It was a Friday afternoon, April 10th, when our dishwasher started making a weird whining noise.
I had originally planned to take the day off for a salon appointment, but the pandemic changed my plans to just staying at home instead of working from home. Aaron was about to go play video games with our son, and I’d been about to either clean my desk or weed the garden, when we started up the dishwasher and it made that funky noise.
We thought it was clogged. So we spent some two hours cleaning it, dismantling it (with help from YouTube), running it, dismantling it AGAIN… Once we realized that it was draining just fine, and that it wasn’t clogged at all, we resigned ourselves to calling in a professional.
No worries, right? Just call a plumber. No, wait, an appliance repair place.
Except that our go-to repair place was closed for COVID-19.
So was almost every other appliance repair place in town, except for one that would come out for “essential” appliance repairs only: refrigerator, freezer, washing machine, furnace, etc.
After four weeks of washing our dishes by hand, we called up our favorite appliance repair service on the day they reopened. They got us an appointment for the next day, at which we got the news that our dishwasher not only needed a new motor, but it was leaking into our subfloor and down into the basement. (Luckily, nothing got ruined.)
Today, after yet another week of waiting (and washing by hand), the repairman installed the replacement parts, and at least one aspect of our lives is now back to normal.
How did we live in our last house for nine years without a dishwasher? #firstworldproblems
Funny how I’ve slowly joined the throng of bloggers who don’t really blog anymore. My husband jokes that he knows something’s bothering me when he reads about it on my blog (and I’m pretty sure he’s the only person who reads it if I don’t cross-post to Facebook).
It didn’t used to be like that. Before I had other responsibilities (e.g. parenting), I would blog almost daily. Granted, that was also before everyone had smartphones and was online, so it was pretty much an entirely different world. Back then, I wrote about my life in the kind of excruciating detail you’d share in person over coffee or other adult beverages. Nowadays, I think twice (or even three times) before posting any Personally Identifiable Information, even though my blog is set to have search engines ignore it.
It also doesn’t help that I accidentally nuked all of my (incorrectly-applied) WordPress theme customizations recently, and that I completely forgot how I tweaked my photo editing workflow on desktop for dealing with the Apple-specific HEIC image files that Photoshop won’t open. Oh, and I’ve been using my widescreen monitor as a second display for my work laptop, but plugging that HDMI cable back into my tower is a royal pain in the butt. (Luckily, I have an HDMI switchbox arriving next week that will solve that annoyance.)
I know that a regular brain dump is vital to my mental health. I know this, yet other things keep taking precedence. Hobbies like gardening or sewing used to be the main culprit, but now that I’ve been stuck at home for the past two months*, other responsibilities and tasks are more immediate. Our dishwasher broke at the very beginning of “coronavirus season,” as my son calls it, so a non-trivial amount of time goes toward washing dishes lately (split between myself and Aaron). I spend some time planning my workday and Connor’s remote school day. I spend 15 minutes outside weeding while Connor watches his evening TV. Once Connor goes to bed at night, my brain is pretty much done. I might do some reading, or watch Netflix with Aaron when he’s not working, or watch YouTube by myself if he’s at work, or play Spider Solitaire on my phone — something sufficiently mindless to wind down for the day.
If I were the avid journal-writer I used to be, this would be the perfect opportunity to capture what life is like during this Very Unusual Time. Granted, I do still write a snippet every night before bed in the Exist app, so I at least have a brief snapshot of each day.
…As interesting as THAT might be. eyeroll
We have at least four more weeks of the stay-at-home order here in Ohio. School will be remote for the remainder of the school year (ending May 28 for our district), and I’ll be continuing to work from home for that time. It remains to be seen what kind of daytime options Connor will have this summer, but I’ve signed him up for four weeks of Cub Day Camp and one week of science camp so far. If I need to work from home during the times when we don’t have anywhere for him to go, I think my boss will be amenable to me working from home, now that we have the infrastructure (and company-wide precedent) for that sort of thing.
I do have to say that Springtime is probably one of the best times to be working from home, though. I can watch my favorite part of the year as the greenery pops up and the first blooms open ALL DAY LONG, not just briefly before and after work and on the weekends. (I feel bad for Aaron and Connor, though, who are both dealing with major seasonal allergies. Spring is NOT Aaron’s favorite season, for sure.)
* deep breath *
OK, brain dump successful.
I’m going to make writing in general a priority for the coming weeks. I’ve made it a priority to spend at least 15 minutes outside every day (I’m totally solar-powered), so perhaps making this a secondary priority will add to the mental health boost I so desperately need during this time of extreme weirdness.
Being a non-religious sort, and not having many local family members to gather together, we rarely do anything special for Easter Sunday. We decorate eggs, and the Easter Bunny shows up and leaves Connor some sort of something, but this socially-distanced Easter wasn’t much different from other years, except that we didn’t go out to lunch with my brother-in-law.
Connor and I decorated some eggs on Saturday. He was proud of his basketball egg, and was aghast when he learned that the decorated eggs get eaten eventually, just like normal hard-boiled eggs. Contemplating getting some non-edible craft eggs for decorating next year.
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When Connor saw this photo on my phone after the fact, I had to admit that I had snuck downstairs after the Easter Bunny came so that I could snap a picture.
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Connor has been wanting Metroid Prime for a Very Long Time; now that he has it and has gotten used to the first-person thing, his favorite part is the multiplayer Deathmatch.
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One of Connor’s other favorite video game franchises is Kirby. He’s been drawing likenesses of the round pink title character since he was in preschool. So, he was pretty stoked about this Waddle-Dee character from the Kirby games in a super-soft bunny costume.
Connor seemed genuinely impressed and surprised that I knew enough Japanese to read part of Waddle-Dee’s tag. I got through “a-ni-ma-ru” before I threw in the towel and fired up Google Translate:
Those who can read katakana will note (as I did) that it actually says “wa-do-ru-ji” and not “wa-di-ji” as Google seems to think. Honestly, though, that’s pretty darn close, and I wish we’d had this kind of real-time almost-translation when we visited Tokyo over a decade ago.
As Easters go, this one may end up being more memorable than most, just because of the circumstances surrounding it. Connor certainly enjoyed his presents from the Easter Bunny, and has been enjoying his jellybeans and robin’s eggs and peanut butter eggs (and still has some left!), and that’s really what matters to us.
I kept telling people that life was starting to feel like the opening chapters of a sci-fi novel. Schools closed, businesses closed, and “social distancing” becoming the new catch phrase. Shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer due to hoarding and panic.
This isn’t fiction. It’s reality. This was our local supermarket on March 15.
The days have gone by faster than I expected, and time has gotten away from me before I could properly blog/journal everything that’s going on. Luckily, i’ve been micro-journaling in the Exist app every night before bed, so I have a sort of timeline of the major takeaways of each day.
