Corona Letters #10

Dear Fellow Quarantiners,

Wow!  My tenth letter!  I'm not sure who is still reading these but I am going to keep writing until this epidemic is over.  This is a promise I made to myself.

In honor of this being my tenth letter, I am going to make a list of 10 things I've done in the last ten days that I wouldn't have done if we weren't experiencing a pandemic.

1.   Have a group ZOOM conference call with friends who all live within two miles of me.   This will have to suffice as "girls night" for the unforeseeable future.

2.  Count how many toilet paper squares I use for each visit.

3.  Keep track of how frequently toilet paper rolls need to be switched, for each bathroom, each with a different number of "users".

4. Make a meal plan (I know for some people this is normal behavior but I'm more of a "what do we have in the fridge?" kind of gal). Now I'm planning meals down to each corn kernel.  And, I'm also delegating who's going to cook those meals.   Fun fact:  I haven't cooked for the past five nights (I've delegated that duty).  Why didn't I think of this before?

5. Refuse to shake someone's hand.  Yup.  Someone offered me their hand when meeting for the first time.  I was like, "Whoa.  No."  To be fair, he quickly realized the situation and pulled his hand back embarrassed that he had even offered it.

6. Walked with sad friends and not hugged them.   This is probably the hardest thing for me.  I am a hugger.  Lots of people have many reasons to be sad right now and I can't hug any of them.

7.  Not hugging my daughter when I see her.  This is probably the absolute hardest thing.  My oldest daughter is staying in her city apartment and continues to go to work.   She has visited us twice in the last couple of weeks.  We keep social distance and cover all our furniture with sheets, treating her like a plague-ridden, unwelcome visitor.  I'm not sure if it's a false sense of security but not hugging her is heartbreaking.

8.  Talking or communicating with my parents pretty much every day.   I'm not the kind of person who communicates with her parents every day but now I am, mostly to make sure they are behaving themselves and not going out into the scary world.   I'm sure many elderly parents are relishing the fact that their children are keeping constant tabs on them.   They would probably brag about the constant contact at bridge or Mah Jong but those things aren't happening right now.  And I feel like I can safely assume, based on their technical difficulties using Skype and FaceTime, that they are not having ZOOM conference calls with their senior friends.

9. Doing family workouts at home every morning.   The trainer from my gym has been emailing gym members a workout video every morning, and I've gotten various family members to join me on most mornings.   I think there was an episode on the "Brady Bunch" where Alice has to go away and her "cousin" (who is actually Alice in a different outfit) comes to stay with the Bradys and makes them exercise every morning.  Boy!  Were they happy when Alice came back!  Boy!  Is my family going to be happy when I can go back to the gym and they can lounge in their sweats back home!

10.  Buying purple hair dye online.  Yup.  I'm going to dye my hair purple.

What have you done in the last 10 days that has surprised you?

Take Care!  Stay Connected! Stay Virus Free!

Deb