CORONA-CATION DAY 19: Pandemic: The Game

Pandemic:  The Game

Have you noticed that nobody seems to care much about what the Kardashians are doing, or maybe I never cared and it just SEEMS like nobody cares that Kim and ….whatever other K daughter she is fighting with are going at it.  I mean that is some ridiculous stuff.  Watching the Kardashians is kinda like going to church.  When you are five or six, you go to church because your mom wants you to go to church and you don’t really know why you are going except you get free cookies and punch afterwards.  I always went to Vacation Bible School for the cookies, but I digress.  Your mom thinks if she can sit you in church for long enough then it will dawn on you that you really need to be there. I don’t go to church now.  Nobody goes to church at five or six because you are filled with the Holy Spirit.  You go for the cookies.  Similarly, you don’t watch the Kardashians when you are pre-teen because you “understand the nature of their relationship and can see it reflected in your own life!”  Nope, you watch it for the cookies.

What are people doing to pass their time if they are not watching the Kardashians?  Sue bought us this game. Pandemic.   It came via Amazon, I mean doesn’t everything?   I was skeptical, but it is an awesome game!  Let me tell you, you play one round of Pandemic and you will FULLY understand the situation we are in.  People in Florida want to go to church so Miami has an “outbreak”.  You quell Los Angeles into submission and those F---in’ people in Miami, ALLLL with a desire to get to heaven, spread the virus to Atlanta on a Church Revival and boom!  So it becomes quite apparent that everyone has to focus on eliminating the various contagions or we are all going to hell in a handbasket.

Me, being the Researcher, I was able to share information but I was not a Scientist.  The Scientist could cure a contagion with only four city cards instead of five (That bitch thinks she is such hot stuff!).  I really just wanted to work with the Quarantine Specialist because I thought she was hot. Sue, being a dispatcher was …well, doing her best but mostly telling people about stuff. But working together we did our best and eventually quelled the contagions.  Then we figured out that we missed a few infections and BOOM, game on!  It was pretty frustrating to see Delhi go down like that, but there were whole cities that we ignored to focus on Milan. Those Italians should appreciate us. I know, I sound like Donald J. Trump, only I am not running for re-election and using a pandemic to leverage votes. Except for that slimy difference, yep virtually similar.

I highly recommend this game, but you probably need more than one person to play it.  I am not encouraging socializing.  The rare few of you who can channel multiple personalities can play it … alone I guess. Or you can all download the Kim Kardashian video game and go that direction.

Mountain Pig…out.

CORONA-CATION DAY 18: Shopping in the Time of Pandemic

No it is not, Love in the Time of Cholera, but it is damn close.

Sue came back from a walk with our neighbors Tania and Dana yesterday and said “I am worried about Tania and Dana.  Neither of them have any toilet paper.”  This concerned me too, for the obvious reason of where this failure to provide for their own families could lead.  “I would give the some of our,” she said “but what if we need it!”  I told Sue that I had noticed several boxes of Kleenex in the grocery when I was there, and I should have snagged them some. Sue could not believe that I had passed up Kleenex boxes. I had to promise that I would never make such a mistake again. Truly Sue would give the toilet paper off her….roll to her friends if they needed it.

The next day, I saw Dana getting packages out of her car on my morning walk with Cali, and she excitedly told me that she had been to CostCo and found all that she needed.  She pronounced it “A good day!”

This foraging behavior is a fascination to me.  Things that we would not have given a passing glance to finding a month ago, now are praised upon our return from hunting like we have just snagged meat to feed the tribe for the entire winter.  I walked in from the grocery last Sunday, began unpacking and Sue said “Ohhh! You found egg noodles!” and I did a small dance around the kitchen island singing “Tuna – Noodle – Casserole – ugh! Tuna – Noodle – Casserole – ugh!” with a twist of the hip to accentuate my excitement. Life was good. I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder, when Pa returned with wood for the fire so they could survive another winter in Plum Creek, Minnesota!  God. 

