“Remoted” – Workday 78 / Day 106 (Tuesday)

It was a day of progress at the work desk with files delivered and things approved. Beyond the office, Neighbor Guy is installing the vinyl picket fence between our yards, making great progress and doing a terrific job. It will be done soon, and we can say goodbye to the four-years-old, now mangled rabbit wire that currently separates our respective canines. When the fence is in, I can thin and relocate flowers from the front yard to the back before the front yard picket fence goes in.

"Elegant and modern"
wine holder.

The “elegant and modern” oak wine rack arrived with some assembly required. It was a quick project, even with discovering the misinterpretation of the hieroglyphic instructions halfway through and the one compulsory screw in every project that doesn’t want to screw in right. The red wines are now safely housed in the kitchen in a rack that dresses up the décor as promised, or at least as compared to the cardboard packing trays on the dining table. The rack is presently set atop a wooden shelf thing to maximize counter space and because clearly I don’t know how to measure and the rack takes up far less vertical space than I estimated.

The rack may be relocated to the dining room buffet, but we’ll see. There is presently too much stuff on the buffet to deal with right now, including half a million candles, a forgotten Christmas decoration, and a flatware chest full of dining and serving utensils that has traveled halfway across the country and back and never been used. 

China lives in the buffet. 

In the olden days of my first marriage, there was the traditional registry with the customary English fine bone china, crystal, and flatware.  Mom and Mummu planned and ordered and celebrated each major gift giving event with pieces of the almost-complete set. Plates, vegetable bowls, sugar bowls, creamers, and napkin rings. And I’ve been dragging it around ever since. Never use it, but for sentimental reasons, can’t bear to part with it. And nobody else wants it, so there’s that. It's an anchor of sorts, made of fine bone china.

Maybe it’s time to start eating from gold trimmed china. If it didn’t require hand washing, I’d probably have been using it all along. 

“Remoted” – Workday 77 / Day 105 (Monday)

Once upon a time, there were work programs on the work computer that worked without effort and tasks were completed with ease. There have been technology glitches recently, and Mercury retrograde is getting all the blame, no matter how misguided. It’s frustrating when you know what the programs can do, and then suddenly they don’t work or worse, have just up and disappeared.

Recently, it was Adobe Acrobat. There used to be a version of it on my work computer that allowed me to make editing notes and comments, make actual copy edits in documents, and save a PDF as another file type. This meant any time I needed a JPG file of an ad or a sign graphic, usually to insert into a Powerpoint overview or an email template, I didn’t need to bother our graphic designer for it. A couple weeks ago, it suddenly reverted to the basic Reader version with which I have been periodically and randomly cursed.  After filing a service ticket, it was upgraded again, but not to whatever version I used to have. The half-assed thing I have now requires me to save the file on my desktop, open up the Adobe program, then open the file in the program. It takes about 275 steps to do something that used to take one step. Of course, I forgot about the 274 extra steps today when I needed to convert a PDF to a JPG, but it’s fun to swear.

Today was the day to set up an email message that needs to go out in a day or so. The approved language was ready and went into the template in a snap thanks to copy/paste. So far, so good, but I know better than to get too comfortable. When I tried to add the header graphic, it was a waiting game starring a spinning circle and a message reading “loading” for a couple minutes before I bailed. The program was opened from another browser. No dice. I tried it again through the original browser, curious to see if it would ever work. It was "loading" for ten minutes and never actually loaded before I gave up. Bailing out of the work system and trying from my personal computer worked exactly like it is supposed to, which suggested it wasn’t the program, just the access channel. That meant another service ticket. I’m getting really good at opening service tickets.

Supper was yummy.

Email technology wasn’t the only quirk today. After work, there was a wi-fi connection issue on a different device requiring troubleshooting and a restart. And right before that, a neighbor knocked on my back door to tell me that our mailman, who just left her house, had told her mother, who lives upstairs, that he just learned he tested positive for COVID-19, but he’s “going to keep doing his route.” What the hell? Even if he just meant today, that feels pretty damned reckless. Neighbor is fuming and said she’s calling the Post Office. This is the same mail carrier that would deliver the mail on foot, then drive back and park the mail truck to go hang out upstairs at the Nuisance Party House. He seemed reckless and as much as I hated being judgey, I also hated touching my mail. Thanks to the USPS advance email notifications, I know that usually nothing very exciting is being delivered, and often leave it in the mailbox for a day or two before fetching it.

My Monday was a bit screwy, but the dogs were adorable all day and supper was a success. Yesterday’s leftover sautéed eggplant, tomatoes, and mushroom was today tossed with farfalle, sautéed onion, and feta cheese for a perfect supper on a gray and drizzly day. So yummy. 

“Remoted” – Day 104 (Sunday)

The busy, active Saturday was followed by a mostly do-nothing Sunday. There was thought invested into certain activities which were then not done. After the extra effort required to dig up irises with the tiny trowel, a proper gardening shovel was shopped for online (again). It could be had for $12.99 from the hardware store around the corner just by pushing the payment button and going to fetch it at curbside pickup, but the payment and pickup parts didn’t happen (again).

There was the usual breakfast, lunch, supper, catering to the canines, and a lot of Netflix. A couple movies were followed by a binge session of the recent remake of Dynasty, which is really, really stupid. Why do so many shows about the wealthy involve so many murders? It’s so unrealistic, but I can’t stop watching. There are some good lines now and then, like this one delivered by Fallon Carrington at the Thanksgiving dinner scene with a woman holding the family at gunpoint: “I’m sorry my family is so screwed up. I mean if my Dad had believed Steven about the whole Willy thing, and participation trophy wife over here had been honest about Matthew, maybe this Norman Rockwell holiday wouldn’t have turned so Norman Bates.” Hahahaha.

Current wine "rack".

