Month: April 2020

• I’m messy.
• I eat food everywhere.
• I leave clothes everywhere.
• I’m not funny.
• I often use a new towel each time I bathe, even though I try to reuse them. I can’t find the old ones!
• I’m bad at recycling.
• I leave cabinets open and lights on.
• I leave many glasses of water all over the house.
• I will throw your things away without telling you if I deem them without use anymore.
• In moments of stress, I become selfish and want it all for me. And not for you.
• I don’t like to brush my teeth.
• I work in a hospital.
• I get anxious and I will have to tell you about my anxiety in order to release it.
• I play white person music all the time.
• I like AMSR.
• I frequently pay the utility bills late (because I forget! not on purpose) and therefore we are almost always on the verge of having something turned off.
• I don’t wash my hands well.
• I will get annoyed at your habits. I won’t yell. But I’ll be really, really nice to you and you will know I’m mad at you.
• I hide treats.
• I will look at my phone and ignore you as you are speaking in front of me.
• I will not help with the children’s schoolwork.

• I’m low conflict.
• I will do laundry.
• I cook mediocrely.
• I will bleach anyone’s hair.
• Jeremy complained that I left the refrigerator door opened too long yesterday. Instead of being annoyed (which I was), I replied, I realize that is a reasonable request. I will try to do it in the future.
• I am quiet.
• I will defer to you in video choices.
• Though I will also offer up suggestions when no one has any which will be turned down promptly.
• I will FaceTime your family members.
• I will FaceTime my family members.
• I tiptoe through the house not making much noise.
• I will not talk about the pandemic if you don’t want to. I will talk about the pandemic if you want to.
• I, incredibly, have two steady jobs.
• I will support people with my two steady jobs that no longer have steady jobs.
• I will not freak out.
• I will not make you do anything.
• I will maintain a semblance of a schedule.
• I make Dutch Babies.
• I will attempt to do TikTok dances to amuse everyone.
• I can cut hair.
• Sometimes I open the window in my home office so I can hear the three kids next door screaming on their trampoline.
• I watch deer outside my window.
• I refuse to buy extra snacks to keep in the house.
• I do not yell.
• I do not curse.
• Maybe I’m boring? Do you want a boring roommate? Maybe not.
• I will spend a long time making face masks.
• I will spend too long reading an MIT listserv list in utter disbelief that even smart-on-paper people are idiots.
• I like to go scrounging in the pantry to use up old ingredients.
• I like to find things and repurpose them.
• I don’t drink coffee, so there is more for you.
• I would love for you to talk as long as you’d like, if you’d take no offense to me falling asleep to your voice.
• I have a lot of sweatshirts you can borrow.
• I am needy only once a day. That is the frequency at which I will ask – are you sure you still like me?

Jeremy had to go to Walgreens to pick up Edda’s prescription for the emergency seizure medication that was prescribed 10 days ago and found some Hot Pockets for sale inside the drug store. He bought three differently-flavored boxes and put them in the freezer and we wondered how long it would be before Vince discovered they were there. It took about 2 days. All weekend, Vince and I did a taste off on Hot Pockets. We promised we wouldn’t eat any without the other and that we would split a box. I have to say, I used to love Hot Pockets. I no longer love Hot Pockets. They are so flabby! Were they flabby before? I thought the food scientists figured out how to crisp in the microwave a long time ago. I think I could go the rest of my life without eating any more Hot Pockets. I wonder, though, about Pop Tarts.

I made mini cherry pies with pre-made pie crusts and canned cherry pie filling. Again, I made them individual sized and froze them, so we wouldn’t eat them all at once.

I also tried to make a Dutch Baby which failed terribly the first time (I used whole wheat flour instead of regular white flour). Looks like a giant greasy pimple, huh? We ate it anyways. Delicious.

I did much better the second time around. Look at that! Gorgeous.

I also promised Vince mid-week that I would help him bleach his hair. I have never had my hair colored, so I don’t know exactly what goes on with the coloring and the foil and Vince had set up the whole thing without much warning for me, so I just had to wing it. I usually like to do a bit more research, like 15-20 minutes of youtube research, but he was just like – let’s go! it’ll be OK. with various warnings of burning scalp, or breaking hair or whatever. I told Vince that I knew I wasn’t his first choice for this hair procedure (he confirmed that I wasn’t his first choice), but that I was honored that I wasn’t the last choice, which logically would have been Jeremy. But Vince laughed and said that he would rank me higher than all of his male friends.

My personality is suited to quarantine. I don’t mind being at home. I find my natural sleep schedule is 10 pm – 6:45 am. This is how much I want to sleep. In real life, I’m almost always an hour less than this. I’m not counting this as real life. Though I’m sleeping through the night, I’m having vivid, scary hospital dreams, so can tell I’m not quite right.

