Day 249

Day 249, self quarantine:

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Is it just me or are the two weeks since the election the longest two weeks since the year of March, 2020?

Anyway, the pencil tree arrived yesterday and as planned, it’s the perfect size to leave up until the kids can safely be here to celebrate, after which it will be installed permanently year ‘round in my office/Julie’s bedroom upstairs where it absolutely belongs.

I know right now it looks like the mummified version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree but trust me on this, I have a vision, and I am posting this as a
“before” pic for fun.

Gary’s going to fetch the lights and ornaments from the basement today and I’m decorating it after work tonight so I will hopefully have the “after” picture soon and also hopefully it’s not going to be like putting lipstick on a pig.

I know it is but we have awesome ornaments.

Okay, so I can only fit about ten of them...sob...

Nah, it’s gonna be fine.

I told you, I have a vision.

It’ll be nice to have a
lit up, decorated  tree at Thanksgiving.  I haven’t discussed this with Gary yet, but I’m thinking of making us get dressed up for dinner.

I’ve been sadly looking at my overflowing jewelry chest lately. It’s filled with so many cool pieces I’ve collected over the years...it’s almost a year since I’ve worn anything other than my wedding band.

And while I did give away a lot of clothes, I kept a few nice things.

So yeah, I could see getting dressed up for dinner.

At least my top half, anyway.  My bottom half might prefer elastic waist pajama pants at dinner.

Gah, I haven’t worn shoes or boots since March, either.  That might be asking too much. But hey hey, I’m rocking fake leopard fur slippers!

They’ll do.

In other news, omg, why do I keep reading stories about people who are wearing masks and staying home and still getting the virus?

This is really stressing me out.

President Joe, a real mitigation plan and the vaccine can’t get here soon enough!

As well as January 20, 2021 in general.

So is anyone getting scared by Donald and the possibility of a coup or should we keep calling him an irrelevant sore loser?

I’m gonna stick with the latter for now.

But it’s getting really hard to ignore what he’s been up to, huh.

And on that note, I’m off to paralegal world.

Happy Wednesday.

 

Day 248

 Day 248, self quarantine:

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

“🚨 Here is today's snapshot of each state's progress in reducing COVID cases/hospitalizations/death, via covidexitstrategy.org

Green is trending better.

Yellow is caution warranted.

Red is going downhill. 

Bruised red is uncontrolled spread.”

Oh hey, do you like metaphors?

The entire country is “bruised red.”

This is terrifying.

Also terrifying:  The Mad King is still here, insisting he won the election while trying to get us into a nuclear war with Iran.

He needs to be removed today.

But as those who know are pointing out, we’re currently being governed by the mafia.

There’s adults in the room, but they don’t care about us, and if it enriches them further to keep Donald where he is...

Good luck getting rid of him.

Okay, I said I am done talking about Donald so I’m moving on.  But reading his unhinged tweets and knowing how desperate he is, is very, very scary.

Anyway...

I got nothing today. Gary and I watched the news about the virus for a bit, got completely unnerved, and then unplugged and listened to music.

We’re just trying to stay sane.

And that’s why I am also going to unplug now and watch the Holiday Baking Championship, which is as corny and cheesy as you can get but I love it so much I tape it every Monday night the whole eight weeks it’s on and wait to watch it on Saturday mornings but I can’t wait this week so I’m watching it now.

Happy Tuesday!

Day 247

 

Day 247, self quarantine:

Monday, November 16, 2020

That’s a pic of my living room this morning.  

Notice the lack of the Christmas tree I intended to put up yesterday?

Yeah.

So right after I finished writing my post yesterday morning, I decided to open the box that held the Christmas tree and set it up myself while Gary was still sleeping.

Did you ever see the episode of the Dick Van Dyke show where Laura opened a package meant for Rob she shouldn’t have?  And it was a blow up boat that inflated to full size as soon as she opened the box, scaring the hell out of her?

