Back in mid-March, when we were first given the stay-at-home order by our governor, I felt the need to do something to lift the spirits of my neighbors in some way. My neighbor Chris and I had long had a plan to use something called Rainworks (link here to see what Rainworks is) to leave fun messages on the sidewalks of our town. Two (three?) years ago Chris bought us each a kit to get started on our messages, but we just never got around to doing it. When lock down started, I texted Chris and said, “Let’s do the Rainworks messages! Now!” and he responded, “Yes. Yes. 1000 x Yes!!!”
The problem is, it turns out that making a Rainworks message is kind of tricky. You have to cut a stencil out of cardboard and then spray it carefully so that the letters are distinct and don’t bleed. My first two efforts turned out to be unintelligible blobs. I lost momentum at that point, but neighbor Chris saved the day by buying two large buckets of chalk for us to chalk our messages around the neighborhood instead. After that I was hooked. A couple of chalking adventures in the neighborhood later, I decided to stay closer to home, writing a new message every morning on the sidewalk in front of my house. Every night I go out and wash the old message down.
I’m not sure how long I’ll carry on with my messages. Our governor is set to start gradually re-opening Ohio on May 1, but I’m not even sure what that means (and he won’t be revealing what that means until next Monday). My workplace will start to gradually go back to normal operations on May 4, but we haven’t been told yet what that will mean. I may be working remotely at least some of the time well into June. So, we’ll see. All I know is tomorrow is Arbor Day, and I hope the rain lets up by morning so that I can get out there and draw a tree.
As I’ve often told Sam, “Corny is what I do best.”I’m particularly proud of my artistic talent on display with that jar of mayo! Yes, I had trouble with the spelling of “quarantine”!The clumpy stuff is wet grass from the previous day’s mowing – in case you were thinking some dog made an editorial commentSam helped me with this one 🙂I’m afraid I might have crossed the line from “talk like Shakespeare” to “talk like a pirate” here
The puzzle pictured above kicked my arse. It’s a thousand pieces, which is my puzzle-making preference – very challenging, but not so challenging that it turns the corner from fun to frustrating. It also has definite “zones” in it – the writing at the top, the young mother, the guy with the ball cap, the baby in the carriage, the gnome selling his mushrooms (my favorite part of this puzzle!) – which is my preferred type of puzzle picture. Again, the distinct zones help keep things on the fun side for me. Finally, when I viewed it on Amazon it seemed to have distinct colors – also a must. I’m very picky about the puzzles I buy. I can scroll through 50 pages of offerings on Amazon and only come up with two or three that I would actually want to make. This particular puzzle made the cut.
Then I unboxed it.
Another preference I have is that the pieces be oddly shaped, or at least distinctly shaped in some way (some with all prongs facing out, some with spade shaped appendages, etc). This is something that is just luck-of-the-draw, because none of the puzzle descriptions on websites or even on the box mention puzzle piece shapes. The pieces of this puzzle were all shaped seemingly identically. Moreover, the colors that had seemed so distinct on Amazon were actually mostly various shades of mud or purply gray. I very nearly put the pieces back in the box before starting. But start I did, and before long I was completely engrossed in the task at hand.
Obsessed, more like.
For the last week I have spent every free moment working on the puzzle. My days have consisted of working, walking, eating, and puzzling. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Of course I have still called my mom each day, texted and messaged friends, watched a movie with Sam and Chris. But other things that bring me joy went by the wayside during my puzzle obsession. Very little writing for this blog, no letters sent to friends holed up in their COVID-free bubbles, not much cooking/baking, not as much just hanging out with Chris as I would have liked. My life felt out of balance. I knew it was out of balance, but instead of deciding to limit my puzzle making to an hour a day or something sensible like that, I said to myself, “I’m just going to push on through and then I’ll take a little break from puzzles when this is done.” Of course, that turned the last couple of days of making the puzzle into the puzzle-making equivalent of the marathoner’s heartbreak hill. It was nuts, really.