Sue had to run in to Home Depot (which is next to the WalMart in Evergreen).  I stayed in the car, apparently she has decided that I am the old and weak of the family and, like my Grandmother, I am encouraged now to “just stay in the car, I will run in”.  Anyway, I am sitting there and I see a woman come running down the paved embankment with a WalMart shopping cart full to the brim, including a large package of Kirkland, Big Roll, two-ply.

She was apparently afraid that someone would mug her for it, so she was movin’!  She crosses paths with another woman with a Home Depot cart going the opposite direction, who gasps and says, in my best English accent “Where on Earth did you find that toilet paper?!?!” To which the first woman, eyes the English Lady warily and says “It is on the shelf at the WalMart, but you better hurry.  There is very little left!!”  The English Lady then cranks her cart up in to fourth gear and runs up the paved embankment to try and score some Kirkland TP’.  Wow.  Has it really come to this degree of pitifulness?

 

We finished our walk yesterday and on the way up the hill, Cali chased a rabbit, which pretty much left her in the dust.  “Oh well, no dinner tonight”, I said and we walked dejectedly up to the house,…but there is always Tuna Noodle Casserole.

Mountain Pig....out. 

CORONA-CATION DAY 17: Amazon has us right where they want us, with our credit cards out.

Amazon has America by the balls, at least those of us that still have some. 

They are continuing to ship us anything we need while were are under house seclusion.  If they strike, we will give them anything they ask for to keep up the flow of puzzles, games, food, movies --- basically everything moving freely!!  When I walk down the road with my dog, there are Amazon boxes littering the roadsides beneath the mailboxes.  The US Postal Service, FedEx, UPS all deliver Amazon purchased good, because they are smart enough to know a juggernaut when they see one. We need Amazon, more than we ever have, and they know it.

When I was growing up in Dardanelle Arkansas, population 3, 261, Sonny Warren owned Warren’s Grocery, a hole in the wall grocery store in downtown Dardanelle.  I would walk down to the grocery with my Aunt Mary to get an assortment of stuff, including bologna.  I was often barefooted, stubbing toes along the way on sidewalks that had been down so long that they had been undergrow by roots, elevating them to toe-stubbing level. Warren’s grocery was like the Amazon of Dardanelle.  Mr. Warren and his “staff”of two would deliver to your front door if needed. He had about three rows of groceries and goods, but I most remember the meat counter.  Sonny had these HUGE cannons of bologna and he would slice off a piece “thickas yur thumb” and wrap it up in white butcher paper.   There were no plastic bags, and my Aunt Mary carried her groceries home in a cloth sack or a simple brown grocery bag (these were recycled by my Aunt Robbie as book bags J).  I guess my point is, if Mr. Warren were still alive and still serving up slices of bologna in this time of Pandemic, he would be delivering, and he would still have his doors open because people needed him. He had a sense of responsibility.  He put everyone’s purchases “On Account” which people settled up at the end of the month, or didn’t depending on your situation. 

Things are different now.  Amazon is not Sonny Warren.  They do not deliver out of “a sense of responsibility”.  They deliver because people will pay them, and they in turn will employ desperate people to package and deliver critical things….like puzzles, games, food and movies. I don’t think that this is wrong, just different.  Let’s hope that we never run out of money, and Amazon never runs out of desperate employees.

 Mountain Pig....out

CORONA-CATION DAY 16: "I just need these two chickens....."

I was walking with my wife yesterday day, because that is what we do now, and I said “chickens are probably THE most amazing animal in nature, maybe in line with the Sturgeon!” She bit.  “So they are pretty amazing,…”she said to humor me “…but sturgeons?”.  Me: “Right ? Chickens and Sturgeons literally gives birth to an edible product, every single day and nobody has to die for it! Right?!?!? " to which she said "You probably should also have a bottle of water.  Caviar is salty."

So like what other animals do that, produce ready made meals?

I mean there are lobsters and crabs, but who in their right mind would go for the lobster or crab EGGS ,when you can go all Flash Dance-Jennifer Beals and just eat the lobster straight up!

