What I’m Doing in Confinement

It’s a little tricky here when the weather is bad and we’re inside the Airstream all day long. Of course we walk Banjo at least three times a day in the woods, but we take turns when it’s cold or raining, and odds are that means I’m outside only once a day.

That leaves something like 22 hours spent in this tiny space. How am I filling it?

Trying to Do Yoga

I can do a variety of yoga practices in the trailer, if only I’m alone and can maneuver things out of the way. The caveat is that if I’m doing yoga inside, that means Tracy and Banjo are driven inside as well, so, um, I’m not alone.

This is a much smaller space when one person is taking up the only hallway, the other person is walking back and forth because he’s emptying our waste tanks, and the third is watching me with eagle eyes in case I decide to play.

You know who that third person is.

Playing Uke

I have songs I’m working on from my my previous lessons, but I want structure, so I went for that free trial given online by Fender. Finn has told me forever that I should learn how to read music, so this is a way to do that, too.

I think they set up these online lessons assuming you have a printer, because you need to be able to read the music and watch the video of the teacher simultaneously, and I can’t do both on my little laptop screen.

Cleverly (ha! I mean, randomly), I packed an HDMI cable adapter for my MacBook, so now I can watch one browser window on the TV and one on my laptop. It hasn’t made me any better of a uke player yet but I do love a solution to a problem!

Of course I can do this set up only during weekdays before 6pm because otherwise the campground wifi is clogged with everyone streaming content. But that’s okay!

Knitting

I’ve been knitting a summer skirt for forever and finally got the elastic in the waistband, but I dropped that to try knitting facemasks for when we go out.

I won’t go into detail here about how different kinds of masks provide different protections; I’ll just say I know perfectly well this isn’t a great solution.

But I will try to sew in a liner from an old handkerchief (if we can find one piece of clothing that we can spare in here), and it will be better than nothing when we go out to pick up our groceries, or Jeeze Louise, have a medical emergency and have to go to the doctor or hospital.

Rearranging Everything in the Trailer

We packed up so quickly and have so much food items with us that only yesterday in the doldrums of being stuck inside did I get to doing a mental inventory of all the food crammed into every cabinet and then rearranging it all so what we use most often is accessible.

Here’s the clothes closet bedside the fridge, which we turned into a pantry. So far it’s working well, but I still need to find a place to store potatoes and onions, away from each other.

Maybe I’ll knit nets!

I’ve got so much under the couch, which is a pain to get to because I have to move the ottoman away and inevitably pull out half the bins to get to something in the back. This is just the front line of stuff shown here. But now I think only non-everyday stuff is in there so I’m hoping I won’t have to adventure in that often.

And this is what we’re fighting against the whole time. You don’t realize how often you want to set something down until you’re in a place where there is no where to set anything down—unless it’s a designated spot for a certain item. And because we’re still figuring out how to live in here, we have a lot of uncertain items with no designated spots.

This is the edge of the kitchen table that’s against the Airstream wall, and it’s where everything seems to end up. I’m sorely tempted to try to find a bin/desktop organizer/something for here, but I’m sure that as soon as I get it set up, we’ll start setting things down that don’t fit it. I think I’m going to have to wave a white flag on this one.

Spilling Things

This is my most-frequent pastime right now. So far I’ve spilled:

• Hot oatmeal (you know about that)
• A huge bowl of salt
• Melted butter (learned: our travel butter container can not live beside the oven, and it doesn’t have a lip around it)
• Corn meal on the carpet, and we have no vacuum cleaner
• Banjo’s water dish, 700 times, so we had to find a new place for it to live
• To come: beer, surely, and other super-messy things we’ll just have to clean up any way we can.

You know how you have one place in the kitchen where you spill everything, like between the counter top and the dishwasher, right in the crack you can’t access? Here it’s the spot in the picture above, right where everything goes into the stove and down to the carpet. I’m working on that.

Reading

I’m of course during this time of isolation I’m also reading, and it’s a special book right now.

Tracy and I have been reading this series at the same time (well, I read quickly and then he fills me in on the complex details I missed) for a while now—there are 22 books in the series.

We saved the final one to read once we were retired and living in the Airstream.

It’s kind of odd to be so carefully rationing this book: one chapter per day so we can talk about it together and not get too far ahead.

Plus it means the end of our previous life together and the beginning of this new one; it’s a bridge for us that we want to walk over mindfully.

Okay, you guys stay safe out there and take care of each other. I see sunshine this morning so I’m going to get out of this trailer!