“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.