Day 3 of the Corona Quarantine

As noted in my previous post, we are entering some unchartered territory with what has basically amounted to a quarantine in the Rita/McC household that is simply not used to all this time together.  Here are some random observations about how this quarantine is playing out:

• Quarantined Rita is Busy Rita.  When Rita has to concentrate her talents within these four walls, things are going to get legit.  And I don’t mean she might paint the bathroom.  I mean she’s always wanted to flip the locations of the stove and the sink.  She is one instructional YouTube video away from replumbing the house. 
  On the other hand, McC may have been under quarantine since 2016, its hard to tell.  I feel like the rest of the world is catching up to the beauty that is 12 hours a day in front of your computer followed by some rigorous TV watching. 
  
  I do have to say….it is very difficult to complete a house remodel around my resting ass.  And that has not gone unnoticed. 
  
• Will someone please define elderly?   Does COVID realize that age is just a number?  If you are old enough to have watched the Golden Girls but too young to currently be on the Golden Girls, where do you fall on the elderly spectrum? 
  
• One thing this particular pandemic has made clear is how very often I touch my face.  Holy shit.  More often than I touch my phone.  50 years of nail biting ain't gonna stop on a dime.  And I have figured out that my very favorite thoughtful repose is the professorial-looking gesture that involves the index-finger alongside of face, hand resting under nose.  Years of trying to look smart and now I just look like Typhoid Mary.  
  
• As we pondered weeks and weeks without any live interactions, we thought about who might be safe to invite over to the house. You all failed. But judging by the lack of inbound invitations, we haven’t exactly passed any tests either. 
  
• I now have thousands of dollars of Southwest flight credits resulting from all my cancellations. I fear these may turn out to be the modern day equivalent of Confederacy currency after the war.  All post-COVID flights will be on Trump Airlines. 

I am hoping it remains fashionable to laugh at ourselves even as we all get tired of this social distancing business.  And that last comment is mostly directed at Rita since I am bringing precious little else to this Corona party! 

Day 1 of the Corona Quarantine

Rita and I both arrived home earlier this week from work trips that were canceled because of the Corona virus.  And it appears that all future travel for at least the next month is canceled for both of us. 

Which means…..for perhaps the first time in our 13 year relationship….we will be spending more than two weeks of uninterrupted time together.  It’s hard to believe that brief spell where I wasn’t working didn’t involve more time together.  As I recall, however, Rita kept getting called away on surprise business trips during my 4 month sabbatical.     

I feel like we will not be the only ones suddenly spending more quality time with their families.  I predict either a rash of CoronaBabies in 9 months or CoronaBreakups before summer.  

But I personally could not ask for a better Quarantine Buddy.  In many ways, Rita has been preparing for this sort of thing for much of her adult life.  And I’m not just saying that because she has enough wine to last years of confinement.  I feel that she always suspected we humans would fuck this up eventually.  Ergo, the start of the Corona virus felt like it just kicked off a well-thought out checklist of “What to expect when you can’t expect anything from your government”:

• 3 tanks of propane in case the electricity goes out for an extended time - CHECK 
• A ream of paper.  I’m not even sure we have a printer that works any more…but just in case we do…
• You had trouble finding toilet paper? Rita clearly found the black market and traded a glimpse of her preparedness checklist for 62 rolls of toilet paper
• The coffee production of a small country.  People have clearly missed the point that you will hardly need all that toilet paper if you run out of coffee.

I mean…damn…Rita even had the foresight to buy a farm three years ago.  I feel like that could come in handy.  

You know what my catastrophe preparedness included?  Buying bacon.  Mark my words…cured meats is going to be the key to this thing in four weeks.  

But I am curious…does it still count as a quarantine if you are allowed to run screaming from your house?  Asking for the wife of a friend. 

Lost Causes

I know I tend to have a reputation for….misplacing things.  I try not to talk about it at work because nobody really wants a CFO who loses important things.  But most of my friends know this about me because they spend a not-insignificant portion of our friendship rescuing me from leaving items behind me.  

That tendency is exacerbated when I’m out of my routine.  And “out-of-your-routine” is actually the tagline of the mission trip to Ecuador.  There is nothing routine about taking off with 27 of your closest friends people you see at church, to an equatorial country for a week of camping and crafts.  So I knew I was bound to lose something.  I did NOT expect it to be during the plane ride from Nashville, before we even made our first connection.  But true to form…..that damn airplane seat-back pocket got the better of me.  When they make the movie of my life, my arch-enemy is going to be the seat-back pocket of an airplane.  I don’t know why I bother putting anything in there, given how often I forget it's there.  I might as well just throw it in the trash when I get on the plane and save myself the anxiety of trying to recover my pocket offering.  This time it was my water bottle.  That seems like something I’m going to need ON THE EQUATOR.  [sigh]  Luckily, I was able to play the missionary card and beat my way back on the plane to recover the single most important thing I packed.

Then I proceeded to spend about 60% of my entire trip rummaging through my luggage looking for something I had misplaced or couldn’t remember if I packed.  Seriously, like half the photos of me on this trip are me with an arm stuck in my backpack frantically trying to make physical contact with my passport.  In true McC fashion, despite occupying a total of 80 s.f. of accommodations, over the course of the first two days I managed to misplace the following items (in order of importance):

• My ballcap (that’s right, you think water is important – but not seeing my barely-washed hair in 100% humidity is even more important)
• Aforementioned water bottle
• Sunglasses
• Every ounce of sunscreen I had brought
• And for just a few minutes….the only pair of sandals I brought (before realizing they were on my feet even though I had just gotten out of bed)

Most of it turned up eventually, but usually right after I needed it.  Like....I inevitably found the sunscreen at 9 o’clock at night and then generally managed to lose it again before lunch the next day.  It’s a talent.