In the latest chapter of “other first-world problems and leisure,” an “elegant and modern” oak wine rack which promises to “dress up [my] décor” was ordered. It can be used vertical or horizontal, and holds up to 11 bottles. This will help with the too many bottles of wine recently delivered. The 12 bottle “Essentials Collection” on special for $119 with shipping included was a better value than six bottles for $79 plus $10 shipping, so the 12 bottles were ordered. Now several of the bottles are sitting on the dining room table, stacked two high in the cardboard packing trays, along with the glamorous, glossy flash cards describing some of them. At the rate I drink wine, I’m probably all set with wine until next summer. I still have beer in the refrigerator from last year’s Christmas Eve party, soju from last summer, and champagne from a couple years ago. This pandemic has me buying stuff I might not actually need. 

“Remoted” – Day 103 (Saturday)

The morning workout was the
stone carry and stack.

It was cloudy for parts of the day which allowed some physical labor to be accomplished. Neighbor Guy has been taking out a lot of stonework edging and a low wall and replacing it with a poured concrete patio.  He was going to pay someone to haul the stone away, but now it’s in my yard for free. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing with it yet, but that inspiration will come. This morning I donned the work gloves and schlepped the stones, one at a time, across the shared driveway, across my front lawn, stepped over the remainder of the post and rail fence (because I couldn’t get the rail out), then down the shared driveway on the other side of the yard, and into my back yard. That, unfortunately, was the only way to get to my back yard.

For whatever unexplored deep-seated, neurotic reasons, I count steps when I walk. I’ve done it for as long as I can remember, and I don’t usually realize it until suddenly “26, 27, 28…,” is marching through my head. Once aware, I consciously count until the inevitable point when I lose count and the loop starts over. Depending upon the size of the stone I was carrying and the length of the stride I could manage, it was either 38 steps or 50 to the back yard. The six  bigger, rectangular stones at the end of the process are much heavier than the 20 smaller stones, and they really slowed me down. Maybe I should have started with the heavy ones, then the rest would have felt lighter.

A much smaller rose bush.

After the hour of moving big stones and sweating, I fetched the big scissor things from the shed, and cut back the once sprawling rose bush to a much tidier, compact form. The new front yard picket fence will be going in soon, and that bush would be a problem working around in its wild and prickly state. Later in the day, after watching portions of a dance festival livestream and doing an online dance class, I headed back out to the yard to dig out irises, also part of the fence installation preparation. I expected it to be a bit of chore, considering I was using just a trowel, but it was even harder than I imagined. It’s surprising how quickly a few irises transplanted from a friend’s yard grew into a very dense clump. Oy. I got half the clump out, and then got half of that transplanted to the back yard along the chain link fence. 

A fence length of transplants.

This gardening and yard work stuff is no joke. Everything I put in the ground since buying the house needs thinning – the hostas, the bleeding heart, the irises. I started with the urgent issues – the plants that would be in the way and/or trampled with the fence installation, but there is still so much left to do. The labor feels good, but dang, the soreness is already setting into my legs and shoulders. My hamstrings are screaming. If I did this regularly, I’d have a buff yard work body. Maybe I should just move the stone from one side of the yard to the other every day instead of doing any sort permanent installation. 

“Remoted” – Workday 76 / Day 102 (Friday)

Work is done for the week, and it was a long and weird week. I was really, really ready for Friday evening booze o’clock to arrive.

The week held a little confusion and a couple wacky computer issues. There was the sudden non-functioning of my computer's web camera right before our team video meeting which left me appearing as a blank box on the grid layout and a disembodied voice on the line. I didn’t like feeling like a spy lurking in the shadows and ended up logging in with my phone. That had me holding my phone delicately propped against the keyboard for the better part of an hour. Yes, I have a cell phone holder. It’s on my desk in the office I haven’t been in since mid-March. I’ve never even used it, but it sure would have been helpful this week.

After the camera issue, I got to enjoy frozen Outlook email for a good hour or so, which is nowhere near as delightful as a frozen pina colada or a bowl of ice cream. (Or "frozen dairy dessert," as it's often called now. Apparently, they haven't figured out it is also a nice breakfast or supper.) I tried using Task Manager, logging out and back in, and restarting the computer, but it just kept opening up in the frozen email screen. Even the IT Help Desk had a little fun with that one, but got it figured out because everyone on that team is some kind of wizard. 

For the rest of the week I was sort of waiting to see what would screw up next. I tried to remain detached so I didn’t accidentally manifest more mayhem by focusing on it and attracting it to myself. I’m blaming Mercury retrograde for all the communication and technology weirdness. And it’s retrograde until July 12, so we aren’t in the clear for a while yet. Hold onto your seats, the fleet footed messenger god probably isn't done with us yet.

There was the Thursday sore throat that led to the rescheduled dental and hair appointments, causing scheduling ripples for two businesses. I hate doing that. I hope the result was that it cleared a slot for a more urgent dental matter at one place and room for a couple more hair clients at the other. On Thursday I also received a “we’re sorry we missed you email” from the eye doctor for an appointment I probably made when I was there last year, you know, long before a pandemic. Oops. Maybe a reminder before the appointment would have been a good idea. I still don’t even know when that alleged appointment was on their calendar. I feel bad, that was not on my radar at all.

Hooray for fried seafood and a cannoli!

Despite having a ton of food here, I didn’t feel like making supper and I’ve eaten tomato pie every day this week and it isn’t finished yet, so I just had to say no.  It was decided to support a local business and order in from my new favorite delivery place with the loyalty program and the $5 off reward coupon I received via email. At least I actually ordered the fried seafood dinner I wanted, and not baked like the last time. And a cannoli! There are plenty of leftovers, too, so that was a success. 

