Covid, the Garden & the Little Cloud

More than a week ago, I tested positive for covid. I've finished both my five days of isolation and five days wearing a mask out and about. This week, I get to go back to the office to work. Today is the first day I've had a normal amount of energy.

I don't know if I had classic symptoms of covid or not, but I woke up coughing one night. I was feeling a little tired the days before, but I figured I was short on sleep and had a few glasses of wine with dinner. I even googled "covid versus hangover." The third day was unambiguous: I felt like shit. I could still smell and taste food, but I had a runny nose and I was really tired. I went to an urgent care clinic and I got the anti-viral medication, which was wonderful. After I started taking the Paxlovid, I felt so much better. I was sleeping a lot, but other than that, I felt okay. The weird thing about being isolated while having covid was I wasn't doing anything, so I couldn't gauge my energy level.

Day 8, I started to lose my mind. I hadn't seen anyone other than strangers I'd run into on the street. Pedro came over for dinner on Thursday. He was the first human I had regular contact with in person in more than a week. It was so nice. He did all of the talking because I didn't have much to contribute because I haven't done anything other than watch "My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," "The Adam Project" starring Ryan Reynolds and "Operation Mincemeat" starring Colin Firth on Netflix and read "Trust" by Hernan Diaz. 

This weekend, I was still technically on the bench according to the CDC, even though according to Jack, my likelihood of being contagious was extremely low. Nevertheless, I live in Seattle and people fret a lot about covid here. I know people who have long-covid as well, one in their twenties. 

I was listening to a friend's covid experience. She got tired of reading books and watching movies. I started to think, "What can I do? What are all of my options? Surely there is more to do than stream television shows and read."

This spring has been miserable, rainy and cold. I've delayed working on planters on my balcony and patio. I decided to the garden store, get some new geraniums and fertilizer, and work on the garden. The garden store is outside, and I could easily socially distance. I wore a mask the whole time I was shopping, which was weird because I was one of the few. People must have thought I was a germaphobe, or at least I hope they did. I am not sure how many thought I was bouncing back from having the virus myself. 

I got my plants yesterday, and today I weeded and added compost to my containers. I am probably the only person in downtown Seattle who composts leaves and other plant debris. It was a perfect and lovely solo activity while I was on the upswing. I feel like I have my energy back.

The best thing about having covid is I am done with it. I feel free, like I can fully carry on with my life without worry and stress. I was getting back to lots of normal things, like traveling, going back to work and eating in restaurants, but there was always a little cloud of fear hanging over me. 

That little cloud is gone, and it feels so nice.

Decaf Mocha, Quaffle, or Breaking Alert -- Happiness Found in Food!

Quaffle? Isn't that something out of Harry Potter? Some quidditch thing?

Hmmm.

I am not sure but I had one for breakfast today. A new coffee shop Anchorhead opened across the street from the condo. There was a "Coffee" flag outside the door where a Tully's used to be. Since it is my personal mission to keep coffee shops alive during COVID (and sometimes baristas are the only people I see during the week), I have been bouncing around to all of the coffee shops in my neighborhood within a three block radius. Plus I had some insomnia last night and needed some caffeine to get through the day.

At one point, I had thought of creating a blog called "Decaf Mocha" where I would visit a different coffee shop, have a mocha, and post about it. That would have been much more exciting to share pictures of coffee in a ceramic mug at a nice table instead of a paper to-go cup, which is what I am stuck with now in COVID.

So what is a quaffle? I walked into this newly opened coffee shop at eight a.m. and my nose lead the way. I smelled a delicious baked good. I am trying the Keto diet where I am cutting down on carbs and sugar so I can hopefully avoid putting on more quarantine weight. At the same time, I am watching "The Great British Baking Show" which is a show dedicated to the many ways can people prepare flour, sugar, butter and salt with extra flavors.

The barista/owner said the aroma was a quaffle, a waffle made out of croissant dough with cinnamon.

After trying to avoid the smell smoke all weekend, the quaffle smelled lovely, but I had no intentions of getting food. I was at the coffee shop purely for caffeine. I was planning to go home and makes eggs for breakfast I swear to god. I got the quaffle, hoping it would be terrible and that I would never want another one ever again, that my quasi-Keto diet had cured me of carbs forever.

But no.

The quaffle was awesome. It was a slice of sunshine and bliss in the middle of this smoke and COVID shitshow.  It was truly amazing and why hadn't anyone thought to do this before? It was getting a little depressed this weekend as the only thing to do in COVID time is GO OUTSIDE AND NOW WE CAN'T EVEN DO THAT? C'MON!!!! WTF? AARRRGGHHH!!!!

And then a very good friend who is young and idealistic beautifully said, "You know I feel kind bad sitting in my apartment working while the world literally burns. I feel like I should be doing something."

