Month: September 2020

My Quarantine Life: Week 29

/ rachelgoes262 / Leave a comment

Simon & Jolene watching the goldfinches get seeds.

With the weather getting cooler, I put the second bird feeder out. There are at least four male/female pairs of American goldfinches that frequent our feeders for our viewing pleasure. This is in addition to the male/female cardinal pair and numerous chickadees.

I read somewhere that goldfinches are a symbol of abundance and prosperity. Let’s hope so. Not only has this pandemic drained all of my savings, but I am going into debt trying to obtain food.

One of my neighbors recently commented how she is saving so much money in the pandemic. I don’t understand how. I am paying 3x, and sometimes 4x, more for groceries now than I was prior to the pandemic. Flour alone is $21. It was $4 pre-pandemic. Flour is just one item on my grocery list of 20-25 items. They are all significantly more expensive. How are people saving money when I am struggling to pay for food?

If anything, this pandemic is widening the economic gap between the haves and the have-nots. All of the economists are saying we have not yet seen the worst of the economic fallout from the pandemic. The next 3-4 years are going to be harder and much worse than 2020 as far as the money situation goes.

I’m hoping that all these goldfinches we are enjoying actually do mean abundance.

Right now, I can’t complain. In fact, we are living an abundant life. We are still together in this house and I am still employed. Even though it is difficult trying to get supplies, at least I have a job to try to pay for things.

Instacart is the best service ever. Instacart has solved the problem of obtaining food. Paying for food is hard, but at least I can now obtain food by using Instacart. 

A friend texted me about 2 weeks ago on Friday and said they were going to the grocery store over the weekend and asked if I needed anything. I said yes, and added 4 items to their grocery list. The weekend passed and I did not hear anything from this person. 

I reached out and said, hey, let me know how much I owe you for those groceries and how you want me to get them. They responded, “oh, I didn’t go this weekend. Maybe in a few weeks.” 

This situation is a prime example of how I have been starving for the past few months. People say they are going to store, so I plan on getting things that week, then they put off their trip for 2 more weeks. I run out of food.

Luckily, in this situation that happened two weeks ago, I did have an Instacart delivery scheduled. I was able to go without the 4 items I had added to the friend’s grocery list without starving. While this friend is trying to help me, they do not seem to understand that when you say you are going to the store this week and then wait 2 or 3 weeks to actually go to the store, I run out of food and starve. Literally.

Instacart is so empowering because I can control when I get food and what food I get. 

The friend that has been helping me frequently makes substitutions and brings me things I’m allergic to. I can’t eat them. It’s a waste of money. If you cannot find my allergy friendly items, then please do not waste money buying an item that will kill me if I eat it.

The beauty of Instacart is that I can specify my allergens and set those parameters. They follow the instructions. If my allergy-friendly items are gone, they are not wasting my money on something that will kill me. While my friend is well-meaning and trying to help me, they are actually not helping me. In some instances, they are bringing me things that will harm me. I don’t have that issue with Instacart. I am so happy I stopped listening to all the naysayers and joined Instacart when everyone told me not to do it. 

Now that Instacart is solving my access to food issue, I can focus more on work. I need to work for us to pay the bills and keep the house. Hopefully, our government will do something about the economy and institute universal basic income. It will all come down to the election. We are either entering the worst Great Depression this country has ever seen, or we are going to get help to survive the pandemic. We will see who wins.

In the meantime, the cats and I are enjoying the birds outside our home. The goldfinches are bringing us an abundance of joy just from watching them. Maybe that’s the sole reason why they mean abundance and prosperity. We are fortunate to be together in this house to watch them.

My Quarantine Life: Week 27

/ rachelgoes262 / Leave a comment

Jude & Jolene spending time together.

It is now officially over 6 months that I have been in quarantine. I have to admit, when this all started back in March, I thought it was something that would just end in a few weeks and everything would go back to normal. I thought it was going to be like Y2K or the Mayan “End of the World” or something, where we all roll our eyes after and laugh about “those few weeks in quarantine.”

Unfortunately, this virus is the real thing. It is here, it is bad, and it is lethal.

Everyone talks about “the new normal.” After 6 months of living with this virus, I don’t think this is “the new normal” anymore. Things will never go back to how they were before. This is our normal. It has changed drastically, but here we are. We need to figure out how to live with this virus, as there seems to be no end in sight. 

From the beginning, I have said that I can survive the pandemic as long as I can get food and I am employed. I am very grateful to still be employed and pray that nothing happens to my job. I know that many people have lost their jobs and are hurting. I am very privileged to not only still have a job, but that I have a job that is able to accommodate my needs and keep me safe from exposure while still allowing me to work.