Maybe during these coronavirus lockdown times this type of loss of balance is common. I know that some people are spending much more time watching and reading the news than they ever have in their lives. We live in 24-hour news cycle times that are now actually filled with significant new things happening around the clock. You would think that substituting making a puzzle for obsessively watching the news would be a positive trade, that it would result in less stress. And it did. Initially. But balance is about having a variety of things going on in your life, and I learned that “too much of a good thing” is really not a good thing.
So, the puzzle is done and I am going to take that little break that I promised myself. I’m going to reset my internal operating system and bring myself back into balance. Write a few letters. Get some blog posts written. Make that banana bread. Take some photos. Sit on the bench in our back yard and watch the birds. Watch a TV show with Chris.
I hope you’ve found balance in your shelter-in-place days. Above all, I think we need to be kind to ourselves right now. None of us has faced this before and we’re all just making it up as we go along. So, if things get a little off-kilter in your life, I hope you can gently nudge yourself back to the right path with compassion and understanding.
I grew up without significant pets – we had a couple of parakeets over the years, as well as gerbils. And, oh yes, we also had a fish tank at one point. My mom, having given birth to seven hard-to-manage, messy, wiggly creatures, did not want anything else underfoot. I was allergic to cats anyway, and although I thought having a dog would be great, I can’t say that I pined away for one.
That changed when I moved, by myself (at the age of 22!), 2,600 miles away from my family to serve in the Air Force. I found Tobie, a little black cocker spaniel, and she helped me navigate life so far from home. Then Ernie, a black and white cocker, joined the family. It occurred to me a while back that I’ve spent nearly my entire adult life sharing that life with dogs. After Tobie and Ernie came Skyler, a black lab mix. Skyler died a little over two years ago, and since then I’ve been without an animal companion. I have mixed feelings about this. Certainly there is a lot of responsibility and a certain amount of mess associated with pets, but I sorely miss the companionship and unconditional love that flows in both directions between human and animal companions. Someday I hope to have a dog in my life again.
In the meantime, I get a lot of pleasure observing other people’s dogs. It’s a wistful pastime, for sure, but watching dogs and their humans walking together and interacting does bring my joy. And I’ve found something else that brings me joy, something I never considered before. Cats! My sister has a cat, Oscar, who is a character and a half. In my nightly talks with my mother, Oscar is frequently mentioned. Although my mom adores Oscar, he’s still, you know, an animal. She will pet him, she will praise him, feed him, let him in and let him out, but that’s where it ends. There will be no lap sitting, no jumping up on beds. Her relationship with Oscar makes me smile, and it makes me happy that she now knows the joy that having a pet can bring.
Have a wonderful weekend, friends. xoxo
A blurry Oscar – he’s always on the move A neighborhood friend who often accompanies me for short distances on my walks
Taken during a trip to NYC in 2017 – I wonder when the streets of New York will look like this again?
Around the world, most people are wondering when we will be able to go “back to normal.” Until there is a vaccine there is no way we can go completely back to normal, and no one knows for sure when the vaccine will be ready. Three months? Six? Eight? Dr. Amy Acton, the director of Ohio’s Department of Health, said on Monday that the general public could be wearing masks for the next year. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around that, but then again it’s still hard for me to wrap my mind around this entire situation we have found ourselves in.
I’ve developed a routine to my days that I find comforting. Walks, work, reading, writing, puzzle making – the days have a simplicity to them, but also a busyness to them that gives me some distance from the harshness of what is going on in the world. I find that I don’t have much time left over each day to check the news. I do get an email every morning from the New York Times with their daily news brief, and at the end of each day I have a ritual of taking screen shots with my phone of three of Johns Hopkins University’s charts – total cases worldwide, confirmed cases by country/region, and confirmed cases per US state. I then put the three screenshots in a photo album in my phone called “Coronavirus.” I started doing this in mid-March. I guess it’s sort of a way of keeping a scrapbook of this experience.