Nothing like a healthy dose of perspective to get me out of my self-induced pity-party. It is really icky and gross in Seattle, but how are these people in Portland surviving? And then I flip through my weather app, checking the air quality of other cities and I am jealous. Until like two days ago, I didn't even know there was an air quality index on my weather app. London is 2. New York is 21. San Francisco is 13. "Air Quality" is below "Visibility" and "UV Index," which I didn't know where there either. In Seattle we are holding tight at 269: Very Unhealthy.

I don't know if I would have tried the quaffle today if I hadn't been so depressed this weekend. I don't know if I would have enjoyed it so much if I hadn't been locked inside and needed something to cheer me up. But I am grateful for how much joy it has brought me today.

"Bitch, Please!"

I was talking to the Boy about COVID. He told me he had seen something on the internet about people bemoaning that they hadn't seen their friends for two and a half months.

"Bitch, please!" he said. "I haven't seen my friends for eleven and a half months and I can't contact them by text or phone or anything."

Yeah.

COVID is my Wilderness

Last summer, the Boy spent three months in the wilderness. He and a group of ten boys had to cook all of their meals over a fire they started. There were no haircuts. No showers except maybe a dip in a pond, stream or river. They lost track of time as they had no clocks and no calendars. No porcelain. A vast majority of them abruptly left home and did not get a chance to say goodbye to their friends.

In the wilderness, the Boy learned to build a fire from sticks. He learned to make a backpack out of a tarp and nylon rope. He learned to cook.

He learned to feel his feelings and speak up and meditate and listen.

COVID is my wilderness.

I haven't seen my friends in months. I have had to cook all of my meals. My hair is long. I've lost track of time.

I have learned to feel my feelings and speak up and meditate and listen.

I have learned to be comfortable with my own thoughts. I have learned to pause, to be a better listener. I've learned to stop spinning and getting worked up. I have learned when I get frustrated to let go instead of squeezing tight. I have learned to let go instead of giving up, instead of staying "Screw it" or "I don't care."

I am feeling a quietness inside that I haven't felt in a very long time, perhaps ever. I asked a friend "What is the difference between peaceful and numb?" I couldn't tell where I was at because I have never felt this way before. Was it peace or was I numb?

"Numb is when you avoid or ignore your feelings. Peace is when you have feelings but they don't control you."

The Boy called me on Mother's Day.

He was calm and quiet. "I really don't have much to say," he said.

For my family, not needing to talk is a miracle. His mind wasn't racing, he wasn't on edge. He just was. He seemed peaceful, not numb.

It was good.

Obituaries and 61,000

I have been best trying to figure out how to consume the massive amounts of COVID news without it sending me into a massive depression. Sometimes I skip the news. Other times, I try to read something funny, like an article on how to dress on a Zoom date during the pandemic. Hint: wear pants.

Sixty-one thousand Americans have died from the corona virus. In two months. And this is very likely underestimated due to people who died who were not tested.

This seems to be a jolting number, like now this is getting real. Why is 61K a shocking number to me? Maybe in my mind I had the number of opioid deaths a year (2018) in the U.S. in the back of my mind: 67,300. Why do I consider opioids and not cancer or heart disease? Opioid deaths to me seem senseless and deeply preventable, and therefore extremely tragic.

I've been reading obituaries, mainly because there are so many, and there isn't much else in the newspaper with less arts, sports, and non-COVID news. While it is sad when people die, it is interesting to read about their lives. Some died from COVID, others did not. Here are three that struck me recently. I am sure there will be more.

Bernard Gersten worked on Broadway at the Public Theater with the famous Joseph Papp. Gersten was the nice, quiet guy who cleaned up many of the confrontational messes left by the hot-headed Papp. At the Public Theater, Gersten dealt with accounting, advertising and agents, things the creative Mr. Papp didn't like. Behind a great but difficult man was a mensch who made it possible for the first man to succeed.

Cesar Quirumbay was a men's tailor who worked for Leonard Logsdail in New York. Mr. Quirumbay made custom suits for the wealthy and the powerful. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1998 from Ecuador. He was married and had five children.

Irrfan Khan was a Bollywood actor who was in a few big Hollywood movies. The only movie I've seen with him was The Lunchbox which one of my colleagues from India recommended. (I recommend it, too.) I couldn't finish watching Slumdog Millionaire because I thought it was too sad, but Dev Patel is adorable.

Reading these, I think of what these people have accomplished, but more importantly it makes me think about how I want to spend whatever remaining time I have left. And it isn't so much about what I want to accomplish or what I want in my obituary. I have finally realized this is my time, and only my time. I have to decide how to spend it. I can fill it with angst, regret and resentments, or peace, love and serenity.

It isn't a hard choice.

The Roaring Twenties, Sparkle! and Word of the Day: Hero-Genius

When I was in high school, we never learned about the 1918 Flu. We learned about World War I, Prohibition, and the Roaring Twenties, but not about the pandemic.