Onto the food issue … I’m not going to lie. The past 6 months have been the most difficult time I have had getting food since I grew up as a child and had to ration my weekly $1 food stamp to try to get food. I had explained this in The Toilet Paper Chronicles, Part 1. I never thought I would need survival skills I used as a child in the 1980s as an adult, but here we are.

Instacart is the best service ever. I have now had two Instacart deliveries, and am looking to schedule my third in the next week or so. Instacart is helping me to feel normal again. I am able to get allergy-friendly food when I need it so that I am not hungry. God bless Instacart. It is literally saving both my life and my sanity in this pandemic right now. 

Thanks to Instacart, I am now able to get food on a regular basis for the first time in 6 months. This is the first time in half a year that I am not worried over when I am going to be able to eat again or if I have enough food left in the house for tomorrow and how I am going to get food again.

Now that my need for food has been taken care of (again, God bless Instacart and the Instacart shoppers), I am able to better focus on the priority of work. I need to work to be able to pay my bills.

The fantasy of working from home for a few weeks is officially over. Working from home appears to be reality for the foreseeable future. I currently still have a box of “work things” near my front door. I had this idea that the pandemic would be over in April and that I would just put that box in my car and return to the office. That hasn’t happened, so time to face reality.

Working from home has been a struggle this entire time because the rural area in which I live does not have the infrastructure to best support work from home. Broadband internet service is not available where I live. I get internet from a work provided hotspot that received very spotty and very little reception. Even though I have the internet for basic searches and email, I lack the internet to be able to do anything strenuous such as video or any type of conference meetings. I can’t even watch a Youtube video.  I have also lacked hardware to be able to work from home. 

Maintaining adequate work-life separation has been hard. My work life has invaded my home, which is my “safe space.” Early in the pandemic, I tried changing my designated work area. This resulted in multiple challenges. I chose an area upstairs, but had no table or chair to work from, so I was sitting on the floor with the laptop on a box. The phone was downstairs and I cannot go up and down stairs all day (with my disability, I can typically do stairs once a day). This meant I could not get to the phone for phone calls. When the weather got warm, the upstairs is the hottest part of the house. I really needed to work downstairs to be close to my AC unit and to be able to reach the telephone.

Unfortunately, working downstairs means I work from my kitchen table and my work life invades my home life with negative consequences.

Working from home is less than ideal and has been a struggle on multiple levels. I would much rather work at work, but no job is worth my life.

After 6 months of enduring these challenges, I finally decided to make an investment on two items that will hopefully improve my work from home situation.

First, the ideal place to work from home is upstairs. This would create a more definitive work-home separation that I so desperately need. Now that the weather is finally cooler (we are getting frost tonight), working upstairs is more feasible temperature-wise.

I need to be next to the phone to work from home. My employer helped by providing me with an extra-long phone cord so that I can take the phone from where it is plugged into the phone receptacle downstairs and take it upstairs. This requires taking the phone through 4 different rooms, and creates a tripping hazard not only for me, but for the cats. They run and get caught on the cord, and then the phone goes flying and slams into the wall. After I personally had 3 falls due to this phone cord, resulting in bruises and other injury, I decided this extra long phone cord is a bad idea.

So I decided to spring $25 and ordered a cordless phone. It has yet to arrive, and I am not sure if it will even work. I don’t think I have a wall outlet to plug it in. This idea may be another dead end, and I may have wasted $25. I will find out when it arrives. If it works, it will solve my problem. I will be able to have the phone near my work space. If it doesn’t work, then I will just continue to suffer as I have been for the past 6 months. At least I am employed.

The second thing I have done to try to move my work space upstairs is that I ordered a table for $25 also. That has yet to arrive. If I have a table, and take one of my lawn chairs upstairs, then I can use the table and lawn chair to create a work from home space upstairs that is not my kitchen table. I am pretty sure the $25 table will work. I am just waiting for it to be delivered from the place I ordered it. 

The last thing I wanted to do was to spend that $50 in this pandemic. I do not have $50 to spend with all the money I am spending on groceries (3 times more than usual due to price increases). However, I have to do something different so that my work stops invading my home. 

Putting a table and chair upstairs will allow me to create a work from home space upstairs that is out of my living space. The only thing missing is the phone. Hopefully the cordless phone idea will work. I have to wait a few weeks to see. 