In the event of a Pandemic…., what am I saying, during THIS Pandemic (notice how I always capitalize Pandemic out of respect) you can literally survive with two chickens and a bottle of water. Now, if you had two chickens a bottle of water and a Sturgeon!  OMG, the party is on!  Scrambled eggs and caviar!  Dang!  Can you say Sustainable Easter Brunch, like every day!  AND the dystopian lemon tree!  Don’t get me started.

Remember that movie, The Jerk, with Steve Martin and the amazing Bernadette Peters ?   

Steve Martin’s character believes he was born a poor black child in Mississippi. He is distressed to find out that he is actually white, and in an effort to “find himself”, he heads north to St. Louis. Martin’s character (Navin) discovers his name printed in the new phone book.  Anyway remember the scene where he is leaving his wife and home and he starts picking key necessities up? "I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that's all I need."  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2X3vVMdh-s

 I know how he feels…. “I just need this chicken and this chicken and this bottle of water and this lemon tree….and this sturgeon…and this copy of Flash Dance“.

Go whip up some scrambled eggs and caviar, and sit down with a good stream of The Jerk, or Blazing Saddles….or Flash DanceJ.

 Mountain Pig out.

CORNA-CATION DAY 15: The Demise(?) of the Harlequin Romance.

“…And that's why birds do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas do it….” – sung by Cole Porter, 1928

I am a bit concerned about the demise of the Harlequin Romance.  Maybe that is exaggerated. Maybe it is fine and healthy, but HR really does play a pivotal role in child rearing. It is kind of the Playboy of the female puberty world, and I would hate to see what might happen if HR were no longer around.  My mom, rest her blessed soul, read HR when I was growing up.  She and my Aunt Robbie traded them like baseball cards.  “Have you read Passion in the Night?” “No, I’ll take that one and you can have On the Winds of Love.” I still remember my Aunt Robbie lying in her bed (she and my Uncle Fred shared two “June and Ward Cleaver-style” single beds in the front room of their home) beneath the window air conditioner blowing a summer gale, and the police scanner periodically calling out some police activity – whatever that might be in an Arkansas town of 3200 people.  She would hand over her most recently read HR to my mom, who was sitting on my Uncle Fred’s bed across from her.   There were literally paper grocery bags of used HRs in my Aunt Robbie’s closet.   No clue what she did with them.  There was a big HR black market in that town.  Every woman who went to bingo or got their hair done down at the beauty shop was a part of it. Think Steel Magnolias times 10!

 Every girl child grew up sneak-reading HR.  It was how they learned that some beefy, moneyed up guy was gonna come through town and have his car break down, stranding him in the local hotel, immediately across from the café where she was working, so that they would see each other several times a day until she offered to show him the “sights” while he was waiting on his car to be fixed and they would kiss on the lookout up on Mount Nebo, and she would marry him because he was so loved by everyone and he was super good to her parents…..and her cat.

Of course my scenario was a little different than that one, but we will save that for another time.

The entire black market HR gang also read these other romance novels.  They were like HR on steroids – thick, 7 x 10 paperbacks that should have been rated X, but instead were left lying around for anyone who was digging through her mom’s closet to find.   Unlike HR, which were just “PG”, there were lots of naked people in these XHR books.  Often the main guy was involved in some nefarious activity like Pirate Capitan or Highwayman that resulted in some woman being kidnapped, or the guy being shot and her caring for him, until she realized that he was just the unemployed guy that she had been looking for all her life. At some point this relationship would go from the woman being disgusted at the guy to the guy “taking her” in some bed of flowers or barn loft.  Which brings me to my point (I really do have one).  

The newer books certainly don't generate the nostalgia that the older ones do.  Some newer ones clearly are working with an "outsized" sense of importance, but let them have their day I guess ("I thought you said it was a TEXAS-sized secret??") 

