Living in the Time of Corona

Good evening my Corona friends and for my Jewish friends enjoy the break fast tonight, even if you haven’t done the fast.  I guess no big celebrations with friends and family.  I am celebrating tonight with my roommate, lover, and techie as today was his last day of treatment. So he is currently doing the cooking from our dinner box, I decided it is not a bad thing because if one things he knows its reading directions, it all makes sense to him. I may even have to increase the box from 2 to 4, when the cold weather comes and we won’t be able to dine al fresco, but I am prepared to break out the long underwear and with some heat lamps I could go all winter, so please don’t close.

Holy Crap it has been more than a half a year since I started this blog, that I thought would be over in a month or so, but here we are still under siege by a Pandemic that just won’t seem to go away. It has been a really tough these past few weeks, with the passing of one of my heroes RBG and the shit show that followed.  I think we are all way passed anything surprising or shocking us, I know I laughed out loud last week when a friend shared something that was on her mind. She was shocked that I would just laugh at loud when she was surely a bit troubled. Why are you laughing she says and I don’t know it was just a reflex that nothing can shock me anymore and I fear it just is not going to end the craziness will continue, but I keep putting off the date that we can all sit around, inside with friends, with more than a few people, maybe a celebration or a wedding, and laugh and joke about our crazy memories of this time. I know it is coming but right now I won’t even hazard a guess as to when because I have been so off on my predictions.   “Abundance of Caution” seriously how many of us have grown to hate that phrase and want to kick its ass to the curb?  I feel like every time we get some bad news or a delay it starts out with “Abundance of Caution”, why don’t they just say because half the people feel it is a Hoax so now the spreaders have ruined it for everyone else and it is going to take a bit longer. Please people even if you are not a believer just give it a shot and see if it makes a difference because what we are doing right now is just not working.  I know my grandson Charlie just wants to go to school and he is in the first grade and we all know there is a limited time when there is excitement about still loving school and not, so please cooperate.  I hate to say this but I could almost root for the “good old days” in Catholic school when you had to hold out your hand a get a good whack with the ruler if you stepped out of line. I have to say that I was privy to more than a few whacks.  I wish I could say it worked but it never changed my behavior, so let’s just scratch that theory, unless I am the one delivering the whacks to the grownups. Who knows what is going to come out of this remote learning, but I already assured my daughter not to worry because Charlie still loves trucks and UPS and FedEx are two of his favorite so I am pretty sure a job is secure for him in the future, even if it is just programming those self-driving trucks. I did purchase him a battery powered jeep this summer and he loves driving it and I love the fact that he doesn’t care that it is Pink because it was the only color they had left, he wanted the black one but when I said all that was left was pink , his response was I love Pink.  Somehow I could have never seen my brothers going for a pink Jeep under any circumstances so we have made some progress.

Yesterday I  told my roommate that we have to get out of town, I just couldn’t do anymore bike rides or walks around the city and I needed to see something different so we drove to Provincetown, for those not from Massachusetts it is the very tip of the Cape.  Normally we would spend some time there every summer after the Pan Mass Challenge but like everything else this year it was disrupted. We stopped at a few different beaches along the way as I was looking for some big waves, hoping for one last chance to do some body surfing.  Well although I didn’t get any rides in, just being in such a beautiful place was good for the soul, even if there were signs of a shark warning. Heck the ones in the water are probably a whole lot better than the ones on land lately, at least they are not under disguise and they are what they are, just willing to take a big bite.  We got a nice reprieve here on the weather as it was late September but the temperature was definitely an Indian summer. Which is another thing I am not sure if we can use that term any longer and not sure where it came from, but we always referred to temperature coming back in the fall to Indian summer like a little added bonus. I just googled it and I don’t believe it is offensive but I am prepared to amend it should it be offensive. Because I am all about spreading the cheer that will be my new motto, till it’s not and believe me I have a short attention span. So for today I wish you all a Good Evening, Happy New Year, and maybe a bit more of this Indian summer.

