Latest - As If It Mattered

The days, weeks, and months are all blending in to each other. Time has either stopped or is going too... what? Slow? Fast? Have we been fighting this forever or just since last week? Or is the answer to that just a geographical one? If it is, do we count by state? country? household?

They - whoever they are - have come out with maps showing where the cases are by zip code. AZ has published it online, on the local CBS station's Arizona Family website. Curious, I checked out two: Sun City, and Sun City West. If you don't know, that's 85351 and 85375, respectively. You might have thought they were quite similar, as both are retirement communities, nearly adjacent. That is, unless you remember that Sun City West shut down its rec centers a couple weeks or so before we did. Our rate is about 3 times theirs. It's hard to tell, though, because they count theirs by "between 6 and 10." Our count is 23. And people like Steve and I started shutting out the world - as much as possible - as soon as we heard what Sun City West had done.

But how are they counting, anyway? Without proper testing, it's impossible to trust the figures, other than being sure they are higher than reported. Perhaps it's per hospital? Per patient?  What about those places which refuse to accurately either count or release their information?

But hey, at least there's still the full DVD set of "West Wing" !!!  You know, with the president we all wished we had right now. I also hear jigsaw puzzles are in high demand. I wonder if somebody would swap ours for a pack of TP?

I made a discovery this morning: the origin of the duck tail hairstyle. It was obviously made by somebody cutting their own hair, plagued by rotator cuff injuries, and completely unable to reach the center back of their neck to finish the job. (Ask me how I know!)

I now have a sort-of face mask. It's in the laundry as I type this, because it's a hand-me-down from Steve. It turns out his men's hankies are enough bigger than my men's hankies that they actually will tie in back of my head rather than not quite meeting. Even so, it's only mine now because when Steve was in for his morning KUB x-ray, somebody offered him one of their spares. (He claims is was the old Steve charm. I don't doubt it.) So his has ear elastic and is shaped to fit a face, and mine looks like a semi-clean bank albino robber. Perhaps once it's out of the dryer, it'll look more than semi-clean.

Uh huh.

By the way, it's just not fair about that size thing. I'm used to items made for women being both more expensive and cheaper quality.  We both buy our hankies in the men's department in the same store. His are for his nose, mine clean my glasses. Wouldn't you think they'd be equal?

(Brief pause here.)

My kitchen floor is clean again. I find there are at least two levels of clean. There's guy-clean. And there's my-mother's-clean. OK, three levels, since I'll never achieve Mom's standards. It's been swept, but not mopped. And the reason it's been swept, as well as the reason for the pause, can be blamed on the morning news. (Now you're curious, aren't you?) It seems there has been a national run on hair dye and clippers. Yep, now that we're all home and have nobody to impress, we're all frantic to look our very best. Or at least as well as we can do it ourselves.

We didn't need to go out for either item. We've proudly flash-blinded the rest of the world with our bright white locks for forty-some years, so no hair dye needed. I've owned and used hair scissors since my own kids were babies and too young to complain while I was learning. It didn't work that way with my own hair, but I had nobody willing to listen to me complain about how I turned out. It has only been for the last decade or so that I've been trusting (blindly!) my haircuts to the "professionals", since my shoulders rebel loudly at the positions forced into them while cutting. Plus Steve has a clippers for those delicate touch-ups on his head. He didn't even jump across the room when I announced I was going to learn today how to do that clipper-comb thing I've seen while waiting for my haircuts. And by George - whoever he was - I think I've got it! No baindaids needed. Honest!

Truth be told, there are a couple extra pairs of clippers in the house. They worked perfectly well on the dogs, so I have no reason to believe they wouldn't on Steve's head as well. I mean, after cleaning, of course. But he says "No."

How does this relate to the kitchen? I cut his hair this morning. About three inches off, all around. Perhaps a whole 1/8 cup in volume, it's so silky. (I would have said thin, but he does read this, you know.) He'd been letting it grow out, but finally decided enough was enough. Not sure what changed his mind. It's not like grandkids came down 1800 miles to rub bubblegum in it or anything. And he usually wears a cap whenever he leaves the house, so often it doesn't even get combed first.

But cut it I did. Of course, that was after I cleaned both of his combs. They not only violated Mom's standards, they violated mine! Fortunately, we have (had?) a good veggie scrubbing brush at the sink and lots of soft-soap to pour over them.

I have to think about whether that brush gets used for food again. I mean, soap is soap, right?

And, coming back to the original point for this tale, the kitchen floor got all the dropped hair swept up off it. Most of it was caught or wiped off my fingers onto the towel around his neck, but some always drops. Even trying to clean the hair off the towel by hand only got off the major clumps, so it had to be taken out the back door and shaken out. Lucky me, I planned ahead and planted enough shrubbery around the sides of the yard where houses are still occupied that I could step out in just my bra and slacks without scandalizing the neighborhood. No need to peel off too many layers to get rid of all those little prickly hairs and  make more dirty laundry, eh? And the house is warm enough....

(Not-so-brief pause here.)

Back from the urologist. Steve assures me he survived, and in a few days he'll actually feel like he survived. He's glad I talked him into taking ibuprofin ahead of the visit. He compared the stent removal to them taking a piece of barbed wire, and ... OK, guys, calm down. I'm not going to describe it further. Just like Steve couldn't explain how he knew what it felt like to take a piece of barbed wire and .... OK, OK, nevermind. But he insisted it never actually happened to him.

While he was being thus entertained, I popped out for a quick trip to WalMart. The hankie was big enough that I had to retie it 3 times to get it close to staying up on my face. Never entertained the thought before that I might benefit from a larger nose. While I was there, miracle of miracles, they still had TP in stock. There were about a dozen four-packs left, and I very courteously took only one. Of course, it was small enough that they are the equivalent to 2 ordinary rolls. Still, something.

After retrieving Steve, we hit his favorite grocery store. I got gas while he shopped, and eventually noticed an open handicapped parking space while he was still inside. We should be good for another couple weeks or so. Until we decide we aren't.

Of course. Maybe 5 days? Anybody wanna lay bets?