Before ordering supper, I logged out of the “work side” of the computer and dashed from the desk, having decided on a wine cooler to be made with the last of the bottle of red that is open and the ginger ale that surprisingly isn’t flat yet. An appropriately sized glass was filled with ice, and the next thing I knew I was standing at the sink holding a glass of ice water, my usual beverage. Duh. The bar service at the BungaLowell really stinks sometimes. It’s amazing how often I end up with ice water instead of the “something better” I meant to have.  I wasn’t going to waste a lovely glass of ice water, especially after some knucklehead left one of the ice cube trays with only two cubes in it and now there won’t be enough ice for the rest of the night. Ok, obviously, it was me. The dogs are ruled out due to being too short (I mean height challenged) to reach the freezer. Whatever.

It’s been a week. I’m glad it’s over. 

“Remoted” – Workday 75 / Day 101 (Thursday)

As a kid, I was well acquainted with the one-two punch of  an earache and sore throat. My brother had the runny nose and watery eyes of seasonal allergies, but I was more likely to be knocked down at any time by strep throat.

The sore throat and earache double feature still strikes at random even now. Like right now. Last night my throat felt a bit off. Not sore, not swollen, it just made itself known with a twinge when I swallowed. There is nothing like a twinge in the throat to highlight just how often you swallow in the course of sitting around not even eating or drinking anything. Last night’s “a bit off” throat had blossomed to an official sore throat by this morning. Technically, it’s only half a sore throat, just one side. By the end of the workday, the ear on the same side had jumped on the party bandwagon and blessed me with a bonus earache.

The immediate result of the sore throat was an alteration in the calendar. Well, actually, the immediate, immediate action was a visit to the bathroom mirror with my cell phone poised to shine the flashlight into my throat and examine the situation. Not too red, but definitely a swollen tonsil, right near the molar with the temporary crown of two weeks ago that is due for the permanent crown Friday. Or was.

The next immediate thing was a call to the dentist to rescheduled the Friday 8 a.m. appointment, because it felt reckless to even consider going. Once the dental appointment was changed, the vacation day was called off. Sure, I could have kept a Friday of total leisure, free from the burden of the appointment, but why not just plan to work and save the day for later? Maybe I’ll get all wacky and leisurely minded and schedule an entire week-long staycation. I’ve done it a couple times before and it’s not too bad.

It’s not like I would jump in the car and just go somewhere on a free Friday. First off, where would I go? I’m not all that interested in venturing out to the pandemic world, and if the past 100 days are any clue, I’m not really the “jump in the car and just go for a ride” type. I’ll be a happy passenger on a joy ride any time, but if I’m behind the wheel, a destination is required. Trust me, it’s better that way. It goes back far deeper than 100 days. Driving has never been my go-to for entertainment. My 2004 vehicle has barely 145,000 miles on it and for years I have enjoyed the low mileage discount on my auto insurance.

Beachy waves!
No beach needed.

The sore throat also prompted the rescheduling of Saturday’s hair appointment. I just went for it and ripped all the Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages right off the datebook. There are no plans that would cause me to care a whole lot what my hair looks like. None. There are dozens of little barrettes and clips and hair elastics planted all around the house to keep the wayward, too long locks of wavy hair out of my face, so I’m really okay with waiting another month to deal with my beachy (bitchy?) waves.

It felt liberating to remove the out-of-the house commitments from the day planner. Now, I just need to be liberated from the sore throat and earache. Maybe some escapist reading is in order. I could retreat to bed and read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland like I did so many times when home sick from school. I love that book. Weird and crazy stuff happens. Alice just rolls with it. Been there, done that.

“Remoted” – Workday 74 / Day 100 (Wednesday)

Day 100 since being remoted. Whew!

On the one hand, it’s hard to believe I stayed put for so much of it. On the other hand, it hasn’t really felt that long. The “first 100 days” was coined by Franklin D. Roosevelt and is now “considered a benchmark to measure the early success of a president” (according to Wikipedia). 

In thinking about measuring my “first 100 days of the pandemic” I don’t have a lot of successes to tout. It seems there are none, really.  Most of what has happened is stuff I would have done anyway under the guise of being a functional adult with a job.

I followed the rules and stayed home for the first chunk of the 100 days, leaving for the first time in mid-May (Day 52) to make sure the car still ran and then to go see Mom for a physically distanced Mother’s Day driveway visit (Day 55). I still don’t leave the house without a pretty good reason, and most of the “good reasons” have been medical, dental, vet or auto service appointments. Why bother, really?

So far, I built two puzzles and read two books in their entirety. In 100 days as a kid with no job, I would have devoured every book in the house. (Young me used to even snatch up Mom’s Book of the Month Club selections and read them before she did.)  I fed myself multiple times each day, catered to the two Canine Overlords, and managed to not scream at the annoying neighbors and their equally annoying friends and family from the nuisance house across the street.  I haven’t burned the house down with my cooking (or even set off the smoke detectors) or injured anything (or myself) with the lawn mower.

It turns out, working from home is much better than I thought it would be. I’m able to focus and get stuff done. At the end of the day, it’s been easy to walk away from the desk until the next day.

In the non-working time, it turns out I love staying home doing not much, and eagerly look forward to retirement to do more of it. At least I’m a lot less worried about the “what would I do all day?” part of being a (probably) broke-ass retiree. The answer to the question is “nothing.” I will sit around and do a lot of nothing just like most weekends so far in the pandemic. It’s all good.

If anyone had told my younger self, say 23- or 30 year-old me, that I would someday spend 100 consecutive days quite content, mostly at home where I worked and also lived alone, it would have seemed impossible to fathom. My FOMO game was huge then. I was constantly out, convinced that the one night I stayed home would be the one night that everything great happened and I would be the loser who missed it. I got over that a long time ago.

I’m sure this experience would have been different if I lived with someone or had some sort of a man-friend or didn’t have the the dogs, but that hasn’t been my world for a long time. Having the dogs to take care of has been great, and now I worry for them when this is over (it will be over someday, right?). Younger me would have worried that fashions had changed and when I went back out to the world my clothes would be all wrong and outdated, but older me prefers vintage clothes, so a lot of my stuff is already old and outdated on purpose.