That was me and that freaking tree yesterday.

The minute I pulled it from the box...and it was heavy as fuck...and I cut the binding cord, the branches sprung out and almost knocked me over.

Our living room is twelve feet wide.

The tree was almost six feet wide.

And seven and a half feet tall.

I immediately started to cry.

I mean, it was ridiculous.  It was a monstrous mountain of fake tree.  It took up half the house and blocked out all the light coming from the back door.  There was no way we could keep it. I started hyperventilating about having to return it, especially less than 24 hours after reading Gary the riot act about the virus and going to stores.  I had no idea how I was even going to fit it back in the box.

Also, Gary doesn’t do mornings.  When he saw that debacle before he even had coffee, we weren’t going to have a good start to the day.

I dried my eyes and tried to think of an alternative spot.  Could I move it all the way to the left and smoosh it up against the end glass panel of the back door?

I got on my hands and knees and tried to drag it by its base and knocked over half the stuff on the coffee table.

I burst into a fresh round of tears.

It was never going to work.

And of course that’s right when Gary decided to wake up and come downstairs for coffee.

I knew he’d be angry at me just for opening the box myself.  Oh, relax, he’s not macho, it’s because I’m a klutz with a bad back and wonky shoulder and the last place either of us wants to go during a pandemic is the emergency room.  He worries about me and is always begging me to “let him do it.”

As expected, we had some words.

Gary said he hated fake trees and never should have agreed to one.

I wanted to say, “It was your idea to buy this King Kong tree!  I looked at one half the size!”

But I didn’t.

The tree did not look that big in the pic online and we didn’t measure.

And what’s the point of arguing?  I’m stuck with him in quarantine. Neither one of us can go anywhere and it was my day off.

I wanted to spend the day happy, playing our traditional Beatles Christmas records and trimming a tree.

Not crying and arguing.

So instead of playing a childish blame game, I said, “Oh my god, this is my worst nightmare, it took us fifty years but we’ve turned into our parents at the holidays.”

Because our parents and holidays = arguments.

Horrible.

Usually alcohol was involved.

We swore as kids dating we would never, ever be like them, and that we’d make our own kids’ holidays like something at Disneyland.

And we did.  And still do.

Welp, Disneyland before we learned the truth about Walt, anyway.

And that was all it took. Gary stopped yelling and so did I.

But I was still all teary eyed.

“Like 2020 isn’t horrible enough with no kids and no holidays,” I sobbed. “Now it’s the attack of the killer Christmas trees.”

“If we were only going to keep it up a couple weeks, I could live with it,” Gary said.  “But I can’t even get out back to feed the birds. And we just cleaned up all the records. Forget about playing records, I can’t even fit back there. And you want to leave it up until the kids can visit when in 2021?”

“It seemed like a great idea at the time,” I said miserably.

“Don’t they make smaller ones?” Gary asked.

I looked up hopefully.

“Yes!  That’s what I envisioned!  They’re called pencil trees - not even two feet wide but seven feet tall. Pottery Barn has them but I’m sure I can find one anywhere.”

But I want the pencil tree from Pottery Barn.

“Okay, order one and we’ll take this one back.  Hopefully they do no contact returns.”

They do.

So the new tree will be here by next Monday, it’s only twenty inches wide at the base, which is exactly the width of the Edison victrola in the photo I intend to put it in front of and it won’t keep us from seeing our records or our birds.

Or playing our Edison. We have 78 rpm records from 1920s we still listen to, especially at Christmas.

Disaster diverted.

We’re both pretty emotional right now though.

So we talked things out throughout the day and by the time we went to bed we were making all kinds of giant fake tree jokes and now that we both know how much we’re both hurting we’re going to be extra tender and considerate with each other so everything worked out in the end.

It’s crazy, though, how it took a pandemic to change our decades long relationship.  We talk about everything now.

Yikes.  We’re normal, huh.

