“red”, quiet older neighborhood, and the number of people we’ve seen wearing face masks in this neighborhood is exactly two: Kathleen and me. There are careful people here who take the virus seriously, we’ve talked to them, but they come out of their houses very rarely if at all.
And clearly the hardest social hurdle to wearing a face mask is you don’t want to be the first one in your neighborhood to do it, or you’ll look silly. But Kathleen and I, as a public service, have relieved our neighbors of that burden. We’ll be like the lone applauders in the audience before everyone else joins in, and march proudly with our faces covered.
Here’s one of the masks we made. To show it in the best possible light, I’ve photoshopped it onto the face of Tyrone Power, star of that great swashbuckler, The Mark of Zorro (1940) with Basil Rathbone and Linda Darnell.
This is from the one scene in the movie where Zorro wears a mask covering his nose and mouth, instead of his more iconic bandit eye-mask (). I thought I remembered that this scene was the first time he went out as Zorro, and I figured that he just hadn’t invented his signature eye-mask yet at this point in the movie.
But while fast-forwarding through a youtube of the movie looking for this image, I saw that his eye-mask was actually introduced in an earlier scene when he tore down the poster about taxing the peasants. Then he robbed the evil Alcalde wearing the protective face-mask in the scene above, and then in all the later scenes he was back in his eye-mask. So I don’t know what is going on in this scene, maybe his other mask is in the wash or something, but this whole thing bothers me probably more than it should.
So the moral of this story is if you’re not staying at home, wear a face mask in public. If you don’t have one, make one, it’s not that hard. Protect your neighbors, and maybe they’ll get the message and protect you too!
t’s funny how things have progressed for me and these Cower in Place blog posts. At first I was just stuck at home with more time on my hands to think of things to write about. Then as the pandemic situation got more dire, it was hard to feel anything was important enough to write about except if it related to the coronavirus.
Now the virus and our response, especially the physical distancing and the stay at home order, are ordinary enough that days can go by with no new shock on the news (the news is still awful all over the world, it’s just not as shocking any more), or new experience to internalize. In just a couple of weeks, where we are now has begun to feel normal.
Before I do anything else, let me say a big THANK YOU to those of you who have settled into a different new normal. People like my niece Ysa in the medical profession (as well as your relative working there, and you, maybe), whose old jobs never stopped when a new, exhausting and dangerous job was added on top. And people like my grandson Chris (and maybe yours) in technical professions, who are still out making sure equipment works, air conditioners are still functional, especially in hospitals and places where failures could be deadly, even though the job puts them at risk every day. And those who are helping just by staying at home, even at great cost to their own livelihood. You’re all heroes to me.
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As part of the new normal, I took another trip to the store to pick up online-ordered groceries curbside (first trip here). This second curbside pickup felt to me like, well, like just a trip to the grocery store. The weirdness of packing gloves, masks sanitizers for a trip out, and the decontamination protocol upon returning, had already worn off.
This second time, Safeway had gotten much more efficient at the the whole online ordering thing. I got an email notifying me that my order was ready for pickup, and this time it included an inventory of everything I ordered, what they provided, what substitutions they had made, and what items were not available at all.
The parking at the store lot was light again, but not strikingly so. As I sat in the truck waiting for the guy to come out with the bags, I noticed that now about 1/4 of the people there were wearing face coverings of some kind. So that’s progress.
Almost all of the mask-wearers were older people. I don’t think this means that people were only wearing masks to protect themselves. I think older people, being more at risk, are simply more attuned to the epidemic, and more aware of the latest expert guidance coming out about how useful masks are. I fully expect younger or more oblivious shoppers to catch on to the mask fashion trend by the next time I go—peer pressure is a powerful thing!
We stay at home pretty much all the time except for a couple of exercise walks in the neighborhood, with Archie. We picked our walk times to minimize the chance of contact. This neighborhood is usually pretty quiet except on sunny summer days, and even with schools and many businesses being closed, there were still times when no one is about. On our walks lately, we cross paths with about one person per walk on average, and that person is always walking a dog of his or her own.
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I don’t know how many people actually read my posts, but clearly Big Brother Zuckerberg and his robot army are reading it. Loyal readers (if any) will recall that I recently wrote (here) about the sub-genre of Norwegian pig jokes (I believe the etymological term for it is “Norcine”). I got an email yesterday from Pinterest, suggesting that if I logged in, I would find all kinds of Norwegian jokes there. I confess I did bite at the click-bait, and sure enough there were a bunch of items there that I will stipulate that someone considered to be Norwegian humor. I didn’t see any actual Norwegian pig jokes, but I did see a Norwegian physical distancing joke of sorts:
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HOARD-O-METER:
Frozen green beans
Milk
Velveeta
Toilet paper
Coffee
Broccoli
Twizzlers
Green peppers
Well, that’s it! Let’s see if next time, the pandemic is such old news that it doesn’t even make it into the post.