Life is “on pause” right now. I do work (remotely) 25-30 hours a week (I’ve worked my way up from 15 hours a week), so things aren’t totally on pause, but the pace of life has drastically slowed. And in a perverse way, when I think about going “back to normal” I’m not sure how much of “normal” I actually want back.
I’d love to keep working 25-30 hours a week, but that’s not going to happen. Retirement is still a long way off, and we need my employer-sponsored health insurance. So, going back to the office 40 hours a week is probably going to happen at some point in the next few months. And I have a renewed gratitude for actually having a job, as I wrote about in my last post. I do enjoy working, but I’ve had some distance from the normal work dramas (is there a workplace anywhere without drama?) and I must say I like the distance. So, when I go back, I will give myself mental space from those shenanigans, even if I can’t physically remove myself from being a witness to them.
Before the pandemic started, I would spend a certain amount of time on Pinterest, curating my boards. I do love Pinterest, if only for the fact that it is a great way and place to collect recipes. I’ve still spent time searching for recipes during lockdown, but only when I’m looking for something specific. No surfing. I used to spend a good amount of time looking at the fashion postings on Pinterest, something that has gone completely by the wayside. I just don’t feel interested in that type of consumerism right now. Will my interest return? I honestly don’t know. What’s more, I don’t know if I want it to return. I had already been toying with the idea of a minimalist, capsule-style wardrobe. Having experienced this pause in normal life, minimalism in all areas of my life is more attractive to me.
I think that like so many other types of life-altering experiences, life post-pandemic will be at best a “new normal.” Some parts of this new normal, like wearing masks into 2021 and feeling my “fight or flight” response activated any time I hear someone cough or even see someone approaching too closely, will be unavoidable. This will be similar to how, in a post-Sandy Hook world, I now look for emergency exits when entering a movie theater or concert venue, in case a mass shooter decides to be there, too.
But other parts of the new normal I will be able to choose, and I intend to spend a lot of time in the next weeks and months deciding what those parts will be.
I keep a gratitude journal. It’s just a blank notebook, nothing special. It’s a particularly jazzy shade of orange, so it makes me happy to see it, to hold it in my hands, and to use it. About two or three times a week I open my gratitude journal and write down five things for which I am grateful. Here’s a sample from a random day earlier this year:
Being sleepy at bedtime
Oatmeal
Morning walks
Birds at the feeder
Cozy clothes
Sometimes I write entire sentences, sometimes just a word or two. Believe it or not, there has been a lot of research on gratitude and on keeping gratitude journals. Supposedly the best way to keep a gratitude journal is to not only write what you are grateful for, but why. So instead of just writing “oatmeal”, I should write something like, “I am grateful for how my morning oatmeal warms me, nourishes me, and makes me feel like I am taking care of myself.” I did try to use that technique at first, but found that it became a chore before long. And then I quit for several months. So, in the interest of “done is better than perfect”, I stopped expecting myself to keep my journal the “correct” way. And I don’t put pressure on myself to write every single day.
I’ve been keeping my current jazzy orange gratitude journal since January, but I have several that I’ve kept at different times in my life. I like to read my old gratitude journals – they tell me a lot about where my head was during that time. Here is a day from the journal I kept during my cancer treatment:
The gift of one more day on this beautiful earth
Walked 1.1 miles and I wasn’t tired or breathless
I am grateful for Chris’ utter confidence that everything is going to be all right
The feel of the cool breeze on my hot head
I am loved
It’s amazing how quickly you can start to take things for granted, even after a life-changing experience like cancer. These days I walk around 7 miles a day, and while I do feel grateful for the ability to do so, the gratitude experience of simply being physically able to walk isn’t as intense as it was during those chemo days. I’m also still grateful for each day that I wake up, but the normality of waking up each day has crept back in. This is a good thing in a way, but I never want to forget what an incredible thing it is to live just one day on this earth.
