Ten Surprising Benefits Of Wearing A Mask

When COVID-19 broke out all over the world, an international debate about the wearing of face coverings also broke out.  Some people believe that wearing masks will slow the spread of infection and that the masks are critical to containing the virus until there is a vaccine.  Others believe masks do no good and represent an infringement on our civil liberties.  Others believe that masks probably have some impact on stemming infection and that there is little downside to wearing them.  Personally, I believe they do have an impact.  I believe that we are seeing the positive results of wearing them in places that have mandated wearing masks in public.  I wear my mask, not intending any political statement, but simply because I want to do everything I can to give us all more safety, peace of mind, and freedom. 

For people who are not completely convinced of the public health advantages of wearing a mask when venturing out into the big wide world, I have compiled a list of ten other benefits that may be more compelling.

  1. You save a lot of money on lipstick.
  2. When worn with sunglasses, you can make faces at people without them knowing it.
  3. You can have a bad hair day and people will just assume it is the mask.
  4. You can buy a whole wardrobe of them and use them as fashion accessories.
  5. You can talk with your mouth full and no one knows the difference.
  6. You can rent out space on your mouth for advertising.
  7. There is now finally something you can buy at Brighton Collectibles that actually costs less than the “free” $25 gift card they send you for your birthday (okay… that one is a little esoteric, but, as someone who routinely ends up using her $25 birthday credit to buy something that costs over $200, it is a considerable benefit for me).
  8. Orthodontia may become a thing of the past.
  9. You have an excuse when you meet someone in the grocery store and can’t remember his or her name (as in, “oh silly me; I didn’t recognize you with the mask on!”)
  10. You can take Tink-ering to a whole new level.

You’re welcome.

What benefits of wearing a mask have you discovered?  Please share your perspective by leaving a comment.  In the alternative,  you can leave me an email at terriretirement@gmail.com

Have a safe day!

Terri/Dorry 😊

Random Observations From Quarantine

Over the past several weeks of “safer at home” lockdown, I’ve had plenty of time to observe the world and think great thoughts.  Well, maybe not great thoughts, but thoughts, nonetheless. Here are a few of the notions that are percolating in what is left of my mind:

  • At some point, my hair’s ability to grow wider, wavier, and wilder exceeds my ability to wield a flat iron. I reached that point a couple of weeks ago.  Now, not only do I have a gray streak running down the center of my head at the roots, I am also sporting a hair style reminiscent of a terrifying Bozo The Clown.
  • It’s okay that I can’t flatten my hair because the flatter my hair is, the more obvious the gray stripe running down my roots is.
  • I don’t recommend watching a Zombieland flick when you are sheltering-in-place to avoid contagion. We just watched Zombieland Double Tap the other night.  A movie about the brain-eating “survivors” in a world decimated by a mutant virus probably wasn’t the best choice.  Maybe a little too close to home right now.  What’s worse is that I found it laugh-out-loud funny at some points.  I felt really crummy about that.  My soul is dark and evil. 
  • Going to the grocery store is now like foraging.  I play hunter and gatherer for myself and several immune-compromised friends. It is interesting that it is difficult to buy milk, eggs, meat, peanut butter, canned soups, and other protein sources, but there is no shortage of potato chips, ice cream, candy, and cookies on the supermarket shelves.  I should be fine. 
  • If my work colleagues who tried so hard to shove me into the 21st century of technology and distance learning could see me now, they would be laughing hysterically.  I was using paper and pen long after every rational person opted for word processing programs.  Now, I’m experimenting with conference calls and zoom.com like I invented the whole idea. 
  • It is helpful to keep a handwritten food diary when in isolation.  You’ll probably stop eating when the writer’s cramp gets bad enough.  No guarantees, though.  For people who are hoarding food as if we were awaiting the zombie apocalypse (ooops… there’s that zombie thing again), we certainly are consuming it like there is no tomorrow.
  • My bedroom floor will never be uncluttered again.  I often have bags and boxes of things I need for my various organizations arranged carefully on the bedroom floor.  Typically, by May, all my pending projects for these organizations are completed and I regain the real estate in my boudoir.  This year, however, all bets are off.  I prepared for several large interactive presentations for my church groups before we went under house arrest, including buying supplies and equipment. I thought that stuff would be off the floor of my bedroom by now.  These presentations don’t lend themselves to the virtual environment. I have an interesting collection of paper goods, decorations, pamphlets, outlines, art supplies, and bed sheets stacked against the wall of my room.  Looks like those things, like me, are not going anywhere for a while. 
  • I wonder if my fingers will ever recover from the pruney wrinkles caused by excessive handwashing. It may require plastic surgery. When I was a little girl, I remember my frustrated mother’s response to misbehavior.  She’d say, “go take a bath and don’t come out until you are pruney.”  I wonder what I did bad this time. 
  • It’s okay to be sad about “selfish” stuff.  Over the past few weeks, many people have had to cancel huge, once-in-a-lifetime celebrations.  Graduations, weddings, funeral services, high school reunions, and many other similar events have been postponed or cancelled. People feel bad about feeling bad because they know that, compared to worldwide death and disease, their events are not that big a deal.  It is a big deal, though, and I feel for those people. I encourage them to mourn those disappointments.  I, fortunately, have not had to deal with anything like that.  There have been several “next tier” kind of cancellations that have hit me, though.  My planned vacation to New York City to see both Hamilton and Come From Away on Broadway is not happening. I miss my weekly trips to Disney and other fun places.  I think I am saddest about missing my annual retreat to Discovery Cove.  I’m sure I’ll reschedule, but, with the wackadoodle Florida weather, the ideal window of opportunity for this excursion is limited.  I think it is okay to mourn these things, as long as I keep everything in perspective.
  • I think I may have discovered the antidote for quarantined-induced frumpiness.  Two words.  Video conference.