It’s been good practice, the first 100 pandemic days. It will be interesting to see what the next 100 days will bring.

“Remoted” – Workday 73/ Day 99 (Tuesday)

The absence of the “old” desktop version of Scrabble through Facebook has altered my free time. I played Scrabble through Facebook for years, like maybe 10. It was recently replaced by Scrabble GO which is hard to navigate on a desktop and clearly designed for mobile. And phones are too small for this game or my fingers are too fat to move the tiny tiles, but in any event I tried it and I hate it. On a desktop, it’s like the nursery school version of a game – annoying sound effects, the tiles bounce up and down when you shuffle them. The game board is stupid tiny even on a desktop, then zooms as you try to place the tiles which is annoying. It was a great game and then they went and ruined it. Whoever “they” are. I am mad at them. 

So now I play Candy Crush on my phone instead of Scrabble on my computer. Also a stupid game, but it’s the only version of it I know so I have no better predecessor to be mad about. The screens while the game loads are amusing with cheery messages like “Swipe the stress away” and “Time to relax.” Umm, this game actually aggravates me more than it "relaxes" me. There are levels labeled “Nightmarishly Hard Level” (aka, the tagline for all of 2020). When you run out of turns or a bomb goes off and ends the round, the game offers the opportunity to keep playing by paying money. Real money. Ummm, no thanks.

No more lives. Get a fresh
one in a few minutes.

If you lose five times in a row (or however many lives you had), you are informed “No more lives” and your options are to buy more time (again with the real world money), ask friends, or wait some specified “Time to next life.” Dang. I wish it were that easy to get a “next life” in real non-Candy Crush life. Lose a few rounds, wait 15 or 30 minutes, be issued a next life and a do-over. Things are more tolerable with a known endpoint, and how many times have you wanted a do-over? The hard part is, you can’t advance without winning the level, which sounds like the premise of reincarnation where you keep coming back until you resolve specific issues or learn certain lessons in life. 

Candy Crush lives have lessons. The game highlights a potential move. Sometimes, it’s the only available move to line up three candies, but not always. Just because the game suggests it, it doesn’t mean it’s the best move for you. Kind of like advice from well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) people. There is multiplying chocolate, which is the same effect as being buried up to your neck in whatever. The game has some Las Vegas slot machine elements at play. Stuff flashing and dinging and swishing, seemingly at random, and when you win, it’s a candy explosion version of fireworks. Some levels feel impossible, which is infuriating, but after failing the same level for what feels like 5 million times over a couple days, suddenly it just solves itself. I think there is a mercy rule built in to keep people from giving up altogether because it is no fun losing all the time. Not in a game, and not in real life.

“Remoted” – Workday 72 / Day 98 (Monday)

The first tomato pie of the season happened tonight.  I’ve been looking forward to summer tomatoes and tomato pie for a while. The plan started to come together the Friday vacation day of the dentist appointment when I deserved the ice cream that led to stopping at Market Basket and the resulting full grocery shop, referred to as “the $50 ice cream.” If I’d stuck to the Plan B of vodka that day, which I have plenty of, there would have been no tomato pie today, so it worked out well for me.

Thanks to the one-way aisles, I traversed each row without the safety net of a grocery list. The traffic flow, plus the absence of many other shoppers allowed me to look around for a change, instead of my usual pre-pandemic scatterbrained, scattershot approach of skipping crucial rows due to “too many people” or forgetting where things live in the store. The orderly travel pattern allowed me to notice things like the presence of Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust, a delicious and affordable solution to my complete and utter lack of interest in mastering crust. It is housed in a corner of the dairy area that I usually blow right past in my haste to get to the nearby grated cheeses, another key ingredient to tomato pie and staple of my pantry. I get nervous if there isn’t a stash of a variety of cheeses in my freezer. 

Tomato pie!

Tomato pie always makes me think of Nashville and the Tomato Art Fest in August, which celebrates the lovely tomato (“A Uniter, Not a Divider - Bringing Together Fruits and Vegetables”) with parades, concerts, art exhibits and contests, Bloody Mary Garden, and baking contests. This was my introduction to tomato pie many years ago, and for that I am still grateful. Thank you forever, East Nashville!

Tonight’s tomato pie was everything I remembered, even though I couldn’t remember if I’d used this particular Paula Deen recipe before. There is  now a collection of about 10 different tomato pie recipes between the paper file and my computer. Once the aggravation of pie crust is eliminated with pre-made crust, the hardest thing about this recipe is peeling the tomatoes. Either both of my peelers stink or nicely ripe tomatoes are hard to peel, and I ended up using my fingers to pull off strips of the skin for about half the effort. If I had this problem in the past, I’ve forgotten, which is just as well. Leaves more room in the cranium for more important memories, because Lord knows that is still a challenge.

This morning, long before the pie making, I was at the back door watching Moose as he headed to the yard to potty and I was noticing the tiny corpse of a baby bird on the ground under the end of the downspout below where the robin’s nest is built. I wondered about the cause of death of the tiny, pale, featherless creature. Was it homicide? Suicide? Accidental? What happened to you, tiny baby bird? Were you shoved, did you jump to escape an evil sibling, or did you just fall? That’s when I realized with a cold chill and rising panic that the car was not parked in the usual spot near that very same downspout. Then I remembered the car was at the shop getting the A/C fixed. The shop exactly two streets over from the house where I had driven it just a couple hours earlier, then walked back to the house. Did I mention I sometimes have the 20 -second memory retention  of a chimpanzee? It’s random. Some stuff is forgotten instantly, other stuff I remember for-ev-er. It certainly keeps things interesting and can sometimes be helpful in trivia games.

“Remoted” – Day 97 (Sunday)

Today I did something I’ve thought about for a long time (as in, a period of many years). It was partly an attempt to recreate a childhood memory, partly an exercise in curiosity. This morning I tackled the family recipe for doughnuts. Mom and I are not solid on the origination of the recipe, but she thinks it was from her Aunt Julia who gave it to Mummu. 