Funny story about the sunglasses though.  I was trying to be super careful about keeping an eye on them – because…..sunburn of the corneas and all that.  So in my version of extreme care, I left them sitting out on the table so I would always have an eye on them…..until I didn’t.  I mean…I have lost a cell phone I was talking on before…so I guess misplacing sunglasses that I thought were in my room wasn’t toooooo unexpected.  

After turning my room upside down for about an hour, I gave up on it and just figured I had made another offering to the patron saint of lost items (who should really be sending me Christmas cards by now).  Luckily I had a backup pair because…well….Maeve.  

Then later that day, I saw Frannie rocking a pair of sunglasses that looked an awful lot like mine.  Frannie is one of the Episcopalion priests that was on the trip with us (does that make her “Father Frannie”?  This non-catholic priest thing is so confusing). Now….I’m not sure…but I think accusing a priest of stealing your sunglasses is bad karma. Rather than coming right out with the accusation….I decided to drop by the dormitory to just ask around. Once I got everyone’s attention, I was able to ask my question:  “Has anyone seen a pair of sunglasses?” .... [McC picks up the sunglasses sitting on top of Frannie’s hat]....”that look EXACTLY like these?  No, no….I mean EXACTLY like these.”  To which Frannie earnestly replied….”do you wear Warby Parkers too?”  And I said….”nooooo…mine are Nike….like THESE.”   I will say….they did look exactly like Frannie’s sunglasses.  So aside from having twice as many sunglasses as she arrived with, I could see why she made that mistake.  And they were only missing for like a day, so don’t worry Father Frannie - I’m sure that sun blindness couldn’t possibly be permanent. 

They tell you to watch your stuff while you’re in the cities.  I say watch out for sticky-fingered clergy. 

The art of the craft

In addition to providing health treatment to hundreds of local San Eduardoans during this trip, the St A’s team also keeps the kids entertained while they’re waiting to see the doctors by providing arts and crafts.  And the arts and crafts room is where you would obviously find me. I mean....obviously.

On the first day, the team organized a craft that included a photo of each child that then went into a photo frame they had decorated themselves. So I would first off like to point out that the St A’s team in Ecuador is not fucking around with their arts and crafts. I mean....we can’t figure out how to eat vegetables, but here we are in the middle of a jungle taking and printing color photos of kids in the equivalent of a M*A*S*H-like Glamour Shots studio.  Judging by the expression on the kids’ faces in their pictures, they also thought “what the fuck?”

The first part of this activity is taking the child’s picture. I don’t know who decided Tara would be our team photographer, but I feel your qualifications should include more than having seen pictures before. It turns out Tara had a seemingly compulsive need to cut off the top of each child’s head in their photo. Like….is she trying to avenge a bad part in her hair from her kindergarten picture or something?   I could understand if she were trying to photograph....say...my 5’12” frame and therefore ended up with the pate shaved off.  But shit, these little munchkins barely took up the frame as it was. One kid’s shoes are squarely in the photo but not his eyebrows. You would think she would have gotten the hang of it after a few dozen photos, but nooo.  What she did decide to do about thirty kids in was to start posing the children in the photos, which I’m pretty sure is not what their parents were expecting when they sent them in for church camp. 

First, the boys started showing up with fonzi-like thumbs-up signs. Then another boy was smiling handsomely while holding a soccer ball that came from who knows where.  Then the girls started showing up with a side ponytail here, an over-the-shoulder-smile there. It was when one girl took her hair bun down to reveal about 4 feet of hair that I was sure we were going to end up on the wrong side of someone’s abuela. Tara claimed the new poses were to make the photos look less like a mug shot. Which I have to tell you, when a gaggle of slightly older ladies grab you, nudge you against a wall and start giving you indecipherable directions, your expression does tend to go full mugshot. 

But the real fun was in decorating the picture frames, which included various little stickers or sequins of whatnot that were either stickers or could be glued to the frame. Maybe we didn’t explain the objective very well, but for the most part, it seemed like the kids’ strategy was to stick as much shit as possible on your mini picture frame. Death by bedazzling. Also, it might have been the fact that a meeting with el doctoro was on the other side of that arts and crafts visit, but some kids aged out of arts and crafts eligibility before they finished their frames. Como se dice “don’t make a career out of it, kid, let’s keep it moving”. In my continued (much appreciated, I’m sure) efforts to be helpful, I just walked around a lot saying “andale, andale”.  You are welcome,  Ecuador, you are welcome. 

Bringing glue guns to Ecuador continues to be a marvel to me. Like it’s 1000 degrees in this country.  Do we think we need to bring artificial means of melting glue?  Half my makeup bag is now a gluelike substance, can’t we just use that?  But after spending an hour dabbing glue on the backs of an endless stream of googly eyes, I must confess - your visiting missionaries started getting a little bored. We finally decided the kids were better at that glue gun business than we were and turned them loose on the glue guns. I second guessed our decision when I looked up to see a five year old gluing a gum wrapper to her frame, but....art, right? I did have to intervene, however, when one little boy at the end of the table was reaching over his little four-year-old sister to grab the gun, dab the glue on his sequin and pull it back to where he was sitting. After watching this for a few minutes, I realized that glue gun was leaving a trail of thin little “glue strings” when he pulled those beads back to his work station.  And as a consequence, when I finally checked on his sister for the first time in ten minutes, the top of her head was practically encased in a cocoon of these trailing glue strings.  I don’t want to lay claim to being missionary of the year or anything, but I challenge any of you to pull a head full of strings out of a four-year-old’s hair without her noticing.

So that was the first morning.