If HR goes down, or, god forbid, we lose these X-HR novels, then how will girls learn about the birds and the bees (interesting phrase! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_birds_and_the_bees).  How will they plan for the future?  How will they recognize their moneyed up future husband when they see him at the Auto-Shop?  Maybe I am making a mountain out of a mole hill. There is still Game of Thrones, or better yet the Scottish Game of Thrones…Outlander.  

On Outlander, women from the future and present are ravaged both willingly and unwillingly a LOT.  They are clearly romancing with people who have not had a bath in several days, something that I have come to appreciate more and more. But the Outlander guy has a Scottish accent, which must make it ok.

Good luck with your own Corna-romance.

Mountain Pig out.

CORONA-CATION DAY 14: Pig 101

My wife said last night "I am thinking four squares for a pee." After doing some research of my own, I said "I think three square for a pee is enough, but how many for a poop?" To which she said, "I am not ready to make a call on that."  I was struck by this conversation but I thought, knowing our family we could be having this conversations even if NO Pandemic was going on.  I am married to a German and they are very .....frugal.  One good thing is Bartley could survive an apocalypse with no TP at all.  He is clearly surviving the Pandemic in style. 

For those of you who might not know Bartley, he is the Pig Extraordinaire.  

He moved with us from Texas to Colorado in 2015 and proceeded to set up shop and build a real estate empire, and become “an influencer”.  He now has a solar house abutting the back of our own house, a cabin beneath the deck and an “efficiency” in the office, which we now call the ZOOM HIVE, and where he graciously is renting me space. 

He has a portfolio, shot by professional photographer Tricia Dunlap that he sends out for modeling jobs and as PR for various things. He drives a Tesla because ….well, Tricia recommended it several years ago, and after she got him sober, he always takes her recommendations.  

He has considered the new Tesla Truck and taken friends out for test drives, but they all say they prefer the car, "...to this stupid looking robo- piece of .....".

Bartley survived the last pandemic; swine flu, and he sees no reason to panic.

Bartley has already run some disaster drills, after The Abandonment of 2010, when he had to stock his cabin with anything that he could scavenge after his family left him to face the first cold front arrival of Autumn 2010.  When we showed up at 5 pm, he realized that he might have been a little overzealous, but at least the dog was no longer blamed or chewing up the potted plants.

Then there was The Abandonment of 2019.  This truly was a bad situation. Due to a miscommunication on his care-givers parts, he was left for a week to fend for himself, with only a single cup of food and the rain water to sustain him. He survived --nay, he thrived, on the solitude. 

The Pig will be here long after we are gone.  He truly knows how to socially distance.  His internet set up for gaming, and ordering take out are second to none.   He is building a lair where he plans to go during the next Pandemic.  Every pig needs a lair.  He is reading George Orwell's Animal Farm.

 And he requires VERY, little toilet paper to manage his business.

Mountain Pig out.

CORONA-CATION DAY 13: I need a hair cut

I am considering having my dog groomer cut my hair.  Look, you can judge me, but I can’t go for months on end without cutting my hair.  This look doesn’t just happen!!

I got the idea from a friend’s facebook site.  I thought it was hysterical, and then I thought “but by the grace of God go I”, so I am looking in to it.  

Apparently Pet Smart is considered an “essential business” and hair salons are not, so why wouldn’t it work? What could possibly go wrong?   In the interest of my image, I didn’t feel like it was something that I needed to do without researching it a bit, so I went to the most reliable source for this type of thing….the internet.

I mean, these guys are cutting sharp and clean lines, under difficult conditions (right). (I am admittedly a bit squirmy.) I might not go for the full Brazilian (left) but a simple bowl cut might be good, and cheap!  

Then I hit on this….

Competition Dog Grooming.  Who knew?!?  I mean these guys are dog groomers on acid.  I am not sure I want an elephant on my ass, I have enough problems back there already, 

but the psycho-candy snail flower child, or the butterfly, crack-induced garden dog!?!  I am there.

Pet Smart here I come! “Could I please get a Hunger-games scale buffant with a nice Disneyland Cinderella’s castle coming out the top??” “$35 dollars? Of course. Is cash ok?” 

Problem solved.

Mountain Pig out.