Here are 16 ways I could tell I’ve been in quarantine long enough:

1. It was bad enough when I started saying “please” to Alexa ona regular basis. And then, it was “thanks.” Hey, I was raised to be polite.
2. When I started to enjoy housecleaning. I’m lying, I haven’t been quarantined long enough and don’t think I’ll live long enough for that to happen.
3. When I found myself audio taping the bull frogs in my pond. Scratch that one. I’m glad I did it. Stop and hear the frogs, folks.
4. When we had a virtual Zoom birthday party for my sister-in-law on her 70^th. Scratch that one too…we had a pretty good time, and I saw people I hadn’t seen in years.
5. Now that I have the cleanest house in town…Never mind. I’m lying. I clean and sanitize the essential areas, but there are still dust puppies in the corners. I have a Collie, remember?
6. When I started thinking about cleaning the windows, I knew I’d been inside too long. While trying to enjoy spring by looking through the windows on colder days, I had the fleeting thought to clean them. Thank goodness the thought fleeted away. I’m sorry, but windows are what I consider, optionalwhen it comes to housework. After all, unless there’s a smudge, no one’s gonna notice. And if you do go ahead and clean them, nobody’s gonna go home talking about your clean windows, and even if they do, they they obviously didn’t notice the dust.
7. There’s that four letter word again, “dust.” Talk about a “non-essential” housekeeping task. I own a sign that says, “You can touch the dust, but please don’t write in it.” I’m sometimes impressed with my dust. It is very uniform and if you don’t touch it, you might not realize it’s there. Nobody notices when you dust, only when you don’t. Let’s face it, dust shows upwithout being asked. It feels it’s essential, but is sadly mistaken. Dusting is definitely non-essential. Windows are optional.
8. Then, while I was walking through the living room, I said, “Hi!” to Elmo as I walked past him. Let me explain…Elmo and I play on Face Time with my daughter’s foster boys in the evenings. He’s actually a lot more fun than I am, but don’t tell the boys. Elmo was sitting by the door waiting for the fun to begin. It would’ve been rude to ignore him and then expect him to perform.
9. I’ve noticed a cobweb that wasn’t there yesterday. How did it grow 2 feet overnight? Now, I can ride from room to room on my broom to knock them down, but I lose interest quickly (keep flying into door jambs). I guess I never slowed down enough to see all the cobwebs. If I give them names, can I just let them stay?
10. When I have to look at my phone, not to get the date, but the day of the week, and that’s after I’ve thought about it for a bit. Finally, my retirement slogan of, “Every day’s a Saturday!” makes sense.
11. When I run out of new recipes to make. I alwaysknew my cooking repertoire was puny and now I’m into reruns. My elderly neighbor might begin to turn down my soup. Even my dog, Noel, cocks her head at me with that, “Not again tonight,” look when she gets my leftovers. Never mind, I’m lying, again. She loves people food, even when it’s a rerun.
12. When I start to think about cutting my own hair and even worse, coloring it. But the good news is, the gray is coming in and almost blends in with the blonde part. Hmmm…I always said I’d never let it go gray. There she goes again, my mom (aka, Barb in SITO) saying, “never say never!”
13. Everyone’s worried about what to do when they need new fingernails or hair coloring, but here’s the $64,000 question…What do I do when my artificial eyelashes all fall out? Now THAT’S scary. I was so excited to get fake lashes since mine qualified for the Guinness Bookof World Records as the shortest lashes ever. All good things must end, I suppose. At least till social distancing is over. Selfies are definitely not happening in my house, not that they did before.
14. As I was getting ready for my “socially distant” Easter dinner with two of my grands, I put on perfume for hugs. Sigh…I’d forgotten there would be no hugs for now.
15. Have you started rearranging your furniture yet? I’m guilty as charged, but my back porch really needed it. Still need to put those boxes away that I packed up two weeks ago…what’s the rush?
16. When I yawned really big and said, “excuse me,” and then realized I must’ve been talking to Alexa again.

Yep, this quarantine is history in the making, folks. Like it or not, we are all in this together. We have to be patient, but that’s easy for me to say as I don’t have a business that’s suffering, little kids to home school, or teenagers to referee under my roof. There are perks to being in the 65 and Older Club after all.

But, here’s the good news. Our lives will come back slowly just as spring has, a little bit at a time, a daffodil here, a cherry tree blossom there. Our lives will be reborn and may we be more grateful than ever that God does indeed, bless America every day.