Sleeping & Netflicking Our Days Away…

I’m a list maker…

I love seeing the things I’ve done marked through with a pen.

I manipulate my list so that I’m not left at the end of the day or week staring glumly at my un-marked list suggesting I’d just couch potato’d my day or week away.

Lists often lead to other, remotely related, I’m easy to sidetrack very often having numerous jobs on the go just waiting to be tied up and put away…none of which are on the written list.

They usually take various forms and range from:

future topics for my blogs (jotted words or phrases in my notebook expressly for that purpose) and  food ideas for the weeks’ meals,

detailed plans for large parties and notions for the ideal part-time job,

projects for long, dark evenings and films or series I want to see.

This year (the year of not throwing caution to the wind and staying put) has seen a very different list emerge.  There are no meetings to cook casseroles for, no event planning for Hubs, no shopping just for fun (unless you’re an Amazon-ite).  We’ve been cast back to those Pioneer days when activities and chores didn’t stray far from the home-hearth.

Hubs and I decided to make this unusual time work for us, for one thing, we were used to being at home together all day and night so there was no adjustment there, and for another, we really don’t go out that much, but all of a sudden the breathlessness of claustrophobia crept up on us and we began to yearn for the cinema or a barista brewed coffee or mass in a church or a hug from a child.

We wanted something to show for this time of social distancing to prove that we hadn’t been sleeping and Netflicking our days away.

I made a list of things we could do that we never seemed to find time for.

Not deep cleaning and clearing out attics and drawers,

mowing fields and trimming trees,

those are house and yard work; they get done during ordinary times.

This list was going to comprise of one-offs that needed doing once only so that we could look back on this time (when the world ground to a halt) with a sense of achievement and satisfaction.

Here’s a sampling of what we got up to…

I gently rubbed all my wood furniture with coconut oil and painted my back door yellow

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Oiled furniture & yellow door

to match my two French doors that open into my living room.

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New artwork on the mantle-piece

Hubs replaced my ’87 Dodge Ram’s ignition by removing the steering wheel,

not such a good idea if I was tackling the job, granted it’s an old model and can be fixed with string and a prayer, but this is my farm vehicle not a Flintstone car!

Thankfully he succeeded (what a Hubs!) and there were only a couple of screws left over!

We cleaned the outdoor pavilion including the fire pit and replaced our clambering roses’ cedar bower, which finally succumbed to the elements, with a more durable one.

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Antique Roses’ new bower

Hubs replaced a fluorescent light that’d been out for years in his closet,

and together we designed snacks and crafts and wrote 4 bible stories for our church’s virtual VBS; we gathered props and costumes for the filming; thank goodness for iPhones and YouTube!

We revived an old baker’s rack which now sits on our front porch,

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and bought frames and mats for the artwork we’d carried back from London, painted by our family and friends,

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Caro’s art and her sister’s Ayers Rock watercolor from years ago

Hubs repaired all the drawers on my 30 year old desk and replaced the canvas behind the roll top so that it no longer sags (from the weight of the cats jumping up on it) onto my computer screen.

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Repaired desk ready for the next 30 years

Hubs started joining me for my daily morning yoga classes

and I learned how to bathe and groom horses.

Hubs changed all four tires on the car and replaced indicator and fog lamps that are a pain to get to (like the truck ignition) and go out far too regularly for his liking.

While it was still cool I dug three new flower beds and sowed seeds, planted vegetables (to dispel suggestions that I do not have a green thumb) and dug pretty deep holes for butterfly shrubs, rosemary and oregano!

The lantana in the back returns year after year!

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Two of 4 new beds with bird-feeders and butterfly plants

Hubs helped me upgrade the RAM on my sluggish MacBook from 8-16GB’s;

We installed the latest version of Microsoft Office although all the young people in our family use Google Docs…

Hey, we’re a little old fashioned but completely up to date with our operating systems, Smart TV and iPhones X’s!

As I was writing out our fifth list during this extraordinary season I said to Hubs,

“Is there anything you’d like me to add?”

He looked up at me and smiled his blue-eyed cowboy smile,

“Nope!”

I guess he’s longing for the week when the piece of paper is blank and we can just sit around sleeping and Netflicking our days away!

 

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ElRay

2020-06-13 20:02:12 Reply

It’s been a dream being quarantining with you! Oh Yes!

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