Phyre thinks he has found the best seat in the house as he tries to beat the heat on our bedroom bookshelf. It certainly is cooler up there, but that is relative to the rest of our sweltering abode, which has been baking under triple-digit temperatures recently. Photo by Glenn.
May 30, 2020: Among the many inconveniences brought upon our civilization by COVID-19 is necessity for social distancing, which is the antithesis of everything about human behavior. People want to celebrate their families and achievements in the company of friends and loved ones, not hidden behind face masks and unable to touch one another because they are forced to stand six feet apart. Sure, we try to compensate with social media and Zoom video conference calls, but it’s just not the same, especially when it’s a special occasion like your birthday.
Our bed is awash in paper lanterns as we use it for an assembly line in preparation for Ben's birthday party. Photo by Glenn.
Lanterns of all different sizes and colors are strung from the living room ceiling and light fixtures as a traditional Japanese swan dance plays on the TV. It was our little effort to make Ben's birthday celebration feel like being in a Japanese restaurant, even though we can't right now because of the coronavirus crisis. Photo by Glenn.
Ben reads his birthday card, which fittingly features a tray of sushi on the cover. Photo by Roni.
Ben puts the finishing touches on his California roll, his first attempt at making sushi. Photo by Glenn.
Glenn's sushi roll looks about as good as any you might find at the grocery store. The only thing missing from the ingredient list was fish roe, which is one of the staples of a real California roll. Photo by Glenn.
Phyre watches for a safe distance as 26 candles come to life atop Ben's ice cream cake. Photo by Glenn.
Ben experiments with one of his birthday gidts — a 4-inch acrylic Pikachu that changes colors when plugged into a computer USB port. Incredible to think that Pikachu has grown up with Ben for more than two decades now. Photo by Glenn.
We enjoyed the paper lanterns so much during the birthday party that we decided to leave them up a few days more, eventually making this small, semi-permanent display in one corner of the living room. Photo by Glenn.
Roni has been getting a lot of use out of her Foodi Ninja air fryer, and this month got to try it our on making pretzels. She sprinkled the tops with sesame seeds left over from our sushi making session. Photo by Glenn.
Glenn wears his COVID-19 mask for the very first time on a May 26 trip to the grocery store. It doesn't help to have extra coverings on one's face when the temperature is close to 100 degrees. Photo by Glenn.
Roni is no stranger to face masks, having made several shopping trips at our local Raley's, where they are required to be worn. The shelves are well stocked one again, although sticker shock is becoming a greater concern than the virus as grocery prices rise. Photo by Glenn.
Proof that inflation is real and painful to one's wallet is signs on the Raley's meat section advising customers of "temporary" higher prices attributable to supply chain disruptions. The pandemic may be temporary, but the higher prices are likely to become the new normal. Photo by Glenn.
With warmer weather finally here, the cats are starting the shed their winter coats. They don't like to be brushed, so we use a special rubber mitt to take off the excess hair. Photo by Glenn.
Phyre gave us enough hair to make our own fur coat. Hey, maybe that would be a good side business if we are still stuck indoors because of the coronavirus this winter. Photo by Glenn.
You never know what you'll find roaming around the backyard. This frightened baby opossum was lurking under our garden hose one afternoon. Photo by Glenn.
We gave him some catfood and a pan of water, but he seemed more interested in finding a place to hide from us. Eventually he slipped off behind a wood pile. Photo by Roni.
Katy has been taking lessons from Phyre, apparently, as she goes belly-up on the sofa for her nighttime nap. This was a pretty hot night, so she was probably enjoying the cool of the ceiling fan. Photo by Glenn.
That is much the way Ben was feeling when he learned last month that California’s shelter-in-place order, which had been set to expire in early April, was extended a second time through the end of May. That meant party plans and gathering with friends on his birthday had to take a backseat to our public health realities. He had been hoping that the situation would improve enough for a visit to San Francisco’s Japantown, which for someone as into Japanese pop culture as Ben is would be like a Disney cartoon fan getting a trip to Disneyland. We’d last been to Japantown in 2009, so it isn’t a place he gets to go very often.
But with coronavirus still making headlines as spring looks toward summer, and San Francisco in particular making it difficult to enjoy a day on the town, Ben reluctantly agreed that this wouldn’t be the year for a social visit. Instead, we looked for a way to give him his taste of Japan from the safety of our home.