When I was a kid, Mummu sometimes made doughnuts on her massive Roper Deluxe stove. I remember anxiously waiting to taste the fried deliciousness. I’d get to eat some of them at her house, and she’d give me a brown paper bag of crispy coated heaven to take home to the rest of the family.

I’ve had the handwritten recipe card titled “Doughnuts” for as long as I can remember. The recipe starts in blue ink in my Mom’s handwriting, then switches to pencil in my writing and I have no idea how this card came to be. In my (obviously incorrect) memory the recipe was written in Mummu’s perfect Palmer Method penmanship.

When I first moved back from Tennessee, I bought a doughnut cutter at a church rummage sale in preparation for the day I would make the doughnuts. It’s taken six or seven years, but that day was finally today. In the lead up to today, there was research. The recipe says “oil” but not what kind. I learned from various online sources that vegetable oil doesn’t provide as much crisp as Canola oil, which was recommended by several sources. Canola oil was not the kind in the cabinet and was the impetus for the trip to Family Dollar on Saturday.

At 8:00 this morning I was pulling ingredients from the cabinets and mixing dough according to slightly vague directions that included “As much flour as is needed (about four cups).” Needed for what, exactly? There was no elaboration. I used four cups and wasn’t fully convinced it was enough, but I didn’t want it to be too dry or get tough. Then the dough had to chill for two hours so I watched a movie and played Candy Crush.

It was Internet research that filled me in on “hot” oil and specified 375 degrees. I also learned how to gauge the temperature without a thermometer, which involves putting the handle of a wooden spoon in the oil. If bubbles form around the handle, the oil is the right temperature for frying the doughnuts.

Doughnuts! And holes!

The first fry had one doughnut which did not come out of the oil “golden brown.” It was anemic. The heat was turned up a bit. The next one came out golden, so it was time to go all out and put in three at a time, which is all the kettle could hold. It took a while to fry a couple dozen doughnuts plus holes. The later ones came out deformed and flatter, which I concluded was because the dough had warmed up too much. Plus the adventurous aspect had waned and I just wanted to be done. The kitchen was a mess with flour everywhere and about 1,000 messy dishes and utensils to be cleaned. And I accidentally burned a finger when it landed directly in the hot oil while putting in a raw dough circle by hand instead of using the spatula like I had been doing when it was still fun and I was still paying attention.

Overall, it was a sort-of success and I learned a few things (keep the dough cool, don’t let your finger land in hot oil). The flavor is familiar, but mine didn’t come out as tall or as crispy as I remembered. This could be because I don’t know what oil Mummu fried hers in and I think I rolled my dough too thin. I brought some over to Mom and Butch and they liked them, so that was good. She and Butch said the style is “Finnish doughnuts.” Next time, I need to conquer the crispiness.

“Remoted” – Day 96 (Saturday)

It’s 90-plus degrees as we welcome the arrival of summer. Yay! And after today, the light starts fading a bit earlier each evening. Boo! If only it could be light out until 9 p.m. all year long.

Today was largely lazy. Again. I seem to have a pattern with weekends and a love of leisure, or in the case of many weekends, a lot of “sitting around thinking” which I guess is the same thing as leisure. I should have been born wealthy and in the days when females wandered the house in a light-colored gauzy, floaty dress before stopping to sprawl in a dramatic pose on a chaise and have a portrait painted. I think this would have suited me.

Before the day crashed onto the couch in a spectacular fashion, the morning started with a bang and dealing with food preparation neglected on Wednesday and again Thursday as originally planned. My procrastination had me peeling and cutting butternut squash at 8 this morning, a punishment which took a solid hour. Stupidly, I peeled both squashes (the easy part), so there was no turning back after cutting the first one was a worse nightmare than usual. Crazy-ass squash has the consistency of solid concrete when raw.

I keep waiting for the day the blade of my knife just snaps halfway through cutting one of these things. After cubing (ok, it was more like triangles) the squash, it was tossed with olive oil and then tossed into the oven to roast. A 400-degree oven. On a hell-hot day. What was I thinking? I know what I was thinking – the kale needed to be cut and rubbed with oil, wine vinegar, and mustard dressing before it got limp and discolored and weird. But then it needed the roasted squash for the rest of the recipe. So yeah. A 400-degree oven on a hot day. Everything came out great, and now there is a bag of roasted butternut squash chunks in the freezer and a container in the fridge.

I also cleaned and roasted the seeds in the toaster oven. Why not? The big oven was already blasting at 400, it wasn’t like the toaster oven at 275 degrees was going to make much more of a difference.

Late in the afternoon I ventured out to Family Dollar. I hadn’t been there since one morning in March when I stopped in before work to get toilet paper or tissues or some other paper product that was already going scarce before the Stay at Home mandate. I used to go there a couple times a week, sometimes just for entertainment. There were three cars in the parking lot today and a few others in front of the auto parts place a few doors down, but the rest of the plaza’s occupants, a nail salon and a gym, are still dark and closed.

Wine coolers are refreshing!

There were only a few customers in the store which made the social distancing easy. The store was the cleanest and neatest I’ve ever seen it, but also sparsely stocked in several departments. Whatever. I got what I needed from the grocery section, plus a frozen pizza, sugar wafer cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and a tub of “frozen dairy dessert” which seems to indicate Breyers no longer has cream in what now passes for ice cream. There were two girls paying at the checkout when I got in line. One had her mask below her nose. She kept touching her bra straps, her crop top, the waistband of her stretchy pants, her mask, her nose, and eventually pulled the mask down to touch her mouth and her nose some more before raising it again. The voice in my head was screaming at her as I waited in my designated spot. The plexiglass panels at the checkout hang from the ceiling and reach low enough that it’s tricky getting the bagged items off the counter without smacking yourself in the face with the plexi. When I got back in the car I doused myself with sanitizer in case I touched anything that the girl ahead of me touched. I hate having to think like this. 