So I’ve used PPE many times in the past, most often for contact or contact plus isolation (which is just gown/gloves no mask) and sometimes for droplet (flu) and sometimes for airborne (TB). Remember HIV is just standard precautions (gloves only), though when I’m doing anything with ostomy bags or feeding tubes or wounds and HIV, I do dress all the way up with mask and gown – though technically you don’t need to. Sometimes the contact precautions are overkill for history of various antibiotic resistant bacteria, but no active infection in the patient. I will admit to being cavalier with PPE in the past, just ripping the gown off willy-nilly and shoving it with a bare hand into an overflowing trash can full of used gowns. Forgetting for hours that I’m wearing a mask that I’ve pulled down off my face from the front with an ungloved hand and is now residing like a necklace around my neck. I’ve been reviewing the proper procedure for removing all this crap which is the most critical part. You think you are done and are tired and want to get out of the room, but not contaminating yourself with the contaminated crap is hard to do. I think the most most important parts are to keep your hands clean (I have a problem with this) and to not touch your face (I have less of a problem with this). I have excellent, professional level seamstresses making me a bunch of face masks and scrub caps.

Jeremy spends his workday with Edda and finally yesterday, he had to barricade himself with his desk and the dog crate so Edda wouldn’t come over every five minutes and hit him on the head. We had the first of many (I suppose) meetings with Edda’s special ed team via video. Jeremy is on top of this – he’s been practicing Edda’s fork skills with her. I have no patience for any of this. Jeremy’s approach is soothing to me – he’s relaxed and matter-of-fact and makes forward progress in a steady, gentle manner. I want to set goals with strict timelines and then get discouraged when I meet none of the goals.

I was helping with dinner last night when I told Jeremy that I thought I should make a homemade face mask with the pattern published in the NYT. He immediately said that he would LOVE a homemade facemask and then I asked him why he didn’t ask me to sew one earlier. He said that if he had asked for one outright, I would have gotten annoyed at him and rebelled by silently refusing to make any masks. I think his assessment was correct. Anyways I’d resisted making a handmade mask even though I sew quilts all the time because I think quiltmaking is just 2D and not 3D which is the skill that is required for a mask. I don’t follow patterns like for clothes, I don’t do curves. I just sew in straight lines. But then Jeremy looked at me and was like – if you ranked everyone in the house in sewing ability, I think you’d outstripped the rest of us by a couple orders of magnitude. He offered to bathe Edda in exchange for time for me to make a mask. The mask was not straightforward, it was a little complicated for people who don’t really know how to sew. Anyways, it turned out mediocre. But serviceable in a pandemic.

Vince is back in classes – kind of. He’s got a couple of zoom classes a day. He’s spending his time trying to teach himself chemistry. I’m a bit embarrassed that I’ve forgotten a lot of high school chemistry, he comes and asks questions and then I google it. And then we find a youtube video and learn it all again together.

About 4 hours after I wrote the last post, I was like, omg that was too dramatic. Like you are really going to die and that you’ll never see your family again. Get a grip on yourself. It’s fine! I’m fine! Everything is fine! Haha. No, no really. I did feel much better in the afternoon after keening around all morning. I’m not an ED nurse, I’m not an ICU nurse (though I probably will float there soon). I probably won’t get sick. If I get sick, it’ll probably be fine. Anyways. What is there to do? Nothing except wash my hands. (And sew a mask. Maybe I should sew a mask today. There are instructions on how to do it in the f*ing NYT today. It’s a crazy crafting newspaper now.) Though I do pause at the nursing crisis contract I posted yesterday. It’s 21 days on and 2 days off which is insane. And you can have no scheduling requests which means that they’ll switch you nights and days with only 24 hours rest in the middle which they perhaps will count as one of your days off. There is no question you will get sick doing that amount of work even without covid.

Now that we have no more physical childcare left, Jeremy moved his home office into Edda’s bedroom where occasionally she does things like try to eat Jeremy’s hair. Though managing her is easier in her room than in the first floor space because she can’t ask to have a snack every 30 minutes.

Funny filters on my serious husband. I think Jeremy comes off as a kind of aloof, serious guy to people who know him at work – but really, he’s a kind goofball.

So there are only a few videos I can watch these days. I’ve reverted to reading children’s books – you know like Stuart Little and Trumpet of the Swan. I kind of refuse to watch the weird tiger thing everyone is watching now.

All of our cooking shows are moving home and making coffee:

I’m also enjoying episodes of Star Trek: TNG which brings back fond, fond memories of college and also it is so soothing. Competent leadership in the face of danger. I love it.