Notes from a Self Quarantine

The yoga studio that I’ve been going to the past 7 years opened back up last month for in person classes, and thank goodness! Sure I enjoyed being able to do a virtual yoga class from the privacy of my own home at any time that I wanted to, but there is just something about “live” yoga. Maybe I just try harder when I am in a group practice, maybe the energy of the students around me makes the practice more enjoyable. Or maybe it’s just a damn treat to get the eff out of my house and go a yoga class.

I’ve been going to the Sunday morning yoga class for a few weeks now. Back in “normal” times this is the class that I would go to every week. The instructor has changed a few times over the last year, unfortunately my favorite instructor doesn’t seem to be teaching that class every Sunday, but again, I just want to get out of my house and go do yoga.

This studio has started in studio classes again, but I haven’t made it to those yet. I’ve really been enjoying the classes that they’ve be holding in this courtyard — it’s in the middle of an office building, so on a Sunday it’s private and quiet, but you’re still outside. And if it’s a perfect summer day, it’s amazing to do yoga outside under a bright blue sky. And if it’s a 90 degree day, I’ll probably sweat just as much as if I was in the studio for a hot yoga class!

One of these days I will go back to the in studio classes. They’re only allowing 10 students for the inside classes and you don’t have to wear a face mask when you are on your mat. Typically the in studio classes are during the week when I am supposed to be working, so I haven’t made it there yet. And I might not if I can keep doing outdoor yoga into the fall.

My husband has even joined me the past two weeks, but while I leave the class smiling and invigorated (and sweaty!), if you ask him what he thought of the class, his response usually sounds like “meh”. Some folks just can’t get excited about things I guess. I get super excited about yoga or birds sitting in a tree or wild bunnies hanging out in my backyard — like maybe a little over-the-top excited. But maybe that’s why they say opposites attract, right? Or maybe I just enjoy all those little things in life, and he doesn’t know what he’s missing. Even though I definitely tell him! Maybe that’s why he doesn’t seem excited…

Regardless, I am already looking forward to outdoor yoga next Sunday!

I can’t believe how big they are! They are now officially taller than I am, which honestly isn’t saying too much, but you get the point.

And I picked my first ripe tomatoes this evening! Look at these little grape tomatoes:

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There is just nothing like fresh tomatoes from the garden. They honestly taste so much better! And they are a little cute too.

I need to replant some spinach, arugula and lettuce again sometime soon. I’ve pretty much picked it all and now the leftover plants need to be dug up and replanted. I already replanted spinach a couple of weeks ago, but it’s not growing as fast as I would have liked.

Here’s some arugula and big lettuce that I picked this week (yes, it’s in a store bought container, but I promise that I grew it outside!):

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Yum! The arugula is so good in sandwiches and obviously salads. And I usually add spinach into any leftovers that I am microwaving, I love to throw leafy greens into every meal!

And my flowers are really starting to bloom too:

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And look at those tomato plants!

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They are out of control!! Now if I could only get the cucumbers and summer squash to produce fruit — they keep flowering, but the veggies just don’t start. We might need some more bees in the area. It’s the end of July and everything is really starting to grow quickly now — I will have tons of fresh ripe tomatoes in the next couple of weeks and I am thrilled!

How does this always happen?? The yoga studio I’ve been going to for 7 years is hosting a 6-week workshop. It’s based on a 40-day program created by a famous yoga instructor. It was advertised that every day students would have to do a yoga practice, a meditation and journal — all on your own, they’d send you links to yoga and meditation practices. And then once a week you’d attend a Zoom meeting check in with everyone in the program. Oh, and read the famous yoga instructor’s book.

That doesn’t sound too bad — I read everyday or at least I try to. I figured I could purchase the book and skim the parts I needed. And I already do daily journaling. I’ve wanted to start a daily yoga practice — at the beginning of this pandemic I was doing yoga every morning, but then I was craving cardio, so I’ve been focusing more on HIIT and strength training the past couple of months. I could really benefit from a daily yoga practice. And you only have to do it 6 times a week (which means I could probably just cheat and do 4 and no one would know…).

