Random bits of my so-called life.

I can vaguely remember my moom and other relatives darning socks when I was a kid. I’ve always been the kind of person who finds a hole in their sock and “darns” it by saying “Oh darn” and throwing it into the trash. What the heck? I can just order more socks, right? I might even be able to subscribe to socks these days.

Except I also get holes in the right elbows of my turtlenecks. The loverly ones that I buy from Chico’s. They are a staple in my wardrobe, both biz caz (which we haven’t even had to adhere to for a few years) and as a general cold weather inner layer. Alas, at Cubelandia I tend to lean on my right elbow a lot and holes happen. Until now I have been ordering new turtlenecks and throwing the old ones out.

Okay, the big problem is that Chico’s doesn’t sell these turtlenecks at this time of year. It’s all summer clothes, a lot of which are not my fave. So for whatever reason (pandemic thinking but maybe not), I started thinking about mending the elbows. In a creative kind of way… I even looked up patches on the intertubes. Of all things, RANDOMLY (or maybe not…), a post flew by my Instagram tagged #visiblemending and WOW! I gotta check this out.

THAT got me thinking about a book I have owned forever and I was kinda thinking it might have instructions for darning things. It’s a large, thick paperback encyclopedia of needlework techniques. So I went to the bookshelf where I thought the book was and… It was NOT THERE! Where could it be? I looked in every place I could possibly think of. I googled all over hell and gone to try and find a replacement but I couldn’t remember the exact title. I even texted my grocery delivery rodent to ask if she might have it. She knew exactly what I was talking about but is overwhelmed with work and moving house. So nada on all fronts.

Eventually, I sat down on my bed and studied the bookshelf I thought this book was on one more time and… I spied a big paperback book shelved on its side. It was about the right size and YES. It was my book! We actually own two copies but both 🐭 and I think the other copy is at the moomincabin. For posterity, I ordered two more copies from eBay today. That’s kind of against my usual anti-hoarding policies but for some reason it felt like the right thing to do. I mean, you never know when a comet might hit the Earth. (Oh, don’t worry, it was not expensive.)

After all that, the original topic I was interested in researching, which was darning, is not included in the book at all.

Oh darn.

I dunno. I take my shower. I walk. I do various chores. I log on to TeleCubelandia… … … I order things online and watch them get delivered. I remember to eat (sometimes). I turn around a few more times and it’s time to go to sleep watching Green Acres re-runs. Start it up all over again tomorrow.

We ordered carry-out food tonight for the first time since the pandemic shutdown. Those first few weeks I was nervous about take-out. We didn’t know (and still don’t) how the virus was transmitted other than close personal contact. What about the mail? What about clothing? What about the packaging surrounding take-out food? And in those early days take-out still involved (dun dun dun) going inside.

I decided I wanted to do my own cooking (and yes I was worried about grock packaging carrying the virus too). Cooking is never a problem for me except during the early days I struggled to decide what to cook. We have had plenty of food all through this, it was more a matter of what’s for tonight? I’ve been cooking enough that we can have leftovers for at least another night so as not to think about it for a couple days. But I kinda do that *anyway*.

We ordered from the Griz tonight for curb-side pickup. I fumbled the app just a bit. The pickup time option wasn’t tap-able so I clicked “Place my order” *anyway* and it said “ready in 15 minutes”. That meant something like 4:20 PM. Waaaay earlier than we wanted. It’s okay though. The Pensioner ordered short rib mac ‘n’ cheese and I got the salmon BLT. His’ll be easy to heat up and mine’ll be fine whatever temp.

I have said this before but I am soooo impressed at the restaurants and other small businesses who’ve been able to pivot their business model to serve their customers during this challenging time. Extra points to those who are also helping feed our essential workers. I don’t know which businesses will ultimately survive but my bet is on those who are creatively thinking out of the box.

We’ll be getting virtually porterized in just a bit and I sure hope it doesn’t get polly-tickle tonight because I am NOT IN THE MOOD! This IS a subtweet and the recipient knows who he is🐽

Oh yeah, there is a paper jail vapor trail in this pic (embiggen). We don’t see too many of those these days.

I mean from some low-info facebook friends… They reference an article that “he” posted. [Disclaimer: y’all don’t know these people so no subtweets here.]

She commented: Get outdoors in the sun is about the best thing to ward off the covid.

He replied: stupid people will listen to government and stay indoors…until they die…

Someone else commented: Immune system going to shit that’s why!