Which got me thinking: what will we have to look forward to when this crisis is over? Will we have a period of paranoia and fear, or will people cut loose and live for today, just like a flapper?

I am voting for flappers. I am hoping our desire to connect and be part of something larger will override our (legitimate) fears and anxieties about this illness. While I am still in favor of an abundance of caution, I hope that when this is over we all will realize how much we have missed having fun, and how much we took for granted. The other day, I got carry-out dinner from the Old Stove Brewery at Pike Place Market, which was a post-work stomping ground with amazing views of Elliott Bay. (Did I say amazing? I meant spectacular. And I can't find a picture on my phone to prove it but trust me.) I texted my friends to say how much I missed happy hours at Old Stove.

"The things we took for granted!" my friend Anderson texted back. I am looking forward to when the Twenties will roar. By that I mean

• Going out dancing 
• Going to concerts where musicians play live music 
• Going to restaurants and hanging out and laughing with friends 
• Hiking in parks, picnicking with friends
• and my favorite -- Traveling!

I suppose I am warming up for the Roaring Twenties with my exciting choice of nail polish:

GLITTER!

The patio of my condo. Not a beach in New Zealand.

The last time I had Ruby Slipper sparkle toes was when I was in New Zealand. This weekend, I dug into Claire-Adele's old nail polish collection. I've never had the guts to wear glitter on my finger nails until social distancing became a thing. I never would have worn silver glitter -- the peer pressure to look normal would have been to great. Thanks to social distancing, I have no peers and therefore no peer pressure making me conform.

Speaking of New Zealand, the country was on the front page of the New York Times for flattening the curve into oblivion. Go Kiwis! Nevermind the country has three million people in a place the size of California. They were built for social distancing! But still, congrats New Zealand! (I missed this story -- Jacinda Ardern said that the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy were essential workers. She is awesome! I want to be her when I grow up. Except I am older than her, but whatever.)

Speaking of curve flattening, let's give a special shout out to our own local "Hero-Geniuses" here in Seattle: Dow Constantine, Dr. Francis Riedo, Dr. Jeff Duchin and Kathy Lofy. Like the New York Times, the New Yorker had an article about how Seattle is doing a fine job at social distancing and flattening the Corona curve. The article talks the healthcare professionals who were alumni of the EIS, or the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and who persuaded King County Executive Dow Constantine how to manage the COVID crisis. First, Constantine let the health officials dictate what to say. They recommended social distancing, and Constantine thought "How can I make this not seem so bad?" The approach was planned to be gradual--in other words, baby steps. Constantine asked Microsoft executives to have their work force stay home, and they did. Amazon followed. Instead of public health officials screaming "The sky is falling!" the government asked Microsoft and Amazon to do it, and it worked! (In fairness to Microsoft and Amazon, they likely did not want their massive work forces to fall ill.) After two tech giants closed, schools followed. Then the government closed restaurants and put in the stay-at-home order. By time the stay-at-home order came out, people were already staying home. The goal wasn't to declare an edict--the goal was to change behavior.

It worked.

Introverted Extrovert, Mars and Boredom

I went most of the week without seeing another person except for baristas. Baristas are people, of course, but I stand six to ten feet away in an empty coffee shop and chat for as long as it takes them to make my decaf mocha.

I miss people.

When I was in college, I took the Myers-Briggs test and I landed in the middle equally between being an introvert and an extrovert. I am either an introverted extrovert or an extroverted introvert. I mentioned this in a meeting last night and I one of the woman in the group laughed in recognition. I am content doing solitary activities like reading, writing my blog, painting my office, quilting, biking, hiking, etc. I enjoy my own company, to a point, and then I need to be around people before I start going batshit* crazy.

I was talking to the Boy the other day. His life in boarding school in Montana has been minimally impacted. As his school is a residential treatment center, it is considered an essential service, like a nursing home. The only change in the school's routine has been washing hands more often and weekend passes. Instead of going into town, the kids are allowed to go fly fishing.

Fly fishing. In Montana. Poor baby.

(See: The River Runs Though It by Norman Maclean which takes place in Montana. First line: "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.")

The Boy said he is sorry he is missing the stay-at-home order, practiced by most countries in the world except North Dakota. (Montana has some of the most rigorous social distancing rules.) Twenty years from now when people talk about the pandemic, the Boy will have to tell people he was in boarding school and nothing was really different.

"I'd be good at the stay-at-home order," he said.

Yeah.

The Boy was great at social distancing, which is how he ended up in boarding school. It isn't natural or normal to spend six months laying in bed looking at a smart phone and watching Netflix, and then sneaking out in the middle of the night to ride a bike or skateboard all over town. I had my son committed to a mental health facility for the very thing everyone in the world is doing now. Ironically, he's out of the house and the rest of the world is locked inside.

