9:40-10:15 – Wake up and check the status on 4 online orders to be delivered. Get up by 10, and go into the kitchen to make coffee. I feed the cat, load and start the dishwasher, warm up my 10-year-old laptop, and get trash together to be taken out while waiting for the coffee. That and a honeycrisp apple are breakfast. Through the patio door, the birds are chirping more than recently; maybe they are happy it’s a little warmer?
10:17-10:58 – “My Aim Is True”: Laptop, mug, and apple on a TV tray in the living room, I sit. The husband is till sleeping; he probably won’t get up until 1. I have been occupying my time during the quarantine with a music listening project. I am listening to all of the records listed in Robert Dimrey’s book “1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die”, and then rank them in my own 1001 list, according to how much I like them. I have 7 basic categories: “Love It”, “Like It”, “It’s OK”, “I’m Indifferent”, “I Dislike it”, and “I Hate It”. I am doing it in chronological order, and I am up to 1977. The first one this morning is the Elvis Costello debut. Alison, I know this world is killing you. Half-way through this, a co-worker messages me, freaking out about how work is restructuring paid time off; we will now have to accrue it. She joined in on the zoom meeting I elected not to do this morning. During a pandemic, this is not a good look, she says. She plans on quitting, citing how it appears that admin doesn’t care about the workers. My Aim Is True goes into the “I Love It” category…currently sitting at #11 of 370 on the big list.
10:58-2:45 – I was wrong – he woke up at 10:45, coming in to the living room, telling me how he has planned for my day to go. I am to drive separately with him to the house his mom lived in before she passed away in March. There, I will help load things from her house into my car, and take it back here to store (somewhere?) in this apartment until who knows when. There goes a quiet morning of records. I get properly dressed, have another coffee, and wait for him to get off the phone with his lawyer (dealing with estate issues), so we can go get this over with. Out the door by 11:30. He needed “breakfast”, so we stop at the local McDonald’s, where he orders the biggest thing on the menu. I am so worried about his health, and he eats SO MUCH. I let my feelings and concerns be known, and I am accused of being mean. Arrived at his mom’s house, out in the county to the north of Muncie, and it turns out he wants to load up and deliver some things to an auction house in Anderson, hoping to make it back home by 4, so that he could participate in a scheduled Zoom meeting for work. He asked me to put “that table” into the trunk, pointing into a specific corner. Turns out that table was a sewing machine built into a table. It was very heavy, and did not easily fit into the trunk. He filled a few boxes with collectibles, and put those in the back seat. With the trunk lid open, we go to the local dollar store to hopefully find a couple of bungee cords. Of course they didn’t have any, so I bought a nylon clothes line to tie the trunk down. I didn’t have a knife to cut it, so I sawed at the cord for 3 minutes with a key once I got it looped around the trunk lid 2 or 3 times. The sawing wore a nasty spot on the side of my finger. Just as we were leaving the store, I get an email that a package has been delivered at home. We agree to stop back by the house, on the way to Anderson, to prevent porch thieves from taking it. On the way, we discuss the nature of comedy, and why certain things are funny. Once the box was safely inside the front door, we drive to the auction house. The folks there were very nice. They helped us get the junk out of the car. We were there maybe 10 minutes. I let him know it was my turn for lunch, so we stop at a Wendy’s on the way back out of town. I get food, and he, wanting “just a snack”, again gets the biggest item on the menu (950 calories for 1 burger). I am growing disgusted with the amount and quality of food that he eats. When approached about this recently, he claims that it is a response to both his mom dying, and a prolonged cold that he has been unable to shake. I don’t buy it that much. I think he’s just ravenous for food all the time, and he needs to allow his stomach to shrink. On the way back to Muncie, I suggest that this quarantine has “made” us eat too much fast food, and that I am going to try and go a year without it, once work starts back on the 18th. He acknowledged this, but didn’t give a real indication as to whether he would play along with that. We arrive back home at 2:45.
2:45-3:15 – I write down all of this so far while he plays Xbox. I desperately need to clean and try and deal with the junk from his mom’s house that is in here with us. I feel bad for him; no one else from his family is helping deal with the house, and he doesn’t really know what he is doing. He has had a bad quarantine…losing his mom, having to deal with her junk, then getting sick. He was tested for the plague, but it came back negative. His doctor told him he was high-risk for getting it, so I am very nervous about him being back at work.
3:15-12:00 – The rest of the day was spent at home. I unpacked the delivered box; it was the new sheets and a comforter for the bed we took from her house for our spare room. He had his 4pm zoom meeting while I did laundry and made up that bed. Since we both work at the same place, talking shop post-zoom was inevitable. We don’t do the work gossip thing, but there are all sorts of things going on regarding re-opening from the quarantine. It was a little bit contentious, but no one was mad at anybody. He made dinner and we watched separate things while we ate, and continuing on until I was too tired to keep watching. I guess after 2 months of only being around this one person, we have realized that we don’t need to keep each other entertained 24/7. I was irritated about having my morning ruined, but I know he is just trying to do his best given a bad situation. I worry about him. This place is a mess; tomorrow I will do something about it. I don’t want to go back to work with it a pigsty here.