What have you observed during this challenging time?  Please share your perspective by leaving a comment.   In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement@gmail.com.

Have a healthy day!

Terri/Dorry 😊

Moving on Up?

My mother says we have moved to a “stupid state.”  She bases this assessment on the following:

  1. The highway and traffic systems are wild, wooly, and weird.
  2. There are more counties, with infrastructures supported by the taxpayers, than seems strictly necessary for sound governance.
  3. The news broadcasts consist almost exclusively of predictions about when the rain will hit each particular city block.

I am aware that my mother is having some difficulty with the transition to her new living situation.  She tries not to complain, but I can tell based on her frequent mentions of the “stupid state” and her abject despair whenever she is faced with any reminder that she has moved (like getting a piece of mail that has been forwarded from her old address).  I suppose it is natural for anyone, much less an 84-year-old woman with chronic kidney disease, to grapple with the trauma involved with a change of this magnitude.  I know I have my moments, as well.  Still, I do wonder if I did the right thing in moving her to our new state.

The original plan was that Max and I were going to remain in the old state while my mother was still alive.  She had a very active, happy life there.  Despite her significant physical infirmities and limitations, she still worked full time during the summer.  She was the queen bee of the volunteer docents at the local reservoir.  She knows more about water than anyone not employed by some water district has any right knowing.   She had lots of friends and acquaintances there. She was driving, something she stopped doing before moving (see “stupid state” reason number 1).    My brother, who has physical and financial issues of his own, lived close by.  She had access to excellent health care basically for free because of the wonderful insurance plan she has been patronizing for the past 50 years.  Still, when I bought the house in our new state, there were a few things in her life that were starting to disintegrate.  I thought she might want to move and it didn’t make sense to postpone our move for her sake if she truly would just as soon go, too.  She surprised me by saying she thought she would like to move.

Although my mother talks about the “stupid state,” I think there are really three main reasons she has some regrets about moving.

  • Her health insurance plan does not operate in our new locale.  This has been a constant refrain since she contemplated moving.  After nearly 50 years with the same company, it is a jolt, especially since the old plan operated completely differently from any traditional health plan.  Basically, it was run sort of like a privatized socialized medicine system.  The insurance company actually employed doctors, ran hospitals, and staffed pharmacies and labs within their own facilities.  A patient makes an appointment, goes to the facility, pays her $5 copayment, and all needs are addressed in one location.  While inexpensive and very efficient, the health plan was also pretty paternalistic.  Patients didn’t have to worry about finding a doctor or lab or paying much of anything.  However, if a patient isn’t happy with the doctors or facilities provided by the insurance plan, she is pretty much out of luck.  My mother loved her care providers and the ease of the experience, so “having to go to their doctors” was a blessing, not a problem.  I’ve got her signed up for a Medicare supplement policy now, which should mean that she should not have any significant costs.  Still, she is worried about a myriad of scenarios, most of which are extremely unlikely… that she will have to pay the doctors and file claims for reimbursement, that she will somehow end up paying the maximum out-of-pocket costs every year, that she won’t be able to find a doctor who will give her an appointment, that she won’t know where to go to get lab tests.  I’ve got her scheduled for her first doctor’s visit next week.  Hopefully, she will like the doctor and everything will go smoothly.  If so, I think that some of “health insurance” objection to moving will fade.  If not, the upside is that she CAN go to another doctor.
  • If she was still in her old home, she would have been working in the accounting department of a school district food service department during the summer.  Although my mother officially retired from her job at the food service department almost 20 years ago, she has been going back as a temporary employee during the summer every year since.  She loves it.  She has always been a social butterfly.  At the school district, she visits with her old friends.  People make a big fuss over her.  She does an important job processing applications for free and reduced price lunches.  Everyone aids her and makes allowances for her physical limitations because they love her and she really is very good at what she does.  Now, she chokes up when she talks about how she would be working at the school district if she was still in her old home.  The sad truth is, though, I am not sure how much longer she could have kept up with the job.  When I bring up the possibility of volunteering now, she puts me off.  Since she has moved here and I am with her more, I am seeing that she is much frailer and more tentative, both physically and in making decisions, than I ever thought she was.  I’m sure she would have gone to work this summer, if she had not moved, but I’m not sure it would have ended well.  Maybe it was better that she “go out on top” and stop because she was moving rather than because she became incapable.
  • My brother remains in the old town. It is hard for any parent to leave a child.  My brother’s health and, with it, his reliability to assist my mother, has been diminishing for the past five years.  I know she worries about him and it was probably doubly hard to leave a child who “needs” her.  On the other hand, there really isn’t anything my mother could do for him ten miles away than she cannot do 3000 miles away.

