Susan's Scribblings the Blog

I haven’t been able to sleep so well lately. When you wake up at 4:30 in the morning and realize you’re still lying in bed like a zombie when the local paper arrives outside at 5:45, you know it’s a problem.

The isolation issue really just started to kick in for me in the past couple of weeks. That’s because I have a pretty definite return to work date and my sixty projects are still in limbo. I have a pile of stuff to go through, plants to re-pot and a front yard needing tending to. On the other hand, I have managed to perfect my chocolate cake and have started working on vanilla, plus I have a great banana bread recipe to go to in a bind.

I hope binds don’t come up any time soon, because I already shared the banana bread with my neighbors, and I don’t want to bore them with more.

I also broke down and finally bought a microwave. It’s a 1000-watt behemoth taking up prime kitchen space, but it will help me once I begin my commute again. The frozen dinners don’t cook the same in a microwave as in a regular oven, but I have found it’s okay to sacrifice a soggy Hungry Man brownie if I manage to nab Mister Softee instead. I’ve yet to do a bag of popcorn, but I suppose that is part of the new microwave initiation process, so I’ll have to make a note to do that. Also need to remember where the popcorn aisle is.

In the past week I also got two new doormats, and consigned the old front doormat to the side door. The problem with doormats is not realizing how much gunk collects under them when you lift them up. The dust from that task, along with the time I took to fix a storm window and encountered more dust, got my allergies acted up something terrible. No matter what direction I swept in, the dust came back to get me. That’s what I get for trying to change something.

Meanwhile, the act of tidying up is troublesome, because no places are accepting plastic bags, shredded paper or clothes. What does de-cluttering produce? All of those. So now I have piles of organized stuff I can’t do anything with, probably until it’s time to return to work, at which time the places accepting these won’t be open outside normal work hours.

Last week I managed a Zoom style meeting with the supervisors, managers and senior staff at the office, but I realized to my horror that I had the only room in the group painted in a color other than white or beige. That was depressing: I’m out of date.

Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep: I need a makeover. I need to finish my projects and then re-paint a room.

I’ll just pop a melatonin.

Two steering wheel covers, that I had forgotten about buying, showed up in a pile of stuff I had to move the other day. I also discovered a bathroom mat set that I didn’t forget about buying, but I suppose my mother or father did; it was still in its department store bag.

Yes, I entered the forgotten pile of stuff portion of my staying at home. It ain’t pretty, but it had to be done.

An old sofa went out of the living room this past week, so I needed to bring the smaller love seat in to take its place. After a couple days of having an empty space waiting for the replacement, I could not stand it any longer. This meant clearing up some things which had gone forgotten in another room, where the love seat was. That is how I found the steering wheel covers and bath mat set, along with some cassette tapes I had been looking for and thought were possibly in the attic, a sweater I had misplaced, and a pile of shoes that never made it to the charity bin.

Hey, it was an empty flat space, so of course it filled up.

Once I cleared the love seat, I had to move it down two flights of stairs. I did have an offer from my friend to help me with this venture, but I found myself in that I-may-be-middle-aged-but-I-still-got-it-in-me stage of life in which I felt compelled to explore my physical boundaries, so I chose to do it myself. Alone.

I unscrewed the legs from under the thing and removed them after realizing the damage they could do by scraping the walls during the moving attempt, then removed the cushions and proceeded to slide the cumbersome thing down the stairs.

Then I got stuck.

For a few moments, I was pinned behind a massive love seat in the corner of the landing, and the darned thing wouldn’t budge. The headline in the local paper, dated a week later, came into my head: “Local Woman Found Dead Behind Furniture.” Fortunately, I was able to swivel it around and continue with the carnival ride.

I probably would’ve enjoyed sitting on top of the love seat to ride down, if I could be sure I would not get bucked off at the bottom, hit the wall and suffer massive bodily harm. The task took about fifteen minutes total, and since it was my lunch hour from work, I was starting to get hungry. I decided to wait and finish the job before eating, but did stop to drink some water. It was the best water I had consumed all week.

After the task of getting the love seat into position, I returned to the forgotten pile of stuff, which was a somewhat more organized lump, and shut the door to the room. For now. More days for organizing are coming, and I was exhausted.

And I took the steering wheel covers with me.

As for the mats, I followed up by mopping the bathroom floor, and the new items now grace the space. Better late than not at all.

The rest of the stuff isn’t going anywhere, but who knows what will turn up when I get started sorting through it. There is probably more to discover in that discarded mess than I can imagine. And I have a clean love seat waiting for me to take a nap when my task is completed.

I may be middle aged, but I still have a nap in me.

