Living Through History, Part IV

Okay, so I disappeared. The clouds parted and the darkness lifted and ... well, I got back to semi-regular life and the semi-regular things I used to do and didn't *need* to blog anymore for my well-being.

However. It doesn't do us much good to document history if we don't ... document it? ... then, does it? So, here we are. A few weeks later. An update.

My nails look like they did in the 8th grade.  Sad, jagged, and poorly polished by yours truly.  But honestly, I don't really care that much about what they look like, contrary to what I'm sure people assume, given that I have had acrylics permanently for the last 12-ish years.  It's actually not for the looks at all. In fact, sometimes I think they're prissy and annoying, and they impede on life quite a bit. But I have them because of my terrible skin -- the thickness of the acrylic nails keeps me from scratching tears and holes in my sad eczema skin.  I'm honestly a little nervous, now that I've taken them all off, what the state of my skin is going to be in a couple of weeks. The painting of them today was also not even about aesthetics; it was about making them more sturdy.  Post nail-removal real nails are super thin, and if you've never experienced the odd and almost-painful sensation of a nail folding backwards when doing something as simple as scratching  your arm, then ... well, you're not missing out AT ALL.  But I hate that sensation, so I'm hoping that keeping my nails polished with a few coats with thicken them up a little bit and stop that from happening. *fingers crossed.*

Also, I had forgotten how stinky drug store nail polish is, and how hard it is to paint your dominant hand with your non-dominant hand. Why do we do this?

Of course, not everything is sunshine and roses. I'm still incredibly fearful and anxious about the idea of going outside/in public again until it's deemed scientifically safe.  This is a disease I do. not. want. to contract and the idea of even going back to school this school year has me anxious and filled with dread. I'm thankful for grocery delivery and I've been tipping HUGELY because I'm so grateful for the people willing to do it, and I've even been writing them thank you cards and leaving them on my porch. That's making it possible for me to stay home and keep my vector -- and Jack's -- from going anywhere.

Second on the list of nighttime and weeds, our water heater busted and leaked pretty much all 40 gallons of itself into the floor of my garage. Thankfully, not too much was in the path of the water as it ran down to the driveway, but now I'm a little concerned that some of the carpeting that's out there (we have some patches of cheap 'frat carpet' as I call it under where we do laundry and under dad's workbench) will get stinky and gross before it has a chance to fully dry out. But I think we got most of the things on the floor of the garage out of harm's way.  And in order to make way for the repair people to get to the water heater spot through the garage and limiting their entry into the house, we had to move a significant amount of crap into our living room.  Granted, we haven't spent any time in our living room during almost the entirety of the lockdown: Jack works in the office and then we have dinner in the kitchen and then we retreat to our bedroom. I spend the day at my desk that's in my bedroom now, or sitting up in my bed (because it's Very Fancy and inclines like a hospital bed so it's like having a couch). But even if we wanted to now, we couldn't, because it's full of junk.  (Anyone need set of golf clubs that haven't been used in the amount of time that Miss Kaylee has been alive?) I guess my project in the next couple of days will be to move all that stuff back and really think about how to put it back, now that I have a chance to do some rearranging.

Oh, and the other drag of the water heater debacle is that our stupid not-cute-old-just-sad-old house (built in 1983) is woefully run-down and showing its age, and the water heater set up was no exception. When the first set of repair dudes appeared bright and early on Saturday morning to install a shiny new tank water heater, they had barely cleared the threshold of the garage before they were basically like, "Oh, yeah, no, there's no way we can do this installation. This whole situation is horribly out of code compliance" and after some discussions with dad via speaker phone, no new water heater was installed.  Basically, the spot where the water heater goes is too small for the modern water heaters, and whoever installed the last one vented it completely wrong (apparently) and it was dangerous and impossible to put a new tank there. (Though for the record: the only thing they were impressed with was the length of time our good ol' newly-dead water heater lasted: it was installed in 1998 and we got like 12 extra years out of it...)

But anyway... we were left with a handful of options, each kinda more ridiculous and/or more expensive than the other: a) hire a handyman who could just install a new tank purchased at Home Depot or whatever and maintain the janky illegal set up, no questions asked (... not ideal ...) b) potentially hire like a proper contractor and have that entire corner of the garage reconfigured to accommodate a modern water heater (for the record, this option was never actually discussed out loud, but it was something that occurred to me...) or c) go with the tankless water heater option, which is twice the money up front. Ultimately, we went with Option C. They're meant to last almost twice as long as a standard tank heater, but they're twice as much upfront. But again, between mom and dad and me and Jack, pooling our money together, it was really the only viable option, all things considered. Now, we have a SUPER FANCY water warming robot hanging on the wall in the garage, in the exact location of the old one, and the water temps are almost exactly the same as the old one (my shower knob position remained EXACTLY the same, which I'm very VERY happy about). And potentially we'll save a tiny bit of money on our SDG&E bill, but that might be slightly negligible because our water heater is on the gas line and that's usually a pretty small portion of our bill anyway.

