Weekend Plans Post: The Unexpected Gathering

We have negotiated a shared bubble with some of Maribou’s best friends. As such, I have been batching it this last week while she drove (not flew!) out there to visit them.

We’ve been doing pretty good, I think, with keeping safe at home. We get most of our groceries delivered (even though this means that I don’t get my Diet Rite, even though I’m pretty sure that King Soopers is NOT, in fact, out of it). I don’t go to the climbing gym. More than 95% of our meals are home-cooked. I sometimes have to go into work, but Social Distancing is fully in play and masks are mandated everywhere and they have a box of disposable gloves at the front desk as you walk in. I DO, however, occasionally stop by the pharmacy to get prescriptions instead of having them delivered. When I pick up the prescriptions, my curiosity always overtakes me and I want to check out the pasta, paper products, and cleaner aisles to see what is and what isn’t stocked.

Well, her friends aren’t even doing that much. They’re full-on working from home, full-on getting groceries delivered, and they pretty much only go out for their evening constitutional walk.

So we looked at their lifestyle and they looked at our lifestyle and they said “okay, we’ll risk it” and Maribou went out to visit.

As such, I’ve been batchin’ it.

EXCEPT! Last Saturday, I got a phone call saying “Jaybird! We’re meeting over here to eat meat on the back porch! We’ll all be sitting outside!” and I said “you know what? I haven’t sat down with friends for far too long”. And so I went over and there were about 12 of us there, and we sat outside, in the sun, in the breeze, and laughed and talked about high school and mullets and cars and how long it’s been since we sat on the back porch and just shot the bull with each other.

We didn’t hug like we all wanted to. We did the thing where we stretched out our elbows to each other and bumped elbows. We didn’t sit next to each other like we wanted. We all sat as many feet away from each other as we could do so while staying in the yard. We didn’t do the “hey, can I try that drink?” thing that we’d be tempted to do when someone brought over a new kind of hard cider or microbrew. We sat distanced from each other but together again for the first time in a long time.

It was emotionally overwhelming, really. I had to leave after about 3 hours. But those 3 hours? Oh, it was WONDERFUL to sit with old friends and palaver.

And, ever since then, I’ve been thinking “you just KNOW that that was a super-spreader event”. So I’ve been doing smell tests every morning, and making sure that I can jog my normal route without any additional effort, and checking facebook to make sure that nobody else who was there has announced testing positive or anything.

And, so far, everything is fine. Fingers crossed.

As such, this coming weekend has NOTHING planned. No going out, no groceries, no nothing. The cocoon returns. A back to normal. I ran out of spaghetti sauce. So I will make some more. And that is the exciting thing that will happen. We’ve got a gaming night scheduled for Saturday, if everybody doesn’t cancel… which, pretty much, everybody has. So this weekend has nothing really happening.

But that’s okay. It was very nice to sit with friends, even if just for a couple of hours. (And we were outside! In the sun! And the breeze!) My cup is full.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is Tiger saying “I don’t know what spelling is, but I know that different words can refer to the same thing, and Tee-Are-whatever refers to YouKnowWhats”. Taken by the author.)