Notes from a Self Quarantine

I went to our local library after work this evening. I’d put a new book on hold months ago in anticipation of it’s release date at the beginning of this month. And it was finally ready for me to pick up! OK, so it was ready almost a week ago, but I already have a stack of books I am trying to finish so I figured I could let this one wait for a few days. Which I’m sure pisses off the other folks in line after me, but whatever, I was proactive enough to put this book on hold in November. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but there are just so many hours in a day that I can actually read! I do have a full time job, folks! Although I would much rather be reading…

So I go in to the library tonight and I wanted to find two other books, because I obviously don’t have enough books as it is…one book I found no problem, but the other author — how are there absolutely no Kristin Hannah books at my local library?? I know that she just had a brand new book released last week and now has a Netflix series based on one of her books that I read almost a decade ago, but has now everyone else decided that they wanted to read her books, just like me??

So to make up for the fact that I couldn’t get one of her books as planned (I wanted to see what all the damn hype was about!), I checked out the new release section in hopes that maybe one of her books was there. But no. So instead I picked up another brand new book that I have to return in two weeks just like the other one I have on hold. How come I never learn??

And then the library does a “Blind Date with a Book” event every February. They wrap up a bunch of books in brown paper, put a three word description of the book on the outside and you can check out a totally unknown book to take home and read. Sure February is over in just three days, but I was there, so I grabbed one of the blind date books.

I practically skipped back to my car with my four new books. OMG — how did I walk out of there with four books?? How the heck did that happen?? I already have another library book in my TBR pile at home. Why do they keep letting me check out books?? Obviously I can’t control myself! I am so not in charge over here. So who is???

I told him that he’d better be careful, that I might just have to see about his untimely demise. And I’m not sure I was kidding…

My husband is a border-line hoarder in the best of times. Now add in a health pandemic that has trapped us all indoors for 10 months and he is stockpiling items that I didn’t even know we used or needed. Take the pickles for example — he adds a pickle or two to his weekday chicken sandwich lunches. That’s maybe two pickles five times a week, less if we have a holiday weekend. Are there 12 sandwich sliced pickles in each jar? Is it more? I have never counted them, but let’s say that each jar lasts him almost two weeks. So he should really be buying two jars of pickles a month, right? Or eating less pickles…

I had to create a second pantry in our other spare room, the one that I am not using for my home office, to accommodate all these new dry goods that he keeps purchasing (it actually started in my home office, but I moved it in July because it was getting out of control and I didn’t want to stare at it all day. Oh and someone asked me during a Zoom meeting what all that stuff was behind me. Cause my husband is a hoarder…).

It’s not a fancy second pantry — we don’t have any room for an extra set of shelves (all my books are already stacked on all the available shelving in our home, but that’s for research, not hoarding!), so this wonderful second pantry is contained in brown paper shopping bags. It’s not pretty and it’s not really organized. It started off with some form of organization — there was bag for pasta sauce and pasta, a bag for pretzels, almonds and other snack items like microwave popcorn, another bag for flours and sugar. (Yes, I wrote “flours” — my husband has two different types of flours to make his Sunday evening pizza dough, and then we also have all-purpose flour and wheat flour and bread flour — I told you, he’s a hoarder!!)

Now that second pantry is so well stocked, I have only have a general idea which bag an item might be in — and there’s now six brown paper bags sitting on the floor in front of the bookshelf. That’s a ton of pantry to manage, because we also still have the actual pantry in our kitchen where a pantry belongs!! The last time I looked there must be six jars of pickles in the second pantry, but my husband insists on buying a new jar every Sunday when he does our food shopping. And if they don’t have his favorite brand of pickles at that grocery store, then he makes sure he purchases them later on that afternoon at another store in town. That’s right — he makes two separate trips to two different grocery stores in the same afternoon to purchase something that we do not need. Sure, they are pickles, so it’s not like they’ll go bad. I even tried making him pickles last summer from the cucumbers I grew in my garden, but he didn’t like them because they just weren’t like the store-bought ones (hoarder!).

