Husband declared the other day that his private Hell consisted of dealing with paper (he has neuropathy in his fingertips from diabetes and can’t sort or easily manipulate papers or feel his fingers on a keyboard), keeping organized the cords for our various computers, phones, and tech instruments, and the internal combustion engine. He is in Heaven, on the other hand turning a phrase or writing a psychological evaluation.
What would constitute your private Hell?
Today’s post comes from Jacque.
Two weekends of my life have been lost to construction of homemade masks. This is not usually how I would spend a weekend, but then these are not normal times. And what else was there to do anyway given our Shelter-in-Place order. And constructing masks certainly is preferable to allowing debilitating fear and anxiety about our COVID-19 problem to take over my life. I would rather allow something useful to take over my life. The need for these was urgent, though. Several people asked me to send masks ASAP. Unfortunately, many of them are going to medical providers:
To date, I have made 65 of these, and mailed out or given away 60. Someone at Blue Cross Blue Shield and Allina designed the masks I have made, then sent them out appealing to anyone who can sew. An NBC article I found yesterday cited a research study by a Dr. stating that these screen out 79% of viruses and bacteria. Not bad for quilting materials. The instructions (thrown together and hand drawn) are here:
Then came the issue of obtaining materials. First everyone everywhere ran out of elastic, then elastic hair ties which were used to improvise elastic. I hear people are cutting the elastic off of underwear to make them. I found shoelaces, ordered 4 spools from a shoelace site, and have been attaching those. They tie very tightly and stay put. The medical people need that. Next, during a trip to Joann Fabric, the store was shut down because people would not stay 6 feet apart in the store. Thus my on-line order was cancelled. I went to the Edina Joann, and joined a line in front of the store. They only allowed 25 customers in the store at once to maintain a distance. The fly in that ointment was that all 25 customers headed for the quilt fabric department – to make masks. We did our best to maintain 6 feet of distance from one another. I did get more fabric, then launched into making more.
I am taking a break now from mask construction, having overdosed on the entire project. I just could not do one more after yesterday. I sent them off Monday morning to family in Phoenix, to KC, to Iowa wishing them 79% ability to block a virus and that they perform efficiently. In a few days I will start some more, but I won’t make that many at a time again. Today, for a change of pace, I planted my cold frame, wallowing in the joy of early Spring and the possibilities of my garden. Then I fixed supper, using the baked potato recipe Steve posted yesterday via YouTube. They were good.
What have you overdosed on lately?
I have four more days to work from home until the State is assured I am not full of Covid19 germs from Minnesota. I was trained last week in the computer platform we will be using for telehealth. Even when I return to the office, face to face therapy and psychological testing are to be done only in an emergency, and l will either reach out to clients via phone or the telehealth platform. There is some glitch in my work computer that I will need our tech guy to fix, as my screen freezes, usually with my face with a weird expression. The audio works just fine.
Daughter is doing 5 hours of telehealth sessions a day, and she even figured out how to have the children she sees use their own toys to facilitate play therapy. (“What feelings do your different color leggo blocks have? Make a sad building with blue blocks. Why is the building so sad? How does that red leggo block feel?”) I wish I was as flexible and creative as she is. I really don’t like doing therapy remotely, and I don’t think my clients like it, either. Not all insurances will pay for telehealth sessions. I know that some of the more active and aggressive traumatized preschoolers won’t do well with it at all. I think I will mainly be offering behavior management and therapeutic response suggestions to the foster parents. I imagine if I do sessions from home, the cats will wonder to whom I am speaking and will want to walk on the keyboard to see what is going on.
What are your feelings regarding telehealth? What have you done remotely?
I was tickled to read about the Kashmiri goats running wild in Wales. during the COVID-19 lockdown there.
There are more than one hundred of them wandering around town. They were described as “quite naughty” by a local. I gather they have come to town on other occasions, but the lack of people has made them even more curious to check things out. And oh, my, those horns! Fiber for cashmere comes from the neck region of such goats. I have several cashmere sweaters, and I love them.
What is your favorite sweater? What are some bright spots in the news or in your life over the past several days?
Photo credit: Wonderlane
I think I may have figured out how I am going to stay sane through all this isolation. I have “discovered” a new room on our house – heck, a new floor! – our Basement. Saturday (I may have mentioned here) we cleaned and organized enough that it feels comfortable down there. It’s an OLD basement (1930 era house) but at least it’s dry. There are five small windows, and the ceiling and walls are painted white, which makes it pretty light.
The joy of it is that I can spread out down there with my mask sewing project – there is room for a cutting table and ironing board. There’s an old rug under all this so my feet don’t get cold – if it feels too cool, I just add another layer. I still need a coffee kiosk, or I suppose I could go up to the “fireplace” niche in my (tiny) bedroom – the Break Room!
But the best thing about this is it feels a little bit “away” from the rest of my life now. I have a commute – even if it is only up and down twelve steps, it will be a bit harder to get to the kitchen. And with a 900 sq. ft. house, it will give us both some well needed space. Heck, I might even get fully dressed to go to “work”.
Some of the “baboons” here (if you’re relatively new on the Trail, click on FAQ at the top) may already have this sort of space in their abode. If so,
is it useful at this time?
