Notes from a Self Quarantine

I went to Home Depot after work today. I haven’t been there in a while, maybe not since the end of June. I typically spend so much time there in May and June, that it feels so weird admitting that I haven’t visited their Garden Center in that long. Like I’ve been neglectful almost…

And the reason for today’s visit? I had two plants die during the past two weeks — both petunias and both from bugs. There were little white fly-type things on one and what could only be spiders on another one. Ugh. I tossed both in the trash because I didn’t want them to infect my other plants.

But just a warning — when you go to Home Depot at the beginning of August, there’s not much left for summer plants. They had mums in every size and color, but that’s a fall plant, and I’m definitely not ready for that yet. It’s still 90 degrees here!

I was able to find another hanging geranium plant for the shepherds hook in the enclosed garden — I like geraniums, they’ll keep flowering all summer and I really don’t have to pay much attention to them, which is a win for both of us! And I got a 6 pack of impatiens in a bright fuchsia color. I have two empty pots I can plant them in and any leftovers can go in my bed with the zinnia seedlings (they haven’t bloomed yet, what is taking them so long?!).

I was pleased that I found a couple of plants, but it was also sad that Home Depot is already rushing seasons. It’s like finding the Halloween decorations out at Target when it’s weeks before Labor Day. Folks always seem to be in such a rush. And yes, I get that this year has majorly sucked, and it will be nice to say good-bye to 2020 and see what 2021 brings. But if it’s more of the same crap, why are we just pushing the days away? I’d rather enjoy the sun and my summer plants for a little bit longer, before everything becomes flavored with pumpkin spice.

The remnants of a tropical storm headed our way this afternoon. The forecast has changed a bunch in the last couple of days, like forecasts do. The weather folks weren’t sure if we would get rain, but they were pretty sure that we’d get some high winds.

And they were right! It started late this afternoon — the dark clouds came in and it looked like it was going to pour. I was really hoping that it would because it’s been so hot and dry. We have an irrigation system that waters our lawn and my vegetable garden, but even with that the lawn has some brown spots (which annoys my husband so much!) and the soil in my raised garden beds dry out really quickly (which annoys me too, but definitely not as much as my husband and his brown patchy lawn), so a good rain storm was just what we needed.

And it did rain — for about 20 minutes, but it came down hard. And then it stopped, and the sun actually came out, but we still had the wind. I had gone out in the early afternoon to finish picking up any loose items on our back patio including the pillows from the outdoor chairs. I hid everything in our little breezeway-type area by our back door, including my two potted sunflower plants. They haven’t bloomed yet, but they also haven’t been attacked by the neighborhood squirrels and I’d like to keep it that way. And who knows what the squirrels would do in a storm, those bold assholes.

It was already pretty windy when I was out there — I propped up some of my huge tomato plants and offered them some encouragement so they’d make it through the storm. Hopefully they listened, because it got really windy after the rain stopped. Our electricity stayed on, thank goodness, but I heard some big tree branches fell down in other parts of our town and knocked out the electricity in sections of town.

And then about 7 p.m., the wind stopped and the sun was out. The two enormous trees in my yard were still standing, although one of them had a couple of larger branches jump ship. My tomato plants survived, but they were all leaning in the same direction that the wind was blowing. They looked like they’d had a rough night of drinking! Poor tomato plants — I’ll go back out to the garden tomorrow and try to prop them up with some more garden stakes. Hopefully they didn’t lose all their fruit! Those silly drunk plants!

I have this charcoal face mask that I purchased a long time ago from a non-toxic beauty company. And it’s a wonderful face mask, after I use it my skin has a weird glow to it, like it’s healthy and clean. I always feel so much better after I use this mask.

But that’s the funny thing — you have to use the damn thing for it to actually work! And I know this, but every day, do I use the face mask? Nope, of course not. I have a million excuses for why I don’t add this face mask to my regimen of daily tasks. OK, I don’t need to do a face mask daily, but you get what I mean. I tell myself I am too busy, there’s all these chores to do — laundry to fold, dishes to wash. I should take out that smelly garbage.

And then there are all those work things that I have to do at home now since I am pretty much stuck in my house day after day, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. It’s frustrating always thinking that you are too busy to do something that is just plain good for yourself. For you, not for your spouse or your boss, or anyone in your family. Just for you.

I’ve realized lately that I don’t do enough things just for me. Maybe it took me to be home all the time to realize that, but I’ve noticed it the last couple of months. So I decided to do something about it.