He replied: yes…they never went out side or built up their imunities [sic]…. what did they expect…

Um, what? Okay…

1) The article shared in the first place (from MarketWatch, can’t find it now) quotes Cuomo saying that the folks they’re seeing in the hospitals in NYC now are people who have not left their homes. I think the article is incomplete. There’s a lot we don’t know about how the virus is transmitted but it’s pretty clear it doesn’t just waft inside people’s homes by itself. I wish the reporters had asked if these folks were letting others into their homes or if they were living with family members who were going out. I also have my suspicions that “staying home” for a lot of folks actually means staying home MOST OF THE TIME! “Oh I just went to the market across the street and forgot my mask”. Etc.

2) This exchange is one of the biggest displays of ignorance I’ve seen since this whole thing started. Sunshine makes you immune to a virus you have no natural immunity to? Really? I believe that being active and getting outside (and yes sunlight) can help boost a person’s immune system in general. Saying that those things can magically build immunity to COVID is uneducated uninformed dangerous thinking! Woefully so.

Happier things? Here is the GG using a selfie stick to get a pic of our robins. We have three babies and one egg. The last egg started to crack open today but then stopped. We are hoping for the best but are prepared for it to be a dud.

FINALLY!!! Bonus pic! Click and click again to embiggen and in front of the birdhouse to the left of the window, you will see none other than Mooma Chickadee. I posted the pic on Instagram yesterday and totally missed her until I emailed myself the full-size pic and opened it in Photoshop on my laptop!

In the beginning there was… Rice! Waaaaay back in March we were all thinking we’d end up eating things like rice and beans. And who knows, we may still get to that point but so far we don’t seem to be. The coronavirus is not to be taken lightly but a comet has not hit the earth* so there’s that.

So a beach urchin found this huuuuge bag of rice at an Asian grocery somewhere over in Ypsi or whereever and asked if we wanted one. YES YES YES! I said that even though I had (and still have) rice and can probably still get it indefinitely.

It took me a while to open this big bag of rice. I was kinda thinking something like what happens if I open it and it spills all over hell-and-gone and I have to vacuum it all up. F*ck. I finally approached it a few days ago and guess what? IT HAS A FRICKIN’ ZIPPER!!! It is dern good rice. I do not know what I thought might be in there. Toads maybe? I’m gonna have to save that bag for posterity sorta like the old wooden Dewars scotch box that my childhood cat had kittens in behind the old wood stove at the moomincabin.

*Comet? I am re-reading the old sci-fi novel Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It’s kinda cheesy in some ways like who is screwing who before and after “hammerfall”. I probably liked that stuff better when I read it the first time but I’m kind of surprised that I’m enjoying it as much as I am now in my re-read. I am a bit more than half way through and in that planet-wide disaster we’re just getting to the point where it’ll be hard to get food. In our COVID pandemic, we don’t seem to be anywhere near that. I hope we don’t get there.

Oh, and when Lucifer’s Hammer was written I don’t think we knew that a lot of comets looked like rubber duckies.

Edited to add: Comet “Kahoutek”? Comet *Kohoutek*! I hate misspellings. Sheesh!

Okay, first we had a Blue Angel flyover this morning. The Landfill was not *quite* in the path but they flew straight down Dexter Ave., to downtown and beyond, low in the sky. Dexter is only a couple blocks away so I had a ringside seat from the Landfill backyard. When the GG found out about the flyover, he decided to walk downtown and he encountered them at the Huron-Dexter-Jackson Y-intersection, down by the party store.

I’ve encountered people in various venues online and off who have questioned or expressed disgust that our country is spending money on these flyovers, which (as I’m sure y’all know) have been staged to support essential workers, et al. I am not an expert on the military but I believe these pilots are *always* training – after all, their JOB is flying jets and we want them to have plenty of practice. Their normal training routes may not be over cities but I doubt it costs a whole lot to re-route them.

In other excitement, “our” Blue Eggs began hatching today. One baby robin hatched this afternoon and now there are two. The GG practiced human/robin social distancing by watching carefully until the parent(s) left the nest on their own before sneaking up to get a pic. And he used a selfie stick. One that I have never quite gotten the knack for. I am deferring to bird privacy by going out the back slider instead of the one right underneath the robin nest.

Other news is that I got a notification that the Plum Market is starting curbside pickup and delivery. I already have a personal shopper/delivery person there but I’m doing anything I can do to reduce her burden to supply us baggy old geezers with grocks. But we’ll see what I do because I have already cobbled together my own little curbside and delivery system from various specialty and farm markets. And what the heck, if she’s *at* work and coming over to pick stuff up here anyway (contact-free) and all I need is a couple tomatoes… Just don’t want her spending time wandering all over the place getting me all kinds of esoteric items that I “can’t live without”.

I cannot believe that every time I drive by a sizeable grocery store, the parking lot is packed. People are reporting on Next Door Neighbor that *many* customers are refusing to wear masks and sometimes being belligerent about it. I dunno what to say about the masks but at least here in this sorta upscale little city there ARE other ways to obtain grocks. (I ALSO know not everyone can pick and choose where they shop and I am WELL aware of my privilege.)