I was called a racist today, on social media. As you might suspect, this was in response to some angry posts about the recent events in Minneapolis, in which a black man was subjected to a slow death at the hands of a white police officer, while fellow officers and bystanders watched, recorded, or did nothing.

I will reprint my post here, and see what you think:

“Well, every suspect who flaunts the law with the “You can’t get me, copper, I have rights” story leads to incidents like this down the road. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to be a cop in the field, but I really believe there are more good cops–black and white–who deserve better pay and respect. The bad ones get theirs.”

In essence, I was boiling the idea down to something basic; if you approached a dog and it bit you once, and you approach a dog again and get bitten a second time, the third time you approach a dog you may be either scared or ticked off at being bitten. This is why some people kick dogs, and maybe why some cops go evil. Hate and fear are close bedfellows.

So when police officers are called in to deal with “the bad guys,” they have already been through days or weeks of unending psychological battering, and it’s hard to tell when the breaking point will, or may, come. Some officers suffer from insomnia, high blood pressure and PTSD, which may go un-diagnosed. Others may turn to overeating, drugs or alcohol, just like other stressed out employees in other jobs do. Some, unfortunately, go off and turn into the mighty enforcer, subduing all evil at any price.

Feelings of being helpless cause us to lash out or cower in the corner. Cops don’t get to cower. Citizens call the police when something comes up that they themselves can’t handle, but then people balk at how the cops do the handling. It’s easy to be a law enforcement instructor when you’re not the one doing the actual enforcement. Cops get called in on injuries, murders, abuse, and see blood and terrible scenes that are bad enough for the citizenry to see.

They’re supposed to take care of what we say we can’t.

I am not playing devil’s advocate for anybody who thinks it is okay to hurt another human being in any way (let alone kill them), but we all create the monsters in our lives by the same ignorance that is terrorizing Minneapolis this week, with burning down buildings (including one new business a local black man was preparing to launch when pandemic restrictions were lifted) and breaking into stores to loot.

Criminal brutality leads to police brutality, which circles back to criminal brutality.

Minneapolis is a wonderful place. I’ve been there a few times, and walked Uptown and in the city proper. I know the good guys outnumber the bad guys about one hundred to one. But wow, that one sure can stir up trouble.

Whether a twenty dollar bill that started the encounter at a store with the victim was counterfeit or not, who knew if he printed it or just came upon it by accident? Ideally the officers should probably have been able to confiscate the money and have it verified, then offer to return it if viable. Nobody needed to be choked to death between the ground and a cop’s kneeling knee.

But back to my allegedly being a racist. My first reaction was amazement. I never got that one before. Believe me, I was prime real estate for bullying in my day, so I’ve had some real classics hurled my way. And the reply went on anew, to tack on the opinion that I was always dumb in high school anyway. Nothing like a little nostalgia over 40 years later; yesterday’s bullies are today’s social know-it-all commentators.

For the record, I am not a discriminator of any kind, but I do like to believe that the best way to live harmoniously is to not look at what is different about us and concentrate on what we can do the same that benefits everybody. This might mean that, regardless of race, you will find law-abiding citizens and non-law-abiding citizens, good cops and bad cops, people who would rather walk away than fight, and those who would rather fight than walk away.

Since I know who I am, I have decided to let this one go. Name-calling avails nothing, and the person who posted obviously doesn’t really know me, so that’s that.

A man is still dead who shouldn’t be, and the cops look bad again.

That’s sadder.

Are you masked up for reopening the country? I am. I have a few masks, and a few have stories behind them. Naturally I admire the people who have broken out the sewing machines and made ten or ten gazillion masks for people, but my crafting projects have been sort of sketchy right now (I have a total of eight needle felting creatures in various stages of unfinished, and another afghan–yes, couldn’t stop crocheting–almost completed), so I made do and improvised a bit.

My office had packs of masks and gloves ready to hand out to staff in the last week we were there. Rather than hand out to each desk, they put them in bins in the lobby. I didn’t realize there were three to a pack, and I had grabbed an extra just in case somebody in my office missed the bus. Those packs went like emergency rations at zero hour, and an admin is expected to always be the go-to for just about everything, so I felt ready.

Since in the end I wound up being one of the last ones out of the building, I took both packs home with me. The extra pack ultimately went into the hands of a local police officer who had dropped by our block for something; I told him I didn’t need the extras, but they and the EMT staff might.

When I broke the seal of the first N-95 mask of the remaining pack and put it on to go shopping, one elastic broke. Well, I figured, at least I would know mine on sight. A good Girl Scout knot job later, and I was on my way.

