Your Last Normal Photo

There was a thing going around on Facebook asking you to post your the last photo on your phone before you went into lockdown.

This is mine:

We had friends over to play Smart Ass the first Sunday of March Break. It was supposed to be after we all saw Cats, but the rest of the performances had just been cancelled, so we were already wondering if we should have people over, but things were still very uncertain. We all washed our hands a lot but didn't exactly social distance, as you can see (we did hug a bit less than we usually do). We were supposed to go over to their house for a hot tub Tuesday night, two nights later, but by then recommendations were coming down and we decided not to go.

Ontario just announced that schools are closed for the rest of the year. We knew it was coming, but it still has a sobering finality. Eve is okay with it, and I'm okay with it for her. I'm pretty sad for myself. I only work a couple of days a week at two different schools, so chances of getting the kids I really like two years in a row are slim. When the kids come up for me to scan their books out, their patron record has their school picture with it. One boy at my Wednesday school is smiling like this in his photo:


When I told him how much I love seeing that smile every time I scan his books out, he started smiling the smile when he came up to my desk. It was a bright, lovely spot in every shift. There's also a boy named Stanley Cramp (I know I shouldn't be sharing his name, but when you google Stanley Cramp you just get some old British civil servant and ornithologist, who for all I know my Stanley is named after, but I don't feel like I'm endangering my Stanley) who has an adorable British accent and was astonished that I remembered his name so quickly, so then I would pretend not to know it - "Walter? Ernest? Plantagenet?" and he would howl with laughter and say "You're winding me up, you are" and guys, WHAT IF STANLEY CRAMP ISN'T IN MY LIBRARY PERIOD NEXT YEAR THIS IS BULLSHIT.

Okay, let's focus on some good stuff. We had no plans for the long week-end, mainly because we completely forgot it was a long week-end, who the frig knows anymore, am I right? We ended up seeing people (from a social distance, MAN I can't wait until I don't have to add that phrase to every second sentence, "I went and saw my BFF and SAT RIGHT BESIDE HER AND NIBBLED HER EAR A LITTLE" every day - my parents for a barbecue on Saturday, our neighbours and their friends that we love on Sunday, and the Smart Ass people and another couple on Monday. Sunday was impromptu banana daiquiris and wine and then someone got the munchies so someone did a McDonald's run. Matt said "did they ask you how much you smoked up before ordering this?"


First time I'd had McDonalds in years. It was better than I remembered, can't imagine why.

My neighbour's dog being adorable and totally not begging for a fry.

Lucy and her big sister.

Our neighbours are amazing and I love them. I feel sorry for anyone who doesn't love their neighbours, especially now when even in lockdown rules - no more than five people, six feet apart - we could go sit in their back yard, drink a bottle of wine or five (that was only once), let the dogs run around and use our own washrooms. There have been no issues with our family being locked in together for two months - due as much to the kids' ages and the amount of space we have as to how much we like each other, which is a lot - but sometimes you just want to see another human other than on your computer screen.
I try really hard not to compare myself to other people, but I have been feeling kind of lame about my quarantine accomplishments - I haven't even baked bread, although I've baked innumerable biscuits, a buttload of maple oatmeal scones and some soft pretzels. So tonight we're making grilled naan. As ever when trying a new recipe, I figure it will either be a good meal or a good story. 

Housekeeping

I'm just going to bang something out here (a BLOG POST, shut up) because I'm feeling antsy that I haven't, even though I've been meaning to clean the en suite our bedroom all day, but instead I carried a bunch of stuff from the main floor to the basement and did some laundry and got some groceries and went to the liquor store and then came home and started cooking and then watched two episodes of Ozark with Matt and now I will probably end up cleaning the bathroom while he's trying to sleep, but goddammit I will not go to sleep one more time with that bathroom uncleaned!

Ha ha, I wrote that two days ago and then gave up and went and cleaned the bathroom. Fortunately Matt was working late, so I didn't keep him awake.

