Notes from a Self Quarantine

My husband’s nephew turned 13-years-old today, which is absolutely insane because I was dating my husband when this nephew was born and I haven’t aged at all since then so I really have no idea what we are celebrating.

And we did celebrate this milestone birthday yesterday. Our newly minted teenager wanted chicken wings and cheesecake for his birthday. I think those are the actual official food groups of the male teenager, right? So his dad ordered pizza and chicken wings from two different restaurants so we could have a little taste test. We were divided on the wings — I preferred the spicier ones, but the other ones had a nice comfort food type fried-ness to them. Don’t worry — my in-laws made sure that the adults had some veggies to round out the meal, there were two different kinds of salads, thank goodness, because I definitely try not to eat like a 13-year-old boy.

The scary thing is this new teenager is already 6 feet tall — he towers over me, which granted, isn’t that hard, and he’s already taller than his uncle. Over the years, my husband has spent every family gathering giving this poor kid awful noogies and sometimes wedgies. My husband should probably be worried.

The cheesecake was delicious — there was a traditional one and the other was a chocolate cookie cheesecake. And my sister-in-law had crushed up some candy bars for toppings and there was both a caramel and chocolate sauce. I had a nice big piece of the chocolate one (who wants plain cheesecake when there is one with chocolate!) with caramel sauce and both kinds of crushed candy bars. It was delicious!

Maybe I will feel like a teenager tomorrow!

One of my favorite yoga instructors left the yoga studio I go to a few months ago. I’ve always loved her Sunday morning class — she just has this gift for taking a “standard” vinyasa flow class, adding kickass music, throwing in some cardio type moves, and of course she always does an intense core section (ugh — you’re killing me here!). Basically her classes are the only yoga classes that my Fitbit registers as “Sport” and that I always reach my 250 hourly step goal! And her energy is just contagious — but in a good way!

She hosted a pop up yoga class today at her husband’s karate studio. Of course I signed up! Not only do I love her classes, but my husband and I just finished season two of “Cobra Kai”, so I was pretty excited to be in an actual dojo…

And what a class! There were plank jacks, tons of squats and her signature “jump switch from a runner’s lunge” move. It was fast, fun and I was completely sweaty just 10 minutes into the class. I’ve also been humming the music from her playlist for the past hour.

I’ll definitely be sore tomorrow, but that good kind of sore when you know you’ve moved your body, done the hard work and deserve to be sore.

And the dojo? I had no idea how padded the floors would be! It wasn’t the best for balance poses, but it was just so comfortable! Could I install that floor in my home??

Every Halloween, my husband and I try to be really good neighbors by making sure that one of us is at home by 5 p.m. to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. My husband believes that it’s one of our civic duties like voting or paying taxes. But I think that’s just his attempt to guilt me into watching the front door while he goes to a 5:30 p.m. spin class at the gym. Every year he promises that he’ll take his turn answering the door afterwards so I can get in a workout, but by the time he’s back from his class and showered, most of the trick-or-treaters are back at home and I’m too tired to work out. Don’t worry — I’m totally onto his antics.

This year due to COVID-19, towns have been discouraging traditional trick-or-treating. Our town had a few COVID-compliant suggestions to replace door-to-door candy giveaways, but I wanted to make sure that I still had Halloween candy in case we did get some trick-or-treaters. Last year, we didn’t have too many, but maybe being stuck at home for 7 months would motivate some parents to take their little ones out on a Halloween walk on a Saturday evening and I wanted to be prepared.

So I made some candy sticks:

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Now this wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be — wrapping orange duct tape around fun-sized bags of M&Ms and BBQ skewers doesn’t always work out the way you hoped it would — duct tape rips candy wrappers, scotch tape isn’t strong enough and masking tape, well, it just didn’t look as holiday festive as the orange duct tape. So I regrouped and figured snack baggies might work, that way I wouldn’t be ripping open wrappers with tape.