Soccery Blue? That was the name of my dad’s sunfish sailbote back when I was a new reader/speller. Of course its actual name was the Sacré Bleu. My dad did not know a lick of French except I guess for that phrase. I’m not sure where he picked it up. Maybe in the Army Air Corps where he WORKED on B29s, etc.? My little brain interpreted the spelling of that as “Soccery Blue”. Go figger.

Have a nice blue day in the best of ways. Blue skies, blue eyes, blueberries, teal blue subway tile chitchen backsplash, whatever🧡🧡🧡

Sorry, had to begin with a sick joke there…

I am gifted a few flats of impatiens every Mooma’s Day and this year was no exception although it required a bit of creativity to get them to me without potentially passing the coronavirus around. First, my Detroit beach urchin ordered them online from a Planet Ann Arbor area nursery. When they were ready, the GG hopped into the Ninja and drove down to snag them via curbside pop-the-trunk contact-free pickup.

Yesterday was too fugly out to pot them although I enjoyed that we got some rain. Today was worse in a way. One of those spring days that never gets outta the mid-40s, windy with no sun. Not pleasant to be outside at all. We have freeze warnings (again) tonight and although I have a suspicion it won’t get quiiiite that cold, I hauled my flowers in ANYWAY.

The last time I had to do this was a few years back when I potted some impatiens on Memorial Day weekend at the moomincabin. That night it DROPPED INTO THE 20s! It was okay. I pulled my pots into the kitchen through the back door. Oh not that it was all that warm INSIDE the moomincabin that night but we closed the upstairs off and ran the gas heating stove, and it was warm enough for the flowers to survive.

It’s spring and this is the Great Lake State and if the forecast is correct, we’ll be seeing 70s in a couple days. I am ready.

Was gonna end with another wee joke but decided it wasn’t really appropriate although I find it funny in a macabre sorta way.

Here’s one of our backyard mothers – mooma robin on her nest incubating four eggs. She flees whenever I open the back door (it makes a big racket) but once I’ve been seated out there for a bit she returns to her nest. Five feet or so away and inside a birdhouse is mooma chickadee and we aren’t sure if her eggs have hatched yet or not. Then there’s Henrietta, who can frequently be seen lounging on the grass munching away. I occasionally also see a baby rabbit but I can’t tell how many she has because I have only seen one at any given time. Squirrels and chipmunks run around everywhere all the time but I suspect that’s because the GG has again hung a bird squirrel/chipmunk feeder🐽

Yesterday I played a small role (from afar) in a bird rescue. Lizard Breath and friends found a live, shivering baby bird in their furnace in Detroit. I am by no means an expert on wildlife rescue/rehab but a friend of mine works with squirrels and frequently shares facebook posts from legitimate sources. I have learned from her posts that if you find a fledgling, leave it alone and mooma will find it. If it hasn’t fledged and you don’t know where the nest is (not sure about that part), contact a rescue center. Most of these places accept birds/animals at a designated location, then place them with trained volunteers. This baby didn’t seem to have fledged, in any case it was pretty cold and therefore vulnerable and not in a place the mooma could find it.

My very small role in yesterday’s rescue was in knowing how this works and locating a rescue operation in an inner Detroit suburb. This one even had a big “I’ve found a bird” button to click. And contact-free delivery in these difficult times. They were able to take the baby there and hopefully all will be well.

Years ago, we had a baby bird foisted upon us via lack of knowledge on the part of a beach urchin’s friend’s parent. I’m sure we had the internet in those days but you couldn’t just load google maps up on an iPhone and type in “bird rescue”. I think the GG called the Humane Society or somebody and they told us what to feed the bird and then we were kinda on our own.

At the time we also had a guinea pig, rat, five anole lizards, two visiting hamsters and a visiting turtle (or am I dreaming the turtle). Anyway a living room full of cages during a hot un-air-conditioned summer.

We took a trip to Hoton Lake and the yooperland over a long 4th of July weekend. We left all of those aminals at home under the careful care of Shuggy. EXCEPT THE BABY BIRD! It fledged in its cage in the POC sometime during the trip. The GG bonded with it and I think he wanted to keep it for a pet even though it was what he calls a “junk bird” (house sparrow). We named it Willow. Alas, one morning he opened its cage in the Landfill back yard to provide food and LEFT THE CAGE OPEN. Yes, Willow flew away. I hope s/he lived a long happy life.