I was talking with one of my friends recently who is also working from home. She expressed similar sentiment about her work from home space. It is important to have distinct separation between work and home. She had said that she had been working in her garage this summer, as it was cooler in there. She just moved her work space back into the upstairs of her home for winter, now that it is getting cooler. It appears that other people are moving their home office spaces seasonally as well. 

If I can get my plan to work, I think I am going to be in a similar situation. In the winter, I will work upstairs and have a good work-home separation. In summer, I will have to work downstairs. This means that work will be invading my safe home space, but it is unavoidable due to temperatures. At least this winter, I will get some respite and have better work-home separation. 

I don’t want to even think about having to work from home next summer. I am trying to concentrate on right now. Right now, I need better boundaries between my work life and my home life. I am hoping that I can manage to make the transition to a new work from home space. We will see if the technology and the logistics cooperate to make that happen.

Right now, I am able to be self-sufficient. I can now get food with Instacart, I can cut my own hair,  I have plenty of things to do at home. I am definitely not bored. As long as I am able to continue to work from home, I am set up to ride out this pandemic safely. 

At the end of the day, I am so grateful for this time I have to be home with my cats. Even if I do catch COVID and die, or end up unemployed and lose the house, I hope that my cats remember this time we have together and know how much I love them.

This pandemic is still going to get worse before it gets better. Numbers in my county have been doubling daily. We have more COVID cases in my town right now than we did back in April. Many more people will die.

Right now I am grateful that we are together and that we are safe. It is a relief to be able to get food again. I am so happy to be employed. We will keep taking one day at a time until it all ends. 

 

Gen X Time

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Jude & Jolene enjoying supervised outside time. Simon refused to come out. He watched from the screen door.

Perhaps one of the only positives about the current pandemic is that it is giving Generation X time to shine. As latchkey kids who spent a lot of time alone before the internet was even made public, Gen X is well-prepared to handle the isolation and quarantine that we are experiencing. Gen X is made to survive.

Generation X is the only generation in United States history to be worse off than our parents. We bought into the nightmare that is the American Dream. We went to college, got the degree, all while the cost of higher education ballooned to 300x more than what it cost our parents. We are buried in student debt while trying to buy and maintain homes, raise families, and take care of our parents who are the generation of excess. 

Although I have had challenges in the pandemic in obtaining basic necessities such as food, I have been perfectly happy and content in quarantine. Staying home and hanging out with my cats doesn’t bother me. Sure, I would really like to see the new James Bond movie. But they have delayed the movie release due to the pandemic, so nobody is seeing it right now. 

Gen X are the kids whose parents have the highest divorce rate in American history. Over 80% of us grew up in single parent homes. Often left home alone, we would spend hours amusing ourselves. We read books, played Atari, listened to the radio, rode our bikes, and talked on the phone when we were lucky enough to find the party line free.

For you young’uns, a party line was a type of landline telephone plan. Up to 10 houses on the street would share the same telephone number. So when the phone rang – it rang in all 10 homes. Everyone would pick up their line and try to figure out which person in which house the phone call was for. This also meant that you could listen to everyone else’s conversation. If you wanted to use the phone, you had to wait for people to get off the party line so you could make a call.  

This may sound annoying, and it was, but it was also a godsend for us latchkey kids. On our party line, everyone knew when I got home from school, I would call my grandmother to check in to let her know I was home alone ok. This meant that all of the other houses on our party line also knew I was home alone. While this could be a bad thing, in my time, it was a positive. In the off chance that any of our neighbors were home, they “kept an eye” on us latchkey kids. If you did something to get yourself into trouble, the whole neighborhood would know with just one phone call. 

In quarantine, I am living by my phone. Internet service here is unreliable. Cell service is only enough for text messages. The cell service is too weak to talk on the cell phone. Just like growing up, if I want to communicate with the world, I am dependent on my landline home phone.

People today are alarmed by this concept. They worry about me. I find you all to be funny. I’m Generation X. This is how I was raised. Gen X was made for this pandemic.

I have so many things I am doing in quarantine now that I have not done since I was a child growing up in the 1980s. My childhood prepared me for this. All those hours spent alone reading books, rocking out to the radio while swinging on the swing set. I have no problem with quarantine. I have books, radio, DVDs, podcasts. I have plenty of things to do. I am not bored. Gen X is used to playing by ourselves. We are used to being forgotten and ignored.

I honestly think that is why I am not having as much trouble in quarantine as other people older or younger than me. I know that my mom is a boomer. Boomers always have to be on the go. That describes my mother perfectly. They work themselves to the bone at the expense of their own bodies and their families. This is what Gen X has fought back against. We don’t want to be like our parents. We value work-life balance.

