It’s another Caturday in Cutetropolis, so it’s time to curl up with a cat and chat. And here’s Jan B. with Lily to keep us company:
We aren’t actually under legal shelter-in-place orders here, but I’m following that course as much as possible. Lily makes a great supervisor, she sits up on my shoulders and watches whatever I’m doing on the computer. Then she demonstrates the Art of the Power Nap!
Well it’s hard work being a supervisor! Such a beauty too.
Not to take anything away from Miss Lily but hubby introduced me to these cute doxie dog videos. Her name is Moonpie Starbox and the videos make like she’s talking … as a little sassy girl. Fair warning, these can get annoying after too many but she’s just too cute and funny not to share.
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCGtE6PrLI_XvbilI_-DGogA/videos
Not much going on, as usual. Finish a few projects around the house, run a few errands and then who knows. Thankfully our Governor figured out our area was playing nice when it came to practicing physical distancing at the beach areas so he didn’t shut them down like Orange County. We’ll see what happens this weekend.
Have a good weekend everyone and I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel for this crazy situation.
Good morning! Lily is such a doll.
I haven’t been around much this week because I’ve gotten to go into the office a few days in the mornings to work on a project that I can do sequestered away in an office away from people. It’s been so nice!! Local retail started opening up this week and bars, restaurants, breweries, etc. can start opening at reduced capacity Monday. Appropriately enough, on Star Wars Day! May the Force be with us.
Spring has finally sprung here in Montana and it’s beautiful out today. After Cricket woke me up with her usual weekend routine of curling up on my chest so I can give her scritches while she purrs like crazy (aw), I’m now off to have breakfast and morning coffee, then hit up the farmer’s which is opening today (yay) and then hike up Mount Helena. What a nice plan. Happy weekend everybody and stay well!
That’s my baby! ❤️
Hope everyone is doing well. I’m still on telework for a least the rest of the month. I can’t decide whether I want to go back or not; getting kind of bored with the work they’ve given us, but like not having to commute. C19 hasn’t had a big impact in my town (~20k pop, 63 total cases, zero deaths) and it’s already trending steadily downwards.
Lily is also now bored with my task work!
When is sweet Lily-pie going to get that smudge off her nose? 😺😁
As if she’d let me wash her nose! All smudges however are entirely natural! 😻😻
Beauty smudges!
Feeling somewhat blah today, but hoping for good things next week.
Miss Lily, I have a job offer for you. Come supervise me napping!
Going to try to trim Duckie’s nails today.
Have a great weekend.
She’d be too busy chasing little Duckie all over, unfortunately… she runs back and forth along the windows following the birds outside and chattering at them! No idea what she would do if she could catch one!
Lily! And bits of Jan peeking out! What great photos!
AJ, I see your Moonpie Starbeam and raise you a Pluto: https://www.youtube.com/user/NJWight
Folks, it’s best to watch Pluto in order, starting with older videos. She’s hilarious with the political/social commentary.
I let myself sleep in today, and while the dreams were intense, they weren’t bad–unlike most of my dreams this week. (Sleeping hasn’t worked out too well lately.) Now it’s time to get the day started: cleaning house, finishing a craft project for work so I can blog about it, online shopping, then a Facetime chat with a dear friend. We email back and forth all the time, but we don’t speak that often.
Things are starting to reopen in Colorado, which has me worried. It seems like nobody wants to acknowledge the possible health consequences; they’re only focused on people’s convenience and on the economy. At least Colorado’s gov has not (to my knowledge) said that if you’re called back to work and you refuse to go, you can’t collect unemployment.
Okay, I’d better get this party started. I have to figure out if Scorpius has extricated himself from the storage cabinet under the stairs. I heard pathetic little mews when I came down this morning. If he is out, I have to put everything back in the cabinet and try to relock it. After a week of hiding because there was a contractor in his basement doing demo, I got to pet him yesterday. For the first time ever, I saw clear signs that he wanted and appreciated the petting!