This baggy old mooma? First of all, EVERY DAY IS MOTHER’S DAY. But we rolled down to Lake Erie with the Lyme Lounge and parked in the day use lot at Ted Sperling State Park. We skedaddled before a storm rolled through and I had the foresight to bring the equipment to bottleP if I needed to but I didn’t. Oh yeah, bacon for breakfast, which was all good but if I had remembered that Monahan’s was serving up bagels and lox for curbside pickup, I think I’d’ve ordered some of that instead.

P.S. I shamelessly stole both of these pics. Mooma robin is by the GG and the baby bird is by Lizard Breath.

A recent Twitter sport is “room rater” where someone with the handle @ratemyskyperoom takes screenshots of talking heads working from home and their background decor. Plants, art, odd artifacts, and bookshelves (unless they are organized by color) get points. Bare walls and self-aggrandizing crapola (diplomas, awards etc.) not so much. So we’re doing a little contest here between the GG and Froooogggy.

First we have the GG in his upstairs lair. What is his rating? I’ll give him some points for the mask and beaucoup points for the, uh, shelf in the top background. Quite the collection. He gets points deducted for general background clutter and not very good lighting and that “artifact” in the top right. So I’ll give him 6/10 points.

And HERE WE HAVE FROOOGGY! He gets 10/10! Yay! Artwork in the background and just because he’s Froooggy. With his secint hed o’ hair and his milk cap ring bracelets and his green fringe of neck hair and his big goggly eyes. He’s one of a kind! Er, sorta except there’s also Frogette.

What say yall? BTW, I give myself 0/10 because I am in front of a blank wall and the angle at which my phone is placed is such that you can only see the top half of my face. Need to work on that…

The farmers market opened back up today. Although I understand the need to keep the economy going, I did not participate for several reasons even though there was curbside pickup. 1) Ordering is a mishmash of online, email, and making phone calls. Too complicated. I did register with Lake Divide Farm but I can get their stuff from Argus anyway (they use the same system as Argus). 2) In person shopping (which I am not “brave” enough to do) involves the same kind of pathway that the grocery stores are using. THIS IS GOOD AND I UNDERSTAND IT but… 3) I wasn’t sure how well curbside would work if I ordered stuff from multiple vendors. I guess I just figgered this is the first day they are trying this and I bet there were some kinks to be worked out.

That said, I had been wanting to put an Argus order in and I made a “rule” that I would do it as soon as asparagus appeared on their product list. Today was the day (I’ve been watching!). So I’ve got a box coming on Monday. This asparagus will be wonderful but I have to say I am missing Farmer John’s lunchroom produce store at Cubelandia.

But yaaarrrgggghhh. I am soooo taaared of hearing that I get all my opinions from listening to NPR “all day”. To set the record straight, at the beginning of all this, I didn’t listen to news on the radio at all. I almost never listen to TV news at all but that’s a whole ‘nother thing. When I was first directed to telecommute, I couldn’t bear to turn the radio on until after my 10:00 standup meeting. Jazz starts up at 10 AM and continues until 4 PM with short bits of news on the half hour. At 4:00 I would always ask the GG to put on Satty-lite radio folk music. He gdam well knows this.

After a few weeks of wondering if/when I could’ve been infected and after some of my young grocery worker relatives’ mild COVID type symptoms subsided (but who knows because no f*cking tests), my low-level background anxieties subsided a bit. I actually started to feel like eating again. There are all kinds of cartoons out there about big fat people hitting the beaches this summer after being in quarantine. I don’t actually think it’ll be safe to hit the beaches this summer but I won’t be one of those. Getting a better appetite but still having to remind myself to eat. I made lasagna tonight!!!

So I do not form my opinions about the virus based on NPR radio. More often than not I turn the radio off when the news comes on (YOU know that and YOU know who YOU are). Instead, I *read* a number of news sources and form my own opinions. I follow a lot of these sources on Twitter (in some cases backed by paid accounts), which is a decent way to aggregate news and any number of other things.

I follow Donald J. Trump on Twitter too. To those of you who think he is a reasonable president but don’t follow him on Twitter, please please please follow @realdonaldtrump and pay attention to what he says on that venue. As he says, it is his way of connecting with his “base” without the “fake news” getting in his way. I’m not sure why connecting with his “base” includes name-calling and being nasty to anyone who disagrees with him (including some of his supporters). But check out his twitter feed instead of getting your news filtered through Rush “Limbo” or whoever.

And I am still wondering why people seem to think calling me “stupid” is going to change my mind. I am not necessarily the most intelligent person who ever lived but “stupid”? Maybe y’all need to re-think that. I may not agree with your polly-tickle opinions but “stupid”? Hmmm…

Yes, I am sorta angry tonight. I do NOT like to be interrupted when I want to say something and I am tired of being disrespected and told I am stupid. To be honest, I wasn’t told I was stupid tonight but I have been in the years since the Orange Baboon was somehow elected president. Pretty sure it’s not me who’s stupid.