I guess that's really it on the doom and gloom stuff.  The Big Picture fear stuff, and then the more specific inconvenience of having no hot water for five nights. Which, to be honest, wasn't that big of a deal precisely because we can't leave the house. Jack and I talked about this at lunch today. He had been thinking that this was The Worst Time Ever to have the hot water go out, and I said that while I get that from a global perspective of everything being terrible and this just added to it, on the other hand, at least we actually didn't have to go anywhere and interact with humans or the nature or anything else that would have introduced dirt or germs or whatnot on our bodies, and having to deal with either cold showers or lugging hot water upstairs to clean ourselves. We basically just ... sat around ... for five days, and so we weren't really that stinky or gross. Jack hadn't shaved so he was scruffy, and my hair was pretty greasy, but now my clean hair feels AMAZING because it got a break, and Jack's skin is all smooth because it got to rest awhile between shaves.

I'm all about finding the silver linings, and considering how our lives are going to change for good after this.  And I don't mean the consequences of the pandemic; that's a given, and something that makes me a little freaked out to think about (especially in the context of my job...) but I'm more thinking about what Jack and I are learning during our time at home, rattling around in our house 24 hours a day and trying to keep up fed. Here are the main things I feel like we've learned and behaviors that I think might be permanent:

1. Better food management and portion control. Pre-pandemic, I made and served us pretty big portions. I'm usually pretty hungry when I get home from work, and we eat too much for dinner and I use a lot of materials for those meals.  Now, I'm looking more critically at how much I need for each meal because I'm trying to conserve what I can, if it's a recipe that doesn't require a specific amount of things.  For example, tonight I made fajitas, and I use a bottled sauce I really like. Typically, I would use about half the bottle for a single fajita meal. But I don't think I have another bottle in the pantry (and of course, once I'm out, I'm just going to look up a recipe for the spices online; I probably have everything I need). So, tonight, I used the bottle that was in the fridge, but just used a LOT less of it. And honestly, it was the same as if I had used half the bottle. Now that I know this, this is how I'm going to proceed.  Plus, we're just generally eating less for meals but also I'm eating better lunches because I'm home and I can.

2. Eating at the kitchen table.  This might sound like a no-brainer, but for almost the entirety of our relationship, Jack and I have eaten meals -- breakfast on weekends and all dinners -- on the couch in front of the coffee table, watching TV.  But as I said before, we haven't spent any time in the living room because we've been eating at the kitchen table.  Previously, the kitchen table was often an extra storage location, but when I needed a workspace (before the great desk migration two weeks ago) we cleared it off and discovered it was great for having our shared lunches together, and it is actually a LOT easier to prep and cook and serve dinner when it only has to go to the kitchen table. Who knew?!

3. Having lunch together.  Well, we're not going to have much control over this one, actually, once one or both of us have to actually go back to work physically, but having lunch every day with each other is rad. We get to have a little mid-day check in with each other: he gets to decompress a little from work, I get to have some company and also decompress if necessary (I'm currently on Spring Break so it's different this week) and it's just a nice little time with just the two of us.

4. Keeping basics stocked.  I thought I was reasonably good at stocking basics like chicken broth and refried beans and tuna and all that shelf-stable canned stuff that lasts awhile, but it turns out I guess I'm not? So someday, when we go back to normal, and grocery stores have achieved some semblance of normal and people aren't panicking and buying everything on a shelf because they can, I want to properly stock a pantry with stuff that will last awhile, should it be necessary again. We're certainly getting by, and we've been eating pretty well, but it would be nice to have some of those staples more handy than they've been.

5. Jack is good in a crisis.  I kinda already knew this one,  but it always stuns me how calm he is. I get a little freaked and screechy, and though I can usually *eventually* flip into problem solving mode, it can take my brain a minute to readjust out of the panic mode.  Jack, on the other hand, very calmly takes stock of the situation (he'll move quickly if the situation necessitates it, like the time our freezer leaked all over the kitchen) but he assesses and mostly keeps ME calm while we manage the crisis. When I mentioned this to him tonight after dinner, he said mostly when it's an "us" crisis, he's able to stay calm because he knows between me, him, and my parents, we're financially able to fix just about anything.  We are super-de-duper lucky that this is the case, of course, and we know that, and the water heater situation proved that, in more ways than one.

6. My parents are the best.  Wait. I already knew this. But every new situation proves it. (Though I did plan on leveraging my cousin Christopher the home inspector if the handy man/continued lankiness option was the one being seriously considered. I was just gonna FaceTime him and show him the situation and have him inspector-shame Uncle Steve into a different choice. (And Jack and I were already financially prepared for the tankless option...) But that ended up not being necessary.

I think I'll end there, given that I have nothing but time and could ramble forever. I'll choose not to do that.  All in all, this is a weird time, but I'm trying to focus on the positives as much as I can and not get too tangled up in fear.

And I rediscovered my super old rubber stamps and the results are rad and some people are going to be very pleased in 2-3 days' time. ;)