My husband and I are part of a group WhatsApp chat that includes his siblings and their spouses here in the US plus all of his aunts, uncles, cousins and their spouses who live in Ireland. Mostly we use it for birthday and holiday greetings or to share pictures of everyone's kids and dogs. Now that we're all under some degree of lockdown we've been using it much more frequently.
My stance on coronavirus jokes is...unnecessarily complex (yes, they are funny but also this whole situation is not at all funny, but you have to find humor in things, but also...death) but we have been mostly trading quaran-memes and it's been nice to wake up to messages from family in another time zone.
We were supposed to go to Ireland this summer for a family wedding, which has now been postponed by a year. I feel terrible for them. Anyone who has planned a wedding of any size can imagine what it would feel like to slam on the brakes three months out, not to mention all the phone calls and emails and rearranging of this and canceling of that.
Here’s the whining part: I also feel terrible for me, because we'd planned to go to Paris after the wedding. Our flights were booked, our hotel was booked, all of which now needs to be un-booked to whatever extent possible. (Note to self, I've also got to cancel our Ireland hotel reservations, do not forget to do this Sarah!!!!!) These are spoiled-person problems, I know. Hopefully, we can do it all next year. But I'm still sad about it.
Anyway. One of the more wack things I've done during quarantine (this is day 20 for us, lol omg) is buying a sewing machine. I DON'T KNOW OKAY. It arrived last night and I cannot wait to start playing with it. The first thing I am going to do – uh, when I get some thread – is hem some curtains for a weird-sized window in our third-floor guest room. If nothing else, my misadventures in sewing should provide some entertaining gaffes for inclusion here in my daily updates.
Finally, we finished Tiger King last night and jumped right into Making the Cut, a fashion design competition show starring Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum. If that sounds familiar to you it absolutely should. Basically, it is what Project Runway would have been with an Amazon production budget (in the first episode, they fly designers from around the world to New York and then immediately fly them all to Paris, where there are no janky L'Oreal hair and makeup rooms or Bluefly.com accessory walls). The best thing about the entire episode (aside from Carine Roitfeld's eyebrows) was the part where they introduced Naomi Campbell as a guest judge. R u serious, TV show!!!! Okay! I’m here for this!
I know I always talk about dinner and cooking but I didn’t bake or cook a single thing yesterday unless you count the salad I made to go with our leftover gratin. Tonight I’ll be making spicy lemony chicken with greens and croutons thanks to our next-door neighbor, who gave us a huge amount of fresh salad greens from her produce delivery. I need to bake her some bread or something in return. Bartering! It’s the currency of our times.