I did the face mask tonight. And I did one last week too. The back of the bottle instructs you to do it two or three times a week. So I’ve done it twice in the last 7 days. My skin looks much healthier. And I feel so much better. And that’s the point.

My husband does our weekly food shopping every Sunday. I use an iPhone app to put the list together for what we need for breakfast and lunch. He takes that list and adds the items he wants to make for dinners during the week. When he comes home, I put the groceries away and clean out any rotten leftovers from the previous week. Since the pandemic, I’m doing a lot more washing of produce, but it all works.

Until today. My husband came home from the grocery store with our purchases. Now several weeks ago, this grocery store announced that it was OK to bring your reusable bags into the store and that they were no longer going to provide plastic and paper bags. If you didn’t bring your own bags, they would charge you for paper bags. Now, I am totally onboard with getting rid of single-use plastic bags in stores, but there is a pandemic going on right now, people! Maybe letting folks bring their own bags into a store is not the best thing for the store employees. I mean, you don’t know where those bags have been, right?

And this grocery store thought of that — when my husband got home with the groceries, in our OWN reusable bags, the store employees had stuffed a paper flyer in EACH of our bags. The flyer listed the proper proceedure for washing your reusuable bags, which we purchased at this grocery store. There was a whole diagram and list of instructions by type of bag. If you’re curious, we’re using the “woven or nonwoven polypropylene bags” which must be “machine-wash on gentle cycle with soap and cold water or hand-wash with soap and water, line dry”.

Now I am all for washing things. People have been so freaked out during this pandemic about washing their hands that you can’t find a bottle of hand soap in Target, which makes me think — were these same folks not washing their hands before?? Did they not use hand soap?? Is that why Target can’t keep in on the shelves??

And I will admit — I have had some of these woven reusable bags for multiple years and have never washed them. Yes, I said that, but I’ve never had anything spill in them and I alsways shake them out in the sink after emptying the bags every week. There might be a stray red onion skin, but that’s really all you will find in my reusable shopping bags.

Maybe I am being naive, maybe I should have been washing them all along. But I am certainly not hand washing reusable grocery bags! How would I even do that?? In my kitchen sink? In the bathtub??

I was so annoyed that the grocery store gave me an additional chore to do on an already chore-filled Sunday, that I tossed our four reusable bags into the washing machine. I selectd the “delicate” cycle and I hung them to air dry on my drying rack where I typically hang my bras and work dresses. And I was annoyed — annoyed that I needed to do this task, maybe annoyed that I hadn’t thought of this before today. But definitely annoyed that I had to wash the bags today. And don’t tell on me, but I already decided that I am not doing it next Sunday.

My husband does the cooking in our house. It’s not that I can’t cook — I survived making my own dinner for many years before I met him. He just enjoys cooking dinner each night, and if I am being totally honest, I’m much more interested in eating than I am in creating interesting meals every night. Now I do love to bake, but that’s a totally different story.

My husband likes his routine, especially for dinners. On Saturdays, he will cook dinner on our outside smoker. He’ll usually think about it during the week, check the weather for Saturday and come up with a dinner plan. This typically involves marinating or brining meat for at least 24 hours, making his own rub and starting the smoker in the early morning hours or sometimes putting the meat on before we go to bed on Friday night. He invests a lot of time into cooking, and it’s not just our Saturday evening meals, this is a task he spends a ton of time on and it’s always evident, especially in the amount of dishes I have to wash!

And that means he is always his biggest critic. Maybe I’m just easy to please, but in the 13 years I have known him, I can remember maybe three meals that I wasn’t super happy about. And that doesn’t mean that they were bad or inedible, that just means my steak wasn’t medium rare, or the pork was hard to cut, or the spice didn’t bring the heat as much as we’d hoped. I still ate every single meal and most definitely cleaned my entire plate.

Tonight, my husband made chicken wings on the smoker. To be perfectly honest, I am not a huge chicken wing fan — they are messy and take a ton of work to eat. I end up using four napkins and have to really gnaw on the bones to get all the meat. It’s not attractive.

To do these chicken wings, my husband will brine the wings in water and spices overnight in the fridge. The next day he will make his own rub in the food processor. He sticks the wings on the smoker for a few hours, there’s even a part were he wraps them in aluminum foil and beer. He finished them up on our gas grill so they get a delicious crisp.