Okay, today I gotta tell Gary I saw a floor lamp in the CB2 catalogue “we” have to have.

As you know, the old me would have just ordered it and told Gary someone gave me a gift certificate.

Not anymore.

I know, right?

Anyway, have you noticed my tremendous restraint in not talking about Donald today?

That’s because he’s irrelevant.

He does not exist in my world anymore.

So that’s it for today.  I have kind of a crunchy work week with deadlines and a review of the case list again crunch crunch but I will ace it and I’m really looking forward to the four day Thanksgiving holiday next week.

And Thanksgiving dinner!

Gary’s menu is INSANE.

Wait for the miniseries.

Pics will follow, naturally.

Happy Monday!

Day 246

 

Day 246, self quarantine:

Sunday, November 15, 2020

“Tonight we reached another dire U.S. coronavirus milestone: For the first time, we recorded 1 million new cases in a single week.

1 out of every 324 people in the country have been identified as positive this week — an average of 145,712 people each day.”

nytimes.com/interactive/20…

I’m so scared.

I just read the obituary of someone who used to do my hair.

Coronavirus.

He leaves a shattered spouse of forty years.

You know Ms. Overactive Thinker here.  I almost spiraled into a panic attack at 5:00 a.m. this morning.

The what ifs...

Okay, I’ll stop.  This is out of my control. What is in my control is staying indoors and Gary knows this, too, but of course I am also reading stories of infected people who did everything right.

And still they got the virus.

And still they died.

I have it on authority Governor Wolfe is going to ask everyone who can, to return to remote work on Monday.  This doesn’t affect me, my boss knows I’m working remote or not at all but I worry about everyone else.

I’ve been so obsessed over Donald and the election and so much in acceptance mode about the virus after eight months of quarantine I forgot to keep worrying that the people I love and I are in serious danger.

Oy.

How much more can we take?

Look, I’m very careful about who I follow on Twitter.  I know the difference between legitimate scholars and news people and internet “legends” like Lincoln’s Bible.  But whoever that is, she’s been right about everything and people I respect follow her. Here’s what she said yesterday:

“No one is prepared for what Hanukkah-Christmas is going to be like.

The time to listen to our healthcare front line is now.

We won’t get a federal response to the raging pandemic until donald, Jared, & Pence are gone.

We have a horror to live through. It will change us forever
And by “no one is prepared”, I don’t mean no one is isolating or stocking up on toilet paper.

I speaking to the emotional, spiritual, mental, & societal horror of witnessing mass death, while health care systems are pushed to the brink of collapse.

It will change us.”

Watching interviews with medical experts
on MSNBC and reading grim statistics out of John Hopkins, I shuddered reading her tweets because I know it’s true.

As if we’re not battered enough by 2020.

My advice to myself is to stay physically busy and absolutely live in the moment.  That includes putting my phone down.

I have to.

So today will be spent trimming the tree and beginning Project Kitchen, which will take us through December.

For the best and most recent Donald news, someone suggested I follow Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook and boy am I sorry to be late to that party, she gives the most intelligent analysis of the day’s events of anyone so if you’re not following her, do it.

Be good to yourselves.

My tip today for that is Bassetts Ice Cream sandwiches.

Omg, Gary used to buy them for the kids and brought them home.  I devoured them.

I can see they’re going to be a “problem” for me.  

Oh well.

Things like being skinny don’t really matter anymore, huh.

Happy Sunday.

Day 245

 Day 245, self quarantine:

Saturday, November 14, 2020

Welp, I talked with Eric yesterday and it’s official - we’re not getting together for Thanksgiving.

Gary and I aren’t distraught, we’re relieved.  The virus is a nightmare.

Our family is everything to us.  We can sacrifice one year of holidays as a trade off for many more in the future.

Read this.  “A dinner party killed my dad.”

https://medium.com/@tonywright_80709/a-dinner-party-killed-my-dad-218101b758b4

I read that after I spoke with Eric.  Had our decision been to go ahead with Thanksgiving, this article would have changed my mind.