When I got home, I washed my hands. A lot. Being out in the world does not feel like it’s for me. Sadly, this is not a new feeling. I need to go fling myself onto the porch glider or the couch and practice my dramatic pose while thinking and drinking my refreshing wine cooler, this weekend's favorite drink. 

“Remoted” – Workday 71 / Day 95 (Friday)

Another Friday vacation day, another hot day spent driving with no A/C in the car dealing with life maintenance issues, but today included the dogs. The good news is, I have an appointment to drop the car off Monday for an A/C charge.  All it took was remembering to pick up the phone and call my friendly and convenient neighborhood service station.  

The car ride today wasn’t totally horrible, but I also didn’t spend time with the A/C blasting hot air wondering when it would get cold like I did last Friday. I opened the windows and put the dog beds in the back seat on the floor a few minutes before takeoff. The beds work pretty well at confining Moose and Winston. It doesn’t guarantee that Moose won’t jump up onto the seat, put his paws on the arm rest window controls, and soon be hanging out the window. This scares me, ever since the time back in Tennessee when he was in the shopping cart at PetSmart as we crossed the parking lot to the car, and he jumped up and over the sides of the cart to get out, landing on the pavement several feet below. I still have no idea how he executed that maneuver, but I have to respect the agility and the motivation to get out of the cart. I have nightmare visions of him trying the same escape from the car as we’re traveling down a busy street, or worse, the highway. Thank goodness for the child window locks.

Winston recently had his heartworm test, but Moose needed his done so I could get a get a refill on the heartworm prevention. This was the reason for today's automobile outing. The Boys also needed flea and tick prevention, so the thirty-minute tech visit plus three months of prevention meds for the two dogs cost a tidy sum ($244, to be specific). Moose was diagnosed with heartworms in June of 2010, six months after I got him from the animal shelter, and that is nothing I ever want to deal with again. The treatment was about $1,200 and required keeping him quiet for around 10 weeks. I’ll gladly take today’s visit and expense before another hellishly stressful and expensive bout with heartworms.

While in Fitchburg (because I never changed vets when I moved to Lowell) I got to enjoy some of my favorite F-burg things. I love the gas prices, which are usually 10 to 15 cents less per gallon than the stations near my house, so I filled up on Route 12. My favorite $3 car wash is also on Rte 12 and I was able to have the heavy coating of pollen washed off. I even splurged and got the $7 car wash with the wheel cleaning, because after dumping all the money at the vet, the purse strings were still a little loose.

He looks like a little saint now ...

While in line at the car wash, I checked to make sure the elements of the 4/60 (four windows open at 60 mph) cooling system were secure, and set the child locks. After paying and rolling into the wet stream on the conveyor belt, things sounded a bit weird and I looked back to see that the driver side back window was open. Wide open. Water and soap were streaming onto the back seat, down the inside of the door, and all over Moose, who was now sitting in his bed on the floor acting like nothing at all unusual was happening. So much for my checking the child lock and Moose, always eager to look out the window, had managed to stand on the controls. There was some colorful language and frantic button pushing before the window was closed again, luckily, without trapping any of the cloth strips from the washer. By the time we got home 45 minutes later, the 4/60 cooling system had dried Moose and most of the seat. 

Delicious, but definitely not Korean food. 

It occurred to me much too late in the game to call my favorite local Korean restaurant (Arisu, also on Rte 12) to order kimbap and bi bim bap to bring home, so I totally missed that boat on my little journey. If I had thought of it while sitting in the parking lot at the vet waiting for Moose instead of losing at multiple attempts at Candy Crush, it would have been ready by the time I was over that way. Assuming of course, that they are even open, which I still don’t know because I neglected to check. Whatever. The day was expensive enough already, and there is plenty of food at the house. Maybe next time. Supper was a delicious gazpacho, but right now I would kill for some kimbap.

“Remoted” – Workday 70 / Day 94 (Thursday)

The heat has arrived as forecasted, but at least there is a breeze. My Mummu used to always say that when it’s hot, you should eat hot foods (temperature and spice level) because then the air will feel cooler. I’m still not so sure about this.

In the spirit of Mummu’s advice, instead of a crisp and cool salad that I wasn’t in the mood for, or a tomato and cheese sandwich I also wasn’t really in the mood for, I rummaged around in the cabinet and came up with spicy udon noodle soup. I had bought this as the Stay at Home mandates were first happening during what turned out to be the last in-person grocery shop for months, on the day before I learned I would be working from home.  I’d had udon noodles in restaurants and didn’t recall seeing it the grocery store before that day, but I’m usually laser focused on finding my beloved ramen. During the shopping trip of the udon noodles, there was but one brick of ramen in the entire aisle, which I also grabbed, even though it wasn't my favorite flavor. Yes, I have a favorite ramen brick flavor and it is Creamy Chicken.

I love the speed of ramen and the udon bricks. My stove has a "Power Burner" that boils water in no time flat, and then five minutes for the al dente firmness of noodles and boom, dinner is served. I can’t prep salad vegetables that quickly, especially with the two Canine Overlords staring at me and begging for cucumber peels and slices, crispy romaine spines, and carrots. No kidding, they hear the knife on the cutting board and magically appear from wherever they have been. Then I flip them vegetable peels and bits of vegetables, which reinforces the act of appearing when the sound is heard, but hey, we all enjoy the game.

When you forget your udon
soup it turns into just noodles.

After setting the udon noodles on the stove to cook, I paced nearby, waiting for the timer to buzz. Once the stove was turned off and the noodles were in the bowl, however, I wandered off to check the mail and in that brief time forgot that dinner was on the counter waiting for me. Sometimes I have the memory retention of a chimpanzee, which is about 20 seconds according to one study I found in my Google search of “what creature has the shortest memory.” Twenty seconds sounds about right for me, and even generous sometimes. When working as a waitperson several different times through the years, if I didn’t write it down, you probably weren’t going to receive it. I’m always amazed at the wait staff nowadays who write down nothing and deliver every single thing to specification. How? I can’t make it from the couch to the kitchen without forgetting what I got up for.

