ARGH. I… JUST… CAN’T… STAND… IT…

Not for another second.

(Switches the media player off)

Ah…..  So much better.

This is what another day of isolation has driven me to (and again, I’m not complaining, just grappling a bit with the will to live, even though I have it 1000x better than someone stuck in, say, mandatory quarantine in their room in an apartment building)… I’ve scrubbed the shower and all the sinks; I’ve plonked zucchini seeds and butter lettuce seeds into soil in little pots and put them in the cold frame (unheated mini greenhouse) and, wow, even though it’s butt cold outside, it’s tropical in there;  I took the Ru-Ru for a walk; I did sit-ups and push-ups and that sort of stuff (for ten minutes, woo hoo); I ate half a bag of tortilla chips; I worked for a few hours on one of my books; I worked on the cross-stitch; I brought 10 eggs over to the neighbors we chicken-share with and we shouted at each other from more than the mandated 1.5 meter space between us; and I fished the soccer ball out of the little pond that Spouse had left in there hoping that Rudolph would just in after it and learn how to swim.  And then I thought I’d dig out all the CDs of music I haven’t listened to in ages and load it up on my computer.  Because I’m kind of sick of all the rest of it (except Mitski!!!! and the newest Lana Del Rey, which I am wavering between loving and hating, but anyway, at least it is a lush sonic landscape).

First up, one of the last two Eels albums I bought (which I bought, gosh, it must have been when I was still living in England, which was more than 15 years ago).  There’s no way I could be sick of them, I thought, because I never succeeded in listening to them all the way through (even though I used to love the Eels and their beautiful sad songs.  But, ARGH.  I. JUST. COULDN’T. STAND. IT.

I still couldn’t get even halfway through the first one (which might have been the second one, chronologically, but it was the first one that I grabbed).

HOW DID WE SURVIVE THE 1990s, listening to stuff like this?!  It’s so… miserable.

And it’s definitely not what you want to listen to at the beginning of weeks of social isolation.

On a brighter note, the farmer husband of the farmer up the street came with his loader yesterday and scooped up the mountain of alpaca poo and urine-soaked straw that is piled up against the corner of our back yard and whose run-off has turned our pond into a fetid cesspool of algal overgrowth (only the blood worms in the gunk at the bottom are happy about this).  He got free manure (not that he needs it, since his wife keeps 60 or so cows and who knows how many he has on his farm a couple of villages over) and the alpaca people didn’t have to pay to have the waste hauled away.  And now maybe toads will lay eggs in our pond again. A win for all involved.

And that’s all the news that’s fit to print from here, except that the nearly 80 year old friend of ours did succeed in cooking pasta.  I was thanked, not just for the pasta sauce, which he managed to stretch out to three meals, but for pushing him into that first-in-a-lifetime experience.

It may turn out to have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience, in fact, now that he’s discovered that one of his local haunts is still open for take-out.