Feng Shui or Marie Kondo?

Funny how being mostly confined to your house gives you a lot of time on your hands. After over a month of familial isolation, I think I’m finally getting used to what will likely be my existence for up to another year; maybe more. The reason I expect it to take that long for me to feel comfortable going to the gym or eating out at restaurants has to do with my vulnerability to this virus. I will be 73 in a little over a month. I have type II diabetes, essential hypertension, stage 2 kidney disease, and mild COPD. All of these health issues are normally well-controlled but, with COVID-19 that quite likely won’t matter. Ergo, great caution is warranted, IMO.

So . . . what am I doing with that time? Well, it generally doesn’t feel like much, though I do spend a lot more time planning our grocery shopping. I would prefer to have our groceries delivered, but nobody was doing a very good job of it for the first few weeks of this social isolation effort. At first, I went online and spent anywhere from a half hour to forty-five minutes carefully choosing what I wanted to have delivered, only to discover when attempting to check out that there were no times available. Frustrating! That’s beginning to change and I’ve been able to successfully get a couple of deliveries. This necessarily includes several disconnects (for instance, I had coffee from Trader Joe’s delivered but forgot to ask the woman who did the shopping to grind it for us.) Also, nobody picks fruit and some other things the way I do, and we normally shop from a half-dozen different stores depending on what it is we’re purchasing. That’s no longer possible for now.

I also find I’m spending a fair amount of time helping my 16-year-old with her homework, some of which requires a significant investment of time. Today I learned (or re-learned) a lot of stuff about the difference between Napoleonic warfare and WWI warfare, so I could help her answer questions about them. I don’t think I’m capable of helping her with her algebra homework. Although I was in one of the first classes in the Los Angeles Unified School District allowed to take Algebra in the second semester of eighth grade (in 1961) I don’t remember a damned thing about it and I don’t recognize anything when I look at the equations she has to work with. Frankly, I’m not relishing revisiting high school; it was a disaster when I was a student from 1962 to 1966 (one extra semester as a result of cutting far too many classes.)

Now, the point of this post isn’t to regale you on all the ways in which I’m coping—or not—with this pandemic lock-down. I just want to share something I found while straightening out some of the clutter in my office. This “Birthday” card, homemade by my brother’s daughters almost 28 years ago, was in a bag with old photos, etc. I decided to scan it and I’ve share it on Facebook. I want to share it here as well. It warms my heart. My nieces were four and seven at the time.