It’s heat-madness hot again. Last week my incredulous husband asked me if I would really prefer it to be 30 degrees and snowy and I said “Frankly, yes” and I meant it. Cold does not make me feel crazy, at least.
On Saturday we went to the car dealership to turn in my leased SUV and get the newer version of the same thing. I had planned to get a different color, at least, but the only one they had on the lot in the trim level we wanted was the same color. This is probably fine, though, considering how long it took me to find the old one in parking lots when I first got it.
I did not really have “spend four hours in a car dealership during a pandemic” on my 2020 bucket list but it was more or less unavoidable. Before we left the house I discovered something extremely on-brand for me, which was that I was driving around with an expired registration. Leasing is stupid in that your registration is no longer tied to your birthday but rather to some arbitrary month having to do with the first letter of the bank’s name. How is a person supposed to remember that kind of made-up calculus?
While we were at the dealership I observed something a bit disturbing, which is that a lot of people seem to think masks don’t need to cover your nose. Also, people spend a lot of time on things like offering you sanitized pens when really a convenient bottle of hand sanitizer or a sink and some soap and water would do just fine.
I don’t know about you, but there is a lot about our current situation that is very tedious, particularly the number of times you need to say “WHAT? WHAT?” in any interaction with people, due to the muffling properties of all the face coverings and sneeze guards that are between us these days. Last night after the dealership and a grocery stop we put together a cheese and charcuterie board for dinner, finished it, and fell promptly asleep before we could even watch one episode of Rubicon.
Rubicon, if you’re not aware, was allegedly on AMC for one season sometime around 2010. I don’t know if it got lost in the Mad Men fanfare or if people didn’t really like it or what, but two episodes in I am really enjoying it. It does perhaps suffer from a lack of star power – it’s very much an “oh, That Guy!” show – and the first person I recognized with any specificity is the guy who played Peter Gregory on Silicon Valley (RIP). I’m paying a fortune for it because there’s no option to just buy the whole stupid season on Amazon, but Pandemic Times call for…Pandemic Measures?
Very early this morning I did something I haven’t in a while, which is sleep-buy something. I don’t take Ambien and I don’t tend to buy stuff while pickling myself with rosé, but I am susceptible to the sleep-buy. This time it was a fidget toy made of magnetic beads that I 100% don’t need, but again I am blaming this on Pandemic Brain.
Today I picked up the dogs from staying overnight at daycare. The puppy looks about 12% bigger than she did when I dropped her off. As usual, they both smelled like a landfill so I gave them baths and took them on a sizzling walk around the neighborhood, listening to everyone splashing around in their wonderful cool in-ground pools. I am real irritated that none of these people seem to want to get to know me and invite me over to swim anytime I want. It’s nice that my brother-in-law has a lovely pool but that is 25 minutes away. I need someone closer to barge in on.
Before it got too hot this morning I made orange-vanilla scones (just use a container of vanilla yogurt instead of arsing around with sour cream and heavy cream) and a huge iced coffee. In a little while, my husband is going to do a big steak on the smoker and we will have that with some CSA potatoes and probably zucchini because CSAs be giving you zucchini like whoa right now. Some of it I will have to shred and freeze, no one is equipped to eat that much zucchini. It’s not natural.