Have a great weekend, everyone. Stay safe.
Pluto is adorable! Now we finally know what dogs think of this whole craziness. And yea Scorpius! See pets aren’t so bad after all.
You beat me to it, DebG! I just learned about Pluto last week and have become a convert. I’m trying to do something similar with Bibi — not necessarily for a big public outreach, just for my clients. I don’t have Pluto’s two-legged mom’s cleverness. I’m in awe of her comedy writing chops.
Austria is emerging from lockdown (back to relatively normal activities, salons and shopping centers join smaller businesses which opened a couple of weeks ago… restaurants are scheduled to open May 15).
Schools will return to physical buildings by a roll-out, starting with graduating seniors on Monday, then the elementary schools and middle schools. Last but not least, high schools will start back up in June so I will contine to teach online from Vienna (none of my students want to do an oral exam in English because itvwas made optional – not the way I expected these five years to end).
So if you’re still stuck in lockdown, rest assured, it gets better! Different, of course, than the way we lived before, but there is light at the end of the tunnel!
Pictures of Lily; Lily, oh Lily.
Always lovely. And glad Scorpius is finally pettable!
I’ve been playing “find the cat” for at least two weeks. Same cat, about the same place. Our bedcover is black on one side and zebra-striped on the other. The cat is a tuxie until he tucks in his nose and (too many) toes, at which point he becomes nearly invisible on the turned-down black side. In poor light I have find him so I don’t sit on him!
Good
morningafternoon! Lily is adorable as always. I’m sure she would approve of my sleeping (on and off) until 1 pm, even if I don’t.Had to go into the office yesterday; it wasn’t too bad. They check your temperature (which means everyone has to go in through the employee entrance; I normally go through the main door). I covered my face with a scarf when I went in, since I didn’t know how many security guards would be around, but didn’t wear a mask upstairs since there were very few people there. Brought home some things from my desk that would have been nice to have but not enough to make a special trip. According to my daily calendars, I was last there on March 16th. At one point in the afternoon, while my coworker was out in the warehouse, I took a walk around the office and it was like the rapture had happened. Everyone’s stuff on their desks and literally no one around. And the other end of the office was dark all day. (There were only four cubicle-dwellers, and a handful of office-dwellers, in the office area at all, and one woman was just there because she’s the payroll manager and it was Friday; she left before lunch. And one other woman left at lunchtime. So then it was me, my coworker who was in the warehouse for most of the day, and one help-desk guy who was not at his desk at the time, and maybe 6 people who were in their offices.) They closed the cafeteria, vending machines, and coffee stations toward the end of March, but what I didn’t realize is that the microwaves (unplugged) and fridges (wrapped in plastic pallet-wrap) in the office kitchens would be unavailable. Good thing I just brought a sandwich and some carrots with an ice pack in the bag. All you could get was water (we have a motion-sensor water fountain that is designed for filling bottles, but I had brought a bottle from home so I didn’t even use that.)
Also, I knew I had lost some weight (due to my habit of not eating much when I’m home all day and also rationing my ice cream and other treats more than normal because I couldn’t just run out and get more) but apparently it is enough to be noticeable to my coworker.
Then I went to Wegmans. There was a long line outside but it moved pretty quickly; I joined it way down just past the next store over (and there is a big gap between them) but it was not more than 15 minutes before I was inside. Everyone wore a mask. No one got too close, at least not on purpose (there are some tight spots where it’s hard to stay 6 feet away). Didn’t have to wait to check out. I spent more than I have ever spent in one grocery trip, though probably less than I would have spent in total if I was shopping normally over the last seven weeks. Probably had my most organized shopping list ever, too, though I did have to backtrack a few times, and got almost everything I wanted. I even got a 20 pack of my preferred brand/type of TP! (Which I don’t absolutely need at this point, but I will soon enough, and they had at least a dozen packs and no one else was getting it, so I guess the frenzy has died down a bit (they are still limiting to one package of each type of paper product, though; some other things are also limited, but there seem to be fewer limits than last time I was there in March).) Got some tissues (not my preferred brand so I hope they’re okay; last time I got something different I was not happy with them) and paper towels, too. Those are all still in my trunk because it took me four trips just to get the groceries and my work stuff up the stairs! They didn’t have much in the way of cleaning products, though, and the only hand sanitizer I saw was travel size in a bin next to the register, and Poo-Pourri brand which was some kind of coconut-something scent, and I know I’d hate that. Got a couple of the ones by the register, but I only really use it when I’m out, so that’s fine.