G’night. Sleep tight. KW

My work friends have short memories about what Old Man Winter is capable of in the merry merry month of May. Snow? Snow? Really? Yes. We do get snow in May. We don’t get it every year and the cold temps are usually not sustained. It was in the 60s today. It’s gonna go below freezing over the next few days. Will it snow? I dunnow. I’m just gonna hang out on the Green Couch aka TeleCubelandia, watching whatever comes down and whoever goes by, which’ll prob’ly include a rodent picking up a flour delivery.

I was cranky about the GG not starting up Satty-lite radio tonight. I wanted to turn the news off and then I realized the news was actually providing some feel-good stories.

1) More and more businesses in our area have PIVOTED to meet the needs of their customers with curbside delivery, etc. I hope that story runs again because I came into it half-way and there were some resources I didn’t quite catch.

2) I almost turned the next story off. It was about testing sewage for the coronavirus. I was like NOOOOOO but then the young post-doc woman they were interviewing was LAUGHING and I kept listening and realized that testing sewage might have a role in controlling the virus. You can kvetch and gnoff about phd equaling “piled higher and deeper” but we need people who can FOCUS in this kind of way. I am sure this woman takes the whole situation very seriously and I think she was laughing in part because she was actually being interviewed about “poo” on NPR 🧡

3) This is not technically a feel-good story. The Ann Arbor Art Fair(s) are not happening in 2020. I used to go to the art fairs all the time when I was a “kid”. For many years now I have practiced Art Fair Avoidance. I’ve been kinda over the crowds, etc., for a LOOOOONG time and my fave jeweler couple died. It’s very sad that it’s canceled but I agree that 400,000 people wandering around everywhere in downtown Planet Ann Arbor (population approximately 120,000) any time soon is a bad thing.

A while back (how many weeks ago was it?), our governor Big Gretch/ThatWomanInMichigan extended her stay-at-home order and ordered that Michiganders could not travel to their second homes or cabins. Boy oh boy did this raise a ruckus. “Who is she to be telling us we can’t travel to those places? We pay taxes.” And worse. “She’s taking away our rights and freedoms.” Y’all have probably seen the covidiots protesting in our state capital. With their assault rifles, etc. What those have to do with the virus I do not know. I don’t think you can kill a virus with a gun. But you can’t fix stupid, as a lot of Trump supporters love to say. (For the record, I am not anti-gun.)

I’m not gonna go into all that in detail. I LIKE Big Gretch and before she issued that order, I had already made my own decision not to travel to the yooperland. I don’t think people should be traveling anywhere unless they can be safe about it and that’s pretty hard to do since we can’t SEE the virus and don’t fully understand its “rules”. I am hunkered down here on the Planet Ann Arbor and have cobbled together a nice little system for obtaining grock and other stuff via contact-free services. That would not be possible at the moomincabin, or at least not as easy, and I would probably have to venture inside stores. I am not comfortable doing that.

That said, the GG took a rocket trip to the yooperland this week and I “blessed” it. He had a drop-off to make at the North Country Trail Center in Iggy and some random stuff for the moomincabin.

So why did I bless his trip? Because he could do it with (almost) no interaction with anything or anybody. He towed the Lyme Lounge up there and parked it in the moomincabin parking lot. We’re not opening the moomincabin any time soon but the Lyme Lounge has a water supply and a mini-fridge so he was self sufficient on food and water. No bathroom but woodsP is good for providing nitrogen to plants and anything else can happen in My Dear Uncle Harry’s outhouse (yes, TMI). He has a key to the [closed] trail center in Iggy and a commuter card for the Big Mac bridge. That leaves gasoline. Paper towels and hand sanitizer and a few prayers to who/whatever you believe in.

I alerted neighbors that he would be there and wave at them from afar. Or maybe he did a Master Salute. His plan was for one or two nights but he is on his way home after one. I suspect ol’ Gitchee Gumee was not all that accommodating in terms of weather. I thought I saw a text fly by about northwest winds 🐽

I should add that the order against travel between two residences was lifted a while back so he wasn’t doing anything illegal.

1) I loooooove ordering grocks, etc., online.

2) I am gonna go craaaaaazy trying to keep up with my orders.

Where’s my coffee? I ordered coffee last week from our own local Roos Roast. This morning my main coffee maker aka the GG was rummaging around looking for coffee. We were getting dangerously low. Did I get my coffee order? I couldn’t remember. I got online to look at the tracking and immediately fell into a total state of confusion because I had actually made two orders. One for us and the second for some young relatives in NY. I was notified when they received theirs. Where was mine? I finally figured out it was sent via the post office and kept getting hung up at various “facilities”.