You know what I keep thinking?

Elections matter.

How many people realized on November 8, 2016 that Donald’s election meant the deaths of their loved ones?

I mean, we joked we were nervous he had the nuclear codes but who expected his gross, deliberate incompetence in a pandemic?

Had Donald been fit and competent and had told the truth, issued a mask mandate and ordered a national lockdown, 240,000 Americans would not be dead and millions on the brink of financial ruin.

I don’t really understand why this isn’t talked about nonstop and why he isn’t being charged with a crime.

This business of not being able to indict a sitting president is bullshit.

BULLSHIT.

I’m really pissed off.  I want him gone.  

Today.

I can’t fucking believe he’s having a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington today.

Never mind, I’m too furious to discuss this anymore.

The whole thing, including his pathetic failure to concede, is fucking ridiculous.

In other news, today is hopefully Slick home decor day. Gary is putting my new bench and Christmas tree together and I plan on spending the day moving stuff around and doing the tree, which ended up being way bigger than I thought.

Once I talked Gary into it, there was no slender, tasteful tree for me.

He had to get the biggest and best.  This thing is 7.5 feet tall and 4.5 feet wide at it’s base.

Why why why.

I’m not really complaining.  I have a fifty year collection of ornaments.

But it’s not going to be the easiest thing to keep up until whenever unless I find a perfect spot.

Oy, there is no perfect spot.  This house is tiny.

I hope this works. 

So yeah, today is a home improvement extravaganza, lots of music including holiday tunes, and french fries and mushroom “steak” sandwiches for dinner.

I can do this.

One day at a time.

Happy Saturday.

Day 244

Day 244, self quarantine:

Friday, November 13, 2020

Woo, I am back to being really, really terrified of Covid-19.

Honestly, it’s spiraling out of control while our President continues to bizarrely and untruthfully insist he won the election and has completely abdicated his duty.

Newly woke Gary doesn’t understand how his behavior isn’t tantamount to attempting to throw over the government and he doesn’t understand why he hasn’t been arrested.

I have to admit, I agree with him.

Today marks month eight of quarantine for Gary and me.  That’s 2/3 of a year.

Unbelievable.

2/3 of a year since I’ve seen my boss in person or eaten inside a restaurant or gone to see live music.

Ten months since we’ve seen Julie, Katie and Natalie.

Eric and Natalie bought a house and have already been living there six months.

Julie and Katie are moving to a new house this week.

Gary and I have basically not left ours since March.

And life goes on.

It can’t be January 20, 2021 soon enough.

I’m so tired of fighting down daily waves of terror, anger and depression.

All caused by a morbidly obese ignoramus in clown makeup and a yak wig.

Un-fucking real.

On behalf of an exhausted nation and me, someone please make it stop.  

Please.

So I got an awesome Facebook memory today.  Pics and fun video of Julie, Eric, Adrian and Andre on tour in Istanbul, Turkey:

http://inherownwrite.blogspot.com/2009/11/not-quite-blog-post-but-still-very-cool.html

I don’t think anyone will ever take live music for granted again, huh.

In other news, I got Gary to agree to an artificial Christmas tree.  We’re picking it up after I’m done working today.

It was so easy to get him to say yes, I’m wishing I piggybacked some more requests onto that one, like French doors and a new kitchen floor.

He agrees with my reasons for wanting an artificial tree, and even thinks it’s a good idea, especially leaving it up until the kids can safely visit, but you should have seen his face when I said the words out loud that we’re probably spending the holidays alone.

I mean, he knew.  Woke Gary now watches MSNBC all the time. (Too funny.  He kept talking about what “Williams” said and I had no idea who Williams was.  I didn’t ask because I was too afraid he told me a story about “Williams” while I was looking at my phone and not paying attention.  It turns out “Williams” is Brian Williams at MSNBC and Gary watches him after I go to bed following Trevor Noah’s monologue.)

