Month: October 2020

I’ve lost track of time in pretty much the way I lose track of my cell phone and other things that are not permanently attached to my body. At this point is anyone actually keeping track anymore? I’m guessing the months by the weather we are having, which can be hard to do in Iowa where it can change from one to the next in seconds.

The only way I know what day of the week it is would be by what TV shows my DVR has recorded for the day. I rarely watch any TV “live”, I record it all and then watch it when I want to, minus all the commercials. It’s usually at 3 a.m. Other shows I watch are on demand, so that’s not helpful at all time wise.

I’m also so over cooking at this point as well. Ok, so yes, I had to cook before covid set in to stay, but its just getting annoying right now. Remember, I can only recycle about five or six recipes so the rotations are getting very boring. They were boring before, but covid seems to heighten everything. We rarely went out to eat much before covid either, now it just feels like we never go out to eat at all. It’s a whole mindset thing. Darn it covid!

Once in a great while we do go pick up our favorite pizza at Zeno’s in Marshalltown. Like most restaurants, they now have curbside pickup. Having done this a couple of times (maybe once a month?) I am getting better at being prepared for the “meal in a moving vehicle” ride home. Paper plates, napkins, paper towels just in case, lidded glasses with ice and a straw for the pop, water for me and a pizza cutter, all the necessities.

The first time we had decided we were going to go pick up a curbside pizza at Zeno’s, we realized we had to eat it on the drive home because there was no way it was going to stay hot for that forty-five minute drive back. What we didn’t plan for was everything else.

Sadly we had not thought this through and our unpreparedness was quickly realized. We pulled into a gas station in town before arriving for our pizza and Jay got a pop for him and water for me. We now remember to bring our own. We hadn’t thought at all about napkins, paper plates, a pizza cutter, things that they give you in the restaurant to eat your pizza. Things that would be greatly helpful trying to eat pizza in a moving vehicle with limited supplies on board.

Luckily on that first trip I found a few napkins from a fast food place in my glove box. Unfortunately they were the really cheap little brown ones that instantly melt into a slime ball when something touches them.

We love Zeno’s pizza, and normally they will drizzle just a bit of olive oil over the top of the pizza after it’s baked to enhance the flavor and aroma of it. This particular pizza however, got a dump of olive oil on top of it. I don’t know if it was by accident or it was a new cook, but each piece of pizza was literally dripping with olive oil. Those poor little brown napkins were no match for the amount of oil of each piece. We soaked up as much as possible and still enjoyed the delicious flavor of our pizza on the drive home. It was worth the drive there and back.

Good preparation is the key to eating on the go. Isn’t “be prepared” a Scout motto? I’m not sure, having never made it past being a Brownie, which I was for two years instead of one. I wanted to go with my BFF who was a year older than me so they let me go a year early. I guess two years of being a Brownie did me in, as I never made it into Scouting.

The down side currently of driving there for pizza is the sun sets earlier so we drive home in the dark. It’s hard to see the pizza in the box. I may have to invest in one of those lighted headlamp things. Yes, I know they have lights inside the vehicle, but it’s hard to see around the big open box lid and it can be distracting for the driver.

The last thing I want to do is end up in the ditch while eating pizza on the ride home. I’m not sure how the highway patrol would feel about our “meals on wheels” pizza run, but it feels nice to be able to go visit our favorite pizza place again. In case you are wondering, yes, Jazzy gets to ride along with us. No, she does not get any pizza.

Be safe, wear your mask, be socially distant.

Until next time…

Toni

Last night as I made my usual bathroom pit stop before going to bed I had a strange encounter with a spider. When I turned on the bathroom lights, there was a largish black spider on the bathroom wall right beside the toilet. I hate most insects and spiders are definitely not my favorite creature.

I stood there staring at it a bit as I had just spared a spider from certain death last week when I found a large spider occupying space on the seat of my lawn chair outside. Granted I did fold the chair back up and tossed it about ten feet away from me, but I didn’t smash him.That felt different though as he was at least outside. This was inside my house, fair game in my book.

I grabbed some toilet paper off of the roll and making a little bunch out of it I reached out to squish the spider. I hate squishing things, but sometimes its about self preservation. He must have seen my intent and was too fast for me. He dropped to the floor and ran into the corner beside the toilet. I tried to get it with the plunger that sat nearby but he escaped behind the toilet where its hard to reach.

I went and opened the bathroom cabinet doors hoping I guess that I actually had an insect spray in there. I got my body spray out, desperate times and all that. I started spraying body spray behind the toilet attacking from both sides. My bladder was letting me know we had to finish what we came in here for, so I quickly sat down and kept turning sideways, my eyes darting left and right to try to find where the spider had gone.

When I got up, I saw it trying to hide behind the very plunger I had tried to kill it with. Bad idea buddy, I thought. I grabbed the air freshener spray that sat on the back of the toilet and let him have a blast of that. That had to do it, right?