Perhaps the Boy would be an ideal candidate to go on a mission to Mars, along with my friend Anderson, who also suffers from anxiety and depression. Both are wicked smart and could figure out all of the technical challenges of running a spaceship, yet at the same time would be well suited to sit and stream Breaking Bad six times in a row. The art of television and film would feed them as they blasted through space. The Boy might also need a virtual ski machine, which would be cool. Anderson could play virtual cricket.

Which brings me to boredom. Boredom--its a good thing if played right. The most legendary act of boredom was J.K. Rowling's train ride which led her to create Harry Potter. How many insights can we find when we have nothing to do?

* Bat bites are one of the theories of how COVID-19 started, right? Appropriate, then, that I am going batshit crazy.

The Camping Philosophy, Corona and Collective Grief

When I was growing up, my family went camping almost every weekend in the spring, summer and fall. We had a pop-up camper and my dad would drive from suburban Chicago to some small town in southern Wisconsin for the weekend. Sometimes we would go with other families in the neighborhood, other times it would be just the four of us and Clancy, our dog.

One thing I learned early on was the camping philosophy: when it is raining, everyone is wet so don't complain.

Does this apply to the pandemic? Who is allowed to complain? Everyone? No one? Is there a magical order of who gets to complain the most? Here is what I propose:

1. People who are sick and/or are dying of corona and are suffering alone.

These people get their own group, especially all of the people who died without their family present. 

Next...

1. Healthcare workers who are risking their own heath by caring for people with corona
2. People who lost their jobs because of social distancing requirements
3. People who should have been lost their jobs but didn't because their governor didn't implement social distancing so 640 out of 3,700 people at the meat packing plant where they work got corona and then their workplace became the current corona hotspot in the U.S.. Did I mention the factory is staffed with refugees who left war-torn countries where working in a plague ridden meat packing plant is better than their previous life?
4. People who have essential jobs--like grocery store worker, police officers and fire fighters--who  keep the world running in spite of the pandemic.
5. People who have to work from home (#me).

Am I allowed to complain even though I am at the bottom of the chain of misery?

Last night I was talking to some friends when I said "Maybe something good will come out of this, yet I can't wait to get back to normal life." As soon as I said that, I immediately regretted it. People are dying and others are losing their jobs. What good could come out of this?

Yet...maybe there could be something good. Maybe my working from home saved ten lives. Just me. Maybe collectively everyone who works from home in Seattle saved 10,000 lives. We might have reduced the burden on the healthcare system by a factor of ten. Governor Inslee sent back the mobile military hospital set up at CenturyLink field due to lack of need. Yay work-from-home workers! Seriously.

Tonight I was talking to my piano teacher and she said that her friend recommended treating this pandemic like it is an artist-in-residency program, which is interesting. While neither Karen or I will help make a vaccine, we might as well make the best of this time at home instead of freaking out. (We decided this after we spent an hour discussing how stressed we were, so I am not sure how successful we will be...)

Everyone is going through their own unique level of stress about the virus. I read a blog post about people who are not completely freaked out by the pandemic. People who recently had gone through another crisis were some of the least impacted. This aligned with a social media post from therapeutic boarding school mom: "I am not melting down as much as I thought I would about this pandemic. Am I normal? Am I the only one?" 

Nope, replied the crowd of families with kids in residential treatment.

A pandemic where you get to stay home and watch Netflix is relatively easy compared to taking care of teenager who has gone off the rails and you worry every night if they are going to die from drunk driving or are so depressed they might kill themselves. Nevertheless, the pandemic is still a crisis (when is a pandemic not a crisis?), even to those of us who have already been through a lot.

Which brings me to another point: I have gone through a decent amount of personal crises. I had a baby who died, my brother has schizophrenia, I tore my ACL (small potatoes, really), and my son is in residential treatment for anxiety and depression. Yet, each of those was more or less an individual or personal crisis. I had stable, grounded friends who weren't going through a crisis at the same time who could support me.

The pandemic is different: we all are going through this together. Everyone. Everyone's life has been disrupted, impacted. Our friends who we normally turn to are also suffering. We can't hug our friends. We can't go to lunch. We can't relax at dinner or at a movie, concert, play or ballet. Even my friends who are home with their family are struggling. I've spent hours on the phone with my dear friend Leslie. She is an effervescent sales woman stuck at home with her husband, three sons, and no nanny. When I talk to her, and I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous line from No Exit: L'enfer, c'est les autres, or in English, "Hell is other people."

We are stuck.

I was reading the newspaper and I read an article by David Brooks. He asked readers about their mental states. He didn't know what to expect, "maybe some jaunty stories about families pulling together," like The Brady Bunch had a corona episode. What he got was gut-wrenching, like reading about widowed senior citizens isolated because their family doesn't want to contaminate them.

What I liked best about the article was the end: "I’m reminded that this is a time to practice aggressive friendship with each other — to be the one who seeks out the lonely and the troubled."

