Tag: new normal

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!

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.

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.)

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