Cower in place 13: adaptation

– Dorn’s isolation journal day 13 (3/28/2020).

This morning we heard a sound that transported us back to better times: a knock on the door! (Remember those?)

“Oh, wonderful!” we thought. “One of our neighbors has come by with some free home-made pastries and champagne, like in those other magical neighbor­hoods that other people describe in their self-isolation journals!” (YOU know who you are!)

It was our neighbors all right, but they were just stopping by to tell us that my car window was open, and I should close it before the rain starts. What they didn’t know was that I hadn’t touched my car in days, since before the last big rainstorm. Any damage they thought they were preventing had already happened. Good thing we’re all now trapped in our own houses and the very concept of transportation to some other location is now obsolete, or I’d be pissed!

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See the source image

We’re starting to adapt to the new normal, I think. For the first week or two, I remember the start I would feel every time I realized “there’s a way that I could do that without coming into contact with anyone!” Now, it’s almost natural.

We canceled all our in-person doctor visits, and interact with them by phone or on their internet Patient portals. We haven’t tried a video-consult yet, but it will be just a small leap.

We’ve been getting our medicines from a mail-order pharmacy for years now (our insurance mandates it), but just yesterday we received our first mail-order supply of dog medicine for Archie. I had canceled my periodic run over to the vet and just had them arrange to mail it.

When we think of restaurant food now, we think of take out. Some of our favorite restaurants seem to be shuttered for the duration (at least, they aren’t answering the phone. We haven’t been there in person to see, of course), but some still do curbside service.

For those restaurants who still open, we have our decontamination protocol down pat now. For those that are closed, well, we just try to make it ourselves, or do without (often, these two options amount to the same thing, in the end).

We’ve tried our hand at ordering our groceries online for curbside delivery from Safeway. The ordering part seemed to work fine, although they are so busy that we couldn’t schedule our actual pickup until next Monday. I guess that’s a good thing, their workers are still working and not on unemployment. And I imagine it’s easier to keep safe protocols in a store when there aren’t all those customers underfoot.

We started the last roll in our normal cache of toilet paper this morning. Soon we’ll be dipping into our apocalypse stash of Brand X (“now extra shreddy!”) toilet paper, which I picked up a few weeks ago in one of our last shopping excursions, back when the rumors of vanishing toilet paper were just starting. But before that happens, we can enjoy the gift-wrapped roll left at our house at some point last week when we weren’t looking, by good neighbor and local hero M—. You see, our neighborhood can be magical and Mr-Rogers-y too!

Here’s a toilet paper hoarding joke from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

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We got a post-card today from our relations visiting our ancestral Norwegian home. (Strictly speaking we got it yesterday, but we give all our mail a 24-hour quarantine before reading it.) It was mailed from Norway several weeks ago, but it took so long to get here that all the travelers have since returned and completed their 14-day quarantine before we ever saw the card. Welcome back! (One of those travelers is co-blogger Lona, who didn’t have blog-posting access from her quarantine site, which is why she’s been so quiet.)

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Big shout-out to Kathleen and to ex-work friend Elizabeth (ex-work, not ex-friend) for passing on this wonderful song, about staying indoors and defeating the coronavirus. I think that’s something we could all get behind. Here’s the link, but be warned it’s Not Safe For Work. It uses raunchy language and some dirty words, as you can deduce from the title, which is also the song’s refrain: “Stay the F**k at Home”.

Thanks,
Dorn
3/28/2020

 

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Day 5   Day 4   Day 3   Day 2   Day 1

Cower in place 12: Norsk

– Dorn’s isolation journal day 12 (3/27/2020).

ccasionally Kathleen gets to worrying a bit about how this whole virus thing is going to affect us, or our kids, or our retirement, and has trouble sleeping. But last night she slept well. She sometimes asks me to wake her up in the morning—a sort of “pay it forward” for Archie waking me up to go on pre-dawn walkies—but this morning I just couldn’t, she was snoring so peacefully.

I told Kathleen about this after she woke up, and she was curious. “How do I snore?” You can’t be married for 41 years without picking up a few tricks, so I told her, “like an angel.”

She observed that I snore in all sorts of different ways—“like a rainbow”, she says. Sometimes I snore like the three stooges.

(For those of you too young to remember or care, the Three Stooges snored like this: “SNOO‑OO‑OORT wee‑be‑be‑be-be‑be‑be‑be‑beep”. The Three Stooges were an afternoon TV staple when I was young, mostly enjoyed because they were STRICTLY FORBIDDEN by Mom, who rarely forbade anything. She banned them because their humor consisted chiefly of hitting and otherwise damaging each other, which she was afraid would give us kids ideas.)

Other times, Kathleen says, I snore like a Norwegian pig. She is referring to this joke, which we learned from brother-in-law Chris, who attributes it to Garrison Keillor.

Ole goes into town of a Saturday night. Much later he stumbles home, completely lit. In the dark, he misses his own house and wanders into his neighbor’s pig pen, where he finds his neighbor’s prize pig lying peacefully asleep. It’s a cold night, so Ole snuggles up next to him, and listens happily to his contented snoring. After a while, it occurs to Ole that it sounds like the pig is snoring in Swedish. The longer he listens, the more he becomes convinced that that pig is really talking, in Swedish, in his sleep. Finally his curiosity can stand it no longer and he jabs him in the belly and demands, “Är du svensk?”. The pig rolls over and grunts sleepily, “NOOOOOORSSSK!”

The Norwegian pig joke constitutes a rich branch of Scandinavian literature. Here’s another, from my ex-boss Leon:

Danish guy went to visit his Norwegian cousin who was a farmer.  The cousin was showing him around the farm and the Dane was amazed at how healthy and plump all the pigs looked. The Dane asked what his secret was and the cousin said he’d show him. He took him and one of the pigs out to his apple orchard, picked up the pig and held it up to where it could reach the apples, which it ate happily. Wow, said the Dane, I understand now, but doesn’t that take a lot of time? Sure, said his cousin, but what’s time to a pig?

I am a firm believer in the Liebniz’s principle of online plenitude, which states that everything that can exist, must exist on the internet. Armed with this faith, I set out to find the website of Norwegian pig jokes. Oddly enough, I could not. There was a page devoted to pig jokes, and plenty of pages for Norwegian jokes, but none dedicated specifically to jokes that combined these two principles of humor. This only shows, I believe, how far our search engines have to evolve before they can reveal to us All Knowledge. The truth is out there!

All of the many Norwegian joke pages, it seemed, included a version of the same pig joke, which indicates to me that this joke is perhaps the archetype of all N/p jokes. (Please note: I am a proud descendant of Norwegians, and am therefore legally entitled to make jokes like these):

A Norwegian, a Swede and a Dane made a bet about who could stay the longest in a stinky pig barn. They all went in at the same time. After only two minutes the Dane came running out. Five minutes later the Swede stumbled out the door. After ten minutes, all the pigs ran out.

I feel like I had best quit now. Thanks for reading,
Dorn
3/27/2020

 

Day 11   
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Day 5   Day 4   Day 3   Day 2   Day 1

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

 

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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

 

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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

 

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