On the plus side, my mother says she feels better physically than she has in years since she has moved across country.  I think she is secretly happy to have left her volunteer empire, as she expressed that it felt good to not have the stress of the timesheets and all the phone calls.  The mobile home where she was living (which she bought for $6000 in 1996) was falling apart around her.  It was filthy and decrepit.  She always said the mobile home bothered me way more than it bothered her, but the fact remains.  Now, she says she loves the new mobile home here in the great southeast and that she feels her living conditions have improved considerably.  I am at her place at least four times a week and take her out often, to run errands and to go fun places. I think she likes that, even though I can’t really compete with all the activities and interactions she had in her old environment.

There are arguments on both sides of the move issue. I truly don’t know if we made the right decision.  I am sure that, as Robert Frost pointed out, there is always the “road less traveled” phenomenon.  Whichever decision we made, there would always be “woulda, coulda, shouldas.” If my mother had not moved, my brother might not have been able to take care of her needs because of his own medical conditions.  The wiring in the old mobile home might have failed and caused a fire.  She might have gone to her volunteer job one day and been unable to get back in the car.

A friend of mine once said, when I was obsessing ad infinitum about some decision or action, “stop shoulding all over yourself.”  I guess that is the problem.  I want an answer that is guaranteed to be the right one, with no questions or regrets.  I don’t get to have that.  Also, people do get to feel the way they feel.  Ultimately, my mother was the one who made the decision and if she has wistful moments, that’s okay.  It doesn’t mean that she thinks it was necessarily the wrong decision to move.  I will do what I can to help her be comfortable and happy in her new home.  And if she ends up deciding to change her mind and move back west, she knows I have her back on that, as well.

So what are your thoughts?  Do you struggle with making the “right” decisions, too?  Have you discovered any successful strategies for living peacefully with the paths you take?  Share your perspective by leaving a comment.  In the alternative, you can send me an email at terriretirement@gmail.com.

Have a beautiful day, no matter which road you don’t take!

Terri 🙂

A Sod, Sod Story

Shortly before we moved to our new home, I received a notice from the homeowners’ association telling me that I had a brown spot on my lawn and needed to remedy the situation.  The community manager suggested resodding the area.  When I spoke to the property manager who was renting the house for me, she said she would tell the tenants (who were soon to be vacating) that they needed to fix the problem since they were responsible for the lawn.  Apparently, that did not go well.  The property manager later told me that she thought the brown spot had been there over 2 years ago when I first bought the property and, therefore, we should not attach the tenants’ security deposit to pay for the sod.  I agreed, but asked that she make sure the problem got fixed so the HOA would leave me alone.

When we arrived to move into the home a month or so later, I saw what the HOA meant. There was a small area of grass that seemed a little bit stressed.  It wasn’t super noticeable to me, but I could definitely see that there was a problem.  I asked the property manager about it.  She told me that she didn’t recommend resodding because it was the wrong time of year and water use restrictions would impede new sod’s growth.  When I shared this theory with the community manager, he was less than impressed and told me that I needed to get something done immediately or be fined. 

Thus began the “sod, sod story.”

We had a fellow who was trimming a tree for us that also did sod.  We asked him about resodding for us and he agreed, but said that we probably needed to get some sort of lawn treatment service or protocol in place, as he thought the dead area was likely caused by some underlying problem like bugs or lack of soil nutrients.  He advised that we would want to fix that problem so that new sod would thrive. 

I called the lawn treatment guy, who agreed (of course) that we needed lawn treatment.  According to him, it was the evil cinch bug that was causing the lawn disaster.  He also said that the sprinkler system was in really good shape, but we might want to think about upgrading in the next year or so.  When he was testing it, I noticed that none of the sprinklers seemed to be hitting the brown spot.  I’m surely no lawn expert (never having had a lawn before), but it seemed to me that without water, it wasn’t any surprise that the grass was dying.  I pointed this out to the lawn treatment guy. He insisted it was the evil cinch bug, not the lack of water, that was the problem.   

