Collected Item: “Bill's Covid Journal #6”
I agree:
Yes
Name:
Bill Hogan
Date(s):
May 1, 2020
Title:
Bill's Covid Journal #6
Text:
[Email #6 written to friends during the pandemic by Bill Hogan]
Fri 5/1/2020 10:52 PM
A gentleman caller from down the street has been joining Pauline and I for the last few years. I don't let him sleep over, but since I'm a night owl, I often get up late in the day to find him with Pauline on the couch. I get my share of affection too, of course. But lately I've been wondering if this is really safe for us.
Perhaps I've used the wrong term, my French really isn't up to par. Isn't menage like a menagerie? Simon is a visiting cat from the cat lady down the street and he spends half his time at our house. The St. Catharines Standard reported this week that two cats in New York have tested positive for Covid-19. The grandkids love Simon and as a matter of fact the kids petting Simon was Pauline's screensaver for years. Everyone heard of the tiger with Covid, but this is new. In a separate story someone suggested the virus could come in the house on pet collars, so don't let your pets out. Try telling THAT to Simon. I've been tasked with telling him he has to wear a little mask, too. And how does someone get two cats tested when some people can't even get tested?
I think I'm ready to go back to Stage 1 in my Covid-19 emotional cycle. What's this, you say? Thought you'd never ask. In a completely unscientific analysis, a quarantined nurse, Jerilyn Gabruck from Alberta, has quantified the stages of quarantine in the style of the stages of cancer acceptance.
Stage 1 is a sense of opportunity, of motivation, of "lets get productive", of doing long-postponed home repairs, say. Remember I organized 5,000 photos and a life-time of memorabilia?
Stage 2 is incredulity, that this can't be my life, this is unreal. You give up on productivity. Remember I put all those photos in 26 small albums? Well, there's still two to go. I have the little albums, I have the 60 pictures each culled and ready to enter, but the 2019 Jordan holiday and the summer of 2019 maybe won't get archived. Maybe Pauline will do it. And I have two books and a mailer ready to go to the teacher at NCC who loves books, but...they're still on a chair in my office.
Stage 3 is called crying, but it's really just despondency and frustration. You stay in your P.J.'s. You don't look in the mirror. You feel frustrated. You can't remember what day it is. "It's April isn't it?" Michelle asked. "Is it too early to be this drunk?" someone else wrote. Pauline's at this stage, I think. Only after she got dressed for Sunday's video church service did she realize she could have stayed in her housecoat and just kept her camera off.
Stage 4 is the awful recognition that this is your new life for a long time. It's not acceptance. It's panic. I've been there. And others that have responded to me seem to be there. And then it repeats, according to a very unscientific analysis remember. I'm ready for the repeat. That garden needs some attention. Those albums need sorting out.
Oh, just in case you were wondering, Ian, no Pauline has not (yet) joined this new Tik Tok craze of videoing your boyfriend/mate's reaction as he's playing video games and you enter the room naked. Pauline showed me a bunch of those on You Tube and in almost every one the reaction is the same, the guy gets what can only be described as a shit-eating grin on his face and drops the video game. I don't think P. actually knows how Tik Tok works (nor do I or do I want to). She's still working on Zoom and this doesn't seem to be Zoom appropriate.
Community gardens are up and running now as long as they satisfy local Covid rules. Only problem, I hear there's a real shortage of seeds with folks planting home gardens, sort of like WWII Victory Gardens. Anyway, thank you Doug Ford for opening the community gardens. I must say, Doug has had a complete personality change. He's humble, concerned, thoughtful and almost prime ministerial in his reaction to this pandemic. Maybe it's all a front, but it looks good from here and I haven't liked a single Ontario Conservative leader since Leslie Frost. (Yes, Martha, I am that old.)