During these coronavirus times, I’m experiencing newfound gratitude for things I used to take for granted, including:
Healthcare workers
Grocery store clerks
Scientists
Sanitation workers
First responders
Fresh food
Co-workers
Having a job
I’d like to think that when this is all over I will feel this gratitude as intensely as I do now, but I know that things will go back to normal and I’ll forget just a little bit how I feel in this moment. That’s one of the reasons why keeping a gratitude journal is so important to me – to remind me that the things I take for granted, including everyday normality, are in fact precious gifts.
I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve been working on jigsaw puzzles during this time of staying at home and avoiding getting infected with COVID-19. There’s something very meditative about the process – sorting out the edge pieces and laying them in place; sorting out the different colors; the satisfying feeling of setting the right piece in the right place; starting with a big messy pile of pieces and little by little bringing order to them. Apparently I’m not alone in feeling this way, because puzzle manufacturers around the world are reporting a huge surge in sales during this pandemic. This article in the New York Times talks about the sudden rise in demand for jigsaw puzzles and shows how they are made (another thing that makes this nerd happy: seeing how things are made).
My parents used to make jigsaw puzzles together. When I would visit them, I loved chipping in, helping with whatever puzzle they were working on. It was a bonding experience. Now my mom makes puzzles with my sister, with whom she lives. Her puzzles have fewer pieces these days, but the enjoyment, the satisfaction of completion, is the same. When we talk each night we often inquire about each other’s puzzle progress. Even 600 miles apart, puzzles are still bonding us.
And that makes me happy. xoxo
This was a fun one to make with Sam over Christmas Break.This one was missing a piece (Freddy Mercury’s head, darn it!) – can you see where the piece is missing?As you can probably tell by now, Sam and I aren’t much into mountain vista, Bavarian castle, or hot air balloon shots.This was the first New Yorker cover puzzle Sam and I made – and now I’m hooked on them.Just started this one yesterday – it still looks like a mess, so here’s what it will look like when finished.
In the last 48 hours we have had a scary thunderstorm (complete with tornado warning), rain, snow, hail, clouds, and gorgeous sunshine. I’ve gone out for my walks wearing anything from a short sleeved shirt to my winter coat, wool hat, and gloves. But out I go, because I need my daily dose of exercise, fresh air, and beauty. It is sustaining me in this crazy time, keeping the “blahs” from turning into the blues. I know I said I wouldn’t be back here until my Friday “Things That Make Me Happy” post, but I thought I would share this daily dose of beauty with you. See you again tomorrow, dear ones. xoxo
I’ve sat in front of this laptop the last couple of days feeling like I don’t have much to say. Maybe, having written almost every day for the last couple of weeks, I’m learning that I have to pace myself. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
I’ve been fairly productive since Sunday. In the kitchen arena I’ve made a lemon-coconut cake; spaghetti and meatballs; roasted red pepper and tomato soup; dehydrated oranges, grapefruit, and apples; and banana bread. I’ve been walking up a storm, racking up 19,969 steps Sunday, 18,119 steps yesterday and 10,254 steps so far today. I’ve gotten a lot done “at work” as well – I’ve been assigned a new computer to log into, which is resulting in my being able to work slightly longer hours each day. Oh, and I finished my puzzle!
But still, blah.
Maybe the novelty of this stay-at-home business is wearing off for me. The uncertainty (will the stay-at-home order really end on April 30? Or will it have to be extended?) is definitely enough to make me feel off-kilter. Part of me feels guilty for feeling off-kilter because I really have it so good – a job, a job that is paying me for 40 hours a week even though I’m only working about 20, a job that I can perform in the safety of my own home, a mother who is safely ensconced in my sister’s house and who just turned 89 years old on Sunday, my own health as well as the health of the rest of my family, enough food and necessities to last us for weeks if so required.
I think I need to remind myself that we are living through a public health crisis of historic proportions. And regardless of my good fortune, feeling off-kilter is an appropriate reaction to this reality.
