covid notes 36

OK, here’s something. In the midst of getting some of these house projects done in June, I did my annual window washing/blind dusting, which longtime readers of Route 153 know is a BIG DEAL in this house of 30+ windows and doors. It’s a task that takes a few days, and sometimes those few days have many days between them. There’s a part of me that enjoys it, oddly, but this year I think I enjoyed it more than usual, and I suspect it was because it felt like something normal and ritualistic in the face of all the abnormal.

 

Given that I do this only once a year, I’m sure it’s impossible for anyone to ever tell that I’ve done it at all. But I know.

covid notes 35

I realize that some of these covid posts are tedious and whiny. These days everything has an odd shadow cast over it. Everything is harder, more complicated. Things aren’t working the way they should—or in some cases, maybe just not the way they used to, and there’s a learning curve. Medical issues are harder to deal with. Grocery shopping is more complicated. There are many things that simply seem too hard to acquire. The U.S. postal service isn’t working as well as it used to, and neither is FedEx or UPS. Things we order get delivered to people who are not us, and then we need to somehow prove that we did not receive them. Awhile back, for example, I ordered a dozen bottles of a salad dressing I used to buy through my now-likely-defunct buying club. They were shipped (from California, it turned out, which horrified me) and then stalled there. Eventually I got word that they had been delivered, but they hadn’t been. I went to the post office, and apparently the shipment had been signed for, but it wasn’t there. So where was it? It had been delivered to the elementary school, it would appear, because why wouldn’t it be? I can’t recall how they figured that out, but if it weren’t for a woman with a cell phone in line behind me who knew some custodial staff there and called them, and if I hadn’t driven to the school myself, I would never have gotten that case of salad dressing with—yes, you guessed it—four of the dozen bottles broken. Which led to more phone calls and refunds. See? I can’t even apologize for getting whiny without eventually going off on a rant.

covid notes 34

When I had my annual ob/gyn appointment last November, we needed to schedule a mammogram, but the year before, because I have dense breasts, my doctor scheduled both mammography and sonography as screens, but apparently no insurance company will pay for sonography as a screen, you have to see something suspicious on a mammogram, so I ended up paying for that out of pocket, and it was very expensive, so I wanted to figure out what I should do, because my doctor thinks mammography is not enough for me, but she said they were about to get a 3D machine, which is much better than 2D, so maybe I should just wait for the 3D machine, which would be there by the end of February, allegedly, but then, of course, with all the regular delays and then the covid delays, it wasn’t, and so when I went for my follow-up in June, I asked if I should just get a 2D or wait or what, because by now it had been 17 months since my last mammogram, and she said if I were her sister, she’d tell me to not wait, and she could send me to Dartmouth, which is a couple of hours away but is in their system, and I asked if there was anything closer, and I could in fact go to the hospital where I used to get my mammograms done, before I got in with this ob/gyn at long last, who wanted to keep all my records down by her, so we scheduled that, and the people there were lovely as always, and 3D felt just like 2D but with an extra D, and according to that screen, I’m good.

covid notes 33

An upside to unemployment is that when Thom (who helped us get our couch) came to barber the trees and clear out the brush from our backyard, Tim and I could work as the underlings, carting brush and limbs up the hill to dump into the truck, trip after trip, so he didn’t have to hire other help for that, and it saved us a little money. Similarly, when Paul came to touch up the paint job on the front of the garage, Tim could assist. Every little bit helps.

covid notes 32

June also brought with it Tim’s aching knee and more Friday telemedicine and a trip to the hospital where a clinic was set up to test for both covid and Lyme disease. He was, thank god, negative for covid, which we found out in a couple of days. By the next week’s end, the blood work revealed that he had anaplasmosis, another tickborne illness. It was what they’d suspected, and it was good that this was what he had, because they had started him immediately on the antibiotics for that—had it been Lyme, they would have had to switch his meds. Chances are he already had it at least a month. They’d suspected it or shingles when he’d called before (again on a Friday), but there was no visible sign of shingles, so they scheduled blood work. Over the weekend, the shingles broke out, so they quickly treated that and canceled the blood work, which, in retrospect, I’m pretty certain would have shown he had both things at once. The poor guy. He’s much better now.

covid notes 31

At March’s beginning, the dentist said that the hairline fracture we’d been watching on that back molar meant I should either replace the filling or get a crown and I decided on the crown because I had insurance and the procedure was scheduled for the 26th and then everything shut down, and the appointment was tentatively rescheduled once, maybe twice, and then they weren’t going to call again until the office was really open, and meanwhile Tim lost his job and I had to call the dentist and find out what happened if I lost my insurance, which was potentially complicated, but in the end I decided to pay for COBRA, which shockingly turned out to be my cheapest option, and the procedure happened on June 8, 13 weeks later, and he put the temporary crown on (with the help of his covid-terrified assistant), and the next day part of it broke off, and three days later the rest of it came off at my friend’s socially distant retirement party, so it may have been the most temporary crown of all time, and I went crownless for two more weeks, but then finally got the thing, some glittery gold in the back of my mouth.

covid notes 30

In April, a friend texted a photo of a couch she was getting rid of to a bunch of us neighborly gal pals.