This is NOT a problem (at least not a 1st world problem) and I am NOT dissing the postal service. This is a challenging time for everyone and I know the postal workers are doing the best they can. I wouldn’t want their jobs and I greatly appreciate them. They are putting their lives on the line. Yesterday we had a sub and he was all excited about the GG’s mail from the Hornet aircraft carrier association and the GG was OUTSIDE and they were BOTH UNMASKED and I was like, “I love y’all but don’t fergit to social distance, you guys!” But next time I order Roos Roast coffee, I will include it in an Argus order, which is delivered from the farm stop downtown to my door. One fewer thing for the postal service to have to deal with not to mention Roos Roast. I’m sure it’s easier for them to schlep coffee over to Argus than to mail it to someone in town.

I haven’t (yet) had any more incidents like the 18 cranberry goat cheese logs, thank you very much to those who took the excess off my hands. I have noticed that Amazon is starting to prominently label its product photos with the number of items in the pack. Like 6 or 24 (!). I was ordering tomato paste yesterday and this helped me avoid ordering a package of 24 cans. Four I can deal with. 24 not so much.

Finally, here is Paint Can Man. He spent yesterday afternoon decanting blue paint into empty plastic peanut butter jars so North Country Trail volunteers can go out and paint blazes. Painting blazes is a safe, socially distancing activity in these pandemic times because most of the trail sections in the eastern yooperland are deep in the forest where most people don’t go.

I mean I think I have said before I have what is now known as COVID Hair probably 95% of the time ANYWAY. Every once in a while I go to Liz’s special Detroit gal for what she won’t let me call a Mom Bob and she makes me all glamorous looking and I love her but it’s been a while and it’ll probably be a longer while until I see her again…

This mask is brought to you (me) by my grocery delivery rodent. The grocery gig (which she is good at) supports her creative side. I know that making masks isn’t anywhere near as interesting as some of her other artistic endeavors but so glad she’s making them. (Note that as an “essential worker” she isn’t making tons of them to donate or taking orders. She’s waaaay too busy working.)

It took a while for us to receive our masks, which is okay since we are not, uh, really GOING ANYWHERE. The few times the GG has ventured into public places, he has used a North Country Trail bandanna. On my 0-skunk-30 walks in the neighborhood, I can easily distance myself FAR from the few people who are out and so feel comfortable without a mask. There are even fewer people than usual because as so many folks are telecommuting or laid off (YUCK!), I don’t think most of them are up and out as early as usual.

I cracked up when I found out the REAL reason we didn’t get our masks sooner. It was because our rodent was agonizing over picking a fabric for the GG’s mask that she thought would actually encourage him to wear it. This cracked me up because it is soooo much like me it is beyond funny. She ended up with kind of a reptile green Kona cotton batik for him, which is perfect.

Hell, Michigan, that is.

I am down to seven cranberry goat cheese logs! A couple/few of those are designated for npJane and My Dear Uncle Harry and I want my original three but whatever is left, I am okay with. Our grocery delivery rodent picked up some logs for her and her old friend Lairi the Rake and dropped off two masks (yay!) and fancy pepperoni (inside joke🐽) and an old serger she isn’t using. We dropped a couple off over at Porterland and then a former YAG dad who I’m Instagram friends with said he’d take three. So all’s well that ends well with that little pandemic shopping misadventure. Note to KW: double and triple check QUANTITIES!

Today was chores, then Lyme Lounging out at Pinckney Rec, which was jammed with people. Social distancing? How do you tell who is a family group sheltering together? I do not know. I’m pretty sure that the mountain biking folks are not family groups and they interact a bit too close for my comfort. I’ll just stay in the Lyme Lounge and read my book, la la la. If the good weather continues I think we’ll have to re-schedule our Lyme Lounge escapades to earlier in the morning. Coffee instead of Liquid Courage.

It might sound like I’m paranoid about the virus but although I don’t have a high comfort level with it, paranoia is really not the right word. I’m struggling with the staggering amount of “information” we are constantly dealing with. I know that scientists are working overtime to study and understand it but there’s still too much we don’t know. Okay, it “only” kills “old people”? Except it also kills others. Anyway, why is it okay for “old people” to die of it (like I’ve seen a few people say on facebook)? I’ll leave the Bad Orange Man and his crazy touting of “miracle cures” out of this for now.

On the good side, we arrived home to a big box of produce and other stuff from Argus and I scurried to get the pasties and ravioli (both frozen) into the freezer. Fortunately it wasn’t on the porch all that long and the sun hadn’t hit the west side of the house (where the porch is) yet. Note to KW: when you order from Argus, schedule the delivery on a week day when you are home!

