Quarantine Diary #655 & #656

12/28/2021 - Written yesterday:

This morning, before we even ate a proper breakfast (already we are sounding like Wind in the Willows fellows) we drove away from home in our little car to a park so that we could hike.  We may have been in less than tiptop moods. I don’t know why. I was silently irritated that Len won’t take a walking stick and he was silently ruing forgetting crampon cleats for his boots.

The first park we got to had paths where yesterday’s well-trod slush had turned into this morning’s frozen ankle biters.  I did not say – aloud – that if all of the people in our hiking party (that would be only Len and I) had walking sticks, we could have negotiated the quarter mile of crumpled ice to get to the dirt paths.

Anyways, we gave up on that path, got in the car and drove to a different parking lot where the ice was worse. So we went to a different park and moseyed around for a half hour and found some places that were amenable to walking and then we came home. The sun never came out and we never said unforgiveable things out loud - though we may have held cynicism in our hearts here and there.

Len made fried eggs on black bean soup when we got home and that was a positive moment in this grim recounting of my morning.  After that I decided to make bread using the oatmeal bread recipe the kids used to love. After I poured the boiling water over the oatmeal and other flours, I realized I stopped making this recipe because I now had to wait for the hot mixture to cool down enough to be able to add the yeast and, well, it was more than an hour later before I finally left the kitchen.

I then tried to help Len with an actually valuable thing he is doing for the Waukesha Democrats, but it involves measuring carefully WITH A RULER HELD UP TO THE MONITOR to calculate where yesses would be in a column of yesses and blanks and I cannot do this. I don’t have as much patience as Len in case you hadn’t already figured that out.

It’s snowing outside. It’s pretty but it means outside exercise will be more of a challenge. I thought this year we could go to the Y in the winter, but with omicron, nah. Most patrons there don’t wear masks; not a place to hang out right now. 

I can see that while I wrote the above, Len figured out a way to do the Dem-supporting project. Boy, if this isn’t us in a nutshell. He solves a problem while I describe the ignominy of life.

If you are waiting for a heartfelt point to arise from this, well, so am I.  I think today it wouldn’t hurt to mention that 655 days of quarantine with another person, even if that person is the one you love best in the entire world, is a bit much.

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I wrote that yesterday. Then we shoveled, ate too much bread, and read all evening. 

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12/29/2021  #656

 I just walked to the library and back which is about two (icy) miles.. May the universe bless people who sprinkle salt on their sidewalks. 

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The book I’m reading is “The Day the World Stopped Shopping / How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves” by J.B. MacKinnon. 

This is nonfiction that is as compelling as a whodunit. MacKinnon researched different ways to look at the global climate crisis we are in. This isn’t just a polemic against buying too much stuff, it’s different paths into the way the world we live in now operates - and what would happen if we consumed less.

Here are some of points and quotes I’ve read so far:

On any average day half the humans on earth are wearing jeans. (pg. 22)

How complicated is the assembly of a smartphone? The chain from beginning to product passes through designers in California, software developers in the Netherlands, camera-tech companies in Japan, and manufacturing in China. Nearly 800 businesses in 25 countries are involved and this doesn’t include raw materials including 19 chemical elements from gold, lead, and copper to yttrium and praseodymium. (Pages 26 & 27)

In chapter 5 he talks about our energy-consuming dependance on light. He mentions that the illumination associated with fracking oil in North Dakota is as visible from space as major American cities.

Like this:

In that same chapter he describes light that is available at night without electricity. Including this tidbit – the planet Venus actually casts enough light so that a person away from all other sources of light would be able to see by its light alone. The scientist who explains this to MacKinnon says that on his bucket list is the desire to see his Venus shadow.

After two centuries of the industrial revolution from which our consumer culture arose – “there are as many deeply poor people on the earth today as there were people, period, when the 19th century began.” (Page 87)

“Spread evenly, the wealth produced by the global economy each year could pay everyone on earth about $12,000.” 

This quotes scares me the most. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” (Page 83)

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