It’s a long process and it’s worth it. They were delicious tonight. My husband hated them — he complained that they just didn’t have enough flavor and they weren’t tender. I don’t agree, I thought they were fabulous. And I ate every single one on my plate!

Yes, that is today’s question. For some reason I’m having a hard time staying organized on Fridays. You’d think I’d be powering through my Fridays — it’s the last day of the work week and the faster I get through the day, the faster I can get to the weekend! But it hasn’t been happening that way the past few weeks and I’m not really sure why.

Maybe it’s because things have picked up at work. Or maybe I’m just trying to cram too much into a Friday afternoon. So today I was busy at work, but I also started the day off slow. My alarm went off at it’s normal time and I just didn’t want to get myself out of bed. So I didn’t — I dozed for a little bit and relaxed. It was nice, but that also meant that I couldn’t get my normal morning stuff like working out done before I needed to log into my work e-mail.

And work was busy today. I thought I’d get a workout it during lunch, but that didn’t happen. I also didn’t shower in the morning because I figured I would be able to get that workout in. See, there’s a pattern here! Least I remembered to eat lunch! But I didn’t go for a walk at lunchtime either — this day was just totally off schedule.

Finally my work day was done, I got a bunch done and felt good about that. And I got my workout in at 4:30 p.m.! And then I was finally going to shower because my husband and I go out for dinner on Friday nights. But there was also a virtual author event at 5 p.m. that I had signed up for…I could have just watched the recording at a later time, but I figured I’d already spent the entire work day un-showered, what was 60 more minutes!

So I poured myself a well-deserved beer from our kegerator and signed into the event. They were using a platform called Crowdcast — the speaker and the author being interviewed are on the screen, but the audience is not, thank goodness. There is a chat and question function if you need to use them but basically this is just a watch and listen kind of virtual event, perfect when you haven’t showered yet!

But then they had technical issues and moved over to Zoom. Of course they did! So now I have a choice — join a Zoom call all sweaty and gross or just bow out and watch the recording later when I have a chance. And I could just go take that shower and get ready to go out for dinner.

Of course I did the Zoom call! And I am glad I did — there were only about 20 folks on the call and I always like hearing this author speak. Although I was a little embarrassed when she said hello to each of us by name and all I kept thinking about was how oily my hair probably looked…but I joined in, enjoyed the event and added yet another book to my to-read list.

Now I’m going to go shower, it’s definitely time…

I really do. There is just no winning when you are trying to schedule a large meeting — there just isn’t a time that works for everyone. Or you get immediate responses from half the group, and the other half all seems to have taken the rest of the work day off, because NO ONE is responding. And the folks that do respond? Well, they all select a different option of the provided available times. It’s just so frustrating.

Now if you’ve ever tried to organize an hour conference call for 14 people during the middle of August, where a handful of them live in different time zones, then you probably understand the hell that I was in this afternoon. Did you know that people are still taking their August vacations during the middle of a pandemic?? Yeah, I didn’t. I just assumed that everyone was stuck at home with their summer vacation cancelled like me. I was pretty surprised!

And then I thought I had a date that was working for everyone and I was so happy. Maybe this was our meeting time!! And then the next 5 people to respond couldn’t make it and there goes my quorum…

So then I got bold and re-polled the group for the week BEFORE I had originally asked for and you know what happened? Everyone could make the Tuesday a whole week earlier then the one I was originally planning for! Here I was thinking that more folks could attend if I gave them more notice, but nope — the less time I gave them, the easier it was to find free time on their calendars. Unless they just felt so bad for me at that point…

And just in case you are trying to plan sometime for mid-August — don’t, most folks are taking vacation that week. Trust me, I know.

I was chatting with a co-worker this afternoon. Back in “normal” times I’d see her a couple times a week in the office, but in coronavirus times I haven’t seen her since mid-March. How strange is that?!

During today’s conversation, my co-worker expressed how done she is working from home, that she’s been hating working remotely and how she can’t wait to get back into the office every day. And I realized…I just don’t agree. And now I’m surprised, because I don’t remember just when everything changed for me.

I felt differently at the start of my self quarantine. I remember feeling lost working from home. It was weird not being in the office, not commuting into the city, not wearing a bra every day. And I felt like my scope of work had changed — not being able to see co-workers made me feel like I was working on this non-tropical island all by myself. All my work events had to be cancelled and I had no idea when I would be able to reschedule any thing ever again. I was spending all my days practically chained to my computer, hiding in my spare room while my husband worked at our kitchen table, trying to figure out how I separated Work Sheryl from Home Sheryl because there didn’t seem to be any damn difference between the two.