By the time I noticed my udon soup on the counter, it was no longer soup, and more like slightly mushy noodles in a bowl with the tiniest bit of broth remaining. Whatever. It was tasty. Between the temperature and the spice level, there was sweating and a runny nose, but I could only wonder when the cooling effect was going to kick in. The breezes coming in through the windows eventually dried the sweat glistening on my neck and forehead, which felt better, but I can’t say it was ever cooling. At least it was delicious. 

“Remoted” – Workday 69 / Day 93 (Wednesday)

It was a wacky Wednesday all the way around. Logged on to work at 8:15 and by 8:45 there were more WTFs and For Fox Sakes flying around than possibly ever in the long and colorful history of my potty mouth. Remember Midas and how everything touched turned to gold? Well, substitute poop and you will get an idea of what my frequent bouts of Reverse Midas Touch feel like.

The day featured a little problem solving, a little learning, and a little putting out of fires. There was the usual deluge of emails. And in between it all, there were brilliant bursts of crystal clear focus that let me finish drafts of website content and customer messaging and deliver them to others for review. 

There were even comical moments. Around noon, as I stood on the tiny porch at the top of the back stairs waiting for Moose to finish his business, a bird flew overhead. I saw the hint of a shadow, and felt a plop. The bird had let a load of poop fly, which somehow landed in the middle of my shirt at about mid stomach. How does this even happen? The precision of that angle! I stood there, looking at the white poop on my black shirt and laughed like a fool. Excuse me, do you have any white poop-on? Why yes I do, it’s right here on my shirt. Sometimes the Universe likes to remind me that some days are just spotted with crap. But it washed off, nobody was hurt, and my demented sense of humor had a laugh.

Find the plum in the produce.

The produce box arrived, and today’s FedEx delivery person at least had the sense to leave it in a patch of shade next to the front stairs instead of baking on the asphalt in the sun like the last two produce deliveries. It contained delicious and tiny grape tomatoes that inspired salad for supper. I had also checked off “plums” on the order customization, which implied more than one, but the box contained just one teeny tiny plum that makes the Roma tomatoes look extra large. The Universe is having a grand time with me today. 

After work, I tuned into a Jacob’s Pillow premier viewing of “The Men Who Danced” about Ted Shawn’s men’s dance group. It is a beautifully done video and of special interest to me because for several years of my youth (but not as many as I wish), I studied Denishawn, the style of dance created by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn which is the early roots of American modern dance and of which Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Louise Brooks were students. The video made me nostalgic for the dance studio and my teacher, Marion Rice, who studied at the Braggiotti-Denishawn School in Boston and taught us so many years later. I’m sad that I can’t meet up with the group of dancers from the studio for their weekly dance meetup outdoors one morning a week because of the whole time/space challenge and work. It’s 2020. Where is my clone who can do my work for me while I go dance? Where is my teleport machine so I can get to places and back in a flash?

To better see the video, I closed the blinds hung in the window behind me to stop the glare on the computer screen. An hour later when I re-opened them, two of the strings let loose and they hung in the window, all pathetically cockeyed and broken. I tried to refasten the strings but the plastic mechanism that secures them in the head rail was broken on two of the three strings and after a few minutes, it hardly seemed worth the effort. It was another “how does this even happen?” moment, but less comical than the bird poop incident. Of course, I may regret having given up on the blinds tomorrow when I’m trying to work and the glare bouncing off the computer screen is a blinding issue. Friday is take Moose to the vet on my vacation day, (because if it isn’t the dentist, it’s the vet and that’s how we roll here at the BungaLowell), so maybe I can arrange for a curbside pickup of a vinyl blind while I’m already out.  I guess we’ll see what the Universe has to say about that.

“Remoted” – Workday 68 / Day 92 (Tuesday)

A couple years ago, I went to a bike swap/sale at a bike shop. I bought a new-to-me hybrid bike, and a friend and I talked about meeting up to ride together on the rail trails halfway between our respective towns. This ride has not yet happened.

In fact, I have ridden that bike exactly once – the day I brought it home from the sale – for about three miles. The Lowell/Dracut traffic freaked me out and I haven’t braved the streets since. It’s funny, because I used to ride regularly in Worcester, which is not exactly known for its quiet or empty streets. But anyway. Every time I enter the shed to fetch the lawn mower, rake, or “big scissor things” to trim the yard stuff,  I’m met by two bikes. There is the (at the time brand new) expensive road bike bought in Tennessee in 2008/09 which I rode for ten miles before wiping out in gravel, hurting my hip, and being rescued roadside by a friend’s stepdad in a pickup truck. And there is also the hybrid bike, bought at the bike swap/sale and ridden for three miles.

Soon will be pumped up.

With the nice weather and the horror of seeing in the mirror my couldn’t-be-further-from-athletic-if-I-tried thighs, carefully crafted by not working out in basically forever, the idea of biking has resurfaced. Unfortunately, all the tires are currently free of air, and the tire pump fell apart in 2016 as I packed it to move. For years I thought about visiting the bike shop that was two blocks from  my office in downtown Lowell to buy a tire pump. I almost made it there once, but it turned out to be a day they weren't open, and last year, or even earlier, the place closed.

After talking with my friend on Saturday  about our to-do lists and other things like biking and the dance classes we miss taking, buying a tire pump was moved up the priority list. I shopped online and read product descriptions and reviews. I found an article that rated the ten best tire pumps, and I found the allegedly best one, which was put into my online shopping cart. For whatever reason, I didn’t buy it and the next day it was listed as “no longer available.” But of course.

