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Cower in place 4: Carhenge

– Self-isolation journal, day 4 (3/19/2020).

Our daughter and granddaughter have embarked on a quest, Mad-max style (i.e., driving) to bring home their sister/daughter from Michigan State University, where they have closed down classrooms and eateries, and generally disrupted the whole college-student experience. The trip from their home in Wyoming to Lansing, Michigan takes about 20 hours.

I couldn’t convince them to take a mere 100-mile detour while transiting the Nebraska panhandle, in order to visit Carhenge in Alliance, NE. I told them they should see the Toyota Coronas there in honor of the corona virus, but they were having none of it: “Everyone knows that Carhenge is built from 100% AMERICAN cars!!”

Riddle: What rhymes with orange?
Hint:

* * *

I’m starting to discover cracks in my hoarding. I’m well stocked up on powdered toilet paper and homeopathic hand sanitizer, but I realize I forgot to get a stash of hearing aid batteries! Now I’m out, except for the ones in my hearing aids right now. And they don’t last as long as they used to, I think because I am listening harder. (You’re familiar with the principle that things wear out faster with harder use, right? Like how the driver side windshield wiper always goes first, because the driver is always looking through that window.)

I’ve ordered some batteries from big-A, but if they don’t deliver soon, I’ll have to set foot outside my door again (yikes)!

* * *

During my time set aside each day for worrying, I thought of a new threat—drought! I’ve been practicing my 20-second hand wash, and soon realized that my habit of leaving the water running while I scrub was wasting an extraordinary amount of water. I’m trying to stop that, but old habits are hard to break. What if everyone is doing that?

Lake Mead is at historically low water levels

Bathroom faucets put out about 1.5 gallons per minute. Let’s say people might ought to be washing six times a day. If they forget to turn off the spigot while singing “Happy Birthday” or “All You Need Is Slugs” or the Doxology, they waste on average 3 gallons of water a day. The population of the US is what, 330 million? If we don’t all get our act together, we’re talking a billion extra gallons of potable water literally down the drain every day! At that rate, we could empty Lake Mead less than a decade, and it’s already at historically low levels!

We can’t let it run out! Let’s get with it, Covid-eers!

* * *

My sister and Third Age Thoughts co-influencer Lona has also been keeping a quarantine journal on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t these days among us Third-Agers?), you can access it here.

Thanks,
Dorn
3/19/2020

Day 3 Day 2 Day 1

Lona’s quarantine journal

My sister and Third Age Thoughts co-influencer Lona has also been keeping a quarantine journal. For reasons she explains in the journal, her quarantine site doesn’t have a computer to make it easy to create posts, so she’s putting her journal in a Facebook album.

If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t these days, among us Third-Agers?), you can access her entries here, and follow along as she posts new ones.

Sample:

-d

Cowering in place, day 3

– The adventure continues…

ill this mind-numbing monotony ever end? The days have started to blend together with a maddening sameness that I’m sure will eventually send us screaming into within less than 6 feet from another human being, for the sweet release from all this waiting, waiting, waiting.

It’s true that it’s only been three days, and we’re both retired so we are pretty much spending our days like we normally do, but the fact that we have to stay huddled at home due to an external threat, rather then just our normal lethargy and misanthropy, is vexing.

The Metropolitan Opera (whose simulcast performances I used to love to attend at the local cinema, back in the Days of Normalcy) has shut down for the entire month of March. Instead, they are offering free streaming of old performances to opera-starved fans. I tried to log into one of these, but got a message that there would be a delay connecting, so please be patient, and I was number 22,483 in line. I disconnected and tried my luck later, and it said I was number 391,044 in line. So much for that!

Other knots of survivors are slowly sending out messages of hope. In solidarity with them, we are no longer wearing pants.

Since our gym is now closed like most everything else, I decided to try out the big eyesore elliptical machine that impedes movement into and out of our bedroom. We got it decades ago in some self-delusion that we could get fit if we just spent enough money. I don’t remember how it got in, but it is too big to move now even if we wanted to. But at last it has come in handy! I pumped on it for about 45 minutes (don’t want to overdo it or I won’t get back on tomorrow), then had a bracing shower. Felt good!

We’re not exactly alone—the solitude I observed early yesterday morning didn’t last. By the afternoon, many of the kids who would have been in school if the schools hadn’t shut down decided that a jaunt to our little beach would be in order (and who can blame them, or their harried mothers?). So they frolicked and footballed while we watched from our house, counting the number of physical contacts and mentally measuring the social distance between each little germ-carrier.

Thanks!
Dorn
3/18/2020

Day 2
Day 1

Cowering in place, day 2

– Day 2 of Dorn and Kathleen’s Cower-in-place journal (3/17/2020).

hen I woke up this morning and took a look around outside, the air was clear and calm, and the bay was still. Because most of our neighbors either work for a living, or have only their “weekend” house down here, this weekday morning was like many: there wasn’t a soul in sight. I didn’t see anyone for the time it took me to drink a whole cup of coffee. I could easily imagine that the disease had already passed through, and I was looking out at an unpopulated landscape. It was calming and creepy at the same time.