Having saved the remaining masks in the pack for however long the pandemic might last, I decided to try improvising an extra or two via YouTube videos. The t-shirt idea was a good one, but as I was looking in my pile of tees I realized I had a pair of underwear that looked rather more appealing. In fact, the waistband was better fitting, so I hacked off the lower half containing the crotch and used the elastic leg bands to cobble together the ties for the back, gathering them at the side seams for a comfy fit.

I placed another order for two masks, but they’re on back order; a third, a gaiter, arrived this week, and I love it. It’s like having a turtleneck that is cool in the summer. With sixty degrees being the average temperature outside in our slow end to a fake spring, I have not had a chance to see how cool I will remain with my breathing filtered through it, but it’s easy to keep on and pull up when “masking up” to enter a store,

Our office has provided guidelines for when to mask up when we return to the office, and fortunately I have a desk separated from the department and can breathe uninhibited air until I have to go into the corridors where others may cross my path. Since we are also instituting one-way transit in hallways, I don’t know how often that will actually happen; it may be comical to see various face coverings flipping up and down as people come and go everywhere.

Whatever your mask might be, remember that it will probably be temporary for now, but don’t toss them. They may still become useful in the fall and winter as flu makes a return engagement worldwide. Think of them as a strange new fashion trend.

Go check for some repurposed underwear.

At work, our CEO and corporate staff set some reopening dates for our buildings, which have been shut down since March. My building will open in July.

So there is now a target date, but why don’t I feel any better?

The 100-year pestilence (which came two years late) has left us uncertain about the future of normal life. The 1818 Spanish Flu culled the herd drastically and tragically, and what some misinformed people have called “Chinese Flu” is slated to decimate the world population again, indiscriminately killing and biologically wreaking havoc in young and old, invisibly and with blinding speed. So right now we can’t even be close to each other. Social (actually physical) distancing is not enforceable, so one leaves the home at their own risk.

Over these weeks in quarantine, I have seen George Carlin’s rant about how over-clean we are: heck, he says, he swam as a child in the Hudson River, the New York equivalent of bathing in the Ganges (if I can dare make such a comparison by stressing that some notorious public waterways just cannot be considered anywhere near healthy to use in any form), while videos elsewhere stress extreme clean at every moment.

Some things can’t be avoided. Germs are one gazillion of them. The India bathers and users of the Ganges don’t get sick, because they are exposed to germs native to their habitat. If a traveler had not gone out of China with the virus in tow, knowingly or not, the pandemic would not have been spread to people unprepared for exposure to it.

Since so many in China got sick, the virus was probably not native to China, so the search has to go elsewhere in hope of finding treatment and a vaccine.

Meanwhile, dissidents go mask-less among us, saying it is their right.

I thought murder by proxy would still be murder.

I’m a bit nervous about going back to work, but faith in the process of overcoming new diseases helps, and if everybody does what they must to keep us safe, we can get back to normal someday.

You just need to aim well and be smart to hit a target.

Mother’s Day may not mean the same for everybody. Some people have no mother now (or never did), or those still living have fallen into the hellish tunnel of age-related mental decline and would not know one thing from another. Like many holidays, this is just one more that is the cause for dread. So many people have lost mothers to the pandemic this year, or won’t get to hug a mother because of distance restrictions, some years it might be a good idea to remember only as much as one can bear.

Those of us with issues have trouble explaining it to those who don’t. We all see pictures of June Cleaver perfect ladies with happily clean children and an admiring spouse, but women who have given birth to children may not all fit that mold. Our revolving standards of parenthood make it hard to appreciate every mother out there, especially if they have not been good enough human beings in the first place. Not every mother earns flowers, a card or dinner.

However, once we are separated from the link the womb provides, we are truly at the mercy of our world and what we do to affect what children experience in it. Whether a mother (or a surrogate) coddles or curses, we ultimately make the decisions that build our character. Often mothers do have a positive influence on children, if only to send us in the opposite direction, and we can celebrate that.

Those who had less-than-good parentage, maybe it’s good to just know who and what you are, and a woman began that journey for you.

If a mother is in failing health, remember that she had the health needed to do what brought you to this world. Moments matter, and when they stop mattering, they become part of your memories.

It’s bittersweet, but the sweet is in there if we look for it. Here’s to mothers.

Mr. Softee came yesterday; it was really Ms. Softee, but a sign that not only had decent spring weather finally arrived–having waited until the month of May to do so–but the pandemic was far enough along that ice cream trucks can resume operations. A sign on the side of the vehicle assured visitors that employees would be tested for high temperature and sent home if they appear sick before starting their shift, along with the usual guidelines and precautions for the staff and visitors alike.

When I got my vanilla cone (a mechanical problem deprived them of chocolate), I could not see the smile behind the mask, but I knew it was there. She was glad to be back at work, and I was happy to have her back. I smiled behind my mask, and I think we both got it.