Then I guess that things just started getting better. I’m not sure how or why or even when. Maybe I started getting busier at work. Maybe it was when I started forcing myself to workout every day no matter how sluggish and uncoordinated I felt that day. Maybe it’s because I can actually pick up a brand new book from the library again (I might be hoarding library books, please don’t tell on me!). Maybe it was when my husband and I could finally go out for dinner again, while wearing real clothes and without dragging take out cartons back home with us to eat in our pajamas.

I honestly can’t pinpoint when it happened, but something did change for me. And that’s a good thing. And talking to my co-worker today just reinforced it for me — this has been a hard couple of months for everyone, but we are adaptable. We will get through this, I am sure of it!

OMG, guys — look at what I grew in my garden!!!!

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That’s a zucchini!!!! Actually it is supposed to be a summer squash, at least that was the name on the seed packet, but who really cares?!?!?? I GREW that from a SEED!!!

And maybe that doesn’t sound like too much, but I have been trying to grow zucchini and summer squash for years. When the seeds actually do sprout, the plants grow like crazy, produce a ton a pretty yellow flowers, but never any fruit. I get so excited to see the flowers and then the plants just die off. And I have no idea why.

Now this zucchini/summer squash is so damn exciting because it wasn’t even there two days ago! I was out in the garden on Sunday weeding and replanting some arugula and spinach seeds. I checked my two large summer squash plants and my three cucumber plants (that I also grew from seeds!!) and all 5 plants had a bunch yellow flowers but no fruit. Actually don’t tell anyone, but I had a tiny, tiny cucumber starting last week and I think the high heat and humidity baked it to a crisp…

So I go out to the garden after work this evening — it was starting to sound like thunderstorms were in the area so I wasn’t even going to go into the garden enclosure, but I am SO glad that I did! Where did that zucchini/summer squash even come from??? I am so excited and hope that our neighborhood wildlife doesn’t decide to have it as a snack before it’s ready to be picked…

And here’s some other cool stuff that’s bloomed in my garden the past two days:

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My gerbera daisy plant is actually blooming again!! That is another thing that never happens for me, I usually kill those plants within weeks!

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And I am loving the two hibiscus plants I bought this year! They keep flowering (although when my friends were here, there were no flowers on anything, I looked like a bad gardener)! I wish that I had bought more of them! I guess there’s always next year.

I am just so pleased with the garden this year! And I have gotten so many more tomatoes this week — they just need to ripen!! I just love summer.

Last week I joined my yoga studio’s 40-day workshop based on the teachings of a famous yoga instructor. Today is Day 1 of the program. I’m still working on my homework, but I did do the 20 minute yoga practice and the 5 minute meditation this morning all before I had to “show up” for work at 8:30.

And I am thinking that’s pretty darn good for Day 1. I did most of the reading over the weekend, but I’m still going through the Week 1 section. I figure this whole week is, in fact, Week 1, so if I am still trudging through it on Thursday, it’s really still week 1. I’m sure that’s not what the instructor had in mind, but sometimes you just need to get done what you can, right?

But what I am really worried about is this evening’s meeting with the group. Since we’re in the middle of a pandemic, we’ll be using my old friend Zoom instead of meeting in person at the studio. And that’s fine, but this will be my third Zoom meeting today and I know that I have another one tomorrow. And this 45 minute Zoom meeting isn’t until 8 p.m., which is smack in the middle of our dinner time. At that point in my day, I’m going to be cranky, hungry and annoyed that I am still sitting at my computer. I know the last thing that I will want to do is share my feelings about the 40 day revolution program with a bunch of folks that I don’t know.

And here’s my other problem — can I show up to this meeting with a beer or would that be frowned upon?? The program is about creating a daily yoga and meditation practice and eating cleanly, but it doesn’t really mention anything about alcohol… OK, I’m sure that it’s understood that alcohol isn’t the “cleanest” choice I could be making, but please — this meeting is at 8 p.m. on a Monday after I just spent all day logged into my computer dealing with work problems. I deserve to relax with a beer in my own home. Maybe I’ll pour it into a coffee cup so no one can tell what I am drinking…

And that statement is why I probably won’t survive all 40 days of the program. It’s only day 1 and I’m thinking about pouring beer into a coffee cup to get through the first session…