This is interesting advice, but aren't all of us in this pandemic lonely and troubled? Who isn't? Just like when rains when camping, everyone is wet. Maybe Brooks advice should be the other way around: Are you lonely and troubled? Practice aggressive friendship with each other. 

The Before Times & The New Yorker

During a conference call this morning when it wasn't my turn to talk, I went downstairs to my kitchen and cleaned up some clutter. In a stack of stuff, I found an unread copy of the New Yorker from the middle of February, which means it was probably written at the end of January and early February before COVID-19 was discovered in the U.S.

Oh, how much our world has changed since then! When I flipped through the magazine, I noticed two things:

1. Things that changed
2. Things that knowing what we know now, seem very eerie.

Travel

First, there was still travel and cruise ships, as evidenced by the ad on the inside cover, to Italy, no less! The eerie part is this trip happens to skip Lombardi in northern Italy. Did they know?

In this travel article, The Transformative Twenties, an interviewee attempts to name this decade less than two months in and before corona virus hits.

Restaurants

Movies in Theaters
Not just Netflix...

"Her activities revolve around her home life..." I have more than enough of my home life. I think I can skip this one.


Performing and Fine Arts
There used to be plays and ballet and art exhibits.

Investing in the Stock Market

Surprise! Your portfolio will lose 25% of its value! In a week!

Paper Books

Volcanoes are for pussies.

(Okay, maybe not. Yeah, Corona isn't as bad as Vesuvius. Or the London Blitz.)

I think I'll skip Black Cathedral about the "temple of end times."

Now for the eerie and the weird...

Valentine's gifts for flu season, or Corona season? Purell, a biohazard suit and roses with a description of how they smell?

Weeks before a deadly virus comes to the US, Shouts & Murmurs is about a will?

Here are some of interesting cartoons where I've added a second caption.

This will never happen again: people riding on the subway and getting close to each other. "No, after you..."

After being quarantined with your "loved one."

Because there are no restaurants...

Yeah.

Sharing food from the same plate? Never again!

At least they are six feet away...

Waiting for Corona?

Before I get to the best cartoon, here are two happy/funny things:

Gotta love jewelry. Portable wealth, good for the end of times.

And the grand winner...

"How to Do Nothing" and Goals

In the "Before Covid-19 Times," I bought How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. I was hoping to read it to gain insights on how I could become less busy, obsessed, stressed out, etc. Now I am reading it with a different intention: how to actually do nothing, how to survive without all of those things I had before, like seeing friends, running errands, going out to dinner.

What is doing nothing, according to Odell, an artist?

"We still recognize that much of what gives one's life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the 'off time' that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.

"The first half of 'doing nothing' is disengaging from the attention economy. The other half is reengaging with something else."

Beautiful. I love it.

Odell continues: "That 'something else' is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention."

Now that we all live in the time of social distancing, it doesn't mean we need to be isolated. We still can connect, and we can connect with the person that is very likely the scariest to many of us: ourselves.

I love jigsaw puzzles, but I used to view them as a waste of time, even though they gave me peace and serenity. They give me a chance to turn off my thinking brain and my heart, and give them both a rest while I am awake. I need to give myself permission to solve jigsaw puzzles if only because I love them.

I also love quilting. I am going to make a new quilt that I can use to cover myself in the evenings when I sit outside on the condo balcony. Here is the pattern design and the fabric. My Aunt Pat helped me decide on fabric and pattern.

The goal is to have the quilt remind me of a waterfall or a river.

I am also going to read. As much as I love all of these introspective, self-help books, I am also going to read fiction. This is a book about a man who is held prisoner in a hotel in Moscow years ago, which could be interesting...

Or, I can read this, an epic fantasy...

I can dig a little deeper into my piano lessons, and practice more often and with more intention.

I can enjoy the market, mostly all to myself. In February, I had friends visit from California and we went to the Market. Before they arrived, I wanted to go to the Biscuit Bitch for breakfast but there was a line outside the shop. When my friends arrived, the market was insanely busy for February. At the time, I was annoyed at both. Why are there so many people here? Now, I long for that busy day, and wait for the market to become alive again.

FTS, Rest, and Behind the Mask

I was talking to my friend Ellen the other day on the phone. The weather was beautiful for Seattle -- sunny and warm. I was sitting on my balcony and she was taking a walk. We were talking about how we have been cooped up, and how the spring weather was such a very nice change.

"When are people going to say FTS?" Ellen said. "People can only be housebound for so long before they start going crazy and need to go on a picnic with all of their friends."

Even the most civic minded of us can find ourselves wanting to "Fly! Be free!" It was relatively easy to be housebound in March, when it is cold and dreary. April? Stay inside when the weather is starting to get nice and pleasant for being outside? Fuck that shit.

Thursday* night, I was picking up a carry-out dinner from the Old Stove Brewing, a place in Pike Place Market that I used to go for happy hour after work. The beer is good and the view is breath-taking. The restaurant overlooks the Puget Sound and with a view of our Ferris wheel and the Olympic Mountains.