 

Tim and I had a sleeper sofa we bought in the late 1980s—our first big furniture purchase. I loved it. But after thirty-plus years, it was worn out, and so are we. We need a little more support for these aging bodies when we relax in front of the TV.

 

Ours was queen sized with a Sealy mattress and iron supports. It was a heavy motherfucker.

 

We had been wanting to replace our sofa, but I didn’t want to order anything without sitting in it first, and so nothing was happening. Shopping out here in the boonies had not produced good results.

 

So we asked to see our friends’ sofa. It’s not what we’d choose if we were out in the world, but it seemed like it would work really well, and it was a lot lighter and firmer than what we had. They were getting a new living room setup but had room in their garage to keep the old sofa until we figured out how to get rid of ours and how to get theirs moved to our house.

 

During a pandemic.

 

First, I checked with friends, one at a time. This took a few weeks, as people considered and one by one said no. My (former) housekeeper had a lead, who called me, but she hadn’t given him enough important information (it’s a sleeper! you have to move it yourself!), and he wasn’t interested after all.

 

Because of the pandemic, I had wanted to avoid online marketplace stuff, not really into the idea of letting strangers into my house. But time was passing, and I was feeling guilty about the time passing. So I posted our couch. Free, but it needed to be picked up. We couldn’t help.

 

I got a bite pretty quickly, but it was from someone who needed a lot of hand holding, asking where I lived and asking, when I told her, Where is that? I wasn’t sure that someone unable to find my town on her computer was my best bet. When I told her how far I was from another town, she dropped out of the running, living as far away as she did, but why she was on my local marketplace at all is a mystery.

 

More days went by. I was getting discouraged. I didn’t want to take my beloved, but worn, couch to the dump, where I would have to pay cash money for its immediate demise (by law they couldn’t let someone else have it, apparently).

 

Then, on Memorial Day, I get a message: Is this still available? Yes. I could come get it today. Really? Where are you? He was 10 minutes away, the next town over.

 

Within the half hour, a strapping young (to me) man and his two equally strapping friends were pulling their pickup truck into my driveway. They lifted that sofa like it was nothing, and it just fit the bed of the truck.

 

And just like that, it was gone.

 

My across-the-street friend Thom has a small box truck?/cube van? and was willing to help us. So at last, we called our friends, and we picked up the couch. More than five weeks after they offered it to us.

 

We have nice friends.

covid notes 29

Sometime in May, the bookstore opened its doors again: masking and social distancing required, number of customers limited, the one-way path through the store defined. You’d think I would want to get there for the books, but my desire was more spec-ific: readers. My presbyopic eyes have been getting worse and worse. The bookstore had better-looking readers to purchase than the ones in the grocery store. But truth be told, I was afraid to try them on in the grocery store. So many people touching them. So I waited.

 

By the time the bookstore opened, I was desperate.

 

Of course it was also risky for me to be trying on readers in the bookstore, and it was risky for those after me trying on the ones I did not purchase. (I do not claim to be logical or consistent. At the time, though, foot traffic had been much lighter at the closed-for-weeks bookstore.)

 

And what a relief for a couple more pairs! (I am wearing one right now.) I could use a pair for each room in the house, of course. I am becoming that person.

covid notes 28

What happened in May? That was years ago now. I see scrawled notes, that Tuesdays and Fridays seemed the hardest, for whatever reasons. May 1, a Friday, I note “rock bottom day.” Depression? Exhaustion? Too many negatives, not enough hope.

 

It snowed on May 9. Then by month’s end, it was summer hot, with a major thunderstorm and power outage.

 

Midmonth, Tim was diagnosed with what turned out to be a (very mild) case (thank god) of shingles. The nurse, via telemed set-up, asked whether he’d been under any unusual stress lately. Why, yes.

 

Some socially distanced happy houring began. All outside. The measure of distancing was likely inconsistent.

 

A teacher friend decided to retire after all, not teach one more year—the one thing she could control.

 

We sat in our backyard one Saturday and participated in a bird count. We went birding as much as we could, because May is when you see them, before they all go quiet and the trees leaf out. I added 45 species to my 2020 list.

 

On one jaunt, we met four interesting birders (one a herpetologist) and tagged along with them, which was an adventurous and wonderful decision.

 

I Zoomed meetings, yoga classes, and a blogger meet up, remeeting Dona (whose birthday is today—happy birthday, Cedar Waxwing!) and meeting Bridgett, Linda, and Maureen for the first time.

 

I have to look at my calendar to distinguish the months and the memories, to remember what happened when. It’s all running together.

covid notes 27

The Moth event that was moved from May 8 to October 6 has been postponed to “sometime in 2021.” I’d been wondering when the concert that had been moved from April 19 to August 1 to September 10 was going to reschedule again, because surely, they would. But when I went to file the Moth paperwork, I looked at that last concert announcement again, and they had in fact scheduled it for September 10 in 2021, not 2020. Duh. That makes more sense. Of course, that’s the same weekend as my rescheduled high school reunion, so I will either be attending one or the other or—quite possibly—neither.