Tag Archives: quarantine

My New Furlough “Job”: Fun With Elected Officials

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Even though, like many Americans, I’m furloughed from my job at the moment, I recognize that I’m in the 1% of ridiculously lucky people who has no one in my home demanding care nor worry; ample resources; and lovely outdoor space close to hand.

I’m sorry, New York–I wish I could send you some!

What I also have? A sense of helplessness. When we finished quarantining after our road trip, I signed up to deliver food around our island. But then I had to go off-island again. Twice. I understand the reason for the quarantine rule, but still I chafed. What can I DO to HELP?

Enter University of Washington professor David Domke and Common Purpose. I’d already attended an Orientation with this impressive group dedicated to promoting voting, and signed up for national get-out-the-vote work next fall. But next fall is so, so far away, and the daily COVID news weighs heavily. So I was thrilled when the email call came to ADVOCATE FOR EXPANDED VOTING OPTIONS FOR NEXT NOVEMBER,* from my own living room.

*Notice I’m not saying voting for whom? That’s not what this push is about. You don’t have to dig too deep to find which party supports more voting and which party wants to limit it…but that ain’t my affair. I just happen to think America has had about enough disenfranchisement for our past couple-plus centuries.

Plus, Professor Domke said it would be fun!

27 of our 50 states don’t allow for any way to vote except in-person on one single day. Which, in a pandemic, sounds pretty CRAZY, right? Right. Just ask Wisconsin. So I signed up to contact elected officials in those 27 states. Two senators. One governor. And one person in charge of elections.

Oh dear. That’s 4 x 27…128 people. Fun, huh?

I decided to treat this task like a job. You have the option to call, email, or tweet, and since the only thing I loathe more than making political calls is receiving them, I chose email as my medium. I tweaked the form letter Common Purpose sent to make it sound more like me. Okay. Ready for fun.

For the past 2 days, I’ve emailed for approximately an hour. Because there’s a Senate bill coming up now (Thank you, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden!) I started with Senators. 

Copy email letter. Open provided link to given Senator. Autofill all my details. Pick topic. Paste letter. Make sure I’m not subscribing to any newsletters! Prove I’m human. Click Submit. Next…

Y’know what, Professor Domke? This is NOT fun. This is boring as all get-out. I hate this.

So I started embroidering a little.

I let the two senators from North Carolina know I’m a Tarheel born & bred, and finished my letter with “Go Heels!” (Too bad for me if they’re Duke fans.)

I congratulated some of the senators who recently (or less recently) dropped out of the race for being so stalwart.

I started noticing stuff. Like: Some senators make you choose a prefix for your name; others let you opt out. Some senators have “Abortion/Right to Life” on their Issues list; others, just one or the other. Some senators don’t have anything on their Issues list that covers the topic at hand–Elections? COVID? Civil Rights?–forcing me to choose “Other.” Hmph.

And Cory Booker has the most adorable website, which asks for your first name right off the bat, then goes to “Hi, Gretchen!” Awww…Miss you, Cory.

After thirty minutes or so, I noticed something else: I was actually having a kind of nerdy fun. Go figure.

Hey, time’s up. I contacted 40 senators. Only 14 to go. And then all those Governors and Secretaries of State…

Wonder if any of their websites will tell me “Hi!”?

If you’d like to join this fun enterprise–no, really, in all seriousness, if you’d like to participate in the push to keep voters safely at home without being deprived of their right to help elect our next President, click here.

Woohoooo! Democracy! At least until I get to back to work at the bakery.

‘Tis the Season of What, Exactly? On Spring, Food, Coronavirus and Quakers

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My local Friends Meeting has an expression for when we want to think about something before making a group decision: “Let’s season this for a month and come back to it.” I think it’s a modern term (don’t remember running into it during my Quaker upbringing), and right now it’s feeling extra appropriate.

Season: to sit with something and allow it to show itself more fully.

But also: Flu season. Which has since become pandemic season. How long will pandemic season be? As I write this, it feels like our country is beginning to split even on THAT question: whether or not we should all hunker down for a few more weeks to protect each other.

And literal seasoning? While I’m hunkering, I’ll be on furlough from my bakery job. I already miss the thought of mixing ginger into fruit for pies, or adding garlic to sautéed greens for strata.

On the other hand, while hunkering, I’m also cooking up a storm, like millions of people right now lucky enough to have food—and seasoning the heck out of things.

Like adding sriracha to fresh-picked, steamed nettles to blend with hummus!

Finally, since hunkering can also be done outdoors (at a safe distance), we have signs of the season—wildflowers, songbirds, lambs, daylight. That sense of “season” brings me comfort, as if the Earth is saying, “We got ya. It’s okay. Everything comes around.”