Thursday night was perfect weather, and the place was naturally and tragically empty.

Even though I am ready to say FTS to this "stay-at-home" order, I will comply, albeit begrudgingly. I don't want our hospitals overburdened or people to die before their time.

I wonder if the stay-at-home order has made people overall healthier, if this period of extra rest has made everyone's life less taxing and stressful, and therefore more healthy.**  Generic influenza and rhinovirus (aka common cold) rates have gone done, but has the extra resting and decrease of the busyness of life made those who have a sub-clinical or surreptitious case of COVID not become actively ill from it? Maybe because for the past month we weren't running errands, going to work, exercising at my gym, going to restaurants and not getting enough sleep all increased our resilience and made it easier for our bodies to fight the virus that it might have been harboring? Just a thought.

I made my own mask and have been wearing it in public. I went on an epic adventure yesterday to Pike Place Market to buy fruit, vegetables, meat, milk and bread, and then on to Metropolitan Market to buy Triscuits, cocoa powder and garlic paste (which I could not find.) Most of the vendors at Pike Place Market were wearing masks or scarves. Since I have lived downtown, I see the same people over and over at the market, and I realized that I miss seeing people smile. Likewise, they can't tell if I am smiling. The good news is that can't tell that I am not wearing make-up or if I've brushed my teeth. They can't tell if I've gained weight and it is all riding under my chin. Throw on a pair of sunglasses and a baseball hat with the mask, and I look like Jennifer Aniston.

"But Lauren, you look nothing like Jennifer Aniston..."

I know, but with a mask, sunglasses and a hat, you can't tell.

* Or was it Wednesday? Tuesday? Seriously, I have no idea what day it was.

** For some people, living with their family and only their family could be more stressful, not less.

Kitchen, Car & Blade

I have been thinking about how my life has been impacted over the past year, since the Boy has been in treatment and before, and what that looks like now. Since Jack and I have decided on a plan for next year for the Boy, and I am feeling relaxed, like I was holding my breath for a year and a half and now I can release. Now I need to heal, recover from the past crazy, tumultuous, eventful year.

Las year, I was so focused on getting the Boy help, everything else went to the wayside, but what does that mean? What is everything? What is wayside?

Imagine you are cooking a meal, a complicated meal with several of courses for a dozen people using recipes you have never used before in a kitchen that is not your own. And you have a deadline. You need to get the food on the table by a certain time. So you fly through the kitchen. During normal meal prep, I put dirty dishes in the dishwasher as I go along. I don't do all of the dishes while I cook, but if I have the choice between putting them in the sink or the dishwasher, I put them in the dishwasher. Likewise, when I am done using the milk or butter, I'll put the remaining back in the fridge. This meal, I don't do any of that. The dishes are all in the sink. The milk is on the counter. I am burning some of the food, and I don't have time to clean the pan, so the next dish I cook in the pan had burned bits on it.

With the Boy doing better in boarding and we have a plan for next year, it is as if the food is on the table and people are enjoying their meal. Dinner isn't done, but we are most of the way there and the hard part of getting the food out is finished.

Now I have to clean up the mess I made while I was cooking, and it isn't pretty.

Here is another analogy. My friend Sarah races her Porsche at a track in south King County. When she drives, she focuses on the road. She doesn't glance down to look at the speedometer. I imagine myself driving a race car last year. I was going so fast I could not take my eyes off the road. My friends sat next to me and would help me navigate and avoid obstacles. Since I didn't know the route, I made a few wrong turns and hit few bumps. More than once, I scraped the side of the car against other cars. Now that the race is over, I am getting out of the car and assessing the damage. The doors are banged up. I have a cut on my head from when I hit the rear view mirror. I am still trying to figure out the damage to the inside of the car: Did I ruin the alignment? Did the car leak oil while I was driving it? I have no idea what happened, but I know something is wrong. The car needs a long while in the shop before it can drive again.

Third analogy comes from a movie I saw at the Fine Arts Theatre in Chicago years ago. It was an independent film about an African American family. I can't remember the plot of the movie, but I remember the pivotal scene. The matriarch is standing between her two grown sons who are arguing. One pulls a knife on the other, and the mother steps between them to stop the fight. The camera pulls away, and the mom's hand is bleeding. She grabbed the knife. She grabbed the blade so her one son wouldn't stab the other.

While Jack and the Boy were going around in circles, I metaphorically grabbed the blade. I got between the two of them, stopped the insanity, and got the Boy in treatment. This is not to make me look like a hero--hardly. (What is a hero, anyway?) Like that mom, I did want needed to be done to take care of my son, even if I got injured in the process.

Remote Life Reality & Data

Data first today. I was thinking about COVID, because, like that is all there is to think about when that is the reason we are stuck at home 24/7.