I've mostly climbed out of the slough of despond, partly because it had run its course and was clearly not helpful, partly because of the headaches from all the crying. I still think that, of the still-employed locked down, the children and young adults have it the hardest, and I reserve my right for me and them to be mournful over that. I do, however, fully recognize that it is a much better situation than being shipped off to the beaches of Normandy or sold into child slavery, and many children and young adults all over the world have it worse just in the normal course of things. And no one is going to argue that the Animal Crossing and Netflix doesn't mitigate the hardship. So. Back to dealing.

I came across a GQ article on Twitter called "Top Sheets are a Scam". It begins "a top sheet is the giftwrap of bedding: it looks nice, but you have to throw it away." It further claims that top sheets never stay remotely in place, and that they make the bed look messier than using just a duvet.

Clearly it was a throwaway piece, but it made me wonder how many people don't use top sheets. My kids don't, which bugged me for a while, but Eve is fastidious enough and Angus's bedroom is in the basement and thus ignorable enough that I got over it. I grew up using a top sheet and making the bed with hospital corners - I don't tuck it in at all now, but I cringe at the thought of not using one. I don't like touching the duvet - not because I think it's dirty, but because I feel like I'll get it dirty. I change my sheets once a week and still wash the duvet every couple of months.

So do people who don't use a top sheet wash the duvet way more often? Do they not feel like the duvet is sweaty and gross? I mean, I shower every night before going to bed, but presumably not everyone does. I never thought of myself as a particularly peaceful sleeper, but do top sheets really get that unruly?

This also gave me a happy memory of when I was in Morocco with my friends Holly and Janet (HI HOLLY AND JANET). The sheets were always tucked in to a punishing degree, so every night Janet and I would get into bed and Holly would go around the room yanking out the tucked ends so we could move.

My arm is still incredibly painful, so THANKS A LOT genial funny Youtube physiotherapists, you made me think I could cure myself and it was BULLCRAP. I'm sort of enjoying cleaning my own house except for the painful repercussions, and I'd really like to do some painting, but it's difficult when my dominant arm is a traitor.

Angus's summer baseball season got cancelled a couple of days ago. We were expecting it, but it still hurts - it was a minor league that he was recruited for in New York and it was going to be a lot of pretty high-level baseball, and both he and Matt were really looking forward to it. We're debating whether it makes more sense for him to get a job or whether we should use his available labour to do stuff around the house.

I keep thinking that I'll be okay and he'll be okay as long as he can go back in the fall. But he might not be able to, so we'll have to be okay no matter what. I also keep telling myself that we don't know what's going to happen, and unexpected good things could happen as well as expected bad things. There won't be a vaccine by fall, but there might be better treatments or tests. My usual M.O. is expecting the worst so I'm pleasantly surprised if the worst doesn't happen, but that's not really working right now, because expecting the worst impairs my ability to function. Even before this, some nights I would lie in bed obsessing about things and then tell myself "why not just think something good will happen?"

Pictures of Eve making Lucy do a puppy dance and a family selfie on Angus's birthday - last week he shaved his beard, which I love, into a horrible moustache, which I loathe, but I try really hard not to tell my kids what to do with their hair or clothes and it's a pandemic, so, shrug emoji. (But ugh, it's terrible).

Hunting and Gathering and Losing It a Little

I'm not doing great at the moment. I'm sad. I'm scared. One day it rained and I nearly had a panic attack because, even if I WASN'T going to go for a walk I really needed to know that I could if I wanted to. Angus has been doing pretty well, but he's tired of working out downstairs and not getting to play baseball and not seeing his girlfriend and, well, this all kind of sucks. I'm going to try to arrange a backyard beer with one of his friends this week because I think he really needs it.

I don't think I ever told the promised grocery shopping story in which I was an utter loon. It was just before the schools closed when we knew virus stuff was happening but not how bad it was going to get how soon. It was a Saturday morning and Matt had gone out to get some groceries. I realized, as always, that I had forgotten to add a few things to the list about ten minutes after he left, so I texted him. He didn't answer. I texted again. He didn't answer. I called him. No answer. I waited a few minutes and tried again. No answer.

