When I started SSJ I promised myself I’d only post when I felt like it. After over a month into isolation, I finally feel decent enough to do what I’ve been doing best these past few months: making lists. Here’s a point-form journal of highs, lows, and high-lows from the past 730+ hours.
The Month in Quarantine…
- Cancelling transit passes for the first time in twenty years + the ever-changing context of “I prefer to walk.”
- The yet unopened Aerogarden in the box we’ve be using to prop the laptop higher up on a chair for zoom piano lessons. When will it be time?
- Discovering the mail slot in the door has been “inadequate” for more than 10 years. [See photo, above.]
- Live streamed dance classes, some of them free!, from The Pink Studio. Broadway in the basement, with chairs, even, and hats, and makeshift props. This week: a plate as a tambourine.
- Wondering if I’m alone in wondering if school closures into fall could result in a second “double-cohort” for Universities in 2021 and what that would mean for our now-11th-grader.
- Not giving a hoot, meanwhile, if the 9th grader’s academics get cancelled?
- Opening my #wrdshed and banning everyone else from entering only to dream about a ginger opossum sheltering in my shed whose point of entry’s undiscoverable and who’ll never leave.
- Everyone doing their own thing as far away from each other as possible, then coming together for family dinner. The conversations, jokes about COBOL, even, and coding the Y2K. “You were only off by twenty years.”
- Healthy family dinners possible in large part because of my favourite coffee shop/neighbourhood life-line, now shuttered, putting together a weekly grocery order & contactless pickup [with a take-out cuppa].
- Making the Buvette Cookbook vinaigrette, with or without the chicken salad with haricots verts. Hiding the last of the vinaigrette beside the cheese with my name on it in the back of the fridge.
- After several successful tweaks to recipes from Nothing Fancy and Dining In based on what ingredients we had on hand (Do these recipes have enough flavour? Are they watered down?), trying to make a keto version of Alison Roman‘s Lemony Tumeric Tea Cake by doing equal swaps of sweetener and almond flour. My bad, here. Two hours in the oven, and the cake remains a spoon-bread & over-sweet. Still, lemon + tumeric = heaven! Freezing it, slicing it into small portions, and reheating it on demand.
- Zoom cocktails with friends, mine with bourbon cherries from Collected Joy + Following a friend of a friend as she makes her way through the Savoy Cocktail Book + Cocktails for Quarantine (But never when we’re sad) = really only 1 or 2 cocktails here at home per week.
- More seltzer than anything else to drink. Though, a strange longing for Diet A&W Root Beer?
- The case for hoarding Kewpie mayo as opposed to TP.
- That trip to Shopper’s Drug Mart to get the Easter Chocolates and Dahlia Postage Stamps considered a hazardous experience, in retrospect.
- Practically busting my wedding-dress sewing machine making not-enough never-enough masks for the hospital where I wouldn’t have been able to give birth without the love, experience, and intervention of essential staff.
- Aggressive tidying + aggressive delegation: asking the kids to consult Youtube [not a parent] for refresher courses on cleaning bathrooms before tackling the job themselves.
- Continuing to put all of my clothes away in the closet before bed, which I’ve only been doing consistently since January of this year.
- Wearing lipstick more often than not, with special preference for MAC Sultry Move, All Fired Up, & Chili + Sometimes, not bothering to wash the lipstick off in the shower when washing the rest of my face.
- Setting the limit at one hour of news, daily, from any source + checking my own disbelief re the roots of so many menfolk on the nightly news.
- Most common post-news earworm: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” from the Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem.
- Balm: Playing Brahms + Reading 12-15 pages of War and Peace every day via #TolstoyTogether @publicspace.
- Not really being able to read much else, despite that one delivery from Queen Books and a stack of cozy mysteries from a friend.
- Except letters and post-cards. Letters and post-cards flying in before there are enough stamps to return the favour, letters with blank post-cards inside them, even, because friends are miracles, and mail from friends, like the post itself, so far, has been encouraging.
- Finding a notebook of poetry I wrote every day last August and deciding it wasn’t half bad. Adding to it irregularly.
- Wondering, meanwhile, if and how I can or should finish the close-to-finished novel due to its uncanny coming together before my eyes right now.
- Karaoke, a longing for + Painting badly + Deciding NOT to memorize “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” at least, not now.
- Family movie night, sometimes more than once a week. Jojo Rabbit, recently, Q Planes, and 20th Century Women.
- Finally, believing it must be true, what they say, about Fred and Ginger movies cheering people up in the Great Depression, because we saw them dancing “Cheek to Cheek” on TCM yesterday.
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