Every morning -- and several times a day -- I check the NYT to see the daily death toll to see how the corona virus is impacting our country and the world. I not only check the data, I take a screenshot and save it to my phone so I can compare different points in time. This chart is from this morning. Almost 10K deaths, up from 2K deaths last Monday morning.

This is a mistake, not only because it is depressing, but because I am looking at the wrong data. What we need to look are these datasets, in this order:

• Number of confirmed cases
• Number of confirmed cases who are ill
• Number of confirmed cases who are hospitalized
• Number of confirmed cases who are in the ICU
• Number of confirmed cases who died
• Number of unconfirmed cases with respiratory distress in the ICU in places where there isn't testing
• Number of unconfirmed cases who died in places where there isn't testing

Life in northern Italy was a shitshow before the death toll started racking up. Let's all of those doctors and nurses and EMTs did a great job of saving people and no one died, the IMPACT of the disease was to the medical system that could barely handle those cases and other people with other illnesses who did not get help because the medical workers were swamped with COVID.

On to Remote Life Realities. I've been on a lot on Zoom meetings this past week and weekend. I sit and the counter in my kitchen and this is the view from my laptop (more or less) because my head is in the middle of the screen.

It looks nice, right? A fireplace, a mantle, pictures of my kids, a nice vase my neighbor got me for my birthday last year, a bookshelf, etc. "Wow, that is a nice place and she is so tidy." Also, the lighting from this spot is AMAZING. I look fantastic, if I do say so myself, especially compared to other places in my condo.

This is what I look at:

In short, piles of crap.

Companies are making working remotely a thing. Rumor has it West Elm is selling Zoom backdrops with their furniture to make it look like you live in a stylish space. I bought the Boy a few shirts for his birthday from this site that has a "Cozy at Home" section and "Remote Life Bundles" where you can get a 25% discount with code HITMUTE. They pair t-shirts with underpants. #awesome

Stephen Colbert had an awesome video of his reveal of whether or not to wear a suit on his home television show. Yeah. I'll let you Google it. 

And I finally figured out why I am not a big fan of working from home. I was a stay-at-home mom for a million years before I went back to the paid workforce. You know those recurring dreams I have where I am in high school or college and I find myself taking an exam for a class I never attended because I didn't check my schedule and I missed that I had signed up for "The History of Women's Roles in the Middle Ages" or whatever? I am afraid that I might wake up and forget that I have a job and then spend all morning writing my blog or quilting and then go "Oh shit! I have a job!"

Speaking of which, I gotta run.

I Miss You

If you are reading this, please know that I miss you. If you are not reading this, please know that I miss you, too.

To the baristas at the coffee shops, I miss you.

To the people on the bus (when I used to ride the bus), I miss you. Sometimes I'd talk to neighbors. Sometimes I'd talk to strangers who then became friends.

I miss my neighbors. I miss stopping to talk to people when I walk Fox.

I miss seeing my co-workers. I miss going to coffee and going to lunch. I miss sitting next to them in meetings and reading body language.

I miss meeting people after work for a beer.

I miss meeting people for dinner.

I miss yoga classes, Zumba classes, any classes.

I miss walking with my friends to walk Green Lake or to get coffee with my old friends, with my new friends.

I miss you.

Yesterday & Andrew

Yesterday morning, I woke up and went outside on my patio downtown.

There I smelled Seattle, the beautiful, sweet smell of cedar.

The first time I landed in Seattle, I smelled the trees. It is a unique smell lovely bouquet that has become such a part of me that I don't even notice it anymore. Somehow, that scent has become the scent of home.

Maybe because so few cars have driven anywhere in the past few weeks, our air has become cleaner and the scent sneaks through.

Then I got my newspaper. The headline quoted the President as saying the next two weeks are going to be rough.

I cried.

I worry about everything.

I worry about Jack and his job in healthcare in the pediatric ICU. There are very few COVID cases in children, but he might get called up to take care of adults. Interestingly, his patient load is smaller right now because the hospital stopped all non-essential treatments, but the only patients in the hospital are the truly ill and complicated, people who are alive in spite of their millions of medical challenges. The healthcare community can keep these people alive which is miraculous, but doctors and nurses are knocked out by a new virus.

Last night, I told Claire-Adele I was depressed after reading the news. "Then don't read the news!" she said. "Why are you doing this?" says my news junkie daughter.

This morning, I watched Gov. Andrew Cuomo's press conference while I finishing off the last of a giant pan of bread pudding I made a few days ago with stale bread, a half dozen eggs, chocolate and cranberries. I friend of mine commented that she was going to gain the "COVID-19" which I am hoping to avoid but not really because bread pudding is good. There is comfort food, and then there is cranberry and chocolate bread pudding. Here is the recipe. I used a baguette or Italian bread instead of croissants, FYI. This shit is to die for. Okay, bad metaphor for these times but this is so delicious.

