We're doin' the best we can, man

Years ago, when the building now housing Luciana's Mexican Restaurant on Broad Ripple Avenue was a Greek place called Korey's, Jeff and I discovered avgolemono soup.

It was a life-saver when it was cold and drizzly outside or if you had a cold and were drizzly yourself. It was creamy and lemony and just wonderful. We'd get it for take-out before take-out became routine.  Jeff tried for a while to find a recipe so he could make it at home and finally merged two that gets us 95 percent of the way there.

He's been on a cooking kick lately as we've been sheltering in place and has hit some dishes out of the park -- couscous with chicken and olives and broccoli, his standard and awesome black bean soup, hunks of meat on the grill, pasta with home-made, fancy tomato sauce -- it's been delightful.

Last night, he broke out the avgolemono soup and paired it with the cous cous.

Alison is an adventurous eater, but tends to eat one item at a time, rather than bites of this and that in rotation as most people in polite society are prone to do. After offering accolades for the cous cous, she and Jeff discussed the nuances of the dish as I stuck to the soup. I wasn't really paying attention to anything else, but Jeff discovered Alison soaking her pita in her soup bowl.

He inquired as to why she wasn't spooning it up in ecstasy.

"It's lemon milk soup, man," said. "I'm doin' the best I can."

It was as if she'd pulled out a bow and shot an arrow straight to his heart.

"And I totally didn't pour half my bowl into Mom's when you were in the kitchen," she informed him.

I'm more known for ordering out than crafting gourmet meals, and I rarely wax poetic over the contents even in those rare wins.  Jeff likes to discuss where the ingredients were born, died and prepared for shipment. He misses the mark far less often than I do.

So I just enjoyed the repartee. Plus, I had more soup than I deserved.

In other news, Ali and I were bored the other night and decided we needed facials. Last night, we binged on Botched and agreed that no one needs to look exactly like Barbie.

I posited that men really don't have a say when it comes to boob jobs. Ali retorted that she prefers they speak up.

"That way you know who to dump," she said.

Keepers? Cooks. Even if they sometimes make lemon milk soup.

Here's to another week at home, #Covid style

Alison is helping Jeff make caramel-stuffed, quadruple chocolate cookies, so any progress I'd made in fighting the Corona15 is about to regress.

It's an amazing cookie. Anything made with four kinds of chocolate inside is guaranteed to make you swoon and then lick the crumbs that fell in your vicinity on the floor.

The recipe came to us years ago from Kirsten Jasheway who hired Ali to make them as a surprise for her husband, Dwayne. He loved them, and we appropriated the recipe, which I encourage you to do. No sense in us being the only ones to gain weight.

You'll thank me. Or you can hire Ali, whose baking skills have only increased since what may have been her first paid baking gigs. Selling cupcakes with Jenna at Canterbury Park may precede that event, but I don't think that's quite the same thing.

Anyway, I have quadruple chocolate in my future. I haven't eaten yet, so I'm think the first one is weight-gain free.

Much like you, I presume, we've had a pretty uneventful week. In between working from home, Jeff has continued playing Tim the Tool Man Taylor.

We have a replacement light over the kitchen sink -- a project we've been eyeing for at least five years -- and we've finally put a light over the kitchen counter, which we've been talking about doing for 19 years. Clearly, it wasn't that big of a problem.

We also have a new router that's allowing me to work in my happy place -- the back porch. (More thanks to Alan Ng whose Ng Computer Services you should be your IT Help Desk, too.)

I've deep-cleaned more parts of the house and Ali successfully took a couple big exams. Today may include some yard work for me, and for sure for Alison who's helping Tracy and Eric keep their Indy house looking sharp. They've decided it's not their forever home and I think it sold (pending) in a week. My guess is the new neighbors won't be as much fun as E&T.

My weekend got started with a Zoom gathering for my TechPoint friends. Before Covid19, we were planning a fancy gala that would have been last night. A group of us got dressed up - some of us Corona mullet-style with fancy on top and sweats on bottom -- and raised a glass anyway. That preceded my Zoom Book Club, where I continued imbibing from the same bottle.

By the time Book Club started, I was already sleepy. It might not have been my finest hour as a Book Clubber. I truly am a cheap date. Jeff and I finished the bottle the next afternoon.

Alison's 19th birthday is coming up fast. Given the more we're learning about #Covid19, we're even less prone to have her out and about. Sure, she's young and healthy and her asthma is mile, but there's no reason to risk her health. I told her I didn't really want to encourage people to come by - even from the road - to give her good wishes.

"That is the last thing I want," she said. "I mean, I'd love to get texts and calls and stuff, but I don't want a lot of people driving by like that."

She seems sincere, and she's never been one to want a spotlight. So don't think I'm a bad parent if I don't organize a parade for her or have big signs in the front yard. We'll do something, and I'm sure we'll have a new box farm to deal with as I start online shopping. But what the celebration will be, is anyone's guess.