With all the shifts in the economy all over the world caused by the coronavirus, many companies are struggling, but some must be experiencing a windfall. Kathleen and I were talking about what would have been good investments, if we had made them months ago before we knew the virus was coming. Hand sanitizer manufacturers, obviously, medical face mask makers, toilet paper companies for some reason.
Service industries too have winners and losers. Big winners, that might have been good to invest in, are companies that can provide goods or services (their own or others’) with a minimum of human contact. Instacart, GrubHub and such, restaurants that are set up to deliver, grocery store shopping services.
I thought that the software companies that make the apps that put a pirate eyepatch or a tiara on your face when you videochat should also be able to make a killing, if they just modify the apps slightly to cater to the new work-at-home crowd—have it automatically blank out all the mess in the room behind you, and make it look like you are wearing a business suit instead of your pajamas, or nothing.
Something else that it would have been smart (in retrospect) to invest in would have been some of the video-entertainment companies, as home-bound people all over the world look for new ways on the internet to entertain themselves, now that they can’t just go to a game, hear a concert, or play board games with friends. The online gaming platform Steam would have been a good investment, I imagine, or Twitch(which, if I understand it right, is a thing that lets you live-stream a video of yourself playing a videogame to other self-isolaters).
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Speaking of gaming, a random article popped up today about a really fun board game I played once with my work friend Jon E—, who is a real game aficionado. He brought this game to a business conference years ago, and we all played after-hours. The game is called Pandemic(you can see why someone might write an article about it just now).
The game board is a map of the world. Each player had a specific, movable location, and a different set of resources (medical, logistical, financial, I forget exactly what). The object, as you might have guessed, is to prevent a newly emerging disease from turning into a Pandemic and devastating the world.
Operation! (not Pandemic)
What I really liked about this game, and what made it unique in my experience, was that the players were not playing against each other. All the players worked together to defeat the disease. If the disease was contained or cured before it had spread through the entire world, everybody won. If the disease managed to spread everywhere and wipe out mankind, well, obviously then the disease won, and all the human players lost.
It’s a cooperative concept that I think would be a good framework for all sorts of games, but I’ve never seen another quite like it. (though I’m no game expert).
Although the game was a lot of fun, I don’t think I’d enjoy playing it as much right now, because (a) it was hard! and (b) if any of the players weren’t in top form, the disease usually won. And I worry about that scenario enough in real life that I don’t also need to be experiencing it in my play time as well.
But I thought then that the noncompetitive play meshed well with the we’re-all-in-this-together premise of the game, and I think so even more strongly now. We all have to fight the common enemy in order to defeat it, we all have to be top form in whatever our role is, and we can’t be wasting energy sniping at each other. Now that we’re in the middle of an actual pandemic, the message of common cause in the game Pandemic is even more obvious, and more urgent. If the game sounds intriguing, here’s the article I saw:
Jon tells me that the makers came out with a followup board game in 2015 called Pandemic: Legacy. He tells me the game added a second unique twist: irreversible changes can happen as the game is played. Institutions or resources that were once available can be lost, and never recovered. Not ever, even if you play the game a second time a year later! Like the cooperative angle, this concept of things never going back to how they were before also seems to predict our current predicament rather spookily.
An article about Pandemic: Legacy, which according is considered by some “the best board game of all time”, is [here].
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But back to what I was talking about originally, economic winners and losers in the pandemic. There are a lot of losers—companies that just can’t operate in this lockdown environment, and who might not be able to last long enough to ever open their doors again. Workers who have to choose every day between staying home and keeping themselves and their families safe, or bringing in a salary to keep their families solvent. And workers who don’t even have that choice, who have been laid off or furloughed.
Op-ed pieces sometimes forecast that for many, many people, the economic damage done by the pandemic will far outweigh the medical damage.
Kathleen and I are at higher risk than many from the coronavirus medically, but fortunately we are both retired, and our pensions will come in whether we stay at home or not. When we think of how to help, we usually think of helping with financial hardships people may be having.
Governments have a big role in helping people and businesses, of course, but we who are able can help too. It’s a good investment in your community.
Shop local. Patronize businesses that are still open, if you can. If you have a contract or subscription to a product or service that the virus has stopped, consider letting the company keep your money until they can start again, rather than pulling it back. We’ve told the Washington Post that we don’t want our paper subscription delivered throughout April, but we would like to keep paying our carrier at the same rate as if they were still delivering it.
Remember, there are more ways to be vulnerable to the coronavirus than just being elderly or having medical conditions!
). I thought I remembered that this scene was the first time he went out as Zorro, and I figured that he just hadn’t invented his signature eye-mask yet at this point in the movie. 
