Cold Coffee

BB4AD83B-6E71-465C-B11F-DD5EAEB1E1D0_1_201_aI spaced out my Saturday morning chores so that they took up most of the morning. I’ve been retired for more than a decade and am already quite proficient at spacing tasks out, but there’s always room for improvement.

Was I successful? Well, let’s see: between 0630 and 1130 I’ve showered, written a blog post (not this one, another one which you’ll learn about in a minute), poop-patrolled the back yard, cleaned and replenished the bird feeders, hooked up the trickle charger to the motorcycle battery, walked the dog, made breakfast, and started a loaf of bread.

We took our old bread machine out of storage a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t have any trouble finding it, but the recipe book that came with it was well-hidden, and once unearthed turned out to be water-damaged and barely readable. I found some older model Zojirushi manuals and recipes on line and copied four basic bread machine recipes into a Word document. This morning it occurred to me to post them on Crouton’s Kitchen, my cooking blog. I mean, who knows? If we had that much trouble finding our 30-year-old bread machine book, maybe you did too, so it’s Crouton to the rescue!

I’m wearing shorts for the first time in six months. No one knows it but Donna, which is why I’m sharing the news with you. I look plenty silly in them, so I won’t share a photo.

I put a Ko-fi link on the sidebar for anyone who wants to support the blog by buying me a cup of coffee (only three bucks, a bargain). Ko-fi uses PayPal. A friend tested the system by buying me a cup, and now I’m trying to verify my PayPal account so they’ll hand the coffee over to me. What a PITA! I had to go to a third-party website to find out how, and then PayPal didn’t live up to its part of the bargain. Here’s how it’s supposed to work: you give them your credit card or bank account info; they make and immediately withdraw a small deposit to the account (like less than fifty cents); you check your activity log and tell PayPal the exact amount of the deposit they made; and voilà, you’re verified. It’s been ten days since I sent the account info to PayPal and they haven’t made the deposit, so I remain a nobody and the coffee’s gone cold.

B6F96F14-9CB7-491F-AD9A-5421BB74A705_1_201_a
Donna with our friend Mary Anne, back when we weren’t as strict about the quarantine (Wednesday)

Polly Index: our daughter’s still working full-time at Amazon, still getting overtime shifts. Polly lives with us and we worry she might bring the virus home with her at some point, if she hasn’t already. She says Amazon continuously sanitizes working surfaces at the warehouse and that individual work stations are spaced out so that workers are well more than six feet from one another (and so far she hasn’t heard anyone coughing). Amazon gives them gloves, but not masks … and what about the break room? Also, too … turns out Polly has a boyfriend, with whom she’s spent time during the past two weeks.

The boyfriend issue hadn’t really registered with us. Yes, we worried, and continue to worry, about what she’s exposed to at work, but add the boyfriend and there are too many variables to count. Like everyone else, I suspect, we’ve only gradually tightened up our sheltering-in-place and social-distancing act. We’d been seeing our friend Mary Anne, who, like us, was quarantining and being careful, but now we see no one, and if we have to go to the store for supplies we mask up. But there’s Polly, going in and out of the house, and what if all we’re doing is for naught?

Well, at least I won’t be giving it to my barber … he just closed for the duration.

One thought on “Cold Coffee

  • I’ve got a loaf of bread in the oven as I type. Lisa likes sandwiches every now and then and for reasons I’ll never understand brings Wonder Bread home. I asked her if she’d like me to make sandwich bread (something I’ve never actually done) just plain, white bread shaped like Wonder and it was as if I were offering to sell my soul for a PB&J. I assured her I had no moral conviction against making something so bland, I’ve just always preferred my sourdoughs and ryes. So here we go.

    I was glad to see you guys out at Agua Caliente’ (did I get that right?) A friend in an RV group posted photos a month or so ago and I was pleased to see it was near a place we intend to come back and visit (this time spending more time and exploring) Even the biggest alarmists agree getting outdoors for some exercise is still good for us and low risk as long as we’re not assembling in packs.

    We’ve done a decent job (I believe) with our social distancing although I’ll admit we have 12 for dinner every evening. But in order to reduce that number I’d be forced to abandon my friends who can neither work from home nor find affordable child care and I’m just not ready to do that. The children need their education to progress and they respond well to me as a teacher. (Perhaps because I’ve never lost touch with my inner 5 and 9 year olds) So it’s us 4, plus 4 more kids, plus 4 single moms. And the kids really enjoy helping prepare the evening meal, plus helping me set and clear the table.

    Sorry to hear about your trouble with PayPal. I’ve been using them for years, ever since they first showed up on EBay. Perhaps I’ve simply forgotten any trouble I had starting off.

    The bread is nearly finished proofing so I should to peer into the oven. I’ll shoot you a photo of the finished product (good or bad) on FB

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