Now, the daily meditation? I will struggle with that. I’ve tried to start a meditation practice in the past and even once downloaded a meditation app, an app that I don’t think I have used in 4 years…so the meditation part will definitely be hard for me. But maybe this program will force me to actually do it instead of just complaining that I’m not meditating…

So I went back and forth for the past few weeks trying to make a decision — would I sign up for this course? It’s only 40 days, I could do that. But that’s 40 actual days that I have to do multiple things EVERY day, and I am working full-time over here! But think about how good for me this could be. Or I could just feel like a total failure on day 3 and scrap the whole thing. I mean I already did mention that I could cheat on the amount of yoga I could do in a week and no one would know that I didn’t do 6 days. I’m already planning my escape from a program I haven’t even signed up for or started yet!

I spent the majority of this week convincing myself that I just didn’t have enough free time in my life right now to sign up for this program. I thought it was a done deal, I would skip it this time. Until the end of my work shift today, when I signed up for the 40 day program.

I was happy with my choice until I got two e-mails from the instructor — the first welcoming me to the program and outlining a few details — there’s a private Facebook group that I need to sign up for (great, another thing to check everyday!). And it’s actually two meditations everyday, not just one (ugh) and it’s a journaling exercise, not just writing in my journal like I do everyday anyway. So do I need to get a separate journal now??

The second e-mail detailed our assignments to complete before the first Zoom meeting, which is this Monday evening. I now have homework, yes, homework! I am 43-years-old and I have a homework assignment that I have to complete this weekend. I have to read 3 or maybe it’s 4 sections in that book I thought I would just skim. Thank goodness I actually bought the book beforehand and didn’t leave it until the last minute! I usually do that.

My husband thinks this is just hysterical, the fact that I have homework assignments and tasks that I need to complete each day. He’s already taking bets on how many of these tasks I will actually complete. He knows me really well.

I’m thinking that maybe I should skip going out for Friday night dinner tonight. I have homework to do!

Today was my first day back to work after vacation. (Please insert deep sigh here.) Now the first day back to work after a vacation is always a bummer. And it doesn’t help when your vacation place and your work place just happen to be the same place, which also just happens to be your home. If there is one thing that I can say about the year 2020 — it’s like living in a damn episode of bad reality TV.

But is any reality TV actually good?? Maybe that’s a question to ponder at a different time…

So here I am — back to work. I’m not sure if any of my co-workers actually missed me, because they really can’t see me anyway unless we’re on a Zoom call and frankly, that’s not really seeing folks. I had a few important things to work on my first day back — one of the projects I am working on has a big series of meetings next week, so today there was a lot of organizing for that.

Things went as well as they could after you’ve been out of the office for 3 days and everyone else is still working while you’re not — there was a lot to catch up on. But I got through it all and feel like I’m in a good place for tomorrow.

And then after tomorrow it will already be the weekend!! I definitely love these short weeks!! Who can I talk to about working a two day week every week?? How amazing that would be! Or to just take every Wednesday off — how fabulous to have a day off in the middle of the week!!

See this is what happens — I have a few days off and I come back and I just want more days off. I’ve tasted freedom and I now crave more…but at least tomorrow is Friday! And then I’m back in the “office” for 5 more days…I think I’m going to pick out some more vacation days in August…

My friends left early this morning — they had a 10 hour drive in front of them, so they obviously wanted to get an early start. My husband and I got up to say goodbye, but then got right back into bed after they left. Ahh, vacation!

So now I had the whole last day of my vacation to myself to do whatever I wanted!! How often does that actually happen?? I sat outside for awhile with a cup of coffee and my library book. I actually brought the entire coffee pot outside with me, which is something that I never do. It was nice to just sit and read outside while slowly sipping coffee. I’ll have to remember to do more of that this summer.

I got back into the garden again too — I had a couple of plants that were getting blocked by other bigger plants, so I replanted the runts into some big empty pots I had in the basement. The tomato plants are growing like weeds, I had to do use some more garden stakes and some clips to help them stay upright. I have a ton of flowers and a ton of green tomatoes already — just waiting for them to ripen. I wonder if it might be too hot for them to ripen right now. I remember seeing an article about that somewhere, but if course I forgot to read it.

