You're Doing It Wrong

Last Friday was our first time to leave the house in a couple of weeks. We had grocery shopping, an errand, and a Dad delivery.

Since the fridge was mostly empty, I completely cleaned it out — checking all of the condiments and rarely used items. I emptied the shelves in the door and scrubbed them clean. I pulled out the produce drawers and wiped them out.

It was shiny and beautiful.

But then —

I was rearranging items on the top shelf and in my gleeful reverie, flipped over a full deli container of olives.

Olive juice splashed everywhere and olives and juice dripped down on every shelf and into every drawer.

Oh poo! I said. (Kidding. I said a creative variety of many, many, many, bad words.)

Bob helped me take EVERYTHING back out of the fridge including the shelves themselves and we team-worked that thing clean again. Then we did our shopping and we’re good for at least another few of weeks.

Bob and I moved in together in March of 1996. Who knows math? Is that 24 years?

And today, for the first time in our relationship, we cleaned house together. He has no excuse to get out.

We are hanging in. Working from home is going okay. Bob finished grading last week and he’s on spring break.

We eat lunch and dinner together and mostly cook here and get takeout a couple times a week to support our local businesses.

Yesterday we watched Parasite which we had mixed feelings about — too much to articulate at the moment. It is definitely worth seeing.

I wanted to watch something light before bed and after scrolling through a jillion possibilities, I ended up starting the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, which is the best Pride and Prejudice. It almost seems like now there are so many choices of things on TV, it’s too hard to pick something. I don’t want to waste my time on anything I’m ambivalent about

And with the current state of the world, I’m having a hard time getting into new shows and I don’t want anything that’s too big of a bummer.

The flowers look amazing. I hope all the people getting out and walking their dogs are saying the same thing.

If you’re running out of things to do, I recommend drawing with Lynda Barry. First person cooking with Kenji is fun, too.

At the first match the family sitting in front of us brought in their own food.

They ate little tangerines, raisins, and trail mix.

At the half every one of them disappeared and came back with pizza, hot dogs, and hot chocolate. They also left every scrap of garbage under their seats.

I get bringing in food if you must because you want healthier choices. But I thought it was pretty funny that they used it as an appetizer until they could dig into the real stuff.

It’s like when you bring a lunch to work and it’s: carrot sticks and fruit and turkey on whole wheat. Then you eat it by 10am and go out at noon and get a meatball sandwich and chips.

I spotted a tulip out front when I got home yesterday.

Last night when we finished with the DVR but before we turned off the TV, we caught part of a documentary about the band Genesis (They’ve been around forever but were especially popular in the early 80s). This was not one of my favorite bands or even a band I cared much about and honestly, if you’d mentioned the documentary earlier I would have expressed exactly zero interest in seeing it. But we were mesmerized. The show brought together the main band members and interviewed them in the present together with lots of clips from the past. It was really well done and you could still get a whiff of bitterness among some of them. hehe.

I found a bunch of bulbs that I stuck back in a corner and missed planting last fall. Last weekend I had a few spare moments so I put them in pots thinking I might still have a change to enjoy them.

Then this. Raccoons are jerks.

I can’t seem to get ahead. It seems like every time I turn around there’s something else that’s not working right that needs my attention and is more demanding that expected.

Right now my email doesn’t work right. I’ve spent 2 days trying to troubleshoot it and getting help that tells me to do exactly what my email to support said I tried and didn’t work and then referring me to a URL for more information — the same URL that I told support I was using to try to troubleshoot the problem.

And support signs off with “let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help.” But you didn’t help yet. Now they want me to talk to the Mac geniuses — and when I follow the Mac genius instructions it tells me to talk to my webhosting.

I don’t have time to get to it today which means I probably won’t have time until next weekend. It’s a vicious cycle.

Here is Kyla Ross is our boss. My favorite NCAA gymnast is a senior now so this was my last chance to see her in person. Both teams were fantastic. It was a super fun meet. Jade Carey is supposed to join Oregon State next year. You don’t know that name now but you will know it after the Olympics — if that even happens. sigh.

Colleague went to Hawaii and asked for inventory on our snack cupboard. We have a whole other box of macadamia candies because brace face here can’t eat them. But the cookies were running low. He brought back a giant box of these fancy cookies plus a Girl Scout snack pack so snack cupboard is stocked again.

Portland Meadows is finished. According to the Internet it opened in 1946. I went there twice. Once I saw Chuck Berry and the Grateful Dead. (They played separately.) The other time I went to bet on the Kentucky Derby. As I recall, everything was on screens. There weren’t any in person horse or dog races. But it’s hard to remember.

A couple of days ago I looked out the window from the laundry room and saw something weird in the flower bed.

I ran out and saw a dirty bandana. I figured it must be from a pet that wandered through and I could deal with it later. I had this great idea that I would put it out front and maybe the person whose pet lost a bandana would see it and be grateful to have it back.

I don’t know why I care so much about this strange bandana. Why is someone’s pet in my backyard? It’s just a bandana. People who put bandanas on pets must expect to lose a few. Regardless, I wanted to do the neighborly thing.

Sorry these photos are so awful. I took them from the bus. Even though I never went there and don’t care about horse racing, I still feel bad that it’s gone. I’m not sure of the exact plans but some sort of warehouses.

This morning I looked out the window in the laundry room and the bandana was gone.

I doubt a person hunted around and came into my backyard to find a lost bandana.

But it seems weird that an animal would come by and grab it. “Oh look, my lost bandana.” We have raccoons and opossum that wander through our yard. Would they have grabbed a bandana for their secret stash? It’s a mystery.