It’s rare to know that our lockdown has been your lockdown too; I understand that some people have not enjoyed the circumstances at all … but as for my pod, we are doing okay — we have the good fortune to be maybe doing even better than okay!
Early in the year, Brian went to New Zealand for the first time in a decade and a half to see his family members in Opotiki in "the northern part of central north island" :). He discovered new family members, new soon-to-be-family-members, and also family members gone. He got to catch up with people from another lifetime ago and had a genuinely good time staying with friends and relatives.
Why so long away? Mainly, life just gets in the way and we've been terrible about tracking time. And he nearly didn't get out of New Zealand — they shut their borders three days after his flight left, and a friend who delayed didn't get out for another seven months, and another friend who left beforehand couldn't return. Moral of the stories is to jump when you can, and be prepared for the worst, whatever that means to you.
Brian had a very nice visit to his old stomping grounds, but he didn't have enough time to see everyone he wished to, and he hopes to go back again soon. After all, the old country has changed in many ways, but in other ways it's preserved, and that's refreshing!
We have not been able to go to Japan this year, for the same reasons very few others have traveled. Since lockdown started in mid-March, our pod has been the three of us: Maki, Brian, and Tomoe. Birthday and travel plans were abruptly cancelled and we wondered what life would be like together. We were able to fall into a pattern that paralleled what we were doing anyway: Mom cooks and serves dinner every night; Brian, as the essential worker outside our bubble, does all the shopping and pick-ups on his commutes; Maki works from home, wrestling with the changes and necessaries … like Zoom shirts and social media (the upside of which is that we have some new and wonderful friends we could not have met in any other way).
Thank goodness for the Internet — through which Tomoe learns a lot about other cultures and styles, but also how the consumption and dissemination of information and literature has changed. She enjoys American reality TV, Internet cooking shows, Japanese radio call-ins, and books on audio; she’s a big fan of YouTube serials, too. In a way, she’s become more like Dad!
Maki has always been hyper-dependent on the web infrastructure for work, research, and entertainment, but with lockdown, she's amped up her demands on networks. With opera houses shut down due to the high-risk virus, we’ve been viewing operas and theater performances from other companies and houses via the web, too. We're using our commuting savings to donate to the arts, as well as to subscribe to new services; and as much as we enjoy live theatre and the Met orchestra, we see the benefits of internet opera openings, too :)
We are amazed and proud of friends in the fields of pharmacy and biochemistry who have been on the front lines of the vaccine research, and of friends who are healthcare workers deep in the trenches of treating the sick and the dying. Yet other friends in politics are helping us to understand the human reaction and denial to the pandemic. It reminds us a lot of the HIV pandemic — not knowing how it spreads, the fear-mongering and denial, and finally the changes in behavior to contain the virus and the research to treat the symptoms. It seems we don't learn and that the youth of back then are now the grand-adults, but no one listens to us — just like we didn't listen to them ;) It seems we all have to learn the hard way ... and people wonder why I wash any cash that comes into our space!
Mom spent a lot of time designing and having us try out many different mask designs and configurations ... personally, Maki has never worn a mass-produced mask ;) And Brian helped in terms of explaining the shortcomings of masks he uses at work. Now she can make scraps and bits of fun fabric into masks — a lot of the photos feature us in masks. She's also been helping us re-sew and adjust our now-too-large clothing. We're keeping busy in meaningful ways, and we hope you are too!
However you lean in any of the issues of the day, please choose to give in and to fight your battle another day. Keep safe and healthy, for your own sake, as well as those of your loved ones, past, present, and future.
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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
— Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities
He could have been describing 2020 ...
Recipe: Fatso Stew
Chase little white tubby dog around till he perspires and frets. This is best accomplished by Maki, though Brian can assist by encouraging him to run along.
Mom can help by making up a real stew so Fatso has an idea of his fate should he be caught.
Let Fatso stew for a while till he crawls under the sofa to recharge his batteries (his power dock, we suspect, is under there). Repeat as needed. :)
About our photos: we do have a lot of photos of food and of us eating, a lot — after all, mealtime is when we are sitting together and still.
The arrangement from since before lockdown:
- Mom makes a wish-list of ingredients;
- then Brian procures that food plus anything else that looks good and is on sale;
- Mom makes dinner every night;
- Maki takes the leftovers and makes lunch with them without purchase of anything additional (usually).
And thus our costs are contained, as is our exposure to the scary outside world.
We really are trying hard to keep safe, and we're enjoying the challenges, as well as eating dinner together every night. :) You know, like a family unit! :D
So, why are there so many loaves of bread in the slide show? Yes, we maintain the "fresh bread list" — now and again, Bif has a yearning to bake bread, but the best batch is four large loaves, which is more than we can reasonably eat. Being a good cook is not enough — one must have eaters ;) Fortunately, there are people around us willing to accept loaves of bread (sliced or unsliced) via the USPS or by Brian's bicycle delivery!
It started out early in the lockdown when Mom was getting a vegetable box weekly; we've since stopped that because they always gave her 10 lbs of potatoes! We don't eat so many potatoes, so we came up with a bread recipe that uses them nicely — the loaves you see are composed of potatoes, carrots, and rosemary.
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