Notes from a Self Quarantine

Seriously, why do they keep letting me take out books?? I just counted and I have 9 unread books on loan from the local library. Don’t they know that I am never going to read them all in the next several weeks?? This stack will take me months…

I have been reading so slow during this pandemic — I used to fly through a 400 page book. But that was when I was stuck on a train for over an hour each day commuting into the city for work. And that was my time — to sit with a travel mug of coffee in the morning and get lost in the pages of a book. And then I got to do the same thing on the way home (without the coffee this time, I never understood why they won’t let you drink adult beverages on the commuter rail train home. Everyone would be happier. Well, maybe not the conductors…). It was relaxing and decompressing, and frankly, something that my husband will never understand (I think he’s read one book in the 11 years that we have been married — it was on our honeymoon and he didn’t even finish it).

Now I’m lucky if I read 10 pages a day. 10 pages?? That’s nothing and it certainly won’t get me through the 9 books that I’m hoarding in a basket under my bedside table.

Why do I keep taking out books from the library, you ask?? Well, because I can. They were closed for so long in the spring and I so missed going to the library and wandering down the aisles looking at books. I have tons of books in my home that I actually own, but there is just something about a library book. It’s free, for goodness’ sake, and you just return the book when you are done. And then you can take out more books and do the whole thing over again. It’s amazing.

When the library opened up for curbside pickup, I started adding books I wanted to read to my queue. The library warned that due to COVID-19, you’d probably have to wait a while for books. So I added things that I wanted to read, knowing I might have to wait awhile for some of them.

Well, the system must be working better than they anticipated — because I have 9 books to read!! And I’m not even counting the books that I have on hold through the library’s e-book app.

I should go now — I have some reading to do.

I plant a vegetable garden every summer. Now every year I attempt to grow the same crops from packaged seeds — cucumbers, squash, lettuce, arugula and radishes. Of course, some years I am more successful than others and then there are some years when I am more adventurous than other.

I tried corn again this year. I’m not sure why — it starts growing thin stalks right away, but then either we get a huge rain storm that washes the plants away or one of our neighborhood animals decides he needs a midnight snack. I’m not sure why they eat corn stalks that don’t have any corn growing, but whatever.

This year I ended up with two good-sized corn stalks. And I was pretty hopeful that they would make it through the season and maybe I’d get an ear of corn.

And look they were getting pretty substantial, and that might be a tiny ear of corn growing!

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I was pretty proud of my two corn stalks!

But then I went out into the garden this morning and found this:

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Yes, those are my beautiful green corn stalks, neither beautiful nor green anymore, dumped on the ground and the stalk is totally mowed down! You can’t even tell where it was growing anymore! OK, I know where because I was using that green garden stake to prop up the top-heavy stalk.

Now while I get annoyed when wild animals eat my vegetable crops, it’s all part of the circle of life. What does piss me off is when these critters knock down my plants and then can’t be bothered to eat the whole thing! You wasted good tasting corn stalk, buddy!!

And this is why I shouldn’t ever get excited about planting corn or carrots — some animal always comes along and thinks it’s a grocery store. At least my tomatoes are still there!

OK, now I’m definitely going outside with a flashlight to make sure no one has touched them…

That’s it — I’m not allowed to leave the house anymore, because this is what happens when I go out:

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Yes, that’s a sloth doorstop that I just bought from Kohl’s. I have no use for a doorstopper. I don’t have any doors in my home that need to be held open or stopped! But still I bought it.

Why, you might ask? I have no damn idea why. I obviously thought that it was cute, and it didn’t hurt that it was on sale. And then you get Kohl’s cash back when you make a purchase…

I’m a sucker alright and I think I need to put together a list of stores that I just shouldn’t go into during a pandemic…Kohl’s is definitely at the top of that list and Michael’s should be second.

Now where am I going to put my new doorstopper??

Friday morning, my husband decided that he was going to smoke some chicken wings on Saturday, so he went out and bought all the stuff yesterday to brine the chicken wings. After work, he put the raw chicken in a big plastic container and made the brine with cold tap water, some red pepper flakes and some fresh garlic. He stuck it in the fridge so it would marinate overnight.

Now I should have paid more attention when he told me to be careful not to move the container because it was really full, but I didn’t even think about it. And I should have.

This morning, I opened the fridge to get my almond butter to put on my toasted wheat bread and I saw it — a pool of rust colored liquid on the glass shelf above the vegetable crisper. And I immediately knew what it was — a salmonella-infested chicken brine sitting in my refrigerator, touching all my fresh produce and the brand new carton of eggs. And it had probably been infecting everything in my fridge for the past 12 hours.

I wish I could tell you that I calmly cleaned up the mess and went about my day. But that’s not how the morning played out. There was yelling and swearing. Many paper towels were sacrificed. I pulled every single item out of the fridge to clean and disinfect it (and some items I just threw out) and somehow we even got the glass top shelf out — the salmonella poison had dripped down between the glass shelf and the plastic structure on top of the veggie crisper. It wasn’t easy to get it out, nor was it easy to get in there to clean up the mess. There were a lot of strong words said this morning.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t my best moment. And I am still annoyed that my husband didn’t even think that a filled-to-the-brim container of chicken could cause a major leak — the man is an engineer for goodness’ sake — put a damn cookie sheet under the container!