My mom requested a couple things so I dropped them off on my way home; she wasn’t home but my dad was; he gave me his old Chromecast (they got a fancy new TV last year that has it built in, so he doesn’t need it), so hopefully we can get that set up without him having to come over.
Three things that made me smile: On my way to work I pass a liquor/convenience store, and in the morning I noticed a sign next to the door that said, from top to bottom: something along the lines of “Masks are required by state mandate”…”No Mask No Entry”…Bud Light ad” 😷🍺 Across the street from that store is an ice cream place and on my way home I saw on their sign that they are doing take-out ice cream sundae kits, call ahead to order. 🍨 And on my way to my parents’, a guy and his kid walking their teeny-tiny Yorkie.
And this.
Is there one of those stages of emotion patterns set out for pandemics? I started with “ah this could be bad but don’t panic yet” to “OMG it is coming and it is going to be bad” to “anxiety, panic and fear it is here!!” to “ok this might be able to be controlled and all my friends won’t die from covid but maybe from starvation as they all lost their jobs” to DESPAIR”…my life has been canceled and replaced by a thin, virtual shadow of its former self and the economy is in ruins.
(Oh yeah I forgot that day that I thought I might explode if I heard one more crapnasty thing come out of Trump but that wasn’t really a full blown stage…more like acute temporary insanity…).
I don’t know what my next stage will be…I am putting a great deal of effort into staying positive and enjoying doing the things I can do. Being productive is going have less emphasis although bonus if it happens!
I have appreciated this site and Mike and all of you…that is not a small thing! Continue to do all the right things peeps…we’ve come this far!! 💕💕
This might be helpful…
Navigating the Emotions of a Pandemic
The 5 Stages of Grief as a Framework for the Journey
https://www.psychcongress.com/article/navigating-emotions-pandemic
Trump has a similar effect on me. I cannot watch his press “briefings” and just the snippets I get from the news or late night shows is enough to make me want to scream (especially since they all tend to highlight the same things so I hear them multiple times).
I will check that out Allein! I knew something like this must be out there!
It was a very disturbing thing to realize that our closest neighbor could not be counted on to “have our backs” during this time of crisis!! It had never crossed anyone’s mind over here that it would be anything but cooperation and support of each other!! But it is all back in perspective again – nothing has happened to our amazing alliance – it is just one man who doesn’t seem to realize the impact of his careless actions and words.
May I recommend New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo, as a partial antidote? He can’t make the pandemic disappear, but he can and does take care to marshal his facts before speaking, to admit when he doesn’t know something and get folks on it to come up with an answer that is based on facts (science, when possible), and to refuse to bow to political pressure when something else is needed to keep the people of his state (and not incidentally, my city) safe. I can seldom watch an entire press conference because my PTSD kicks in regardless, but whatever I watch of him makes me feel better, because in my state, the idiots are not in charge. (And New York State borders with Canada in places, so that might help you a bit more).
TBH, I feel a ton more confidence in my governor than I do in my mayor. But I’ll take what I can get.
Apologies here to anyone who disagrees with my POV. I recognize we can’t all like the same politics, or the same politicians. So this is just my two cents; your mileage may vary.