I’m not evening going to talk about the amount of coffee in the second pantry — the last time I checked there might have been 12 bags. Sure he told me that they were on sale, but how are we ever going to use all this coffee?!? It’s not like folks come over any more!

And don’t get me started on the amount of frozen food stored in my freezer…that we will probably never eat because my husband is saving it for an emergency. Sorry, buddy, but I think this pandemic might just qualify as an emergency…

But at least we have pickles!

We actually made it to the end of this shit show of a year! I’m honestly a bit surprised…maybe I’m just still waiting for the murder hornets. Or the locusts. Maybe this asshat of a year will produce a swarm of vomit-inducing ticks. That seems about right.

So for our last night of this crazy year, my husband and I have decided to smoke a pork butt:

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Doesn’t that looks fabulous?? And fitting…it’s a butt for goodness sake, a butt of meat cooked on our outdoor smoker for almost 24 hours. And the above photo is actually from yesterday — my husband made a dry rub for the meat and it sat in the fridge all rubbed up for a good 12 hours before it went on the smoker last night.

And boy was it yummy! I completely forgot to take a photo of the cooked pork butt (which is just what happens in 2020!), but believe me — it was delicious! And we’ll have tons of leftovers this week!

Happy New Year everyone, let’s hope that 2021 will less challenging and maybe a little bit more “normal”! I’ll settle for a little bit less interesting…

We had our first major snow storm of the season today — we probably got about 12 inches of snow. It started last night, continued while we were sleeping and went through most of the morning. Now in normal times, this type of storm would shut down schools and offices and create delays in public transportation.

My office would have shut down for the day and I would have enjoyed a nice relaxing day at home watching my husband shovel out our driveway while I stayed inside nice and warm. OK, I would have offered to shovel, but he complains about my technique, he says I leave little white lines on the driveway and he would rather just do it himself. I think he’s just too picky, but if it gets me out of shoveling, then I am all for it!

But today is not a “normal” day. My office didn’t close down, I’m already working from home, so nothing changed here. I went outside to clean off my car and helped with a little bit of snow removal (afterwards my husband mentioned that I left a little bit of snow at the end of the driveway — I can’t win with that man!)

Yes, I am thankful for the technology that let’s me work from home especially during a public health pandemic. But darn you, 2020, you’ve even taken away snow days!

That is totally unheard of for me — usually on December 24 I am surrounded by unwrapped presents and crying ugly tears. But today I took all those wrapped presents to the post office! I even boxed them up correctly before leaving the house! With packing tape! And addressed them properly!

Now it’s up to the post office gods if they get there even close to on time for Christmas. I mailed a birthday gift last week that was supposed to take four days but still hasn’t arrived after seven — the gift has now missed the birthday, but hopefully it will show up before the Christmas gifts that I sent to the same address this afternoon.

And the post office was absolutely packed this afternoon. It’s a darn small parking lot on a good day and I sometimes struggle finding a spot I’m comfortable pulling in and backing out off (because that is totally a thing that I stress about all the time!). And today there was a line of cars just waiting to get into the parking lot! I don’t like to wait in a line just to get into a parking lot so I drove over to the grocery store to check some other stuff off my list.

By the time I drove back over to the post office, there was still a line of course and now there was a huge truck making a delivery to the CVS across the side street. The truck was pretty much blocking the back exit of the CVS parking lot and now folks looked really confused. So I did one more circle around the block and there was still a line, I did one more half circle of the block and then pulled into the CVS parking lot. It was packed there too, but I squeezed my car into what I really hoped was an actual parking spot. I was able to get in OK, but if that delivery truck didn’t finish up soon, I might be spending the night stuck in the CVS parking lot.