I got out of bed, washed my face and brushed my hair and got dressed, went into Eve's room and said "I'm sorry about this, but Dad's not answering his phone and he is definitely probably fine but I have to go look for him because I just have to." She nodded calmly because she knows me. I drove the route he would have driven. A few minutes in I got a text from Eve that said "don't worry too much. The virus doesn't actually eat people". I wasn't worried about the virus. I was pretty much utterly convinced that he had gotten in a catastrophic or fatal car accident. I was, concurrently, also convinced that no such thing had happened and I was behaving irrationally, but I was powerless not to act.

I completed the route. There were no car accidents. I shrugged and started driving back home, and then realized I might as well stop and pick up the forgotten items on the list myself. As I was parking, I got a text from Matt saying he had no signal in the grocery store. I am ninety percent certain this was bullshit and he just had his phone off and didn't check it (he and Eve are both famous for this. Always have their phones, never have them on, nearly impossible to get hold of them, makes actual steam come out my ears). I didn't bother getting angry because it's not fair to expect him to know precisely when I'm going to go Full Paranoid Lunatic.

So we ended up with a metric fuckton of groceries, including a big bag of flour, which was just as well, and no one was much the worse for wear. I was exhausted and embarrassed and also a tiny bit proud, as if I'd had to wrangle a giant, ill-behaved pet through a crowd of people and done a passable, if not perfect, job of it.

My other Shopping During the Pandemic story was a couple of weeks later. Eve had been playing Club Penguin nostalgically with her friends online since school closed, and then started playing Animal Crossing. She finally decided that she wanted to buy a Nintendo Switch Lite- she's never bought any kind of video gaming thing before and generally hoards her money rather than spending it, so she has lots. Then of course we discovered that they were all sold out except the ugly grey one, and she was disproportionately upset about it, while knowing that she was disproportionately upset, which helps a little, but not a lot. We had out eye on the restocking date, and then I went to pick up some stuff at Shoppers Drug Mart and near the cashes suddenly there were two Nintendo Switch Lites - yellow and turquoise. I texted her and she texted back "OMG, you could LITERALLY SAY you RISKED YOUR LIFE to get one for me!"

The funny thing is, years back when I was looking for a PS4 for Angus for Christmas, the same damned thing happened - sold out everywhere, found one at Shoppers. And yet it never occurred to me to look for one there.

So yeah, I came off better in that story.

Just to round things out, today Angus went to throw in the parking lot near where he used to play baseball - it's not blocked off and there are often cops there when he goes, so it seems to be allowed. I get him to drop me off on the way so I can do the nice 4 or 5 k walk home on the path beside one of our main streets. I got home and decided to go to Farm Boy because I find it easier to just keep moving once I'm moving. So Angus had the car and, though I didn't realize it, my debit card from last week because he was going to get something and couldn't remember his own pin number. I had the van and a credit card that, for some reason, didn't work when I finally got to the cash. So Angus was uncontactable and Matt had no car. I had to call my Mom who basically drove over (they live right near Farm Boy) in a nightgown and a jacket and lent me her credit card. Then I gave her the stuff I had bought for her (they don't go to Farm Boy because the aisles are too narrow and they don't have seniors hours) and drove home. I was angry because I was exhausted and it was kind of humiliating, but it really wasn't anyone's fault, it was just a perfect storm of stupid stuff. We've done well having one low-limit credit card, but I really need to have a second one for occasions like this.

Isn't it funny how it's a big thrill right now if you go grocery shopping and there's no line? And people stay far enough away from you? And you actually find all the things on your list? I guess it's sort of good that we might appreciate shopping for food becoming mundane again. But I'm working pretty hard to find a silver lining right now.

Meh

Everything seems kind of digital these days. Either the fridge is overflowing with food and I can't figure out where to put anything and that's annoying, or it's nearly empty and there's room for everything but I'm panicky at the thought of having to go shop again. Either I get up and feel like doing multiple errands and accomplishing numerous household tasks or I can't summon up the will to do anything. Either I remember I have a blog or.... you get the idea.