Giving him a trip to Tokyo was obviously out, so instead we got creative and decided to bring a bit of Japan to his family party. Roni found a couple dozen paper lanterns online that we strung on fishing line across our living room, then we decided to set him up with an interactive lesson on how to make his own sushi.
Roni found a fancy kit on Amazon with all the spoons and mats and chopsticks needed for sushi making. She was able to get most of the ingredients for the project from the grocery store, including rice, tempura, imitation lobster, cucumber, avocado, sesame seeds and the traditional seaweed wrapper material called nori.
Ben wasn’t quite sure what he thought of the idea when he unwrapped the sushi kit as one of his early birthday gifts. Actually, he seemed a little skeptical that it was the thing he wanted to do on his birthday, but he humored us. Glenn had watched tutorial videos on YouTube, so he was willing to become an amateur sushi chef for the day alongside our 26-year-old son.
It is amazing how easy it actually is to make sushi rolls, and while we are far from experts to the point where we could bang one out in a couple of minutes, we did manage to make our two California rolls in a way that you might at least have recognized their appearance and flavor as close to the real thing. Roni made it easier by preparing the sushi rice and chopping up the ingredients in advance.
To make a California roll, basically all you need to do is cover a reeded sushi mat in plastic wrap, place a sheet of nori on the mat, spread the rice out to cover most of it, flip it over so that the rice now faces the plastic wrap, then set a row of the inside ingredients on the center of the exposed nori and roll it all to form a log, gently squeezing the mat to help shape the roll. Once you remove the mat and plastic, you are left with a rice-covered roll upon which you place avocado and a line of wasabi mayo. Sprinkle it with sesame seeds and then cut the roll into eight pieces. Done!
The sushi-making party was fun, but Ben was probably more happy to get to his ice cream cake and gifts. We were lucky that Cold Stone Creamery is open for business, so we were able to get him a small red velvet cake. For gifts, this was the birthday of clothes — pants, shirts, and a new pair of Skechers shoes for work. He also got a Mandalorian POP figure, some Pokemon-related items, and a few shares of stock in Funko and Super League Gaming, mostly as a nod to his interest in anime and online video gaming, respectively.
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HAT BEN PROBABLY would most have liked for his birthday would be an end to the COVID-19 crisis and a return to normal conditions at his work. Although customers are mostly understanding of the need for wearing masks inside the store and staying six feet apart in aisles and at the registers, Ben still reports more than his share of incidents in which people try to flaunt the rules and make things difficult on the clerks for enforcing them. He often comes home in a funk because the world has gone mad and he just wants to do his job. Can’t blame him there.
True enough, we have seen the craziness in our own trips to the grocery store. Glenn finally got his first real taste of it this past Tuesday when, for the first time since the coronavirus panic came to town, he had to put on his face mask for the first time to venture into Raley’s. The way that came about was a little unexpected.
It was a quiet afternoon, one of Ben’s days off, and he had gone out to Gamestop in Brentwood with his friend Aaron to pick up a video game they had been looking for. We were at home, trying to beat the heat and just settling into our usual afternoon routine of watching news and reading, when Roni got a call from Ben that the car wouldn’t start and they were stuck in the parking lot at the mall. He thought the battery might be dead.
So we dropped what we were doing and headed out into the 103-degree day with jumper cables in the trunk to hopefully get Ben back on the road. Roni needed to go grocery shopping anyway, and this was the perfect excuse to get Glenn to come to the store with her, so he took along the face mask that until now he’d had no reason to wear.
When we reached Ben and Aaron, we found them parked under the shade of a tree (thankfully!) with an open stall next to them so we could angle Roni’s car next to Ben’s and connect the jumper cables to their respective batteries. Ben turned the key a few times to confirm the engine wouldn’t crank, and then we hooked up the cables. Still no luck. Was it the battery? Or perhaps the alternator or starter? We didn’t know, so it was time for a call to AAA for some roadside assistance.
It was only after this we learned from Ben that he had been sitting in the parking lot with the engine off, running the air conditioner to stay cool while he and Aaron waited in the car before they planned to return home. Naturally this drained the battery, which the AAA driver who came to rescue us told us as much. He ran some diagnostics that proved the battery and alternator were still good, just depleted. The cure was for Ben to drive the car for about half an hour, which he went off to do while Mom and Dad headed to the grocery store.