Just Sayin

Good evening my Corona friends. I thought I would check in with you all since today is Labor Day and an official end of summer. It has been a while since I last put pen to paper to pontificate of all my meanderings of my boring life during a pandemic that I try to believe is a bad dream and not our reality. OK you get the picture I may be going over a dark edge so let me try and right the ship before I get too scary.  Yes, it may be the end of summer, although not sure if anyone is thinking it, as long as the weather holds up since there are no school openings till later this month. Techie and I were fortunate to escape up to Maine and be with our grandkids and kids for five days, and happy to report on this trip we were upgraded to another family cottage that had a 21st-century coffee maker, that could dispense at least 10 decent cups at a time. Amazing what a decent cup of coffee can do for you when camping out with all your family who is up at the crack of dawn.  Don’t get me wrong I am most often up at that hour but it is generally me and my beloved cable news and coffee, not diaper changes and cereal wars at that hour, but happily will do it for the short week. Happy to report that I went off the cable news for the week, after all, I was in Maine and our cottage did not have the requisite satellite dish, or if it did there was no telly. OMG, we had to settle for the sound of nature and the relevant silence interrupted by dueling two-year-old cousins staking out their territory. Charlie is six and he had to be the referee of these two and I must say he was just the best of doling out his wisdom. I heard him say to his two-year-old sister you are not the boss of Tilda, his cousin also two, brought me back to when my kids were young. “You are not the boss of me” and “you are not invited to my party” were the fighting words.  Now it is where is your mask and please don’t stand so close to me, and not by the Police. I can’t imagine what I would be like if I was a parent in this day and age, and thankfully I don’t have to find out. I can be sure that I would never be as patient as my kids are today with their kids. Imagine coming into a Pandemic when all of a sudden you have to school your kids remotely and also work from home at the same time. Now imagine even worse that you were one of those parents that were pretty adamant of limiting screen time and never used the TV as a babysitter?  Seriously I am pretty sure a lot of this has gone out the window and if it hasn’t how are you all coping?  The screen time that you fought so hard against is now the primary source of your child’s learning and who knows when they are going off-script to video games during class time?  I know I am going to date myself but way back when we worried about the “new math” and how were we supposed to help them with homework when I didn’t know shit about it in the first place. We had to send our son to a private school and pay a lot of money so he would get his homework done. Seriously we were ill-equipped to help him navigate learning with dyslexia and I feel for those that are trying to figure it out during this insane time in our history.

I say to techie what happened here we were supposed to be retired by now and here we are still working?   I suppose it is ok since we really can’t travel, which is what we love to do but now no one wants us, and borders are closed. Forget about the wall we don’t need one, as most people don’t want us as guests but hoping that changes soon. Basically, we haven’t been out of New England this summer, and our biggest worry on these road trips is where am I going to pee?  I am not going to lie in the beginning I was peeing on the side of the road rather than enter a highway restroom because who knew where Corona was lingering, but now I have given in to indoor plumbing. I have been looking at those Winnebago type of vehicles but have to admit what I really want is a Glamped up airstream. This is coming from a person who always thought Holiday Inn Express was the closest thing to camping that I ever wanted. Granted there were times in my early days when a pup tent on the side of the road was just fine but along with my youth that is long gone.  I always loved those road trips with my roommate because he could always handle anything that came up and fix anything on the spot, hence MacGyver. So I was thinking I could get my airstream and be ready to hit the open road this fall, once we have to wrap up the beloved boat. If we had this and we had to go into lockdown this fall or winter we would have another room to go to when this place shrinks.  During my research, I found that Walmart will let you park in their lots, as we certainly have no place to park it. I haven’t found any Walmarts in the city of Boston that are close by so may have to wait on this new venture.  We just have to be prepared for what may be coming as it is starting to get dark earlier and nights are getting cooler, in another month we will be getting up in the dark and coming home in the dark. Oh wait a minute we will still be working from home so won’t have to worry about commuting in the dark.  Things have been going pretty well here in the city and the state as a whole with the plague so let’s hope it can continue because I don’t want to go back to jail again.  I really can’t believe that I have 170 days in on this Corona thing and I honestly don’t want to give it another day, but I guess we will see what tomorrow brings. So please don’t leave home without your mask and keep your distance, now is the time you can avoid a lot of people you always wanted to and blame it on the Pandemic.

Just sayin