I stared at the calendar for an uncomfortably long time trying to figure out which week we were in. Somebody tipped me off that my phone shows the date when it turns on, which was something I could have happily gone the rest of my life without knowing, but now it's essential. Angus and I have gone almost completely nocturnal - we sleep from four a.m. or so until noon or so. He gets up and Matt has left him a cup of coffee that is now cool enough to be iced with minimum effort. I get up and make lunch for everyone - no clue if anyone eats breakfast. Matt gets up early to work and goes to bed early. Eve ping pongs around between everyone's schedules. Sometimes she goes to bed early and sometimes she comes into our room at 1 a.m. because she can't sleep and Matt goes to sleep downstairs and she plays Animal Crossing beside me while I read. Animal Crossing is.... really weird.

I still have more sleep shame than I think I should. All the evidence points to the fact that my body just operates on a different schedule than the socially acceptable one, which should be fine if I still get my work done and take care of my family and right now who on earth should give a fuck when I go to bed or get up? And yet if my mom calls or someone drops something off at ten a.m. and I'm still asleep, Matt will say I'm in the shower or out for a walk, as if I'm in the bathroom doing cocaine or out kicking puppies instead of just slightly out of phase with the world.

Matt and I started watching Ozark on Netflix. I usually don't really like drug shows, but Angus said it was really good and I love Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, and we're enjoying it so far. Angus and I are still making our way through the Neeson oeuvre. We watched Taken and Taken 2, which I thought were better than their Rotten Tomatoes rating - I only like action movies if they have some black humour or a different twist on the formula, and I felt like these did. Then we watched Cold Pursuit, which seems to be a Nicholas Cage movie with Liam Neeson in the lead instead - it was quite odd, and very entertaining. Angus fell out of his chair laughing when someone said "they shot the messenger".

It's so weird. Sometimes I love the weird family-pajama-party vibe. Sometimes I'm just so happy to have Angus here at the dinner table being goofy and needling Eve. But he's not really supposed to be here. But he is here. Maybe my head hurts so much because of all the cognitive dissonance.

I caught myself thinking today that after this is over I will never turn down a chance to go out with my friends again. Then I remembered that last Tuesday night I couldn't be arsed to sit in front of my computer and drink for our regular bar Zoom thing because I had gone grocery shopping and I just wanted to sit and stare at a wall for a while, so it will probably only take a couple of weeks before I am back to my own lame introvert self.

Ugh, this post is boring and I do not have the wherewithal to fix that. I could go find my phone and add some funny pictures, but that would mean I would have to go and find my phone.

Face Stuff Part Two

You have questions? I have answers! Well, not really, only in a very narrowly limited way. So like Sasha, I have been doing a lot of Zoom or Google virtual meetings wherein it is extremely difficult to avoid staring at my own face, and I also do not enjoy it in the least. Everybody else seems to look roughly the same and I seem to look like Oliver Platt (who I'm sure is a lovely fellow). I'm trying to get over it. I also agree that when I look at my face ruthlessly it seems that it would require a goodly amount of liposuction. I always get upset that when I smile for pictures my eyes disappear and Eve says I'm being dumb because 1) if I tried to smile and keep my eyes open I would have crazy eyes and scare people and 2) many people have cheeks that squish their eyes closed when they smile and she thinks that's nice. I should be more like Eve.

Also, I think Botox used judiciously might be less jarring than the lip filler. That's what my friend (Eve's friend's mother) has done and it looks great, by which I mean it's unnoticeable and I like her face. I'm not in a rush to try it because I think it's mostly for foreheads and I have bangs. I often hate that I have to have bangs (have you SEEN that meme going around about no matter how bored you are during quarantine you don't need bangs? HURTFUL!) but since I do, might as well look for the silver lining. 

To answer Lynn's questions: The injection is hyaluronic acid, which is an ingredient in a lot of skin care stuff, they're just injecting it under the skin instead of applying it topically. It subsides over about six months. It's very noticeable to the touch at first and then gets less and less so. Right now I can barely feel it at all (when did I get it done? Hmmmm... checking....oh, ha ha, it was Valentine's Day, so almost two months exactly. Honestly, if I could get this effect right away, I might consider doing it again, but I don't really think it's worth the money or the hassle.