Today, before work when it was cool, and then again after work with the sun shining and the trees rustling in a light breeze, I thought how nice it might be to go for a bike ride. Yes, I could get air at a gas station, but no, the bike doesn’t fit into the car easily and no, I’m not fighting with the bike rack to transport the bike to get air. But I did go online, and it was my lucky day because the tire pump was back in stock and at a lower price than Saturday. It is now ordered and due to arrive Friday. Boom! Another thing off the list. Whaddaya know, sometimes things really do just work out.

“Remoted” – Workday 67 / Day 91 (Monday)

Vacation Friday, pay dearly on Monday.

Monday morning after a Friday off is always, um, fun. As in, 100% not fun at all. The angst used to begin with the initial opening of the inbox, but over time, the knowledge of what usually awaits has pushed the dread even earlier so it invades Sunday evening. Today there were 117 new emails lying in wait for me, which is about usual. Generally there are anywhere from 80 to 120 emails on Monday when I am out on a Friday. It’s terrifying. Yes, I could log in and check emails on the weekend, but why ruin those days too?

Sometimes, when I see the number of unread emails in the inbox, I want to logout immediately and flee. And that’s before any of them have even been opened, when I can still tell myself there is a glimmer of a chance that there won’t be a bunch of problems hidden within. This level of delusion is required to proceed and I’m finally getting good at it.

Sometimes (rarely)  I actually get lucky, there are no problems lurking, and it’s just an extra volume of messages from newsletters to which I subscribe, or touch base emails  from people I haven’t communicated with in a while, or progress reports confirming that projects are on track. More often than not, it’s issues with vendors or media, or last minute projects from out of left field that didn’t even exist on Thursday and are already behind schedule, or projects we thought were completed but are suddenly resurrected. It’s certainly not dull.

Today, as much as I dared to hope it would be one of the rare Mondays after a Friday vacation day, it was one of the usual ones. Most of the morning was consumed with learning that things skidded sideways on Friday, trying to understand what happened and what didn’t, wrangling all the loose ends and notifying the people who need to know and the next thing I knew the morning had blown by in a blink. Fastest Monday morning ever. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Welcome to the weekly cable reset.

After work, it was time to be greeted by a blank TV screen and reset the cable box to then wander about while the box does its thing. This is a weekly event, and some weeks, the blessed joy happens two or three times. Hooray for cable/internet companies with a monopoly on the local market and no other viable options! 

On the bright side, I probably don’t have low blood pressure any more. At least not on Monday mornings after a Friday vacation day.

“Remoted” – Day 90 (Sunday)

Sunday "vacation" supper.

Treating weekends like lazy, commitment-free vacation days is working for me. As an adult, I’m as well-suited to reading books, watching TV, and eating ice cream for supper, as when I was ten years old. I used to attach a lot of guilt to staying home and doing nothing and would force myself out of the house purely to have an answer to the Monday morning office chit chat of “What did you do this weekend?” Trust me, it was hard work. 

The pandemic concept of Social Distancing and avoiding large groups of people basically slapped the social seal of approval on the lifestyle I accidentally landed on after moving back from Tennessee. Several friends and family members with robust social circles and pre-pandemic active calendars filled with events are having a hard time with the isolation. I had the advantage of a seven year head start on the isolation thing, so the pandemic guidelines and staying home as an activity for the greater good is right up my alley. Permission to not leave the house is liberating! I no longer feel embarrassed by doing nothing over the weekend – it’s for the greater good! The pressure of finding destinations and heading out to do something just to have an answer to the usual Monday morning office chit chat is gone.

The past 90 days have delivered the best run of sleep I can recall in, possibly, ever. Sure, the news and events around the country make me cry a lot, but my neck doesn’t hurt like it used to. My shoulders have returned to their normal position and no longer hover around my earlobes. The longer this COVID scenario runs, the harder it might be to get me back out into society. I may need to find a finishing school to relearn basic manners and social etiquette. Do those schools still exist?

“Remoted” – Day 89 (Saturday)

During a conversation this morning with a friend, we talked about house projects (roofs, fencing, deck rails, oh my!), growing to-do lists, and shedding extra stuff (among other things). We talked about the most useful tidbit about project queues from my Production Operations Management class way back when, which is to do the quick jobs first to get them out of the queue, and how sometimes completing one task provides momentum for a series of tasks (that whole bodies in motion thing).

Eggplant casserole!

When I got off the phone, inspired by our conversation, I decided to wash the bathroom floor, a generally quick task that had been put off for a week (ok, it was way longer). It’s a small floor which doesn’t take long to do by hand. The completion of that first task inspired a further step – cleaning the tile grout with a toothbrush and a paste of baking soda peroxide. The completion of the floor led to washing the frying pan and plastic containers in the sink, which led to scrubbing the sink and cleaning the counters. Lunchtime was approaching, so a casserole was assembled with sliced tomato, sauce, and mozzarella cheese layered with breaded eggplant from the freezer (which looked a lot like cookies through the plastic container  and faked me out/disappointed me for weeks as I rifled through the freezer). 

Soul crushing failure.

Propelled by forward motion, preparation of the future flower bed continued with weeding and the addition of a bag of planting soil and shopping online for flower bed fencing. That’s pretty much where progress ground to a halt and it wasn’t solely because I was sucked into multiple consecutive soul crushing losing rounds of Candy Crush and binge watching all seasons of Schitt’s Creek for the third time. 

The flower bed fencing choices seem to be limited now that I need more of it. The criteria include being inexpensive and tall enough to keep the dogs out of the planting area, which rules out a lot of the edging solutions. If only I had ordered more than one roll of the wire fencing a few months ago when I bought what I needed at the time. Drat. Who knew I would decide to install another flower bed? In my imagination, there would be a flower bed edged with concrete breeze block, but, even though Facebook groups are full of photos of the stuff, it seems to be impossible to find in real life. Perhaps it would be more realistic to aim for one edged in wine bottles, which is a material that is easily sourced, starting immediately from my own recycle bin.