I signed a contract for lawn treatment every other month.  The lawn treatment guy said to wait a couple of months after the first treatment before resodding.  While I was wondering how the HOA was going to feel about that, he uttered the words I have come to know and fear….

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Now, what is that supposed to mean?  What does worse look like?  And how will we know if it is the “worse before it gets better” or if it is the “worse because this crap isn’t working?”

True to our new friend’s word, it did get worse.  And worse.   The lawn treatment technicians left us with cryptic notes and multiple flyers about every possible thing that could be wrong with our lawn, from frost to the German measles.  The flyers seemed to suggest contradictory courses of action.  When I read that spraying with Round-Up was the remedy for one of the possible lawn maladies, I became alarmed.  Did you ever look at the label of Round-Up?  It is called “GRASS and Weed Killer.”  It seems kind of counter-intuitive to spray grass killer on an area of lawn where you are trying to grow… well, grass.  Applying Round-Up doesn’t seem like the best thing to do when you are trying to bring a lawn back to life, does it?  Still, I tried doing everything suggested in the flyers, and, also, several strategies I discovered on the internet.  Nothing seemed to make a difference.  At least not a POSITIVE difference. 

I called the lawn treatment company and, also, the guy who mows the lawn.  Both of them said…. You guessed it…. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

After the second lawn treatment, with the area of brown expanding at a rather startling rate, we started trying to get our tree trimmer/sod guy back to do the resodding.  Let’s just say that he wasn’t the most responsive of creatures.  Max pursued him with the tenacity of a male musk ox trying to attract a mate.  After no less than four no shows and reschedules, the sod guy finally showed up.  I guess he figured it was either show up or take out a restraining order. 

Never having seen sod before, we didn’t think anything of the pathetic collection of mud squares with some sparse grass blades sticking out of them that our sod guy delivered.  He apparently did whatever one is supposed to do to prepare the ground and then laid the “sod.”  Before he went away, he told us “It will get worse before it gets better.” 

Max religiously watered the resodded area every day with a garden hose because the sprinkler wasn’t hitting that area.   Some of the new sod seemed to start growing, but, for the most part, the lawn just got worse.   Having been advised that it would “get worse before it gets better,” I wasn’t immediately alarmed, but when the dead areas started spreading and multiplying geometrically, I decided it was time for action. 

I called the lawn treatment guy again, who finally agreed to come over and check the technician’s work.  When he arrived, he was shocked and appalled by the state of the lawn.  Duh.  Initially, he thought the problem with the sod was that we had not kept to the heavy watering protocol for new sod.  This pronouncement didn’t make us very happy since Max invested hours upon hours hand-watering what was presumably dead or dying grass.  We explained what we did but the lawn treatment guy still eyed us suspiciously, assuming we were negligent, non-watering sod-killers.

Eventually, after much discussion, the lawn treatment guy could see I was about at the end of my rope, so he called in a sprinkler guy, a sod guy that their company used when needed, and the lawn treatment technicians. They all decided, of course, that I needed a new $2000 sprinkler system because (wait for it) …. THE SPRINKLERS WERE NOT HITTING THE PART OF THE LAWN THAT WAS DYING!!!  After I stopped reeling from a severe case of déjà vu, I started bargaining.  Noting that some of my problem was that I was dealing with too many components of the same issue (sprinklers, lawn treatment, sod) and wasn’t lawn-savvy enough to know which component was the problem (or even if there was a problem because, you know, “it gets worse before it gets better”), I demanded that this lawn treatment company take complete ownership of the problem and arrange for all the moving parts to do what needed to be done and monitor the success.  When they agreed to that, I figured buying the sprinkler system for $2000 (which did seem kinda necessary since even I could tell lo those many months ago that the sprinklers were not hitting the dying lawn areas) was a bargain.

But wait…. There’s more.  The sprinkler installation went pretty smoothly, except for the hit to my pocketbook.  Then, the sod guy showed up immediately to take measurements and quote me a very low price to install the sod to replace the first sod guy’s mud.  For, when the second sod guy finally showed up with the sod (it took several reschedules, but what else is new?), it was clear that the first sod guy provided something that truly didn’t even resemble real sod.  It was no wonder it didn’t grow.

Our lawn is beautiful now.  It only took six months.  And, just for the record, after the second sodding, it never did “get worse before it gets better.”

Do you have a sod, sod story of your own?  Who knew that acquiring a lawn that meets the minimum standards of the HOA would be such a trauma?  Or at least a drama?  At any rate, the grass is greener on the other side of the lawn now.  Please share your perspective by leaving a comment.  In the alternative, you can email me at terriretirement.com.

Have a sodding good day!

Terri 🙂