I went back into the living room to finish watching my show before heading off to bed, all the while both wondering if the spider was working his way out here to bite me, and almost gagging on the sickly sweet smell of the mixture of my body spray and the air freshener spray that was wafting out into the living room.

A few minutes later my show ended, and I went to bed. Well I went in and laid on my bed still wondering if the spider had survived my attack. Hours later I finally drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

Three o’clock a.m. rolled around and as usual I woke up. Normally I head right into the bathroom to empty my bladder so maybe I can fall back asleep. Not tonight. Tonight I was worried that I hadn’t killed the spider and he would either be laying there suffering, forcing me to smash it, which now just felt inhumane to me, or he would be gone, and I wouldn’t know where he’d snuck off to.

I tossed and turned for about an hour and my bladder won out. Side note; why do we always try to put off getting up to use the bathroom? The bladder always wins out. I crept into the bathroom and flicked on the light switch. I peeked beside the toilet to see what had happened to the spider. To my relief and dismay, no spider was in sight anywhere.

I sat down and lifted up my feet so they weren’t touching the floor, short people can do things like that. I was worried that the spider, who may now be temporarily blinded by the sprays and is certainly ticked off, might run out and bite me as I sat there helplessly. I hurried as fast as my sixty-five year old bladder would let me and quickly got back into bed.

Laying there wide awake once again, I ran all the possibilities through my head about where and when the spider would have his revenge on me. After a long while I once again drifted into an uneasy sleep.

In the morning, two hours later, I woke thinking about the spider first thing. When I went into the bathroom I began lifting everything around the toilet area, the grandkids step stool, the plunger, the little stool that holds the bucket with the spare toilet paper, the two rugs. That was everything, and no spider body, alive or otherwise. I looked up to make sure he wasn’t above me waiting to jump on me and bite me.

I’m not sure how this is going to play out, maybe he went down the heat register and is living out his spider life in the basement somewhere, telling others down there about his horrible adventures with a crazy lady upstairs who sprayed sweet smelling stuff on him, or maybe he’s lying in wait somewhere up here plotting his revenge. I do know that for a while, the bathroom is going to be a scary place with an unknown spider danger possibly awaiting. I guess we’ll never know…

Update: I don’t think this is the spider in question because I swear it was a lot bigger than this one, but there is a similar though smaller spider now living in my spare toilet paper can!

Every time I use the bathroom he turns and stares at me from on top of the toilet paper roll. Is he a child of said spider waiting to exact his revenge? One of these days I am going to have to take that whole can outside and dump it out and he can make his way in the world outside. Did I mention I hate spiders?

Until next time…

Stay safe, wear your mask, social distance.

Toni

Have you ever had one of those Mondays where nothing seems to go right and many things seem to go “fall off the rails”. Not in a tragic way, but worse than normal days. Well that was my Monday.

I slept horrible Sunday night, it was one of those long tossy turny kind of nights where nothing brought me relief or sleep. Fan on, fan off, fan back on. Blanket on, blanket off. Pillow between the knees, pillow back out, feet up, feet down, left side, right side, back, adjust head pillows, etc. Use the bathroom, play soft music, glass of chocolate milk, listen to audio book, etc. From one-thirty in the morning until I gave up at seven nothing worked. So Monday morning I was expecting it to be a very groggy brained tired kind of day.

Normally I babysit Brittney’s two little children on Monday’s but she had one of her bad migraines so she wasn’t going to her painting class at UNI. In a small way I was relieved only because I was so groggy and tired, and now I could get a nap or two in during the day. Things seemed to be going ok.

I would have also thought from the email I received that morning that it would be a great day. You see, I had ordered through my cell phone company a new iPad because the one I have is at least 7 years old, a dinosaur in iPad terms, and it was starting to fail more and more.

I don’t have the hefty money that it costs to go buy one, so I opt to buy through them and just pay a small monthly charge forever. I knew it would be a few weeks because Apple is extremely slow right now with new products coming and covid concerns that has slowed down everyone.

Two full months later it had finally arrived! Hurray! Ok, kill the fanfare because the agent at the cellular store ordered the wrong one. Yup! I had very specifically stated I didn’t want the lowest GB model, I wanted the next one up. I received the lowest one. I could reject it and have her order the correct one, but that would be another two month wait or more because that size was even harder to get. Yay me.

So hence the lack of enthusiasm about my iPad arriving. I went and picked up my wrong iPad order and brought it home. It’s not as thrilling to open and set up a new electronic when it’s not really the one you wanted, but I made the best of it. Years ago I lowered my expectation bar down to zero, so now nothing really surprises me or disappoints me. I started going through all the set up steps, and then it asked me if I wanted to transfer all my old iPads information to it via the iCloud. Why yes please, that would be wonderfully easy!