I read, too, of someone who invented new games played inside during lockdown. The one that caused both P. and I to laugh out loud was where one person reads a book and the other sits at the end of the couch or the other easy chair with their phone out and mutters "nice" and "how adorable" and "aww, that's so cute" until the reader gets up and leaves. Bonus points if the reader leaves and the person on the phone doesn't even notice.
No word yet from TD on my interest charges rebate but I paid my first bill ever through Easy Web. I followed the TD online tutorials and shazam, it's done. What banks have been trying to do forever, talk their older customers into doing banking online instead of with a teller, has miraculously happened almost overnight. After full-page newspaper ads about this, I'm one of over 3,000 TD customers in Ontario who have signed up in April. We won't go back to tellers, this is so easy. This is radical permanent change. Since I was at it, I bought my first thing ever (Timmies of course) by tapping my card. Instantly I realized that there was no tip! I'll have to think about this part of "banking."
But I'm still hanging on to my flip phone; they haven't broken me there yet. The way they are tracking people nowadays with I-phones is very scary to someone who grew up with talk of "Red" China, the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the Dew Line. Admittedly I grew up an "army brat" (an actual technical term, I think) so maybe I'm a little more paranoid than some, but I distinctly remember school drills where we had to practice for a nuclear attack. (The thought of which cracked my Dad up. He told me to just bend over and grab my ass.) Anyway, no tracking device on me, thank you.
Maggie next door had an interesting Covid-19 experience. Her two year old washer broke down and when she called for repairs the first question asked was if she were working. At 85 years old--no. Then they can't come to repair it. Well her daughter phoned the place up (it shall remain nameless out of courtesy), said that she and her husband were both working (true) and her mother handled their laundry. (Well, I'll have to fact-check that another time). The machine was fixed at 9:30 the next morning.
We got out a bit this week since the weather finally turned warm. We drove over to Westview Fellowship to donate some stuff they need for their outreach ministry. As well, we went for two walks, one along the canal and the other in Queenston Heights Park. At Queenston we saw the Chief Tecumseh memorial written about in The Globe, and we saw the fairly new "Landscape of Nations" (First Nations during 1812) memorial, a tremendous installation. There was no trouble distancing at either place. Queenston Heights Park is massive so it hasn't been closed down, just the playground inside it.
On the way there we passed the magnificent Tulip trees (proper name Saucer Magnolia?) along Queenston St. Maggie's next door is in full bloom too, but I couldn't get a proper picture. I wonder, do we have Magnolias here because of the large number of Southern gentry (with their slaves) who used to annually visit the Mineral Springs in the old Welland House Hotel and other local spas?
As well as Maggie's Tulip tree, our own garden is now bursting with violets, dandelions, forget-me-nots, and the tulips the squirrels didn't dig up. With the isolation, every new blossoming seems so special.
Oh. One thing Keith noticed. "When you leave your clothes in the closet while in isolation--THEY SHRINK." This was exactly one hour before Marlene emailed for Pauline's cheesy bun recipe. Coincidence? I think not. Marlene, this week's specialties were chocolate chip cookies. I saw six printed out recipes and can report that Hershey's won out and Martha Stewart's wasn't popular here.
Well, time to get the garbage out, dawn is here. Under Covid rules only three bags of leaves, clippings, etc., per household are allowed because garbage collection is essential and so many people are at home madly gardening, that the garbage men were quitting or calling in sick for a week or two because there was just too much work with all those extra yard material bags. The "casual" employees who usually pick up the slack were staying home collecting CERB so there were no replacement workers. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. Epidemic=Lay-Offs=Lots of Gardening=Garbagemen Shortage.
In closing, yes, Brock Archives accepted this blog post, email, diary, whatever this is, and it was exciting looking it up. There were 153 entries so far and I think mine was number 1 (under a great Covid19 banner with the virus as the "O") because it was the most recent addition. I'll send the link if anyone wants, it's too complicated to type up. But now I guess I might have to watch out for nudity, coarse language, violence and mature subject matter and give out a reader discretion is advised notice. I think I got them all except the violence bit. That was happening privately as I threatened my computer again and again while typing this.
