Cower in place 9: celebrate!

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 41^st 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!

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).

According to holidayinsights.com, there is an official gift category for the 41^st 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 44^th anniversary, the “groceries” anniversary!)

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,

(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