Now I know that I shouldn’t be parking at CVS if I’m not a customer so I went into CVS first (why am I so honest??), I figured that I could buy some Advil for the bathroom medicine cabinet. Well, everyone in my town must have had the same idea because it was packed in that store too. And Advil is pretty expensive at CVS, did you know that? It was almost $10 for a bottle with only 25 pills. I’m going to stick to Target from now on, sorry CVS.

After I waited in line for what felt like forever and paid for my $10 bottle of Advil, the line of cars to get into the post office parking lot was still ridiculous and that delivery truck was still there. I grabbed my two big reusable bags filled with packages out of the backseat of my car and crossed the street to the post office hoping that no one noticed that I had parked in the wrong parking lot. (Can you get towed for that??) I left the Advil and my receipt on my front sheet — hey, I’m honest!

I finally get into the lobby of the post office and there’s hardly anyone there. Sure there are three people at the windows being helped and three people in front of me in line, and maybe two people using the self-serve option in the lobby, but that doesn’t add up to all those damn cars parked in the lot. Where did all those people go?? Is there a secret post office entrance that I don’t know about?

I successfully mailed my seven Christmas packages in only about 10 minutes (cost me almost $80 — this was an expensive outing! Some of these gifts didn’t cost too much…) and walked out of there with a receipt with my seven tracking numbers for packages to be delivered both pretty close to my home and several that were traveling over 1,000 miles away. There was even one going to the west coast. And each of those packages surprisingly had an anticipated two-day priority delivery.

Now the fun starts — I’m going to go home and start obsessively checking these tracking numbers. What else do I have to do?? This pandemic has changed how we do holidays, folks aren’t traveling to see family and friends this year, so they are obviously mailing packages just like me and I’m sure the system has been overwhelmed. My new daily entertainment will be checking to see how fast (or even at all!) my gifts arrive at their destination.

But first I have to figure out how to back out of this parking spot…just how much stuff is that truck delivering?!?

We got a Christmas tree today. This is pretty early for us — usually we’d get it around December 15 or whatever the date that Saturday would be. But this year it seems like everyone is getting their tree early and tree lots in our area were selling out. And you can’t have a COVID-19 Christmas at home without a Christmas tree! Well, you could, but I definitely wanted a tree. And my husband refuses to have a fake tree. I think they’re so much easier — no watering, no clean up, the damn thing is less likely to fall down in our living room, but I’ve learned to pick my battles, and I’d much rather he clean up that pile of useless crap in the spare bedroom…

We always buy our tree from one of the Boy Scouts lots in our town. Sure the trees are overpriced and most times they’re pretty darn ugly too, but the kids that work in the lot are just so stinking cute (Is that even possible?? Can “cute” be stinky?? I might need to go pull out my dictionary for this one…) and they try to be so helpful that we just can’t purchase our tree anywhere else. And it’s just so much fun watching the scouts carry our tree out of the lot to our truck — the tree is obviously so much bigger than the kids. Maybe that’s why it costs so much — the price is for the entertainment! And it’s well worth it!

So this is as far as we got today:

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The tree is purchased, it’s standing safely in the tree stand (fingers crossed it remains upright!), and I poured a ton of water mixed with white sugar into the stand. Now it will be an absolute Christmas miracle if we get organized enough to start decorating it sometime this week. Or next week would be perfectly fine too.

But the tree is up — we are actually ahead of the holiday game this year! Please don’t tell anyone…

This afternoon my husband admitted that he was bored. I’m sure that he has plenty of work to do, but I think we are all just a little bored sitting in our homes all day. Yes, we are busy working in our home “offices”, but it’s just odd that we spend each and every day only seeing each other. I never realized that physically seeing co-workers actually motivated me. Who knew?

Sure I have tons of work to do, but sometimes my mind just wanders…I feel like that goldfish stuck in a little glass bowl, anything shiny walks by and I’m completely distracted. And then I forget what I was working on. Is this just the pandemic? My husband keeps telling me it’s just old age, like he’s trying to convince me I’m suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, while he is still in the prime of his healthy life. And he’s two years older than me, the jerk…

But it’s just so hard to stay motivated some days. I wish I could say that I’ve used all my downtime learning Italian and writing my first novel, but sadly that hasn’t happened.  It’s a big day if I put on makeup and real clothes!