Your diarist,
Bill
Fri 5/1/2020 10:52 PM
A gentleman caller from down the street has been joining Pauline and I for the last few years. I don't let him sleep over, but since I'm a night owl, I often get up late in the day to find him with Pauline on the couch. I get my share of affection too, of course. But lately I've been wondering if this is really safe for us.
Perhaps I've used the wrong term, my French really isn't up to par. Isn't menage like a menagerie? Simon is a visiting cat from the cat lady down the street and he spends half his time at our house. The St. Catharines Standard reported this week that two cats in New York have tested positive for Covid-19. The grandkids love Simon and as a matter of fact the kids petting Simon was Pauline's screensaver for years. Everyone heard of the tiger with Covid, but this is new. In a separate story someone suggested the virus could come in the house on pet collars, so don't let your pets out. Try telling THAT to Simon. I've been tasked with telling him he has to wear a little mask, too. And how does someone get two cats tested when some people can't even get tested?
I think I'm ready to go back to Stage 1 in my Covid-19 emotional cycle. What's this, you say? Thought you'd never ask. In a completely unscientific analysis, a quarantined nurse, Jerilyn Gabruck from Alberta, has quantified the stages of quarantine in the style of the stages of cancer acceptance.
Stage 1 is a sense of opportunity, of motivation, of "lets get productive", of doing long-postponed home repairs, say. Remember I organized 5,000 photos and a life-time of memorabilia?
Stage 2 is incredulity, that this can't be my life, this is unreal. You give up on productivity. Remember I put all those photos in 26 small albums? Well, there's still two to go. I have the little albums, I have the 60 pictures each culled and ready to enter, but the 2019 Jordan holiday and the summer of 2019 maybe won't get archived. Maybe Pauline will do it. And I have two books and a mailer ready to go to the teacher at NCC who loves books, but...they're still on a chair in my office.
Stage 3 is called crying, but it's really just despondency and frustration. You stay in your P.J.'s. You don't look in the mirror. You feel frustrated. You can't remember what day it is. "It's April isn't it?" Michelle asked. "Is it too early to be this drunk?" someone else wrote. Pauline's at this stage, I think. Only after she got dressed for Sunday's video church service did she realize she could have stayed in her housecoat and just kept her camera off.
Stage 4 is the awful recognition that this is your new life for a long time. It's not acceptance. It's panic. I've been there. And others that have responded to me seem to be there. And then it repeats, according to a very unscientific analysis remember. I'm ready for the repeat. That garden needs some attention. Those albums need sorting out.
Oh, just in case you were wondering, Ian, no Pauline has not (yet) joined this new Tik Tok craze of videoing your boyfriend/mate's reaction as he's playing video games and you enter the room naked. Pauline showed me a bunch of those on You Tube and in almost every one the reaction is the same, the guy gets what can only be described as a shit-eating grin on his face and drops the video game. I don't think P. actually knows how Tik Tok works (nor do I or do I want to). She's still working on Zoom and this doesn't seem to be Zoom appropriate.
Community gardens are up and running now as long as they satisfy local Covid rules. Only problem, I hear there's a real shortage of seeds with folks planting home gardens, sort of like WWII Victory Gardens. Anyway, thank you Doug Ford for opening the community gardens. I must say, Doug has had a complete personality change. He's humble, concerned, thoughtful and almost prime ministerial in his reaction to this pandemic. Maybe it's all a front, but it looks good from here and I haven't liked a single Ontario Conservative leader since Leslie Frost. (Yes, Martha, I am that old.)
I read, too, of someone who invented new games played inside during lockdown. The one that caused both P. and I to laugh out loud was where one person reads a book and the other sits at the end of the couch or the other easy chair with their phone out and mutters "nice" and "how adorable" and "aww, that's so cute" until the reader gets up and leaves. Bonus points if the reader leaves and the person on the phone doesn't even notice.