Raley’s in Oakley has quieted down considerably since the early days of the pandemic when people were hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Those shortages have been replaced by a lack of meat products and a run on frozen treats, thanks to the summer-like temperatures we were experiencing.
Roni is a veteran of shopping in a face mask. She gave Glenn some pointers about the best way to wear his, and together we ventured into the store. Technically you aren’t allowed inside the store without a face covering, but clearly once inside it is anything goes. We saw more than one person not using their mask, and apparently they are regular customers and the clerks are doing nothing to stop it. When one man in his 30s was called out by one of the stockers (“Are you being a rebel?” she asked him) he told her unapologetically that “It’s just not necessary,” and that was the end of the discussion.
And therein lies the challenge of getting an entire nation to go along with anything the government says we should do for our own good. People choose to comply based on their personal beliefs and political agenda, so the only thing apparently that will settle this debate is either for us to go back to our usual routines and not have a new wave of coronavirus cases, or for there to be a surge in fatalities that drives us all back indoors as we wait anxiously for someone to produce a viable cure. Time will tell, but meanwhile we are all victims of pandemic hell.
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OW THAT SUMMER is on the way and temperatures are rising, so too is the number of critters visiting (invading?) our home. We joke that our three cats should start their own bug collection, as every night seems to bring a new adventure leading to the discovery of one pest or another. Phoenix, Phyre and Katy have collectively captured ants, earwigs, spiders, Jerusalem crickets, house crickets, a wind scorpion, damselflies, crane flies, moths, mosquitoes and, unfortunately, more than a couple cockroaches.
It is this latter discovery that had us concerned enough that we wanted to head off any possible infestation before it started, so we began with placing a few baits in strategic locations and watching to see what if anything came to visit. It is no secret that roaches are part of the environment around our neighborhood, which was built on sandy river soil once occupied by fruit and nut orchards. You don’t have to look long or hard to see giant specimens crawling on the sidewalks at night, so it would be naive to believe they don’t live nearer to our home than we would prefer. The question, of course, is where and for how long. A rogue adult roach or two can slip through an open door or come home inside a shopping bag or delivered package. But it takes more to have a colony of them, and we had never had a problem in the three decades we have lived here, so we weren’t in panic mode immediately.
That was until the other night, when we noticed Phyre poking around the coat rack in the corner near the front door, where he and his brother had been watching the day or so before. We decided that our guard cats hadn’t been wrong yet, so we pulled back the coat rack and discovered a smaller roach skittering away. Not fast enough to escape the can of bug spray we brought with us, but our worst fears were now confirmed — Houston, we have a problem.
It was when Roni went into the laundry room to toss out some of the debris we had removed from the coat rack area that she turned on the light and surprised another roach, this one far larger than any we had seen. We killed it, then went on a mad spree of dispensing bug spray along all the baseboards in the entryway and laundry room. Glenn turned on the porch light and discovered four more of various sizes fleeing for cover. More spray. And then the worst discovery: a huge roach in the garage near the laundry room door. Arrrrrrgh!
How? Where did this come from?? A million thoughts raced through our minds, none of them encouraging, and then Glenn speculated that he may have brought them in from the backyard last November when he brought in all the tools he’d been using outdoors for months during the kitchen remodeling project. If so, that would mean half a year for a population to get established in the garage, meaning that our problem may be much worse than we know.
Starting tomorrow, the day after this newsletter goes online, we will be launching a major assault on our garage and front porch in an effort to locate the source of our problem. A call to an exterminator may be in our near future, but at least for now we have our cats on patrol.
The insects are not alone on the unwanted guest list. We also recently heard the trampling of little paws up in our attic, which we never did confirm but suspect may have been a large rat or small marsupial. We’ve had mice in the attic before, generally during the cold winter months, and usually they depart after a night or two of scratching at the walls. It’s not like there is any food or water up there to sustain them.
But this little fellow was quite unruly, and its nighttime antics were a constant source of curiosity for the cats as they kept their gaze pointed at the ceiling. We considered turning them loose in the attic to see what would happen, but we worried about them becoming stuck or getting hurt. Meanwhile, we endured by wearing earplugs at night as we tried to sleep, and wondered what every sound meant. We are happy to report that in this case whatever it was has moved on, but we are going to look for points of entry to the attic and seal them up once discovered.
That’s all the time we have for this month. Wish us luck in our pest control efforts and maybe we’ll have better news to share in June.