But my fridge probably hasn’t been this clean since we bought it 3 years ago. And the chicken wings tasted pretty good tonight. We sure did spend a lot of time preparing them…

OMG — look at my tomato harvest from today!!!

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And there’s a ton more out there that should be fully ripened in the next couple of days! Yay for tomatoes!! There is just something about tomatoes right from the garden, maybe I am biased, but I think they taste so much better than the store bought tomatoes. And they last longer too.

My husband can’t stand tomatoes, but he likes marinara sauce and ketchup, go figure. He says it has to do with the texture, but he gets all grossed out when I put fresh tomatoes on my salad or in a sandwich. Or when I make eggs. He doesn’t know what he is missing!

But that also means that I have a ton of tomatoes to eat all by myself…and the rate that they are ripening out in the garden, I am not sure that I will be able to keep up. And I absolutely hate to have to throw the rotten ones away, it seems like such a waste. Although I usually toss them over by our back fence, hopefully our neighborhood wildlife will enjoy the spoiled ones. Just as long as they stay away from my actual garden!

I guess it’s a pretty good problem to have too many tomatoes, right? Anyone want some??

Our town brought back the weekly farmers’ market sometime in July. I didn’t notice it the first couple of weeks because I am obviously oblivious. And maybe it’s because they changed the day of the week and the location. It used to be on a Thursday afternoon until 6 p. m. during the summer months. Back in “normal” times, I used to pass it on my walk home from the commuter rail station, realize I didn’t have any cash on me once again, and just walk home.

Well, good news for me — it’s now on Saturday mornings and it’s outside the town hall, which is even closer to my house! And I am not walking back and forth to the train station every day because there’s a darn pandemic going on…

There’s about a dozen booths each week ranging from an actual farm that sells veggies (their corn on the cob is amazing!) and flowers, an artist that does a wide range of pottery (I bought this sunflower bowl for berries that I am currently obsessed over!), and a home-kitchen bakery that sells out most Saturdays before I even get there. There’s a lady that makes jewelry, someone else that makes face masks, basically something for everyone.

Right now I am obsessed with the florist that does seasonal outdoor flower arrangements for homes and businesses. She offers a subscription service and I’m too chicken to ask her how much it would cost to do four front step arrangements a year because my husband would absolutely freak out if I hired someone to put greenery and sparkly Christmas balls outside our front door in December. Actually now that I think of it, that just might be worth the cost…

She also does these beautiful flower arrangements in mason jars. I bought this one today:

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Here’s a closer side view because I am just obsessed with it:

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I love purple and yellow flowers together! And her stuff lasts too! I bought one two weeks ago with yellow Gerbera daisies and some purple flowers that I have no idea what they are called. I finally had to throw out the daisies, but look at it now TWO weeks afterwards!!

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It’s still beautiful! Maybe I should do the seasonal subscription service…how cool would it be to have someone bring new flowers to your home seasonally?? And to not have to do it yourself??

In the meantime, I know where I will be this Saturday morning!

And I must have looked like an escapee from a psych ward (not that there is anything wrong with psychiatric wards!) but I didn’t even care!

So I have been doing this 40 day yoga and meditation program for about 4 weeks now and as the weeks go on both the yoga practice and meditation get longer. The meditation practice is at 20 minutes twice a day right now. And I am definitely having issues fitting in the two meditation practices into my work day. I do the yoga practice in the morning before my work shift and for the first three weeks I would do the morning meditation right after the yoga practice. And when the yoga practice was under an hour it was definitely easy to do yoga, then the meditation, grab a cup of coffee and head to my home office.

But this week, the yoga practice is up to 60 minutes and the two meditations are 20 minutes a piece, one in the morning, one in the evening. I can get the 60 minute yoga practice in, but then I really should be heading into the “office”, not meditating on my yoga mat for 20 minutes. I try to get it done during my lunch break, but sometimes it just doesn’t happen. And then I find myself doing the morning meditation at 5 p.m. and that’s not really how the program is set up.

And then today happened. Our house cleaners were scheduled to come around 12 p.m. today (yes, I have house cleaners, it’s the best thing I have ever spent money on, they do so much better cleaning my house than I do, don’t judge me!), so I needed to make sure I exited my home office at some point while they were here so I wasn’t in their way. So I went outside, sat in a chair on our back patio with my iPad, stuck my headphones in, closed my eyes and did my 20 minute morning meditation! Sure it was 12:30 p.m., but at least I was doing it.