No word yet from TD on my interest charges rebate but I paid my first bill ever through Easy Web. I followed the TD online tutorials and shazam, it's done. What banks have been trying to do forever, talk their older customers into doing banking online instead of with a teller, has miraculously happened almost overnight. After full-page newspaper ads about this, I'm one of over 3,000 TD customers in Ontario who have signed up in April. We won't go back to tellers, this is so easy. This is radical permanent change. Since I was at it, I bought my first thing ever (Timmies of course) by tapping my card. Instantly I realized that there was no tip! I'll have to think about this part of "banking."
But I'm still hanging on to my flip phone; they haven't broken me there yet. The way they are tracking people nowadays with I-phones is very scary to someone who grew up with talk of "Red" China, the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the Dew Line. Admittedly I grew up an "army brat" (an actual technical term, I think) so maybe I'm a little more paranoid than some, but I distinctly remember school drills where we had to practice for a nuclear attack. (The thought of which cracked my Dad up. He told me to just bend over and grab my ass.) Anyway, no tracking device on me, thank you.
Maggie next door had an interesting Covid-19 experience. Her two year old washer broke down and when she called for repairs the first question asked was if she were working. At 85 years old--no. Then they can't come to repair it. Well her daughter phoned the place up (it shall remain nameless out of courtesy), said that she and her husband were both working (true) and her mother handled their laundry. (Well, I'll have to fact-check that another time). The machine was fixed at 9:30 the next morning.
We got out a bit this week since the weather finally turned warm. We drove over to Westview Fellowship to donate some stuff they need for their outreach ministry. As well, we went for two walks, one along the canal and the other in Queenston Heights Park. At Queenston we saw the Chief Tecumseh memorial written about in The Globe, and we saw the fairly new "Landscape of Nations" (First Nations during 1812) memorial, a tremendous installation. There was no trouble distancing at either place. Queenston Heights Park is massive so it hasn't been closed down, just the playground inside it.
On the way there we passed the magnificent Tulip trees (proper name Saucer Magnolia?) along Queenston St. Maggie's next door is in full bloom too, but I couldn't get a proper picture. I wonder, do we have Magnolias here because of the large number of Southern gentry (with their slaves) who used to annually visit the Mineral Springs in the old Welland House Hotel and other local spas?
As well as Maggie's Tulip tree, our own garden is now bursting with violets, dandelions, forget-me-nots, and the tulips the squirrels didn't dig up. With the isolation, every new blossoming seems so special.
Oh. One thing Keith noticed. "When you leave your clothes in the closet while in isolation--THEY SHRINK." This was exactly one hour before Marlene emailed for Pauline's cheesy bun recipe. Coincidence? I think not. Marlene, this week's specialties were chocolate chip cookies. I saw six printed out recipes and can report that Hershey's won out and Martha Stewart's wasn't popular here.
Well, time to get the garbage out, dawn is here. Under Covid rules only three bags of leaves, clippings, etc., per household are allowed because garbage collection is essential and so many people are at home madly gardening, that the garbage men were quitting or calling in sick for a week or two because there was just too much work with all those extra yard material bags. The "casual" employees who usually pick up the slack were staying home collecting CERB so there were no replacement workers. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. Epidemic=Lay-Offs=Lots of Gardening=Garbagemen Shortage.
In closing, yes, Brock Archives accepted this blog post, email, diary, whatever this is, and it was exciting looking it up. There were 153 entries so far and I think mine was number 1 (under a great Covid19 banner with the virus as the "O") because it was the most recent addition. I'll send the link if anyone wants, it's too complicated to type up. But now I guess I might have to watch out for nudity, coarse language, violence and mature subject matter and give out a reader discretion is advised notice. I think I got them all except the violence bit. That was happening privately as I threatened my computer again and again while typing this.
Your diarist,
Bill
Location:
St. Catharines
Publish online:
Yes