It worked, but the snow we got yesterday made it a little difficult to keep the sticks upright and dry. But at least I had something out there for possible trick-or-treaters!

And we must have had a few customers, because when I went out at 9 p.m. to check — three sticks were missing! Now I guess I’ll just have to eat the rest of them…

It’s been cold and rainy most of the week. I actually didn’t leave the house on Wednesday and Thursday because it was so gross. But I was happy that at least it wasn’t snow!

Until today:

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What the hell is this?? It’s still October!! Sure we live in New England, but c’mon!! We got about 5 inches of snow today. In October!!

And I have not finished breaking down my vegetable garden yet:

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All my plant pots and solar powered lights are still outside. I’ve emptied some of the pots and picked up some of the gardening stakes and cages that I use of the tomato plants, but I haven’t actually stored anything away in our basement for the winter. And I just picked 20 tomatoes 5 days ago!! Thank goodness I did that, because everything would just be frozen solid now.

I am definitely not a fan of winter — I hate the cold and the wind, I don’t like to walk or drive in snow and I definitely don’t like to shovel it! Flipflops are my preferred footwear. It’s going to be a long winter, I can just feel it.

Thank you, 2020, for starting our winter season early this year! Now cut the crap, it’s just not amusing anymore.

My husband walked into my home office today to grab something off our printer and he farted. While he was standing right next to me at our home printer. I was sitting at my desk WORKING and basically his ass was at the same height as my head because I was sitting in my desk chair. And he laughed because it was really smelly.

I know that I’m working from home right now, but can I report him to HR? Because I think it might have been intentional. Is this workplace harassment even if we don’t work for the same company, but we’re stuck working out of the same house? Who do I talk to about this? Because it was gross and my office smelled for awhile after he left the room. How can I be productive in this environment??

This makes me really miss my co-workers. I get that sometimes gas just happens, but does it have to happen so close to my workstation? He says he didn’t do it on purpose, but I’m not sure I believe him, he’s a big fan of farting humor. Some days it’s like being surrounded by a group of 5-year-olds, when actually there’s just one 45-year-old in the house.

And then he did it again later this afternoon. He laughed, but I know it’s definitely intentional. And I’m on to him now, he better watch his back. I wash all his dirty laundry, imagine all the things I could do!

My husband had a virtual meeting today at 12 p.m. Now normally this wouldn’t be an issue — his home office is set up in our kitchen/dining room area, and my home office is in a spare room. Sure I can hear his work conversations even with my “office” door closed, but it usually works out well.

Until today.

Our house cleaners come every other Wednesday (don’t judge me, it’s the best money I have ever spent!), but sometimes they are not consistent with their arrival time. Today they were coming to our house for 12 p.m., so that means that my husband needed a place where he could set up his laptop on a solid surface and close the door. And it’s been raining all day, so he couldn’t go out back and sit on our patio. It’s also a tad chilly here today.

So I had to give up my office today at 12 p.m. And I don’t think that I was given an actual choice or that I was part of any discussion about giving up my office for an hour. My husband just set up his laptop on the big folding table I have set up across from my desk. I put the folding table there a couple of months ago because I was desperate for more surface area to sort papers, read my book during my lunch break or paint on the weekends. I knew I shouldn’t have left that table up, it was only a matter of time before he grabbed it!

And I couldn’t sit at my desk in the office during his meeting — I would have been in direct view of the camera, I’d have to listen to his meeting and he’d have to hear me typing! So what did I do? I grabbed my cell phone, a glass of water and some almonds and hung out in one room before the cleaners were ready to clean that room, then moved into the bedroom when they were done cleaning in there. I would have taken a walk, but it was really raining. It was pretty awkward!