On other skin care fronts, I did realize that it was a little bizarre that I went directly from Dove soap and a dab of Oil of Olay every night to shooting crap into my lips, so I decided to try something a little less drastic. The first thing I tried was buying Retinol A in Mexico, which I never would have thought of except my friend asked me to get her some. Like a total noob I didn't read the instructions or look up how to use it, and after three days it was burning my face off. I asked my friend how hers was working and she said "fine, if you used it the right way". I was like "ha ha yeah totally, the right way is....?" and she said "once every three days" ha ha YEAH, THAT MAKES SENSE. Eve was mortified when she found out about this and thereafter referred to it as my "sketchy Mexican wrinkle cream" and I stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. 

Happily, the same awesome-mother-having friend's grandmother (by marriage) sells Rodan & Fields and is ALSO AWESOME, so I decided to try some of her wares, partly just so I could hang out with her for an hour. I bought a microdermabrasian paste, an under eye cream for night (actually I think I'm supposed to use it in the morning and at night, but I don't) and a big-ass tub of moisturizer, plus an "unblemish" mask for my oily t-zone. It took me a while to get into the groove of using it, but now that I am ( for a couple of months) I think I am seeing subtle results - my skin looks a little brighter and I'm comfortable going without makeup even when I'm dressing up to go out. This isn't a huge deal, since the most makeup I usually do it lipstick, mascara and a bit of concealer on the spider veins on my right cheek and the sides of my chin. Eve commented that my skin looked nice at Easter dinner. 

So yeah - maybe consider smearing shit ON your face before trying the shit that they shoot INTO your face. Thank-you for coming to my Ted Talk. 

Stupid Things I've Bought Lately: Facial Injectables

I thought I was going to make a series out of this, back when I posted one in November 2016 for NaBloPoMo, but as with many things, I did not follow through. I do, however, buy stupid things on not-so-rare occasion, so maybe it will still be a thing! Who knows?

Easter was nice, with obvious caveats. My mom cooked the turkey and stuffing. I cooked mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts. I feel like I got the better end of this deal, except that her house ended up smelling like turkey and mine ended up smelling like Brussels sprouts. I sent the boys over to do the food trade - we put our food down, ring the doorbell, back up two metres, they open the door, put down their food, we have a brief chat from the driveway, they pick up food and go inside, we pick up food and go home.

We also talk on the phone every day, but I hate that I can't squish them. 

We had a nice family dinner, and then I bottomed out really badly. I don't know if I was coming down with something (weird since I go basically nowhere, but there's the grocery store, I guess), or my brain hijacked my body, but I felt achy and flu-ridden and horrible. I went to bed to read and fell asleep before eleven, which is approximately four hours before my usual bedtime right now. Yesterday I still felt weirdly exhausted - like, needed to sit down and take a rest after finally dragging myself out of bed to shower - and today I feel much better. Also, yesterday I was sobbing because I felt like such a useless waste of skin and today I'm feeling like I should maybe have just trusted my body to know what it needed instead of always fighting against it. Sometimes I am dumb.

So. The face thing. I don't look down on people who do cosmetic surgery or botox, but I've never really considered it seriously, partly because I'm too cheap, partly because I couldn't see an easy path to getting it done, and partly because nothing I don't like about my face seems easily fixable. But a friend that I have because she's Eve's friend's mom (and YAY for Eve making that friend, because the friend AND the mom are AWESOME) does some stuff and is loud and proud and open about it (and looks great), so a couple of months ago I went on a ridealong, thinking that I might try something tiny if it sounded reasonable. 

We went for lunch first. At the end of lunch, our cute young waitress asked if we had plans for the rest of the day and we happily announced that we were getting stuff shot into our face, and joked about how we would be careful not to do the lip thing that makes you look like you stuck your lips in a bottle trying to look like Kylie Jenner. Ha ha. 