Is there some nook or cranny (attic, closet) at your about that you haven’t explored lately?
If you are living with others, do you have a place where you can get “away” if you want to?
Our discussion the other day about paper plates reminded me of stories that my folks used to tell about their early married life. My dad was in basic training in North Carolina and my mom moved there to be close to him. She taught gym part-time and they lived in a small trailer. One of the stories they told me about how broke they were was that they couldn’t afford to buy a set of plates. So not only did they eat on paper plates, they cut the paper plates in half!
By the time I came along, they were in better shape, although still not great; my dad was in law school with two part time jobs and my mom was forced to quit working the minute the school district found out she was pregnant! As a kid, things were tight, not destitute, but definitely tight. One of the ways that my mom saved on groceries was by using powdered milk. I still remember it after all these years, chalky and for some reason never seemed to get really cold. I hated it.
At least once a month we had Saturday dinner at my grandparents’ house – hamburger and french fry night. There were a lot of reasons that I liked to eat my Nana and Pappy’s; one of those reasons was that they had “real” milk. It was always very cold because that’s the way Pappy liked it and there was always plenty. They had a special half-gallon carton holder that looked like this:
When my younger sister started school and had “real” milk every day, she began refusing to drink the powdered milk at home. While I hadn’t been brave enough to do this on my own, I quickly followed her lead and my mom gave up and began to buy “real” milk. I started drinking skim about 30 years ago and I’m still a big milk drinker all these years later. My mom doesn’t understand how I can drink skim and has suggested more than once that I “might as well go back to powdered milk”. Yes, after all these years, she still remembers how we “forced” her to buy milk.
My milkman told me yesterday when he was making our delivery that big local dairies are going to discontinue skim milk production for a bit. Apparently skim milk requires more steps and production time; during our current crisis, trying to keep up with demand means cutting out skim so more easily produced milks can make it to market faster. Who would have thought? Guess I’ll be on a higher fat milk for a while.
Do you remember any meals you enjoyed at your grandparents’?
It says a lot about you when you really decide that there is a crisis going on. Work from home? Concert cancelled? Dog class postponed? Even the decision to stay away from Target for now didn’t bring it home to me until this: Tuesday morning I got a note that the Hennepin County Library is closed until at least April 6. Oh, the inhumanity!
Of course, it’s ridiculous to think this will have a serious impact on my life. First off, I still have 14 books checked out; the library computer generously changed all the due dates to April, even the interlibrary loans. Second off, there are tons of audio books online and I could always break down by reading books on my phone or pc. Then there is the third off; I probably have 50 non-library books in the house that I haven’t read yet either. I don’t think I have to panic. Matbe Funny Planet by Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy guy) will be my next read.
What’s up next on your reading list?
Husband is slow. Motorically slow. He always has been slow. He really can’t do much of anything quickly, and it has been a source of frustration for him that I can do things quickly. Really quickly. When I did my psychology internship at a VA hospital in Iowa, we interns were administered the same battery of neuropsychological tests that we would eventually administer to the patients. One of the tests was the Purdue Pegboard, which is a large board with holes for pegs, and you time people to see how fast they can put the pegs in the holes. It assesses bilateral motor speed and coordination. I had the fastest time ever for anyone who had taken the test at that clinic.
Last week, I got a notification from Ancestry.com that recent analysis of my DNA revealed me to have the Sprinter gene, common in athletes, especially in successful short distance runners. I never was an athlete, but my dad was, and he was really speedy. In high school he could zip around the basketball court so fast that he once caused the boy assigned to guard him to start crying during a game because he couldn’t keep up with him. He did most things really fast, and I am pretty sure I inherited that gene from him.
What genetic advantage do you think you inherited? Make up a gene you would like to have.
For a couple of years now, I have used some relaxing piano/bird song background music during the day as a way to relax and keep my balance at work. It’s the same musical theme (YouTube) and it repeats and repeats. There are days when I have it playing on my headset for most of the day.
No need to go into this in detail, but suffice it to say that the last two weeks have been the most stressful I have ever endured in the travel industry. I realized on Friday that even my pretty piano & bird compilation wasn’t quite doing it. So I went searching and found this:
I don’t look at the actual video – not much to see – but I’ve been listening to the rain almost constantly (when I’m not on calls or being accosted in my cube about something). It is actually very calming – not sure why the sound of softly falling rain relaxes me, but it does. In fact, this morning I accidentally closed down the browser that is playing the rain and I immediately tensed up and hurried to get it back.
Apparently there is an app that goes along with this soothing sound, but it doesn’t look like anything I would really like or use, so I guess I’ll just stick with the YouTube rain for now.
What helps you relax? Or are you already relaxed enough?
Work and life in general have both been rather trying of late. The other day I was sitting in the living room, rather dazed, on a sunny Saturday morning when I noticed the sun pouring into the dining room onto the leaded glass windows of our oak dining room buffet. It was a lovely, peaceful sight, and I told myself I had to start noticing and remembering things like that when I was stressed.
There are lots of things that are simple pleasures that can make all the difference in a person’s life.
What are the simple pleasures that keep you going?
Trail Baboon 