Gummies and Orange Soda

March 16, 2020: Chicago, IL

Tess and I were planning to be on vacation this week: ten days in Ireland starting with the Dublin St Patrick’s Day parade. Now, we’re hunkered down in our apartment, debating on whether we still take a vacation here at home (our aging radiators don’t allow us to crank up the heat to simulate an Arizona-like dry heat, but we can lay in supine position and fall asleep with paperback books on our faces) or I go back to work, i.e. open my work laptop instead of my personal one and videochat for eight to nine hours a day.

This morning, I woke up around 8:30. I woke Tess up when I went back into the bedroom to get my glasses. With our home cluttered with cans, jars, boxes, and winter squashes, I’ve lost my sense of where I usually put things – glasses on the living room TV stand before bed, for example. We watched several episodes of Better Call Saul – I am stunned every time a character touches her face – and I started cataloging by expiration date and quantity the food in a Google Sheet so we can remember to take stuff out that’s getting on in age. Then, we tried to nap and were interrupted by notifications about the White House news conference, which we’re currently awaiting as the now fourth distinct Ohio government official makes a very much overlapping statement on national TV. That’s been our day.

I’m back and forth on how well I can handle reading the news. Stock values plummeting, idiot public officials flouting their own rules and/or insisting it’s all a hoax, and young folks celebrating their personal resilience in bars all get old quickly. I love to read the news, so I am bummed, but it’s an even more masochistic exercise than the already brutal recent norm nowadays. That said, I do need to make sure that I hear about any ban on looking out the window before I see a red dot on my forehead.

These are indeed wild times.