So while my mother has a hard time staying at home and constantly goes to the stores (I wish she wouldn’t), I am more content to stay home. I’m used to spending hours each day home alone from growing up. This pandemic is like my second childhood.

The generation that came after me is the Millennials. Those kids were so over scheduled growing up that they can’t sit still either. They don’t know what to do with themselves when the gym, the coffeehouse, and everything else is closed. Yes, they are better with all the technology than my generation, but they are used to always doing.

As a member of Gen X, I think we are the only generation that knows how to sit and just BE. We do not have to be constantly moving. We are able to amuse ourselves. We are the low maintenance, self-reliant independents that everyone seems to forget about, as we just sit in the corner quietly playing. People think we don’t play well with others because we are loners. I disagree. I think we play better with others because we work hard, pull our ow weight, and expect others to do the same. 

If anything, I think that my mental health has improved in quarantine because I am not constantly rushed. I can pay more attention to what is important in life. I know how to amuse myself, so I am not bored. I have a landline telephone and can reach out for socialization when I need it. At least now, I have a private telephone and do not have to wait for someone to get off the party line. 

This pandemic is time for Generation X to truly shine. This is how we grew up. We were made for this moment. We can stay home and flatten the curve. We can weather quarantine. It’s no different than being a latchkey kid. Except now we’re doing it in our 40s instead of at 6 years old. The world has changed and continues to do so. There is one thing I know – Gen X knows how to survive.

I saw a quote somewhere that said if all of life was an episode of Survivor, Gen X would win. Gen X knows how to survive. That includes this pandemic.

Once we turn the corner and the pandemic starts to end, Gen X is uniquely poised to guide us on how to recover from the pandemic. We survived our boomer divorced parents and made it to adulthood. We got this. We have survived many, many times, and can show the world how to survive this pandemic too.

In addition to Gen X being one of the smallest generations in American history, I would also argue that we are the most underestimated generation in all of history. Our boomer parents called us “slackers” and wrote us off. Unfortunately, that label has stuck. Yet it’s not true. We are the hardest working generation with the smallest return. We know how to work. More importantly, we know that work-life balance is imperative to survival.

This pandemic is Gen X time. This is our time to shine. We know how to survive this pandemic. When the pandemic is finally over, we know how to get beyond it too. Don’t write us off just because we are so adept at amusing ourselves. That doesn’t mean we’re not working on making this world better in our own small ways.

I have never been so proud to be a part of Gen X as I am right now. My childhood was a dress rehearsal for quarantine. 

Generation X for the win!

My Quarantine Life: Week 25

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Simon is playing in the box.

Labor Day weekend this year is going to look like none other. For over 20 years, Labor Day weekend was a camping weekend for me. It has been a time to relax, recharge, and reset for the upcoming year. Two years ago, I spent Labor Day weekend moving into my house. Last year I ran a race on Labor Day weekend. That makes this year the very first Labor Day weekend I have nothing going on. 

It seems so surreal. 

Yes, I have plenty of things to do around the house. That list is never ending. With my disability, I struggle to complete basic tasks such as cooking and cleaning, so there is always something to do. 

But with the pandemic this year, I just do not feel like I have gotten a break from anything. I am very grateful to have a job, but it is less than ideal to work from home. 

Hopefully, without alarming anyone, I plan to completely unplug this 3-day weekend. I just mentally need the break.

I am looking to place my second Instacart order after the holiday weekend. I am so excited. It makes me feel normal. I can “do” my own grocery shopping again. I was grocery shopping twice a month prior to the pandemic. If I Instacart twice a month, that keeps me on the same schedule. 

I am now able to meal plan and have a wider variety of foods to eat other than just the same 3 things.

I am very grateful for all the people who have helped me with food these past few months, but it has been hard, especially with multiple food allergies. I never know if I have to wait one week or 3 weeks for food. Is the food people bringing me going to be safe to eat with my food allergies (not to mention, all the food I have paid for that I can’t eat due to the food allergies). People mean well and have been trying to help, but I have been hungry the past 5-6 months. 

Having someone else trying to buy food for you when you have 5 severe food allergies is very challenging.

I am hoping that my second Instacart experience goes as well as the first one. I can pick out exactly what foods are safe for me to eat so that I am not wasting my money. I can also control my spending better because I know exactly what is coming and how much it costs.

I am not sure what the future brings, but it does not look like Labor Day weekend is going to be the respite it usually is. We will see what happens. All we can do is take one day at a time. Hopefully, I am able to obtain food again next week.