This stuff is an integral part of our pandemic snack arsenal. The GG usually picks them up at the Aldi a couple blocks away but I won’t let him go inside there and I’m pretty sure they don’t have curbside or delivery, at least not easily schedule-able. So a while back I ordered one of these from some online outfit to try it out. It was good and the shipping was fine – i.e., it took a while for them to ship it but when they did it was FedEx overnight and it arrived cold and iced in an insulated bag.

So I ordered three more. Or so I thought. What arrived today was three CASES! Six in a case so 18 total! Holy Toledo! And it was MY ERROR! I guess this cancels out the duplicate coffee grinder that I received that I didn’t order or pay for? It was more or less the same price.

I started loading a bunch of them into my already jam-packed freezer and then I thought, hmmm, maybe my grocery delivery rodent would like a few and maybe this or that local friend/relative. So I put out some text messages and it looks like at least some of them will be taken off my hands. Anything left from that, I will freeze. I think it’ll freeze okay. Might change the texture but as another beach urchin pointed out, heating it up in the oven would probably mitigate that.

This stuff goes well with Triscuits! 🐽🐸

And then there were four. We don’t expect any more. As I have probably said before this nest is on the security light in the “lee” of our house, an inside corner between the east wall and the south wall of the A-ddition. It’s been quite a few years since robins nested in this spot but they’re doing it again. Five feet away chickadees are nesting in a bird house.

Yesterday was a day, beginning sorta slowly and accelerating and then all of a sudden it was 9:30 and I couldn’t have strung two words together to save my life. You’re welcome.

First, I remember at the beginning of all of this STUFF worrying about some of my fave places to shop, including the seafood market in Kerrytown. A seafood market in the midwest? Yes. A really good seafood market in the midwest. I found out they were doing curbside pickup and placed a big order. We were getting down to the bottom of that order so yesterday I made another one. I needn’t have worried about this place. They were so BUSY the order-taker had to put me on hold for a bit and then forgot to get my debit card info. When I got down there (and yes of course I paid), the owner brought my fish out and said that they were way beyond BUSY. More like CRAZY! They deliver both fish and lunch and I guess people are buying. Which is a good thing!

We were less successful picking up a hardware item later in the afternoon maybe in part because the GG didn’t read the DIRECTIONS for how to pick up but also because they LOST his order. After a half hour wait in that parking lot and a couple of employees disappearing inside never to return, we gave up.

I don’t get, you know, OUT very much these days and usually when I do the streets are pretty deserted. Not yesterday! I don’t know what was going on besides it was a nice day but there was just about as much traffic as, you know, before.

Maybe more later. Maybe not.

So what was today? A virtual retirement party for FZ and another long-time employee. One that I have never known well. We are mostly introverts at Cubelandia. Hearing his story I can only wish I had gotten to know him better.

I could’ve retaaaared today too but I chose not to. That was a good decision for me because my job is keeping me sane during the pandemic plus I think I am still needed. I am very very very fortunate to have this job, knock on wood. Today our CEO sent out a message saying that telecommuting has been working very well for our company and we can continue to work from home for the duration. The company will re-evaluate in MID-JULY and even then they will not require us to return to our offices if we don’t feel safe.

I remember when I first got this job. I was kinda pinching myself like “I have an actual job?” Yes. I had a job. A real actual job, one that pays money. After all these years (12), I am still kinda pinching myself but yes I still have that dern job. I have somehow survived a bunch of Black Thursdays, I’m not sure why but I am still around.

I am doing okay with telecommuting but I do miss my Zen Commute to Cubelandia. Slow-driving the Ninja over there and back, shifting up and down.

Love y’all and g’night. KW

So for about the third time since you-know-when, I started to put “canned sliced black olives” on a list of stuff for my main grocery delivery rodent to pick up for me. Then I thought, “WAIT A MINUTE!” Why am I onesy-twosy-ing her with an item that I can actually buy a *few* of and keep around? And then I thought, “In fact, why am I asking her to buy esoteric items like that at all?” I can probably buy them online.

And so I can and I spent Sunday morning ordering “stuff” from Amazon: canned sliced black olives, canned diced green chiles, bread crumbs, pizza sauce, TRISCUITS🐽, pizza crust mix, tamari (LOL-private joke), and I fergit what else. I didn’t buy cases of these things but most of them came in multiples and I think six was the biggest pack I bought. These are things I will use eventually and I don’t want my rodent to be wandering all over the place looking for them every time she shops for me.

This is counter-intuitive to how I usually shop. I usually buy stuff only when I need it but that’s when *I* am doing my own shopping. Oh sure, mishaps occur. I get really annoyed when I buy something thinking I’m out of it only to find that I have something like FIVE at home. This MOSTLY happens at the end of the summer when the moomincabin and the Lyme Lounge get emptied out and I end up with like three half-full yellow mustards, etc. at the Landfill.

