Rounding the Corner on Week EIGHT WTF RUKIDDINGME

I keep track of the weeks on our kitchen white board (an item that Current Me thanks Past Me for daily. Way to go, 2-months-younger-RG! That was a solid panic-buy.) Otherwise they’d all blend in and I’d have to check a calendar, count, and shriek in surprise at how long we’ve been doing this.

In my March 14 post I described my dash to Wal Mart to grab some stuff in the one hour of advance notice I had before the kids came home forever. (It was SO CROWDED that day. So crowded. The thought of it gives me hives now.) That day while running around in a panic, I noted the party supply aisle and decided to grab a four-pack of black plastic tablecloths, thinking they’d come in handy for easy art project clean up. After I’d finished shopping and right before checkout, in a moment of prescient pessimism, I ran back to the party supplies aisle and grabbed a second four-pack. It has turned out in the weeks since that setting out the fresh black tablecloth each Monday (and removing it each Friday) has evolved into a good visual cue that divides weekdays and weekends. Anyway, this is an extremely long way of saying we are down to our last tablecloth, folks, and we ain’t even done yet.

Side note about the tablecloth – the children have adopted the nervous habit of shredding the bottom of it while watching their lessons, so we now walk through drifts of plastic black tablecloth shreds everywhere we go. I’m thinking of buying two large cheap cloth ones online that we can wash on a rotating basis instead. Except they probably won’t ship for weeks, much like the basic gym equipment which I tried to purchase three weeks ago and still hasn’t arrived, and will probably all get here right when my gym reopens.

A few more pandemic frets: has anyone else’s face just gone to seed? I think it’s a combination of things, chief among them stress. Also, I walk every day for 3-5 miles, and put on greasy sunscreen (I also wear a wide-brimmed hat, but the sunscreen is still key). And I tend to exercise throughout the day in short bursts – 20 minutes of Pilates when my back starts to hurt from sitting, or jumping in on my son’s PE workout, or lifting light hand weights while I watch tv. I’m positive it doesn’t help to sit in janky workout clothes all day, although I do try to wash my face a lot. Anyway, I guess I need a better skincare routine. Or maybe just trust it will all come back into balance once this is over (in possibly two years they’re saying now? Really?)

Next fret: my jaw keeps clicking out of place. I think that I am clenching in my sleep? My sleep is not great – like everyone else, I’m having apocalyptic dreams, mostly involving solving an impossible problem necessary to save children’s lives. (The other night, I was holding a baby who didn’t have a diaper, and had a bunch of other kids of miscellaneous ages in my care, and was trying to help them escape a homicidal maniac who had us trapped in some sort of movie theater type building and was about to release lava to kill us all, and we made it out to the parking lot (after multiple trips back to gather wayward children who weren’t listening to me when I told them to follow me out), but I couldn’t get the car started and was also worried about the baby peeing on me, and ultimately woke up trapped in a tangle of sweaty sheets. Interpret THAT, Freud!) Anyway, also now when I chew anything tougher than yogurt, I have to press on the right side of my jaw hinge to keep it in place. I probably need some sort of bite guard I guess? I don’t know. It’s too hard to think. Somebody think for me.

Next fret: I have a lot of general underlying anxiety grounded in food and money scarcity, which leads to crazy thought spirals. The food supply chain seems out of whack, and I’m pondering getting chickens for eggs and maybe a goat for milk, and growing tomatoes and cabbages and kale and such. Since a human of normal wingspan can stand in the middle of our backyard and practically touch both the back deck railing and the back fence with outstretched hands, these animals and plants obviously aren’t going to fit in our backyard so we’re going to have to sell and move to a small farm. Although small farms are probably going way up in price right now as everyone is having the same thoughts as me, and for similar reasons our compact urban house is probably way down in value. So maybe we’ll buy the farm and rent out the house until home prices stabilize, though then we’ll have home expenses for two places. But the house rent plus the savings on the eggs from the chickens and whatever vegetables I can manage to grow will make up the difference, maybe, right? I read a story once about a lawyer and her wife who bought a farm outside DC and did just this – the lawyer kept lawyering and the wife became the farmer and homeschooled the kids. The Prof would actually LOVE large parts of this (the farming/outdoor work parts, not the homeschooling parts), and if I could get him trained up on making dinner and canning, then actually I could make it work.

Does this sound crazy to you, because it sounds crazy to me, and yet my mind goes down this crazy path on the reg.

I am generally a person who solves problems by addressing the underlying systemic issues. This sounds fancy but what I mean is I have a very low tolerance for poorly-designed systems, probably lower than most, and I have a borderline OCD need to fix a system that is working against me. As an illustration – right now, we store our bikes in a tiny overstuffed shed in our backyard. In order to do this, the front tire has to be removed from the bikes and they have to be stacked *just so* or the door won’t close. This is a TERRIBLE SYSTEM. We need a DIFFERENT SYSTEM, that makes it seamless to get the bikes out for the kids to ride, rather than a Giant Fucking Chore. This will irk me until I solve it, and in fact we now almost never ride bikes because the thought of how dumb this whole process is fills me with such rage, I can’t face it. A second illustration – getting the boys to get their socks in the morning before school (back in the day when there was school, of course) drove me bonkers, as did trying to figure out whose socks were whose when folding laundry. So we decided just to throw all the little boy socks of all sizes in a basket in our bedroom downstairs, so now they don’t have to scatter upstairs to their various rooms and dressers while I try to manage them from below. (I can’t even tell you the enormous challenge of keeping them focused long enough to find a pair of socks and get out the door if I am not standing over them). Until I came up with this solution I was filled with abject despair every morning at Socks And Shoes Time, and dreading it, and raging at how stupid the world is. The need to fix this and other problems with the One Perfect Solution is as strong as the impulse we all feel to check our social media notifications when we have that little red number pop up – almost undeniable. (I turned all my notifications off on my phone for this reason – it was making me crazy.)

I am forever reorganizing closets and cabinets and shifting around charging stations to try to maximize efficiency, both in my home and in my work life. Everyone does this to a degree – I think I feel a *need* to do it more than most people, though. I do have clinical anxiety, so this tracks – trying to create control and ease in an uncontrollable and increasingly difficult world. Anyhow, there is the giant global pandemic and so much uncertainty about food supply chains and stock markets (not that we own stocks – just a 401k and 529s) and my new firm just did a temporary pay cut for everybody, and I don’t have a particularly large freezer to store large amounts of meat in, and canned and dry goods only take you so far, and as time goes on and my children get squirrellier my urban house feels smaller by the day, and so. My anxiety tells me “this is a broken system!” and runs wild with Farm Dreams.

Luckily I haven’t snapped so I let myself think it through, put together a lil’ Farming Plan in my mind, and then think “well, ok, that’s planned out then” and set it down and go on with my day. Who else is thinking like this? We should all go in on a plot of land somewhere.

Anyway, now I have many of my frets aired out and so I am going to go get dressed and motivate the children to disconnect from devices. Let me know what you want to do on the giant Pandemic Farm in the comments – we can put together a pretty solid little community I think, if we pool our non-tech talents!