Yeah, I’m in central NJ and my “local” news affiliates (ABC/NBC/CBS) are out of NYC. I don’t watch a lot of the news conferences just for my own mental health in general, but Cuomo is definitely infinitely more watchable than Trump.
Oh YES R and B’s Mom… Cuomo is an antidote!! I always listen to his remarks and feel good – he inspires confidence.
I try to watch Cuomo every day. His manner is very calming and he is definitely thinking everything through and taking science as his guide rather than politics. I feel so much better knowing he’s in charge of my tiny spot on the earth.
Randy Rainbow is a national treasure! I adore his Spoonful of Clorox video.
I agree with everybody about needing leaders who make smart decisions, and we’re sure not getting it at the federal level. Thank goodness I live in a state with a smart governor. Most of my family and friends do too, even though they don’t appreciate the governors (cough Michigan cough cough).
My emotions have been going up and down on a daily basis, even more than usual. On Wednesday, I just couldn’t function and after a frantic email to my boss was allowed to take the afternoon off. Thank goodness for my wonderful boss.
Mr Tangerine Man has reached the point where, almost every time he gives a press briefing, he says something so bizarre that not even ‘The Onion’ could top it. I don’t think he’s mentally competent to run a hotdog stand, let alone a country.
Thank you, Alice, for that much needed laugh.
If you bankrupt a casino, that’s not a good sign. And it’s hard to believe The Onion can still be in business, because all their worst predictions have come true.
I’ve never understood that. How is it even possible to bankrupt a casino?!!
In the case of You-Know-Who, the problem was in that he overspent on renovations and decorations, taking on so much debt that the casino revenue could not cover debt payments.
This was covered in a lengthy New York Times article about how his father Fred funneled money to his children, partly to prop them up and partly to avoid estate taxes.
just promise me that you won’t inject yourself with bleach. (don’t get me started on him or the people who are just , well, candidates for the Darwin Awards,
Unfortunately he’s already procreated so he is not a candidate.
Hang in there Dulcie; all this is stressful and exhausting. We can do it though. 🙂
Yes FKA I am certain we can – somehow or other! It is not easy. But necessary and saves lives. Makes it all worthwhile.
Last Wednesday I went to the pharmacy to collect my dad’s prescription, fully expecting to queue for at least an hour and therefore equipped with book and reading glasses. Upon discovering that there was NO QUEUE I felt weirdly confused rather than pleased, so confused that I forgot to buy the non-prescription items on my shopping list!
In other news, the concrete bollard at the end of my street has been hit by a car for the second time in two weeks. I’m beginning to wonder if local parents, bored out of their minds, are taking the opportunity to give their equally bored kids driving lessons.
Finally, Boris Johnson. Compared to Trump’s sociopathic clown he comes across as a bumbling music hall comedian, but who the hell names his son WILFRED in 2020? I suppose it’s better than Arthur Dunkirk Blitz Johnson, but not by much…
I am very lucky in that I live in the fine state of Ohio. Our governor has been fantastic!!
I never listen to Trump updates, because what he says almost doesn’t matter as everything in my life is determined by the state. Plus, Trump’s info is usually wrong.
Our experience in Ohio has been as good as it can be. I am comforted by the experience over the past month. While we have had a Stay at Home order, still quite a lot of retail has been operating safely and successfully. Grocery stores, mass merchandisers, gas stations, home improvement stores and pharmacies have been open and keeping our lives as “normal” as possible.
And during that time we have learned that social distancing, wearing face covers and frequent cleaning are WORKING!! I live in a relatively small city and we have not had major outbreaks at our local stores. Our reported cases, hospitalizations and deaths are on the decline.
I’m also really happy to see that at least one national chain (Costco) is going to mandate that all customers wear face masks in order to access their stores. I’m hopeful that other major retailers follow suit and that wearing face masks in public becomes our “new normal”. It’s one of the most effective weapons we have to fight the virus.