Sooo, we rolled up to the office and went in and I showed her the line above my lip that I don't like. She said I could either do a little Botox, which would make it hard to drink from a glass, or do half a syringe of lip filler. 

Like, WHAT? The thing that I JUST SAID I DEFINITELY WOULDN'T DO?? She explained why it would be the more obvious solution. I nearly walked, but then I thought, what the hell, I'll try it once just so I know, it'll be an experience. 

Jody held my hand because eeeeeuuuuaghhhhhh needles going into your lips is gross and painful. You know what else it does? Makes your lips swell up, EVEN MORE THAN THE EVENTUAL GOAL. By the next morning I looked like this:

Want to know the even funnier part? NO ONE NOTICED. I went out to dinner with friends the next day. I hung out with Eve and Matt all week-end. When I finally confessed to Eve she was livid that I hadn't told her, and I was like YOU'RE upset? None of my friends and family know what I LOOK LIKE!! (Is it possible other people are not as obsessed with the minutiae of my facial topography as I am? Barely). I feel like if someone I know had done this I would have noticed. I remember way back before I even knew that collagen injections were a thing, watching Star Trek TNG and thinking, 'the fuck's going on with Troi's LIPS?' 

Anyway, I won't do it again. It pretty much solidified the suspicion I already held that it's just not possible to fix your face just so it looks better or younger - if you mess with one part, it changes the other parts. It's very subtle, especially by this point, and the tiny line is gone, but I just don't quite look like me in the mirror, and I don't like it. I also hate how I can feel the little pockets of filler when I put on lipstick, *shudder*. It's cool, at least now I know. Back to Dove soap and a dab of moisturizer and fretting over the tiny line when it comes back - fretting less now, because clearly nobody I see regularly looks at me ANYWAY, I mean GOD. 

Random Crap

Angus posted this to our family chat: 

Eve has this problem on days when she doesn't go to school (which is now all the days) that if she gets dressed, Lucy thinks that means she's taking her for a walk. She follows her around nosing the back of her legs and if she stops she sits wagging her tail looking up expectantly. Mostly this is a good thing because it gets Eve out of the house and getting a little exercise every day. On the days when somebody else has already said they'll walk Lucy or it's raining and she really doesn't want to go, it's hilariously annoying. Sometimes I hear her yelling "I'm not getting dressed to take you out, I'm getting dressed so I don't GET DEPRESSION!"

Today she came down to do something in the kitchen and kept saying "stop looking at me like that! We're not going out!" "I'm ignoring you!" "She really thinks we're going". Then a few seconds later, "So... we're going, I guess". She maintained eye contact for too long. Rookie mistake.

I was trying to think of something I did when I was seventeen in a pandemic-less world. All I came up with was this bizarre memory of going with my boyfriend and my best friend and her boyfriend who was also my boyfriend's best friend (sorry) to some dance at the... legion, maybe? Why? Dunno. I felt like I looked incredibly hot in my peak late-eighties style - a magenta-purply sweater with like a kelly green collared thing underneath and a long jean skirt. Sexayyyy. My poor best friend had had to have surgery for some leg problem (she was a dancer) so she was in a cast and a pink Ralph Lauren sweatsuit. Her and her boyfriend did some remarkably creative chair dancing. At one point I was coming out of the bathroom at the same time as a fifty-ish man and he yelled "you're so drunk! -- oh! not you, sweetie, the old people." We got totally shitfaced and started writing stuff on Danielle's cast. Someone put a dot and wrote "they say this is a very sensitive spot" and then my boyfriend put an arrow to the dot and wrote "push here 4 orgasm". She thought it was the funniest thing she had ever seen, but eventually realized that she couldn't go to our (Catholic) school like that so she whited out orgasm and wrote oranges. 

Usually at this point in a blog post I would look for a way to tie all this together. I don't think there is one, other than I feel pretty lucky to be shut in with the people I'm shut in with, and I miss my friends. And, looking back, I'm also pretty happy that I seem to have kept up my early talent for surrounding myself with weird people who make me laugh.