I was able to respond to a couple of personal e-mails and free up some much needed space on my phone by deleting some crappy photos I’d taken the past couple of months, so that’s a bonus. But this really wasn’t how I wanted to spend my hour lunch break today. I probably should have just gone for a walk…

Our weather has been unseasonably warm the past couple of weeks, and I am definitely not complaining about it! My vegetable garden has benefited from the added warmth and sun — some of my tomato plants have started blooming again! Now if I could only get that second crop of spinach to actually grow full-sized leaves…

The temperature is going to drop by the end of the week, so I made sure that I went out into the garden to harvest the rest of my summer crop.

Look at these beauties!

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My tomato crop has been amazing this year!! Look at all of those tomatoes! The long oval type ones were supposed to be a Roma tomato — look at the size of them!! And they will totally ripen in a bowl on my kitchen counter. Too bad my husband doesn’t like tomatoes…more for me!

And that might be the biggest bell pepper I have ever grown! My husband keeps saying that I am an expect in growing little vegetables. Sure, they might be small in size, but they taste amazing! And it’s just so cool that I can grown my own veggies outside in our backyard.

Maybe I can start an inside vegetable garden this winter…I’m sure my husband would just love that! I would be worth it to have fresh tomatoes all winter!!

I’ve been pretty pumped about the pumpkin I painted last week in my virtual painting class. It’s hanging on the bulletin board over my desk and I just keep staring at it — I’m just so impressed that I was able to paint an almost perfect pumpkin — the shape is good, and I’m really impressed with my shading and highlighting. And I mixed several paints to make the brown I used for the stem and it’s just a beautiful shade of brown!

Obviously I have been pretty excited about painting a good pumpkin and the instructor posted another tutorial on painting two pumpkins onto a wood board. Of course I wanted to try out my new pumpkin painting skill again! So I ran out, bought a wood board from Michaels and I sat down yesterday to paint two little pumpkins on the wood board.

And maybe I should have stuck to mixed media paper because…well, it was definitely different painting on a wood board. And she had us use a palette knife, which I had never done before, and I definitely had a problem spreading the white paint across the wood. The instructor said that it was supposed to make a texture to the wood board, but I just had globs of white paint that I was smearing around on the surface. It took me forever to figure out to how to get it to look a little bit more like texture.

And what’s up with the stem on my smaller pumpkin??

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It looks more like a hose coming out of my washing machine then a pumpkin stem. The other stem is a tad bit better, but I still feel like my perspective is off. There’s more stem then pumpkin!

And then I was trying to do a little shading on the smaller pumpkin, but I didn’t like the black paint I used, so I tried to lighten it up, but the paint was so wet that it just made everything darker and redder. It definitely dried better than I thought it was going to, but I just wasn’t as pleased with this painting as I was with the one last week.

And then my husband asked yesterday if I was going to start painting anything besides pumpkins. OK, I get the hint — maybe it’s time to learn to paint something else. Maybe I could paint some squash or maybe an orange??

I’m looking right at you, Amazon.

My husband and I have been Prime members for over two years. Sure somedays it’s really annoying that we’re just making Jeff Bezos even richer, but then there are other days when it’s really damn cool that I can get something delivered to my home the next day and the shipping is free. And yes, I am paying a monthly fee for this service, so the shipping really isn’t free — I get that. But when I run out of a product and I can’t find it at Target or the grocery store, it’s amazing that I can get it in one or two days from Amazon. My husband can only find this specific type of flour on Amazon’s site — he uses it to make pizza dough and loves it. We can’t find it any where else. We’ve looked.

I don’t know what is going on with Amazon the past month, but we’ve now had three different orders where the delivery has been messed up. Is it because more customers are ordering from Amazon? Are they overwhelmed with filling orders?

Two weeks ago, I ordered a new round pizza pan. Yes, homemade grilled pizza is a big thing in our house. The pan was supposed to show up on a Friday, but I received a box of water pressure valves from Fed Ex on Tuesday. I figured it was delivered in error, because according to my Amazon app, the pizza pan was still coming on Friday. I spent the next few days arguing through e-mail exchange with the company where the pressure valves came from — they didn’t understand that I didn’t order them from their company and I didn’t understand why they showed up at my house.