For now, we still have booze, toilet paper, two working toilets and soon, cookies. Pretty sure we'll be okay for another few days.

Cheers to however you're managing.

Quarantine Lessons

If Covid-19 quarantine has taught me anything, it's that it's really important to be careful about who you pick to share your quarters. For example, you want partners/roommates/housemates who:

1. Will take his/her turn making the pot roast;

2. Use the recipe that calls for red wine; and

3. Set aside most of the said wine for direct consumption.

It's a bonus if the partners/roommates/housemates will clean up on occasion, pitch in for laundry duty and know when to find themselves their won corner of the space and stay there. It's also helpful if you have partners/roommates/housemates who don't break important things you all need.                                                                                                                                                                               ⬇

Chez Reed has been blessed in some of the areas mentioned above and cursed in others. Overall it's made for a tolerable quarantine. We also have ample liquor, food and toilet paper in the house. So that helps.

We are down one toilet, though, and it's totally my fault. I was working in the basement and I heard a funky noise coming from the downstairs bathroom. The Captain advised me first that it didn't exist and then second that it didn't matter. But it persisted, so I took off the tank lid to find out why it was hissing a little bit. I pushed down the rubber thing that seals off the water, thinking it wasn't closing properly.

But when I went to put the lid back on the tank, my hands were wet and the thing slipped. It landed against the tank. If you don't know what happens when a 20-pound block of enamel hits a hollowed-out block of enamel, I'll tell you: 

1. You curse and try to catch the slippery object.
2. You grab onto it and pray that it didn't damage anything.
3. You spy the fracturing and hear its crackle as it continues to spread.
4. You put the lid back on, step back and gulp because you know duct tape isn't going to fix it.
5. You swallow hard and go find the Captain to confirm that yeah, we're going to have to shut the water off and get a new toilet/tank.

Fortunately, we have two other toilets, but the quarantine space inside our quarantine space has been compromised. I guess the next sick person we need to separate from the herd can pee in the shower.

Hopefully we'll get it fixed before we need to double isolate anyone else. On another bit of household consternation, Jeff added an extender to broaden the areas where we could all work online. It seemed awesome until my laptop stopped talking to some sites critical to my job.

Happily, we got nearly instantaneous professional help from Alan Ng, who used to be technically family (he's my cousin in-law's brother in-law.) He's now fully part of the clan at least as far I'm concerned. He not only helped us identify the issue, he's going to help with the fix that will broaden our modem strength but won't put up roadblocks for my PC.

On a funny note, within the same 12 hours of time I was trashing our toilet tank, my sister Donna took a hammer to what I think was frost build-up on her garage freezer. The door had been inadvertently been left ajar. So we're both going to soon contribute to the local economy with replacement/repairs. 

In other news, the daffodils have gone by, my neighbors' tulips are trying to bloom, the flox is trying to come in and Easter came and went. 

My housemates were not as excited to see their Easter baskets as I thought they would be but they didn't reject their treats. I guess 18 may be the end of this ritual, though I suspect had The Bunny not hopped by, there would have been a bit of melancholy.

We've had weather whiplash, too. I had a few online meetings on the porch and outside under Lois' magnolia. Ali and I even napped in the sunshine one day. But now it's like winter is back. 

My magnolia was glorious this year, but has flagged a bit under high winds and winter's return.

I got a lesson in using the power drill, and finally got around to putting legs on the cheese wheel container-table our cousin Mary gave me at Christmas. It's a perfect addition to the back porch. 

Jeff's been a regular handyman, too. He's fixed a drawer, did some fine sanding/gluing on the cheese table and replaced our shower heads so we feel like we're getting hotel service when we remember that we need to actually wash our whole bodies.

If only he were confident in his toilet repair abilities...

How mulch do you love me?

Neither the Captain nor Ali are fans of yard work, but it generally works out just fine because I do like yard work. I work out a lot of frustrations out there. I work through things I want to write. I feel like I get a good work out. It's all good.

But when you order 4 cubic yards of mulch and have it dumped in the street in front of your house, it begs for an all-hands-on-deck kind of weekend. We were all asleep when the doorbell rang around 9 a.m. to announce the mulch delivery. I'd told Jeff I was going to order it, but he didn't realize it was happening as quickly as it did. I got dressed and started working on the pile, which took up about half a lane of the road and peaked at about 4.5 feet.

Jeff had recycling and groceries to get, but Ali came out of the house to survey the situation. She volunteered to help, and I don't ever want to know if it was because the Captain called and told her to. I prefer to think she wanted to be there.

I gave her some options and she decided to clean up the weeds on the non-bed side of the rocks that hold in a flower bed that stretches from the street to the front stoop and over to the neighbor's wall. When she finished with that, she decided the lilies against the wall needed raking.