And the beat goes on…

P.S. In case you were wondering, I am on the other side of a big pane of glass from this masked rodent and actually a few feet back from that so yes we are social distancing. It was this rodent who convinced me to stop any kind of shopping back in early March. It didn’t take much convincing because I was already pretty freaked out. I suspected COVID was already lurking at that time via asymptomatic carriers and it turns out I was probably right. STAY HOME, no matter what the politicians tell you to do. Most of them, especially the Orange Baboon, have no clue how successful viruses spread.

I am reading (occasionally) with mild interest about how workers are adapting to telecommuting. This was a non-issue for my work team. We do it all the time. Or at least some of us do and others of us do occasionally. Most of us telecommute whenever there’s a snowstorm and others telecommute at least some days a week because they have long congested commutes. And then there’s India and a long-time telecommuter in Chicago, etc.

I don’t think ANYONE was lacking the proper equipment, which for most of us consists of a laptop, power cable, and VPN key. And the VPN key has been a phone app for a couple years now. Oh, and wi-fi of course.

This NPR article mentioned some of the drawbacks of using the popular Zoom app. Besides getting everyone set up with it (and not mentioning the reported security issues), the article talks about what it’s like to be looking at everyone’s face throughout every meeting. From the article:

But the default setting on a lot of these videoconference technologies is a Brady Bunch grid, where everybody’s staring at you right in the face. It would be exhausting and superweird to have disembodied heads just staring at you for hours.

I think that would drive me crazy too. We don’t use Zoom at my work. We have been using MS Teams for a couple years now. It isn’t perfect but one thing we don’t have to do is look at each everyone’s fugly COVID-hair mug. Our badge photos show up as little cameos when we join and when we are talking. I think all of us are adept at ignoring those.

I am not trying to dis Zoom. We are using Teams because that’s what The Mother Ship decided we were going to use a while back and installed it on our laptops. We have no choice so we adapt to whatever they install. I know that others are scrambling to figure this stuff out. Imagine switching from in-person music lessons to online. That’s been a Hot Topic on my “floot loop groop”.

At home we are using Facetime to meet up for Friday Porterization, Happy Hours with our kids and niece et al, and I am doing Coffee with MMCB at Barry Bagels that way. It’s what works for us.

BTW, I have attended ONE Zoom meeting. It was set up by a client (I RARELY have any contact with clients). I quickly found the setting to go to Audio Only and so did everyone else!

P.S. My hair looks like COVID hair 95% of the time anyway🐽🐽🐽

It was one of THOSE days when someone spent an inordinate amount of time on the computer/phone for very little gain (and it wasn’t me). They were trying to track down a missing stimulus check (not one of ours) and if I had known that, I could’ve shortened the phone wait time considerably. Why? Because I encountered an article on the WaPo this morning reporting that people in certain situations would not receive their stimulus until April 29 or thereabouts. I did not read the whole article but just the first couple paragraphs indicated that our person was likely in one of those situations and that turned out to be true. Anyway, negative vibes emanated from the Upstairs Man Cave for the duration and he never did get anywhere on the phone.

News on the internet annoys me in general, even from the more respectable sources. So often the headline has nothing to do with the article or else it gets buried “all the way down to the bottom” (say it in a British accent if you will) somewhere. Is that what they call “burying the lede”? As you might guess by this boring blahg of blather, I know nothing whatsoever about journalism, not that I am trying in any way shape or form to be a journalist. Also I find a lot of long online stories to be very boring. I want some background info but don’t overwhelm the story with it. On the other hand, if a story is too short, I’m often left wondering what the heck happened? TV9&10 I’m looking at you. Tune in at 11 for the story? Nope. Of course, that is related to TV news and I barely watch *anything* on TV. Here we are in the middle of a pandemic and I haven’t even seen Tiger King.

I love when the GG gets outta the house (walking) while I’m working. I also worry that he’ll have some kind of social distancing mishap. Even though I know he’s careful and carries hand sanitizer and a bandanna. We have masks of sorts but not anything “official”. On the other hand, if he obtains an “official” mask, I worry that he will get into macho mode and start shopping *inside* stores, which we really don’t need to do since I have cobbled together a number of ways to obtain goods in a contact free way. What do I mean by “official” masks? I’m not even sure.

Day what? I do not know. I do know that the last time I ventured *inside* a store was Thursday March 12 when I hit up the liqwire store on the way home from my last day at Cubelandia. I arrived home to a text message from Amazon Woman saying everyone was to telecommute starting the next morning and here we are.

Breaking news is that we lost another relative to COVID. Wife of the 94-year-old uncle who died, when was that? It was 10 days ago or so. Nursing homes and similar facilities are NOT SAFE because we have no way to keep asymptomatic employees out of them without TESTING!

STAY HOME! Love y’all, KW