My husband and I went out for our afternoon walk around the neighborhood. We’d skipped it while our friends were here. It’s amazing how quickly I forgot about the coronavirus pandemic while my friends were visiting. It’s like I’d forgotten all about wearing masks in public and staying social distant. But being back in the center of our town and seeing all the precautions that the local businesses have taken brought it all right back. It’s amazing that I was able to block that out for two days while I was enjoying having guests again. Or maybe I’m just getting forgetful…

It was a nice three days off from work. I am so not looking forward to logging back onto my work computer tomorrow. I’m probably have a bunch of e-mails to deal with. Ugh. It was so nice to take a little break, we didn’t even need to go anywhere, it was just a nice opportunity to reset. And to hang out with friends, which might be the thing I’ve missed most during the pandemic. Sure, my husband is a nice guy, but I think we are both getting sick of having no one else to talk to. At this point, he knows everything that goes on in my day, there’s not much we can chat about over the dinner table.

I think I’ll go and read a little more in my book this evening. It will be nice to get a little bit more relaxation in before going back to the “office” tomorrow!

There really isn’t! My friends are visiting today and I took the day off. We don’t have any plans, and I am totally fine with that! One of my friends has to work today, so we’ve been giving her some space as she holds virtual meetings in my home “office”. Better her than me! That sounds mean, but I really needed a couple of days off. It’s been a long few months…

And it’s been a relaxing day — I did some reading, got in a good upper body workout and spent some time out in the garden. My tomato plants have skyrocketed! And now they are getting so tall that they are starting to droop. So I grabbed some tall garden stakes and propped them back up. I’ve got a little replanting that I need to do, but that will probably be tomorrow’s task.

It’s hot again today, but not as humid as yesterday. When my friend is done with her meetings, we’re going to sit outside on the patio with some beers and a cheese plate I put together earlier. And my husband is smoking steak and salmon in the smoker for dinner tonight. He’s never done salmon in the smoker, I’m sure that it will be delicious!

It’s so nice to have folks visiting us again. I actually keep forgetting that we are in the middle of a pandemic! Back in “normal” times, we’d always have people over on the weekend, I have definitely missed it. And my husband and I are super excited to have new people to talk to and new stories to hear. I’ll be sad when they leave tomorrow morning!

Or I will after I attend one quick morning meeting and answer a few e-mails…why is it that there is just always something to do when you are trying to take a few days off?? My weekly Monday morning Zoom meeting went longer than I had hoped (some Mondays it’s only 10 minutes, that’s my kind of meeting!), and folks weren’t even saying much — I’m sure I was the only one hoping that it would end soon!

And it did (26 minutes this time!) and then I worked on composing the one e-mail that I had to get out that morning before I could log off and start my vacation. And then that one e-mail turned into 4…as it always does. But I finished around 10 a.m. and logged off, ready to start my vacation!

But I still had to do some last minute pick up for my friends’ arrival. They’re staying in my home “office” for the next two nights and I wanted it to be comfortable. I had already changed the sheets on the bed yesterday and vacuumed the carpet, but I still had some stuff cluttering the surfaces. I definitely wanted to pick up my stack of work to-do’s and my planner that I can never remember to actually use.

And then there was our second pantry that I had to move into the other spare room. What, you don’t have a second pantry?? How is that possible? Where else do you store the extra food items and paper products that your husband purchases at the grocery store? You mean you don’t have 4 family-sized jugs of pasta sauce, two boxes of elbow macaroni and two bags of fancy fusilli sitting in paper shopping bags on the floor in your spare room? You don’t have enough ground coffee for the next 3 months? And I am sure that you don’t have so many jars of deli pickles that you could put one on a sandwich daily until at least October. Hmmm…what do you do with all your free time? I mean it takes a lot to manage two pantries in one house. There’s only two of us here and at least one of us can’t find the item they are looking for about twice a week. I might create a third pantry just to be an asshole.

Well, I’d better get back to cleaning up the spare room — my friends will be here in a few hours and there’s 30 rolls of toilet paper and a case of paper towels that I need to relocate.

I took the next 3 days off from work. I guess you’d call them vacation days, but we’re not going anywhere. And referring to it as a “staycation” just seems wrong. I mean what else have I been doing since March?? Sure, I’ve been working full time, but I haven’t left my house in order to do it. Have I been on a “workcation” since mid-March? That doesn’t quite sound right either.

