That's My Bix!

Sundays blend into every other day. Is it like that for you too? We’ve tried to maintain somewhat of a similar Sunday plan of attack — well, not really attack, more like a roll over and surrender. The Before Time involved a trip to Starbucks, maybe a stop out for brunch, or a trip across town for the good bagel place, or a flagrant abuse of dietary nutrition and stopping at the patisserie for croissants and palmier. Now, not so much.

We have been enjoying our new coffee time on the couch, solving the New York Times crossword puzzle using its app. I’m starting to get the hang out of the logic — such that it is. Esteban and I both agree though that phrases are stupid, as are nonsensical abbreviations. Both of these things are kind of hard mode, since it removes one of the logical data points for the puzzle — the number of letters to solve it. We ended up googling one yesterday, because neither of us follow tennis. Basically if it’s not Venus Williams, Billie Jean King or maybe John McEnroe, I have no idea. Pete Sampras? Is that a guy? I don’t know and I certainly wouldn’t know Ilie Nastase if you put an infected COVID mask to my head.

We did make a Skype call to his parents, who are celebrating their 51st wedding anniversary. Last June, we took them to San Francisco and Napa to celebrate the big ‘un, and this time, they’re celebrating with sous vide lobster tails and steaks.

Our own anniversary is next month which means that our marriage will now be old enough to legally drink, but knowing us, our marriage has probably been sneaking into clubs since it was 12. Flagrant disregard for rules, this one. The real impressive date will be in July 2020, which will mark 30 years of the random blind date that launched a thousand plus weeks of making out with each other (I just did the math and apparently in July we will have been together for 1565 weeks or over 10,000 days).

Whoa. Seriously, blind dates, you guys. They totally work out sometimes.

Esteban has maintained a long-distance Dorkathalon, which meets through teleconferencing on Sunday afternoons and as such, it was never really impacted by the stay at home order. I had some long weird conversations using the Marco Polo app (I still hate looking at my own face while recording messages to my friends) and did laundry, but otherwise spent hours of Doom Scrolling on the internet — which I need to break my habit of doing, because it’s not good for any number of reasons, most of all my sleep happiness.

Ole has gotten keen to the bedtime ritual and now refuses to go into his off-bed sleep area. I let him sleep on the bed, and Esteban slept in the guest room, but at some point in the night he had my legs pinned down under the blankets, and I tried to extract myself and he growled and snarled at me. Avi, who had been asleep on the bed next to us, got up and immediately fled to the living room. What I should have done at that point was put him off the bed and point to his crate, but I am a lousy dog trainer at 2 am, so I just rolled over and went to sleep. Maybe I should sleep in the crate?

Today, I have a bunch of little nothing things to do, including the admin stuff for the Dearest Confinement Friend folks (sorry, it’s too late to sign up now), and doing a bunch of catch up for the class I’m taking, which meets this afternoon.

While my class happens, Esteban will make a run to pick up our grocery order, which we made this afternoon and already were able to get a pickup slot for it. I fear that this is another data point to suggest that the noise made by the Las Vegas mayor has had unfortunate side effects that people aren’t taking the pandemic seriously and are resuming a bit more normalcy despite the advisements of the health department and the governor. I can only shake my head. If ever there were a situation where caution and proactive preparation were key, it’s this one, which is literally life and death. Being reactive gets you in the situation where New York is now, which is over 16,000 deaths (combination of confirmed and presumed due to lack of tests). But this, like our love of zombie movies, speaks to our inherent belief that when the worst happens, that we will be among the survivors, unscathed and standing at the end.

That paradigm is exactly how you get a giant mob of zombies, my friends.

Right now, one of the things that is keeping me sane is knowing that at any point, I can just opt to eat queso dip and chips for lunch. Highly recommended coping strategy, dietary nutrition be damned.