“What if the tree is still up in June?” he asked.

“I’m cool with that!” I said brightly, ignoring the nauseous pit in my stomach.

I really am fine with a decorated tree in my living room year round. It’s the only thing this place is missing.

Welp, that and a greenhouse growing hydroponics. 😎

So that’s it for today. We’re gonna have takeout Chinese tonight.  Omg, Fairmount people, why am I the last person in the ‘hood to know about i-Tea?  

http://us.chinesemenu.com/wx/521397660.htm

Mmm...can’t wait. Their food is incredible.

Though last night Gary made ravioli in a white wine butter sauce with artichokes and fresh tomatoes and I think I swooned all during dinner.

Yep, I’m a lucky girl.

Okay, I’m going upstairs to bang out work early so I can call it a day early though actually it’s the sabbath and my office closes early on Fridays in the winter, anyway.

Happy Friday!

 

Day 243

 

Day 243, self quarantine:

Thursday, November 12, 2020

You know I’m dying to write about what’s going on.

It’s disgraceful and dangerous and I can’t believe it’s happening.

I really don’t want to give it any more power.

The virus is way more concerning.

We have serious problems.

I’m back to wanting 100% quarantine, with no trips to any stores. I’ve basically stuck to that with few exceptions but Gary goes for groceries 1-2 x a week.

I’m terrified.

Cases in Philadelphia have literally doubled. Hospitals are overflowing.

I’m reading stories of healthy, younger people who wore masks and washed their hands and got COVID-19 anyway.

And died.

And our *snort* super spreader President hasn’t attended a virus task force meeting in months.

In fact, he’s totally stopped working.

Unless you count his hourly airing of grievances via Twitter.

It’s like they announced Biden won on Saturday, we had 24 hours of beautiful celebrations across the nation, we all went to bed stress free for the first time in four years, only to slip back into the darkest, deepest hole of our country’s lifetime a day later.

I don’t know what’s going to happen but I do wonder where the adults in the room are.

We let someone who’s akin to a serial killer run wild.

And now we’re letting him stay in our house, which he is clearly getting ready to burn down.

If you’re not bothered by this, bless your heart.

Happy Thursday.

Day 242

 

Day 242, self quarantine:

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

“Hey, Rob, you have a package,” Gary yelled from downstairs.

Music to the ears of any quarantine dweller.

I flew down the steps.

I didn’t order anything, at least not that I remembered.

I looked at the thick brown package.

“It’s from Julie!” I shouted.

I tore that taped up sucker open with bare strength!

Omg, what a package.

It contained my favorite things in life: chocolate, music and art!

It was such a terrific surprise, for no reason, though Katie included a really lovely note about missing us and wishing they could visit...

Damn pandemic.

The virus news is kind of terrible right now.

I talked to Eric yesterday.  We’re still planning Thanksgiving, but I don’t really know if it should happen and we’re taking it a day at a time.

After reading some very alarming statistics this morning, I am just thankful my family is healthy. That’s enough Thanksgiving for me.

So anyway, naturally after getting that fabulous surprise package from Julie, we had to FaceTime.

I wish you guys could see Jake’s routine during these calls.  He absolutely knows it’s Julie, he runs to the front door crying, then he races back and participates in the call.

Julie was able to capture a picture and it is pretty much everything to me this morning.

What’s really crazy is look what’s in the background of this pic - Julie’s record!  When Gary put the records away last week, we held the kids’ records out - Gary wanted to make them their own section.

So that’s kind of cool, huh.

In other news, I’m still not going to acknowledge what the fuck is going on in the White House because I don’t want to give that insanity any of my time or any more power.

But you know I’m about to explode.

We’ll see how long I can continue to keep it in.

Probably not much longer.

DONALD? YO, DONALD!  YOU LOST, BRO.  YOU. LOST.

Deal with it.

Happy Wednesday.