The experience of the ice cream truck was a light after days of dreary weather and anxiety about when things would begin to get back to normal. Though the state is still awaiting better hospitalization and death figures, soon it will be time for cautious adventures outside of home again. Open air recreation seems to be the priority, followed by limited crowd control in restaurants and such. A friend of mine is a librarian, so I know she has been out of work for a month and hope for good news there soon.

So far I have been deprived of seven in-person writers group meetings, two musicals in Philadelphia, one movie on hold, and an opera in New York.  Who knows if we will ever feel totally comfortable sitting in a theater or large sports venue again? Some studies say it will be two years before we can call this virus over (if not eradicated), and we cannot be sure how summer will alter the spread or containment.

The best we can do is adjust ourselves to be less contagious. Those of us who practice good hygiene should continue, and those with questionable habits should get with the program. There is no excuse not to wash hands or carry a tissue. Since toilet paper is reappearing on store shelves, that is not an excuse, either.

We often live our lives by what we see. We could not see this virus’ affect on our lives, but we should all be over our ignorance now, and be ready to see some pleasant things.

Like ice cream trucks.

Getting rid of clutter is the new workout for everybody staying at home, and whether your guidance comes from Marie Kondo or an overstuffed condo, the act of tackling a pile of stuff guarantees calorie burn and muscle flexing, not to mention new space in which to put more stuff once we start shopping in actual stores again.

I tackled a pile of shoe boxes this week. Why was there a pile of shoe boxes? Because there are two generations in my home: one of the mind that there is a replacement for things, and the other that you never know when you’ll need a good box. When it was over, I had broken down over 20 boxes and found several feet of space, as well as an alarm clock I had considered missing in action for two years. Turns out it was hiding under boxes 12 through 14.

Those boxes were nearly impossible to break down without taking scissors to the corners first. Whatever was done to shore them up for all-purpose handling, it must have been some super strong heavy duty kryptonite reinforced cardboard, or else I’ve become a meek milquetoast at my age. No, can’t be, since I can lug around trash bags weighing as much as the local fourth grader.  Of course, the only problem with having finished this task is I no longer have the boxes to do a second workout. The reward is the calories burned and the space obtained. Plus an extra clock.

Along with the boxes, I found about a hundred plastic shopping bags. You never know when you might need a bag, or 100. Herding bags requires checking each one to make sure there is no receipt inside, which would give away not only what you bought, but how many years ago it was. Admittedly some of the store names are of ghosts of businesses past. I think there was a Walden books in there. At least a book wasn’t in with it.

Of course you can’t put plastic bags out with the trash, nor can you put out shredded paper. My current dilemma involves the tissue paper which came out of those 20 shoe boxes. Is tissue paper recycled, or landfill fodder? The local website is not helping much, because the answer is hidden at the end of a video game-like quest of clicking around for a length of time I don’t normally have.

At least I know I can bundle the shoe boxes with the newspapers and cardboard for pickup, and the local supermarket will take the plastic bags. Maybe by trash day I’ll have figured the tissue paper out. I’d reuse it the next time I need a good box, but it has the name of the shoe manufacturer on it.

Unless I’m giving shoes as a present, in another box, it’s going out. And yes, I thanked them for their service before letting go. Marie Kondo would be proud of me.

Going out is harder these days than being home, mostly because the shutdown has extended from the entrances to stores to the collective brains of the occupants. Being home has given us the opportunity to see the flaws in the world outside, and just what it does take to keep, as Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs so aptly put it, the civilized world work.

The ATM forced $50 bills on me. Again. The touch screen is supposed to give you the opportunity to get fives, tens, twenties or fifties, but nothing I tried produced the result I wanted. I had to settle for an item of currency nobody likes to toy with. Hey, at least it isn’t faked as often as twenties. Some banks I use only have drive-through services today. It’s a bit odd arguing about the flaws of an ATM with somebody 100 feet away behind plate glass. Fortunately I was able to break the fifties.

I hit five stores before I found a bottle of ammonia at Walmart. Fortunately Target obliterated its cart fort in front of the store I go to, but some places still use directional crowd control, such as at Wegman’s. I gave up the idea of going there because the line of people in the queue was about an hour’s worth of waiting at minimum.

At least I did see toilet paper in stores, though other shelves continued to be nearly empty. I did manage to score my peanut butter and milk, too.

Leaving the house seems lately as if we are still captive, but in a bigger bubble with limited options, but enough to get you through the week. Back at home I have supplies enough to survive until the economy gets back to normal, and I have faith that essentials will still be on hand, because dedicated workers on those essentials are still out there making sure the shelves are stocked.

Plus, I did some cleaning, so I have empty shelves if they need more room.