I will be back on Friday with my “Things That Make Me Happy” post. Until then, take care of yourselves and stay safe, my friends.
I am a big fan of the YouTube yoga instructor Adriene Mishler of “Yoga with Adriene” fame. She is down-to-earth, funny, self deprecating in an adorable way – just a lovely human. I must admit my yoga practice, if it could ever really have been called such, is on hold at the moment, for no particular reason except I can’t seem to find the motivation (although the benefits are so great that I really can’t figure out why). Anyway, although I haven’t been yoga-ing lately, I do receive a Sunday morning email message from Adriene that is always a wonderful way to begin a new week.
This week’s message resonated with me, especially this:
“These days it is no secret we are on a ride. Somedays it’s the Shockwave, others The Joker. Sometimes you feel like you are on The Texas Rattler, one of those large wooden rollercoasters, or perhaps one day – all metal – get in the cage – like The Zipper! And, in a strange but very romantic moment with yourself and/or your loved ones, sometimes you are on a gondola, or you are on a sailboat, sailing away.”
Last night was a gondola night.
Earlier in the day, I texted my across-the-street neighbor Emily (who also happens to be my boss, but that’s another story!) that I was going to be consuming her favorite drink that night:
When I saw her response, I wasn’t sure how to reply. Unfortunately we have observed other neighbors holding “social distanced” outdoor get-togethers where the distancing was decidedly suspect. I wanted no part of that, so I responded:
Which resulted in:
We carefully positioned our chairs six feet from the sidewalks so that we wouldn’t endanger people going out for their evening constitutional. Emily, her husband Bob, Chris & Jenny, and my little group sat there for about an hour, asking for recommendations for TV shows to binge-watch, inquiring about children who have left the nest and are weathering this new coronavirus climate on their own, comparing notes on working remotely, and just generally catching up. It was so lovely I am getting choked up just writing about it.
After the happy hour was over, we retired back to our respective houses, promising to do this again when the weather permitted. Chris, Sam, and I continued our new Saturday tradition of ordering take-out dinner from Chili’s and watching a movie (Jojo Rabbit this week).
I hope you have found ways to step off the roller coaster now and then and enjoy a gondola ride with your loved ones.
If you’ve read any of my other posts it will come as no surprise to you that the beauty of nature makes me happy and I seek it out as often as I can. Usually I do this by going out for walks in the neighborhood or in the many public parks and trails around here, but I also have gotten many hours of enjoyment just looking at the bird feeder outside of one of our kitchen windows. I’ve been known to spend a good twenty minutes just sitting and staring at the feeder during lunch breaks (back when I worked in an office and came home for lunch – about a million years ago, it seems). I consider watching the birds to be one of my favorite kinds of meditation – I can just feel the stress melting away.
Now, let’s talk squirrels. I don’t mind when the squirrels eat whatever falls to the ground, but when they climb up on the feeder, setting it wildly swinging, knocking huge amounts of seed to the ground and generally making a mess, it pisses me off. I know there are squirrel-proof feeders out there, and one day we will most likely get one. But for now I guess I will continue to bang loudly on the window to scare them off (until they come back two minutes later). Maybe all that banging is good for me, too – a way to vent my coronavirus-induced frustrations instead of being grumpy with my loved ones. Maybe. I do love squirrels – just not at the bird feeder.
The weather is glorious today. I’ve already been out on three walks and will be out for a couple more before the day is over. We are making pizza for dinner tonight, something we haven’t done in easily more than a year. I hope you have a great weekend. I’m sure I’ll be back here at least once before Monday.
Michelle xoxo
Hello, bird friend!I’ve counted as many as five birds at the feeder at one time.“We are NOT pigeons (although scientifically there is no difference between us and pigeons)! We are mourning doves!”Ahem. I’ll just put this here with no comment. Although, REALLY. I think he can easily lay off the seeds for a few days with no ill effects. That’s all I’m gonna say.
