McSiblings Virtual Happy Hour

In honor of St. Patrick’s day, my three siblings and I decided to do a virtual happy hour on St. Patrick’s day. I don’t want to say we’ve all had a jump on this social distancing thing, but we did have to do an ice breaker to get to know each other again.

And our Zoom videoconferencing happy hour is just like a real happy hour except with a delay from a 1950s transatlantic phone call.  Apparently modern videoconferencing expects people to talk One. At. A. Time…and well…that’s just not how the McC’s roll.  Like all good Irish people, there can be 4 of us in a room and six different conversations going on.  And now thanks to Covid, Zoom (!) gets to decide who gets heard.  And I thought we were all competing for attention before….  The whole point of virtual happy hours is to facilitate interaction and here we are having to mute the line.  For the next call we’ll install buzzers and go full game-show.  Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure my mom thought she was watching Hollywood Squares for the first half of the call (and that I was Paul Lynde).

And just in case the slight delay didn’t make the call hard enough to follow, my sister tried repeating the high points throughout the call to my 82 yr. old mother listening through a daisy-chained set of hearing aids.  So every really clever snippet was first repeated by the speaker (lest it get lost in the delay and someone missed the cleverness) and then reenacted again for my mother.  It wasn’t so much a happy hour as a killer dress rehearsal of “row, row, row your boat”.

My brother’s cat is clearly taking the social distancing harder than the rest of us.  The laptop on the counter seemed like a great video angle until I saw more of that cat’s behind than I did of my brother.  This is what a happy hour with Banksy is like.  

After verifying that even if she hasn’t seen another soul for six days, my mother still doesn’t want to talk to us on the phone, we all signed off while humming ~Life is but a dream ~

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.