We watched an old movie in bed. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, they were showing Peg O’ My Heart with Marion Davies as an Irish orphan—or is she? It included a timely (but bad) influenza joke from the comic relief character, who described it as a jolly good “wheeze”:

“I opened the door, and in flew Enza!”

(This was apparently a stale joke even in 1933. It seems to have been a common skip-rope chant in 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu pandemic, and had its roots well before that.)

Later I had to break quarantine to get some medicine from the vet, so I also stopped at the Giant. There was milk there, but no meat, flour but no sugar. Still no hand sanitizer or toilet paper to be seen, but I did find the last bottle on the shelf of rubbing alcohol—with wintergreen!

I was there only to get the items we absolutely needed for an extended isolated stay, so I didn’t dally. We had agreed to full Andromeda Strain protocol, where I would march straight into the shower when I got back and do a full head-to-toe before even taking the groceries out of the car.

I wasn’t nervous going into the grocery store—everyone seemed normal and unpanicked out in the real world (but every single customer wiped down his or her shopping cart handlebars). But then Kathleen called me to remind me of the shower protocol, and how important it was to take it seriously because of all the risk factors and the lack of hospital capacity, and the store (which I was still in the middle of) started seeming more and more sinister. Get me out of here!

Back home, we watched more black and white movies, and tried to make a dent in the (virtual) pile of library e-books we had remotely checked out. In keeping with our psychological need to eat differently from when we weren’t under plague alert, we cooked some chili for supper. And that’s about it.

Thanks,
Dorn
3/17/2020

(Day 1)

Cowering in place

– In which Dorn records his and Kathleen’s experiment with self‑isolation.

Prologue:

I. The libraries and schools in our county have been shut down since last week, due to the threat of coronavirus. Today our governor ordered that restaurants, bars, gyms and the like are also to be shut down, at least through the end of the month.

II. Some of my siblings and niblings just returned from a jaunt to our ancestral grounds in Norway. (That trip, and its harrowing escape back to the US as the virus was closing borders all around them like the jaws of a gigantic bear trap, is a hearty adventure tale in itself, that I’m hoping one or more of them will write.) They are all back in the US now, and in accordance with the latest wisdom, they are self-quarantining for 14 days before visiting any old people.

One of those siblings is Lona, and one of the places she’s quarantined out of is her own house, because her husband Gordon, who is fully as old as she is, lives there. Today Lona started sharing her quarantine journal on Facebook.

Kathleen and I haven’t been out of the country lately, or (to our knowledge) in contact with any corona-positives (or “Cee-Pees”), but decided it would be wise to socially-distance ourselves away in our little country cottage, “The Lotus Eatery”.

Lona’s example has inspired us to start our own “Cowering in Place” journal.

Cowering in Place, day 1 (3/16/2020).

Having joined in the fun of panic-buying last week, we are confident of having enough toilet paper to last out several extra days of the zombie apocalypse. We’re stocked with foods fresh, frozen, and imperishable. No milk, but plenty of that kind of canned tuna that we don’t like.

One of the universally acknowledged rules of cowering in place is that you have to eat differently than you would normally. So, we pulled the old Spiralizer off the top shelf, dusted it off, and made lo-o-ong strings of spaghetti out of all the veges we could find: zucchini, carrots, beets, pickles. We weren’t brave enough to process the broccoli in the fridge, and the celery and mushrooms just wouldn’t cooperate.

Mixing this with some lemon juice, feta and oil made a tasty salad, that when cooked became a delicious mirepoix. We learned that the safest (perhaps the only safe) way to eat it was with a snail fork (perhaps a tuning fork could be substituted) in one hand and a pair of kitchen scissors in the other.

* * *

The stock market has been spooked by the whole coronavirus thing, which has sent my IRA teetering. I had calibrated my contributions to it down to the penny, so that I didn’t have to work an hour longer than needed to give me an IRA that lasted exactly as long as I did.

You would think that the fear of an unexpectedly early demise from the Chinese Flu would cancel out the fear of living longer than my IRA, but oddly enough it didn’t. Instead, by some weird calculus of human psychology, the two fears were added together! (Bet you didn’t see that coming!)

So we called our IRA guy and asked him to advise us about the money in the IRA. He came armed with charts, graphs, and future projections. ˆ”See?” he told us, “you’re still on track for meeting your retirement goals, despite this market tumble.”

“But what if one of us gets sick?” I asked. “Excellent question! Let’s plan for that! How about we have Kathleen go into a nursing home at this point, and then die at this point three years later. Let’s re-do the math, and …. great, you’re still fine!” (He really said that.)

This was very comforting to me, although Kathleen didn’t seem as reassured. “Why am I the one who gets to die?” “It’s only reasonable,” I said, “I’m the one who arranged the videoconference.”

But she still didn’t seem reconciled to our new plan. I didn’t say it aloud, but i think she was letting her cabin fever jitters get in the way of rationally planning what was best for All Concerned. And it’s only day 1!!

Are you keeping a Cowering in Place Journal? If so, it seems like a good topic for a GUEST POST! Let us know!

Thanks,
Dorn
3/16/2020