Right now the satin flowers are blooming. They bloom only for a week, only in this one tiny spot on our whole island. Satin flowers ALWAYS hunker in place.

I think I could handle that.

Can we stand to think of ourselves as satin flowers for a little while? Do we need to season that thought?

Road Trip X, Days 33-35, Boise to North Bend to Lopez Island: Aaaaaand, Scene!

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So that’s it. Road Trip X is in the bag. As Wing road trips go, this one was DIFFERENT. Past sojourns have averaged around 45 days, but #10 weighed in at a runty 35 (and we still got home midday on that last day).

Difference #1 was, of course, the fact that our beloved Tarheel men’s basketball team played its last game a week ago. But Difference #2 was the fact that ALL BASKETBALL ended the very next day, thanks to the Coronavirus. So not only did we start heading home 3 days earlier, we spent those days eating up as many miles as possible each day, diverging rarely for scenery, and not at all for friendship.

Need proof? Here’s all I got from crossing the upper east corner of Utah:

Hiya. Now keep driving.

A bit further south, hoodoos like these turn into Zion National Park. But along I-80…

If you’re not going to stop, this is all you get.

We did stop for 90 minutes’ recreation in Twin Falls, Idaho. Twice before we’d been blanked when wishing to ride the Rim Trail of the Snake River’s canyon there, once due to weather and once due to lack of daylight. But third time’s a charm.

First you drive over the bridge. Then you bike under it.

Shoshone Falls was even more jaw-dropping than I’d expected.

Guess who just won Best Waterfall of the Trip?

Can we get a close-up?

Rainbow & all.

After spending the night in Boise (where we LOVE the river trail, but no-no-no, time for only one bike ride and you’ve already had it!), we followed the Oregon Trail route into the Pacific time zone, breathless with joy to be beating the big snowstorm we knew was on its way from the coast.

Frost: fine. Snow? No thank you.

That was a LONG day’s drive. But it could have been longer; we’d started early enough that we could actually have made it all the way to the Anacortes ferry terminal if we’d so chosen. But we didn’t.

It was our 41st anniversary (the falling-in-love one, not the wedding one. What’s better than two anniversaries?) and we wanted to spend it someplace special before diving back into our daily home routine. So I found us a BnB in North Bend, Washington, and we aimed ourselves there.

But before checking in, we decided to go for a hike. Snow levels being too high up on Snoqualmie Pass, we stopped at Rattlesnake Lake, outside North Bend, a place we know well. “We’ll get some exercise while practicing our Social Distancing,” we told ourselves. And here’s where irony took over.

The parking lot was overflowing. And the trail? Imagine a food court at the mall. Now take all those happy teenagers and arrange them along a hiking trail, laughing & talking loudly as kids do.

Ohhhhhhh. Oh yeah. Schools are closed in Washington. So are malls and movie theaters. So where do all these healthy young Seattleites go? Hiking! The thought made us happy. But it also made us turn around. Social distancing on that trail was just not possible. Not to mention it was kinda noisy.

Up on that crag was where we had intended to hike. Look closely; you can see a bunch of people up there.

Instead, we found a perfectly nice walk along the lake, with lots of room between people.

Not winning any waterfall prizes, but perfectly nice.

Then on to our trip’s final night. The place advertised itself as being near the Snoqualmie River. It was.

View from the deck of the main house.

What better homecoming to the Pacific Northwest than tall firs and rushing water?

ahhhh…

Our room wasn’t on the actual bluff above the river…

Up those stairs, it felt like a treehouse.

…but a kind of porch swing was, and I took full advantage.

Who needs a porch when you have a river bluff?

And up on that little outside deck, I used our Coleman stove to cook up the Mate’s and my traditional anniversary meal, Reuben sandwiches.

We’re a cheap date.

Next morning we picked up some groceries (as island friends had advised) and drove through eerily light Seattle traffic, back to the ferry terminal. At 150,000 miles, Red Rover mayyyyy have just completed her final cross-country road trip, so I gave her a grateful hug.

Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome. Now how ’bout a wash n wax?

And now? The Mate and I have been everywhere and touched a lot of surfaces in the last five weeks. But turns out road-tripping is the best practice for self-quarantining. We’ll be with each other now and almost no one else for the next two. Red Rover will get a bath. Nature will get our full attention. And Wing’s World will morph out of Travel Mode.

How ’bout y’all? Anyone else in self-isolation? How are you passing your time, or changing your work routine? Please share any wit & wisdom from the experience.