– 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.
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!
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.
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!”
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