Back to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He is more spectacular than my bread pudding. I cried watching his press conference. He is more spectacular than my bread pudding. It was so beautiful I watched it twice today. Listening to him talk, I got chills. I felt like it was eighty years ago and I was listening to FDR on the wireless discuss the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I have a masters degree in communication where I studied crisis communication and Cuomo's speech is brilliant. He strikes a lovely balance between dread and hope. The State of New York isn't planning towards the worse case scenarios because they can't even imagine how they would achieve that. Cuomo talks about the anxiety, the unknown, the isolation that is brought up from this virus. I bought a condo downtown so I could be close to the pulse and heartbeat of the city, and now that is gone. Cuomo gets that. He is upfront about what he doesn't know, but I have the strongest sense that this guy is doing what he believes what needs to be done.

What else is awesome?

1. Data! As bad as COVID is medically, it is a fascinating math and modeling problem. Cuomo uses and understands his data. Math is getting its moment in the sun. Let no student in a math class ever ask again "When will I use this?" When the world is nearly coming to an end and you need to figure out a way to stop it. Math needs a commercial. "Math. It is not just for nerds anymore."
2. Charts! He has nice PowerPoint slides.
3. The deeply endearing brotherly bond between Chris and Andrew Cuomo. Their mother must be proud.
4. Italians! Go Cuomo and Fauci! I never really thought of myself as having ethnic pride because I feel like such an American, but I'll claim Cuomo and Fauci.
5. Finally, leadership. Cuomo is taking charge as if he were the parental figure for all of his constituents and it is his job to take care of everyone. It is inspiring.

I was Right!, Bow Down and a Very Dark Thought

I was right! The corona virus data from China is wrong! I knew it! All of my years of looking at data and looking for trends proved me right! And a whole bunch of other people, too, as the New York Times reported this morning:

China Created a Fail-Safe System to Track Contagions. It Failed.

"After doctors in Wuhan began treating clusters of patients stricken with a mysterious pneumonia in December, the reporting was supposed to have been automatic. Instead, hospitals deferred to local health officials who, over a political aversion to sharing bad news, withheld information about cases from the national reporting system — keeping Beijing in the dark and delaying the response.

The central health authorities first learned about the outbreak not from the reporting system but after unknown whistle-blowers leaked two internal documents online."

In short, the doctors reported the data to local officials who were (my wording) afraid to share the data with the Chinese government because it wasn't good news. Also, the situation had to be worse than the data suggests. A country of 1.4 billion people does not go into lock down because a few hundred people  died in a few weeks. This article looks at the outbreak--I am more concerned about the follow-up: If we can't trust the data in the early stages, how can we trust their data that the cases have miraculously dried up, when Italy, Spain and the US are seeing far more cases and a greater rate of death for those who tested positive?

From March 16, 2020

From March 30, 2020

I know COVID was in China since December, and I know they had a major lock-down, but how could have had so few cases when the rest of the world was ramping up? Did it really die down that fast? I can't believe that their numbers would stall so dramatically. I hope to god I am wrong.

In less depressing news...the State of Washington is kicking ass! Bow Down!

1. Social Distancing works! Boo-yah! Washington's spread of COVID is slowing. Maybe some it is because Seattleites aren't the most warm and welcoming...

Since college basketball is offline due to the virus, maybe we need brackets to track the virus by state? The winning state will be the one who has the lowest rates of infection and death. I think Ohio will win because their governor shut down the whole state the first time someone sneezed. Tell Urban Meyer to lead the cause and they have to beat Michigan and watch the Buckeye State have the least amount of illness in the world.

2. Congrats to Mercer Island High School student Avi Schiffmann for making the COVID-19 tracking website ncov2019.live.

3. Dr. Helen Chu is another amazing Washingtonian. She was the first to discover COVID-19 in the U.S.

While Washington is my adopted home, I have to give a shout out to my fellow NU alums who are keeping us entertained during this epic crisis. What a Herculean task to find humor in this challenging time where the best thing most of us can do to help is nothing. Yay Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyer, with a special cheer for Julia-Louis Dreyfus who appeared on Jimmy Kimmel. (I think Jimmy Kimmel has a massive crush on JLD based on this interview. He looks like a love-struck schoolboy, bless his heart.) I also nominate Trevor Noah to be an honorary Northwestern Alum. I love his interview with Dr. Tony Fauci.

Here is my dark thought: the major impact of Corona on Seattle is suppose to start around April 7.

Which means there are a whole bunch of people walking around around right now feeling fine who in a week will find themselves very, very ill. Some will not recover.

"Jesus, Lauren. That is really, really dark. Why are you sharing this? I am going to stop reading your blog!" is what I thought to myself.

But isn't that life? We don't know what is around the corner. It could be love. It could be death. We don't know and there are some many things over which we have no control. I guess the best I have is eat like you are going to live forever (that body has to last a long time) and love like you are going to die tomorrow.