The water pressure valve company figured out that the mystery order actually came from an Amazon seller — it turns out I bought the pizza pan from a third party seller (which I never usually do because of situations like this!) and they messed up the order and I received the four water pressure valves instead of the pizza pan. I re-ordered the pizza pan directly from Amazon the second time and the first company refunded me the $25, but I now still have four water pressure valves. Anyone need a new valve?? They’re free!

Then this past Friday, my husband and I each placed an Amazon order — probiotic vitamins for me and that special pizza flour for him, and both orders were scheduled to be delivered today. I went to a yoga class this morning, when I got back home Amazon had e-mailed me that the US Postal Service had tried to deliver my vitamins, but couldn’t because my driveway and/or front door was inaccessible at 10:38 a.m. Sunday morning. Hmmm, I was at yoga, that means only my husband’s pickup truck was parked in our short driveway.

Then later this afternoon, Amazon sent me a message that the flour had been delivered. I checked outside and we didn’t have any packages at our front door. I opened the app notification and there is a photo of our package sitting on the front steps at someone ELSE’s house!! How is that even possible??

I’ve been trying to chat with an actual customer service person through Amazon’s app for 20 minutes now. And one of our neighbors just came by — with our box of flour!

It definitely has not been a good week for Amazon deliveries! And I still have no idea what to do with these 4 water pressure valves… Any takers??

Last night, my husband and I went up to the local Irish pub for dinner. Now that we can sit at the bar again, it’s almost feeling like a normal Friday night! Except for the moveable plastic divider the staff put on either side of us to create more of a physical barrier between patrons…sure it’s weird, but at least we are back at the bar on a Friday night!

Outdoor dining is fabulous in nice, warm weather, but there’s nothing like relaxing at the bar at the end of a long work week, enjoying good beer and burgers and chatting with the bartenders. So I can’t really understand them when they stop to chat because they’re all wearing face masks and there’s a huge plexiglass barrier in between us — but we’re back at the bar!

This week the Irish pub was hosting a pumpkin fest event. They had a good selection of craft pumpkin beers on tab and some fall food specials. They had chicken and pumpkin waffles, a few salads and entrees that featured sweet potatoes, and some pumpkin-themed desserts.

My husband had already started marinating steak tips for Saturday night’s dinner, so I decided to skip my traditional Friday night messy burger and go with one of the specials. It’s Friday, let’s live dangerously!

I picked the sweet potato bowl — this entrée featured grilled chicken, rice, beans, corn, avocado, tomatoes, of course sweet potatoes, with a poblano aioli sauce! It sounded yummy, like a fun Mexican dish with sweet potatoes. We ordered our food (my husband went with his old standard — the buffalo chicken sandwich. The bartender told us the kitchen was pretty backed up, but we didn’t mind, we were happy they were busy! Take that, COVID-19 pandemic!

We had another beer and our meals arrived. I was super excited about my bowl — it was packed with pretty much all of my favorite foods (except bacon was missing, oh and cheese, but I was going with something new and maybe a little healthier!). We started eating. I dug in and mixed up all my bowl ingredients and poured the spicy sauce over the top.

My husband looked over at my plate and asked where my pumpkins were.

“Huh?” I asked. “What pumpkins?”

“Wasn’t there supposed to be something orange in there?” he asked.

Why yes, there was supposed to be something orange in there — it’s a sweet potato bowl! And the sweet potatoes were definitely missing!! Look how smart my husband is!

Don’t worry, I told one of the bartenders that my pumpkin fest ingredients were missing from my pumpkin fest meal and they brought me over a big bowl of hot sweet potatoes! Thank goodness, because how can you have a pumpkin fest meal without something orange!

It was absolutely delicious — it was spicy and it was definitely orange!