I agree with some of the other posts today – there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Attention all wearers of glasses! Do your specs steam up when you wear your spiffy home-made cloth mask? Are you more afraid of being killed by a car than by Covid-19? Today I stumbled across a solution to this thorny problem. Simply push the mask as high up on your face as possible and place the nose-piece of your glasses on top of the cloth instead of above it. This will dramatically reduce the amount of condensation on the lenses, allowing you to cross roads, interact with others and rob banks with complete confidence.
Also, if you can sew, my Mom has sewn plastic twist ties (like from every electronic gadget with a cord) into the bridge of the nose of masks to keep the hot air in the mask.
I sewed a piece of thin plastic-coated wire into the nose piece of my mask but it didn’t have much effect. Perhaps I just have unusually steamy breath…
LOL!!! 😂😂😂😂😂😂
I did that yesterday and I didn’t have much fogging (not a homemade mask but it did fog a little when I first put it on). I did have to pull it down a few times because it was right up against my lower eyelid.
My dad had ordered some washable cloth masks, so he gave me one. I haven’t tried it on yet. He said it was a little tight on him but I think my face might be a tad smaller than his.
Boob tape, people. It isn’t pleasant to remove, but at least you can see!
It must be so frustrating when people keep sending in not-dogs to a dog-rating site…
Even the smile is frog-like!
🤣🤣
I absolutely adore their commentary on “not-dog” submissions. Hilarious stuff and so sweet.
I forgot to mention one thing about my version of find the cat. Sometimes he arranges himself so that one white paw is off the spread and on the white blanket instead. No idea if he’s aware of this at all, but it looks like it when he gets it just right!
You know he’s aware of this. He plans it, obviously. Because CAT.
So I sat on my porch twice for about an hour each. Walkers, bicyclists, kids on scooters, dog walkers, landscapers, returning grocery shoppers. Only the landscapers were wearing masks. No one was bunched up, but still… and we are in a town with extremely high incidence in NY state.
My biggest worry is my housemate’s daughter attending summer camp starting end of June. Even thinking I had Covid I cannot be sure yet. I’m hoping it is canceled.
Sort of awkward to say but my life is mostly the same as before the shut down. I stay around the house pretty much. My only change is I haven’t been able to go to doctors offices or for routine stuff like mammogram, etc.
Worst part MY HAIR. OMG. My go to style is a very short Pixie cut. I was already overdue in March! So huge decision. Growing hair to below chin length. Then blunt cut. Then to mid back. With all my greys. I cannot handle the idea of being dependent on someone to cut my hair ever again.
And seeing Miss Lily made my day.
She has definitely made my telework far more entertaining! 😻😻
Faye, trust me, you can both cut and color your hair at home.
I used to get my color done in a salon, but it was such a time sink! Having to sit in the chair doing nothing while the color took was awful! So I asked my stylist if I could do this at home, and he said “of course!” Turns out if you know what color tube you need, you can get professional color products on Amazon.
As far as the cut goes, it took me 4 tries, but I really feel like my hair looks pretty good and I don’t think anyone would ever guess that I cut it myself.
You can do it!!
Julie thanks for the encouragement. I used to color my hair at home. Now I have embraced my silver highlights. I think I will be able to get my housemates to cut my hair once it grows out for chin length. It’s until then that makes me nuts. I’m figuring I’ll have to suffer with crazy old lady hair until September. But once it’s blunt cut it’s growing.
My dad asked me and my brother if we want to “try coming here for Mother’s Day dinner next Sunday?”…and I don’t know how I feel about it. Of course, I want to. (We already missed properly celebrating their 50th anniversary because of all this.) But should we? It’s just the four of us. None of us have been sick (though if I’ve been exposed from anyone other than my parents, whose house I have been inside but not for very long, it would have happened Friday when I went to work and grocery shopping). If it’s nice out we could eat outside on the deck and stay farther away from each other. Hmm.
Julia is an inspiration to us all