It was pretty quiet this afternoon in our kitchen — I came out of my home office and my husband wasn’t sitting at his computer. Our house isn’t too big, but I couldn’t find him at first. Then I saw him outside on our front lawn — he’d dragged the big ladder out from the basement and was hanging white Christmas lights from our porch roof and the bushes circling the front of our house.

Thank goodness he put his boredom to good use — I love the little white outside lights at Christmastime and would enjoy seeing them out there all year, which is probably why he only puts them up for two weeks every year… But he’s early with it this year and I’ll take all the tiny white light enjoyment I can get! And I am sure the lights will just keep distracting me.

Now what was I doing?

Now just how much will my husband hate the new Christmas decorations that I bought from Target yesterday?

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There’s a good chance he’ll really dislike them. He already thinks that I buy way too many stuffed or ceramic bird figurines. But how can you not like these guys? They’re wearing puffy coats, hats and scarves! One even has a pair of skis! That’s just really funny.

Or maybe I am the only person who finds this funny? But then why would Target be selling these seasonal birds every year? There’s obviously a market for them.

I don’t care what my husband says, I’m already looking forward to the spring bird selections. Maybe I’ll be able to get a pair wearing fun Easter bonnets again in 2021!

OMG — you guys, I actually won something! And I never win anything. Never. Zip. Nada. Nothing.

During this pandemic, I find myself entering any contest I find — raffling off a gift basket? Giving away a free book? A gift card that I will probably just stick in my wallet and then forget all about it? Yes, please, sign me up for all of it!

Last month, I attended a virtual weekend event showcasing authors with new books coming out in 2021. It was all weekend and of course there were tons of book that I wanted to read. The event organizer was giving out free pre-publication galley copies from every author and she even had multiple copies of most books.

Now I have been attending her virtual events all pandemic, I’m constantly replying to comments on Facebook and submitting my name for free books, and I’ve never won a single book. I’m sure that there’s a ton of other folks responding too, and I’m also just not lucky at wining things. But I sent her my list of books I’d like to win and crossed my fingers that maybe just this once I would win a free book. I read a ton and I can’t think of anything better than getting a free book! OK, maybe a free vacation, but you get the point…

Look what I got in the mail today:

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I am super excited!! This book was my second choice!! I finally won a book!!

And this book hasn’t even been released yet, I believe that it’s official date is the end of January. And my virtual book club has already picked it as one of our books for this winter. And I already have it! I might actually be prepared for book club!

I also gave the wrong zip code when I was asked for my address. Maybe that’s why I never win anything — I don’t even know where I live!

I can’t be, right? Has everyone else tossed their leftover turkey in the trash? Or am I just gross because I made myself a turkey sandwich for lunch today… Sure it’s been 8 days since Thanksgiving, but the turkey was so good and there’s only the dark meat left, which is my favorite. I toasted the bread, and added big spoonful of homemade cranberry sauce and stuffing. It was absolutely delicious.

This week we had turkey and biscuits for dinner for two nights — my husband used to only want Bisquick brand biscuits, but I’ve finally convinced him that homemade biscuits are so much better. And it was so good — we added the leftover spicy corn to the turkey mixture one night. I’ve had a turkey sandwich for lunch every day this week. I’ve changed it slightly for every meal, and it’s been fabulous each time.

And I have enjoyed every single helping of leftovers. My husband pretty much turns up his nose at leftover food by day 3, but I plan on eating this meal until the last plastic container is wiped clean. Is it gross? Probably. Should I just throw everything in the trash tonight? Yes, definitely. But will I do that? Probably not. Even though tomorrow is garbage day.

I see another toasted turkey and swiss cheese sandwich in my future, and it will be tomorrow.