Nope, not as easy because apparently at some point in time my auto backup to the cloud for my entire old iPad had been switched off. Luckily my photos were still saving there, but nothing else. So I went through all the steps on my old iPad and told it to run a complete backup. It told me it would take at least 4 hours.

During that waiting time I decided to have a snack. I got a little convenient snack pack out that has almonds, white cheddar cheese and dried cranberries and started snacking happily away. I also had cut an apple up for the squirrels and had kept a couple pieces so I was munching on those as well. As I was eating I noticed something kind of hard in my mouth, so I extracted it and saw it looked like a bit of a tooth. I have a tooth in the back that has a slight crack in the top, so I thought that was it. Nope.

My top lip began to have this very odd sensation of something very sharp going across the inside every time I chewed. I went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror and there it was, a big piece of my front tooth had chipped off. Its had a very tiny chip in it for decades, but this one looks like I used to play hockey and caught a puck with my front tooth.

Awesome. Just what I needed. The tooth next to it is capped and has been since I was twelve. I broke it off after ice skating in our homemade backyard “pond” and after removing my skates and walking up the small hill to the house I slipped and landed front teeth first onto some ice and broke that tooth in half. Now I guess I’ll end up with a matched set.

It was now supper time and I was just going to get out the chili I had made over the weekend. I set the table with the usual bowls, spoons, glasses and chili crackers and waited for Jay to get home so we could each nuke (aka microwave) ourselves a bowl of chili. No, I do not put it in a pan and warm it up, are you kidding?

At around six-fifteen, I decided to go ahead and start eating so I scooped some chili in my bowl and hit the button several times to make it cook it for a couple of minutes. There is a soup sensor setting on my microwave, but its faster just to hit the 30 second button numerous times.

My chili bowls have little handles on them similar to a coffee cup, so when it was done I reached in and grabbed it by the handle. Not even thinking it may be the temperature of the sun. I almost dropped it midway over the stove, but willed myself to quickly set it down on the counter before yowling in pain from my now burnt middle finger.

I ran it under cold water for several minutes and then got a cold wet paper towel and wrapped that around my finger for good measure. I sat and ate my chili and crackers in silence.

Jay got home a few minutes later and I smiled showing him my new front tooth situation. His instant comment was “go to the dentist.” Guess he doesn’t like my new look. The upside is, I always wear a mask when I’m out and about, so no one will even notice!

After supper I checked my iPad again, and over the next several hours it gave me a new estimated time of being done. Five hours, twelve hours, eight hours, it was as if it were taunting me. I wonder if it knew I was replacing it with a newer model? I had started this whole process around two in the afternoon, by eleven-thirty that night it was finally done!

Now the new iPad finally recognized that there was data in the iCloud for it to fetch. It took what seemed like hours to transfer the information but not as long as it took to put it there. Finally that was done and it asked if I wanted to install the newest update? Well of course I do. There went at least a couple more hours of time.

At around two-thirty in the morning my new iPad was finally ready for me to open and check it out. Nope. Wrong! It wants my apple ID and log in first. Well who on earth can remember that? I have it written down in my “big book of everything I need to remember and can’t”, but that was out in the living room.

I went to get up to make a bathroom run since I was wide awake and in the process I knocked my container of water off my shelf. I have one of those “cubby shelf units” that holds canvas bins in it for storage. It was half full of water and the lid hit the edge of the cabinet and came off spilling all of the water on the carpet. I brought a towel back with me and pressed it on the carpet, no harm, no foul right?

I had Alexa turn on my small bedroom lamp and only then realized that the water had also spilled out on top of the shelf where my phone laid. It was a little wet but not bad and had dripped into one of my top clothes bins and gotten a few socks wet. Nothing too tragic, just annoying.

I had decided not to go into the living room for the information I needed because Jazzy was sleeping in there on her favorite spot on the couch. Most nights she can’t be troubled sleeping on my bed with me. If she does grace me with her presence it’s only for an hour or two and then she abandons me for the couch.

I could shut my bedroom door at night so she’d have to stay in there with me, but I think she likes the couch better as its in front of the window and she can be on guard if she needs to be, protecting us from field mice, owls, and the occasional random leaf that blows by outside. I would not want to take those responsibilities away from her.

In the morning I woke up to a new iPad waiting for me to log in, (I did) a middle finger that thankfully didn’t blister and is just a bit red with a big dent in it the shape of a cup handle, a front tooth that still has a giant chip in it, and a happy Shar-pei who had a good nights rest and is outside making sure the squirrels don’t get too close to the house.

I am still waiting for my new iPad to finish uploading all of the programs from my old iPad but happy to say it is chugging along nicely! Sometimes the joys of new technology are real.

Until next time…

Stay safe, wear a mask, and social distance.

Toni