And typically when I do a meditation, my mind travels all over the place. I hardly pay attention to the voice guiding the meditation. I’m thinking about what I need to do later, reminding myself to pick up eggs at the grocery store and trying not to itch my left big toe. I’m paying attention to anything but the meditation. And I’m guessing that means that it’s not working. But today, sitting outside in my backyard, sunglasses on, headphones in, I paid attention to almost all of the 20 minute meditation. And I actually enjoyed it! And I felt relaxed while doing it and that feeling lasted afterwards too. Which obviously is the whole point of the meditation…

So why did it make me feel so much better doing the meditation outside? Was it the sun, the fresh air or the birds chirping? Was it just freeing to sit outside with my eyes closed, meditating on a summer day? Or did I finally enjoy it because I was relaxing while I paid someone else to clean my bathroom…

Seriously, when can I pick this zucchini? How long do I let it sit out there?? Are there zucchini rules posted somewhere that I’m not aware of??

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Because look at it — it’s beautiful and I just don’t want to lose it to my neighborhood wildlife. I planted it from a seed packet that definitely said “summer squash”, and while I am no squash expert, that sure looks like a zucchini to me. So I need to protect it because maybe it’s a rare zucchini/summer squash hybrid. And it only grows every hundred years in the middle of a pandemic…that could be true, anything seems to be possible in 2020.

So do I pick the damn thing tonight? Is it done growing? If I left it attached to the plant, could it actually get bigger?? And now I am getting greedy and competitive about the size of my zucchini/summer squash hybrid…

But if I wait a week to pick it, think about all the meals I could get out of it! Is that even possible? What do you do with a zucchini/summer squash hybrid? You could slice it, stick it in a kabob (I really love the word “kabob”, is that even how you spell it??) and grill it for dinner. Or I could slice it and bake it in the oven with some olive oil and fresh herbs that I also grew in my garden. Cause I am now a pioneer women, people! My husband mentioned that he’d really like a zucchini bread, but I doubt I could make all those things out of the same zucchini/summer squash hybrid…

I guess I should have grown more of these weird suckers. That’s it — I’m waiting a week. Fingers crossed that our neighborhood squirrels don’t have a hankering for zucchini…or summer squash.

And how did that even happen?? I feel like yesterday it was the beginning of June and now it’s mid-August! How is that even possible?

I wish that I had some wise advice for this day — the 5th monthly anniversary of my stint at home. But I don’t. I have noticed that working from home has gotten a bit easier for me the past few months. I’m probably getting more done at home than I would be in the office.

But I’m also not taking a ton of time for myself — I repeatedly find myself working through my lunch break. I quickly stuff a sandwich in my face while reading e-mail instead of taking a walk to clear my head. That’s never a good look or a good thing. And I’m reading less for fun because I’m not commuting anymore. My daily step count has taken a severe plunge these months at home — I used to do 20,000 steps a workday, now I’m lucky if I make it to 10,000 a day.

But I’ve been doing a daily yoga practice first thing in the morning before work for the past 3 weeks, and that would just have never happened if I was going into the office every day. And I’ve been able to clean up a lot of my junk piles in my home “office” — I see them everyday now, it’s a constant reminder to clean my crap up. And my office plant is doing really well in my living room, I think he just needed some more natural light.

So see — there are silver linings to this pandemic. Now I’m not sure if I am ever going to start learning Italian or finally write my great American novel, but this is a start. Maybe it’s a slow start, but it’s a start at least. If being at home for 5 months has taught me one thing, it’s to be kinder and less judgmental of myself. We’re all doing the best that we can, right?

Five months ago, pretty much to the day, I attended my last in person yoga class at the studio I’ve been practicing at for the last 7 years. It was that last weekend of normalcy in mid-March, before everything started shutting down. It would have been St. Patrick’s Day weekend, and my husband, the wise sage that he is, suggested that we go back to the local Irish pub that Saturday to listen to the live Irish rock band, because we might not be back out for awhile. I can’t believe how right he was that weekend in mid-March. We went back to the Irish pub that Saturday night, sat at the bar, had a few beers and enjoyed the live music.

The next morning I went to my normal 10 a.m. yoga class. It definitely wasn’t as crowded that morning. And later on that afternoon, the yoga studio announced via Facebook and e-mail that they were cancelling classes due to the COVID-19 virus. The studio, like many businesses, quickly pivoted to offering virtual classes. I did a ton of them, maybe not as many as I should have considering how many they offered, and I probably should have paid for them using my class passes instead of just doing the Facebook recordings later. Sorry, guys, I did have the best intentions, as always, but there was a pandemic going on!

Since our state has started lifting restrictions, the studio has offered outside classes in this courtyard down the street from the studio. I’ve gone a bunch of times — it’s been amazing to be able to practice outside and with other people.

Today was my first day back inside at the studio for a class. And it was the same class from that Sunday 5 months ago — same day of the week, same time slot and same instructor. It was so strange that 5 months has passed since I was there last. And now they are limited to 10 students plus the instructor. There are white taped lines on the studio floor so you know where to place your mat so everyone is spaced over 6 feet apart. You have to bring your own blocks and straps to class, and wear a face mask until you are on your mat. It’s a different experience that’s for sure!

But it was good to be back today, normal almost. It was a good workout, but damn did I forget just how hot a heated yoga class can be! Thank goodness I brought a towel, because I needed it. I’ll probably need the next 5 months just to get reacclimated to the temperature of hot yoga classes!