I would have been content to put mulch on top of the leaves, but neither Ali nor Jeff agreed.

All of that extra ambition resulted in about eight bags of yard waste, a good 12 hours of outside work this weekend and a few moans and groans along the way.

My back was complaining as I carefully placed mulch around my day lilies and it was then I remembered that these plants push themselves through the hard ground every year. A little bit of mulch isn't going to top them from poking through. After that, I was a little less gently.

On Saturday, with about one yard of mulch down, I must have been looking depressed. A neighbor came by and called out, "Just think about what it'll look like when you're done. You're almost there!"

Right. She was taking a stroll. I was leaving skin cells on my shovel handle.

About halfway through, Jeff reminded us it was time to head down to 450 North Brewing Co. He had some newly released beer on order, and Ali and I were going for the pizza and BBQ. It's an hour south of us but, man. So worth the trip.

It was drive-through service for both and we ate in the car before heading back home for more yard work. Our friends Eric and Tracy hired Ali to mow their yard weekly until their Broad Ripple house is sold. Hopefully they find another one that's better suited for them but still close to us.

"I could mow three or four yards after that," Ali declared after snarfing down her sandwich and a good portion of her fries.

Once home, Ali headed up to her paid gig, Jeff left to deliver beer to friends -- in a socially distanced way, of course -- and it was back to the mulch pile for me. Jeff got back fairly quickly and unearthed more leaves. We surrendered around 6 and put a tarp over the mulch.

It will be hard to get them back in the yard after this weekend of hard labor. Which is fine. It's mostly my domain anyway. And I need them to rest up for fall when the rakes, bags and blower will be in need again.

She had just mentioned to her boyfriend that she loved the smell of mulch. "It makes me think of Spring and my mom doing yard work," she told him. Notice she didn't say, "My mom and me doing yard work."

Jason disagreed. A summer of Boy Scout fundraiser apparently had ended with mulch in his pores. It took months to get the smell out of his nose, he said.

It's been quite a week of Working From Home for all three of us. I'm grateful that I don't have one or more elementary or high school kids who have to finish their years e-learning. I'm more grateful that Alison has maintained her focus on her Purdue coursework.

She's hard core man and has given me "the hand" as Lynda and Amy would call it more than once. I'd invite her on a walk when I needed to get out of my chair. "Sorry, I'm working," she'd say.

I complimented her on her focus one evening after we'd all packed in the work day. "Yeah, how does it feel?" she asked with a grin.

"Huh?" I asked.

She claims there many, many times when she was younger that she'd asked to do something and I'd tell her that I was working but we'd get to it when I was done. It's probably true. Hopefully we did actually get to whatever it was she wanted. I suspect I don't score 100 percent on that.

One early evening, Ali was still working out some kind of complicated equation and Jeff and I took a walk around the neighborhood. We discovered the tiny, walk-up/drive-up Dairy Queen near us had 16 Dilly Bars on sale for $12.99. We didn't think we could get them home without melting, but we were tempted.

On Friday, we caught Ali on a light day, got out a beer backpack, filled it with ice packs and all three of us trekked over to see if the sale was still on. I don't know why they're so overstocked on Dilly bars, but it seemed wrong not to help them out.

We each had a frozen treat on the walk home, which took us by Indy Tacos, which had a huge sign out front reminding passersby that they were open for take-out.

That night we feasted like kings as we watched more of the Tiger King on Netflix. I blew through it during my basement confinement, but there are things I missed. And it's fun to hear their reaction.

In other news of note, Ali came out of her bathroom chortling to her father. "Dad! Dad! It finally happened. It finally happened!"

While some fathers might have been nervous about what had happened in there, the Captain was all ears.

"What? What?" he asked.

"We finally ran out of that awful Scott toilet paper and I have real toilet paper again," she exclaimed.

I hadn't told him that I'd rewarded her for her devotion to her studies. He assumed, however, that it was yet another sign that I love Ali more than I love him.

"Well your mother must have put all the Scot in our bathroom because we still have three more rolls of that one-ply, half-ply stuff in there," he groused.

I thought about reminding him that in this Covid-19 world, there are lots of people who would loooooo-ooooove to have his Scott tissue. But I was afraid he'd go find them.

Anyway, the yard looks better than it has for years. Jeff and I are pounding Naproxen, and office work isn't at all unappealing. Which is good because we all have a lot of it -- and we're grateful for it given the numbers of unemployment in this Covid-19 world.

Hope you're all coping as well or better than we are. Stay physically distanced but virtually social. Wash your hands and find a fun mask to wear if you have to go out around people. We can get through this. Think about how hard it must for a flower to push through hard earth to reach the sunlight.That takes a lot of patience, time and perseverance. And when that hard work is over, there's another bit of beauty in the world.

Happy spring, everyone!