Day 49 of rollback-California Covid-19 spike-Governor shuts us down
The seals were not there…
Sunday. 8/30/20
10:00 - 11:30 - I’m up so I go downstairs and take the dog outside. I should note that we can’t just go outside when I greet her downstairs. As soon as she sees me, she rolls over on her back so I can rub her tummy. We have a routine. When I stop and say, excitedly, “Lets go outside”, she remains on her back. This means I have to rub her tummy again. I say the same sentence, and she still remains on her back. After I rub her tummy for the third time, she gets up. Such is life. Outside and cheese. I grab my coffee and go upstairs.
I sit down in the shower, lean my head against the tiles, and drink my coffee - I’m exhausted after last night. I dress in hiking attire. Minimal make-up.
11:30-12:00 - I have overnight oats and water, while I read Mothership.
12:30-4:00 - B. arrives and we drive to the Carpenteria Bluffs so we can hike to the Seal Sanctuary. I use the verb “hike” loosely because it’s really just a series of easy trails, although we’re cliffside and quite high. Regardless, this counts as my cardio so no additional exercise today.
We find the “tomb plates” for two people who lost their lives on the cliffs, one of whom is quite young and then move on to the Seal Sanctuary. When we arrive there are no seals, although I think I see a lone head bobbing far in the distance among the kelp. B. brought his Binos so we take turns looking and concur, that, yes, we actually saw a seal.
We “hike” back to our car - see how active and physically fit I am? I used the term ‘hike’ - but there is a quiet, shaded park here, next to a vacant baseball field, with a old stone retaining wall that I want to sit on. I grab my lunch bag and two prosecco-in-a cans for B. and I (never leave home without them). We sit outside and toast to the lone seal that we saw. I eat a few snacks from my lunch bag and share trail mix with B.
4:00-5:30 - Return and B. proposes Mexican food so we call it in along the way. He has a coupon for buy one, get one half-off, so orders two meals for himself today and tomorrow [Mexican shrimp (gross) and enchiladas] and then orders cheese quesadillas for me. By this time, I’m starving. We pick up the food - B. runs in and gets it.
5:00 - 9:00 - Back at B.’s house, and my quesadillas are not in the bag, although B. was charged for them. He asks me which one of his meals I want, but I don’t want either of them because I ordered…quesadillas. I guess he doesn’t want to go back to the restaurant. Since I always travel with my lunch bag, I pull out L. and R.’s 7-day-old Chinese take-out and have that for dinner. If I die, it’s not Covid-19 - it’s Chinese take-out. We eat outside on B.’s patio and look at his “golf-course backyard.”
After expecting to have quesadillas for dinner, the chicken and rice tastes like cardboard. Then again, maybe it tastes like cardboard because it’s so old.
B. had proposed earlier that we watch a few episodes of Leave it to Beaver after dinner. Apparently, this is one of his favorite shows. I grew up without cable so had limited access to TV and have never seen the show, although I know the characters and the premise. As we’re watching, B. looks like he really enjoys it, but I’m dubious…June Cleaver appears to be trapped in her own home, almost as if it were a prison. She is never filmed outside of this setting. Maybe this was the case for all women in the 1950s…
I have ‘class prep’ left to do so B. drives me home. He says he’ll redeem the quesadillas tomorrow and drop them off at my house for lunch. That’s good, because I have nothing to eat here - just a bunch of ingredients that need to be assembled into a meal and I don’t mean Blue Apron or Purple Carrot. I mean I actually have to prepare a meal using a (horror-of-horrors) recipe.
9:30-12:00 - I record lecture for Specialty Class No. 1 tomorrow and note the times I’ll be deploying course content tomorrow because the class is “synchronous, synchronous...”
12:00-1:30 - L. and I listen to Radio Rental, still with the stairwell light on.