So I’ve taken Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off this week. Last week should have been our annual trip up north, but obviously that didn’t happen. So I will vacation at home for half this week and maybe get some non-work stuff done. And we have friends that are coming to stay with us while they are between houses.

It will be nice to have visitors. At least I think it will — what if my husband and I have become anti-social in the past 4 months? We’ve been isolated for so long, what if we forget how to have house guests?? It’s not like we’ve started walking around naked in the living room in the daytime (never in the daytime!), but it’s just been us here for months. We’ve gotten into our work and home routine. What will it be like to have other people join us??

Well, there is one good thing about having guests — my husband finally cleaned up his home office, which is my dining room table. There was no way that 4 people could have sat down there for a meal or even to talk. He organized all of his crap this morning (nothing like waiting to the last minute!) and I can actually see the table and chairs again! It’s a pretty table, I’ve missed it.

See, there’s always a silver lining, folks! Mine just might be a few sunny, hot days off and a clean kitchen table.

My husband really likes his routine. This is a man who likes to order the same pizza from the same takeout place every Thursday evening for diner. They’re so used to him by now that they sometimes mess with him when he calls to place the order. (Don’t worry — they deliver the correct pizza!) And this pandemic has been pretty tough on him because he can’t follow his normal schedule.

But today he almost had a normal Saturday! I’d gone out to run a couple of errands this afternoon. I knew he’d gone to the grocery store to pick up something for us to grill for dinner. But when I got back home around 6 p.m., he was still out. My first clue should have been that he was wearing khaki cargo shorts, not his normal black gym shorts pandemic-wear.

Well, he went to his regular Saturday afternoon watering hole! He couldn’t sit at the bar like he normally does, but he sat at a table right up next to the bar. The bartender had to walk all the way around the bar to serve beers, but whatever. There were live sports on the TVs — he watched a lacrosse game and some of a golf tournament. He saw some of the regular Saturday customers. I think he was pretty pleased.

When he got home, I mentioned that he most have been happy because it was almost like a pre-pandemic Saturday — we slept in a little, worked out, he mowed the lawn and ran errands and then he got to go to the bar before we made dinner. He replied that it wasn’t a normal Saturday because he didn’t go to his morning spin class. But the man rode 20 miles on his actual bicycle! What can I tell you — he definitely likes his routine!

It all started very early this morning — around 2:30 a.m. the smoke detector in our bedroom started chirping again. Yes, the same smoke detector that my husband had to change the battery in like 2 weeks ago! How does that even happen?? Did we get a faulty battery?

And actually, it beeped the first time at 11:30 p.m. when I was just closing my eyes. My husband was already sound asleep, his CPAP’s ocean noises had already lulled him into a deep sleep. I chose to ignore the smoke detector at that time, figured that it would just go away if I didn’t give it any attention. And it did, until 2:30 a.m. when it started beeping every 30 seconds for about 30 minutes. My husband slept through the whole thing. I had just convinced myself to grab my pillow and go sleep on the living room couch (but remember the mouse!) and then the sound stopped. Thank goodness.

Now I know this is silly, but that 30 minutes of interrupted sleep just messed with my day. I felt like I was just off the whole day — I put a load of laundry in the washer around 1 p.m. — I didn’t remember to stick it in the dryer until 6 p.m. I forgot to take my lunchtime walk — I snuck out of the house for a quick lap just before my 3 p.m. Zoom meeting. My printer stopped working, the coffee pot leaked again this morning, I didn’t do my morning journaling until this evening, I skipped my morning workout and then just never got to it later in the day. I was going to head over to Kohls to return a few items and then I just forgot. I did successfully attend two meetings and one conference call, but finished out the work day with a long list of things I need to do next week — and I am attempting to take Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off.

It wasn’t the most organized day. Why do Fridays keep ending up this way?? Is it because everyone is trying to finish everything before the weekend? Am I just so excited that I have two days off in a row that I can’t concentrate on the tasks right in front of me? Or am I distracted by the fact that my stomach is still angry about my cheese-a-palooza from two nights ago?? Could I possibly be developing a cheese allergy?? OMG — the horror!

But for now I will enjoy our Friday night outing to the local Irish pub for outdoor dining. Tomorrow is another day and thank goodness it’s a Saturday.