We'll do whatever...

Woodblock print by ThingOne

The frog arrived! 

I've never seen ThingOne quite so happy. The frog is a beautiful little thing, delicate, tiny for now, about two inches across. Hard to believe he will grow into an eight inch behemoth! 

But first Ziggy has to eat. 

[By the way - quick pronoun clarification - we won't know for a while if Ziggy is male or female. But we're all saying 'he' for now.]

We had ordered a bunch of various wriggly things with names like nightcrawlers and wax worms and black soldier fly larvae. Everything showed up in the morning via FedEx, the frog and its food, dropped at our doorstep by our incredibly grumpy FedEx delivery guy. Tall, stooped, FedEx guy has a permanent scowl no doubt protesting the ridiculous state of affairs where he has to risk his life delivering packages during a pandemic, packages that he would like to think contain essential things like medicines or PPE but he knows, he just knows, he is transporting things like chocolate pacman frogs and wax worms. 

Despite the four scarlet stickers saying 'Handle with care' and 'This side up', FedEx guy put the box down with a clunk on its side outside our front door. 

Perhaps Ziggy was traumatized by the journey from Owosso, Michigan, or perhaps it was that sideways clunk, or being in a new environment. Whatever the reason, Ziggy wouldn't eat for two days. The first night he tried to, got a larvae half in his mouth but it fell out. And then he wasn't interested again. Just sat there, winking occasionally.

ThingOne became increasingly agitated. We tried to be reassuring. We found online articles saying that pacman frogs sometimes didn't eat for a week or two after travel. My parents, who are biologists and frog enthusiasts, said all would be fine, that Ziggy needed to settle in, to get to know his new habitat, get to know ThingOne. The main reservation I'd had about the whole frog endeavor was the potential for ThingOne to fall apart if things didn't go perfectly. But I'd repeated the mantra 'life lesson' and hoped for the best. 

Night three, praise be, Ziggy ate a wax worm and so far, continues to eat. He is, as it turns out, partial to crickets. So we now have 30 live crickets living in a special cage, as well as the worms and other wigglers in the fridge. Deeelightful. 

Meet Ziggy

To add to the menagerie, a hamster has come to visit. She belongs to a friend of ThingTwo who kindly offered to lend 'Plumpkins' for a week or two. Slightly risky given that we have the cat, Pepper, but ThingTwo was eager and it seemed like a good time. Plumpkins is elusive during the day but comes out early evening and runs up and down ThingTwo's arms or rolls around her room in a little ball. I'll try and catch a photo next time.

At first it struck me as a little odd that we have added the job of keeping various creatures alive on top of ourselves during these interesting times. But maybe it makes sense. It brings distraction, routine.  And not to get toooo pretentious and potentially morbid, but I think there is an element of adding a touch of meaning and purpose to our lockdown lives. 

I've become obsessed with a singer songwriter called José González - his music just seems like the perfect soundtrack for these times. He has a soothing, slightly melancholy but almost detached singing voice that plays against a pulsing, thrumming guitar - the combination seems to say, yes time is tick tick ticking away but hey, chill out, it's going to be ok. He has this one song called 'Stay Alive' that I keep coming back to  - it has a great line:

We'll do whatever just to stay alive 

So maybe right now keeping other things alive is helping those of us at home stay sane. Having things depend on us confirms our existence. Whether it is a pot plant, a cat, a frog, a hamster, a kid, a job, a blog, wild birds, a tray of brownies cooking in the oven, someone on the other end of a FaceTime...

Continuing the theme of keeping things alive, I was almost tempted to try and make sourdough starter and read a bunch of articles about how easy it was. But then I read an equal number of articles about how impossible, frustrating, and soul destroying it could be. So I decided to draw the line. 

Instead, I'm playing around with yeast. I accidentally (long story) ordered 40 lbs of  flour and a 1 lb brick of yeast. Because I ordered the flour from fancy hipster places (Flourist in Saskatchewan, Canada, and Hayden Flour Mills in Arizona, US), it has a pretty short shelf life - just one month at room temp! Longer if you store it in the fridge but who has a fridge that big? For scale - the bag on the left is a regular five pound bag of flour. 

So what uses up a load of flour and yeast quickly? Bread!

I've taken to making  this ridiculously easy but insanely delicious 'no knead bread'. It really is easy and so worth it I think we should all try it! 

Here's how: in the evening mix a pound of flour, a quarter teaspoon each of instant yeast and salt, and 1 5/8 cup of water. By the next morning it is all bubbly and gooey. The kids are fascinated by the yeast granules, had their minds properly blown that yeast is ALIVE and the bubbles in the bread are essentially yeast burps! 

Once the yeast has done its burping, just tip out the dough, fold it in on itself a few times and put it into a 'proofing bowl' if you happen to have one. I don't, so a colander with a tea towel works just fine.  I found this video from the NYT helpful for this stage. Then slap it in a dutch oven, cook for half an hour with the lid on, 15 mins with the lid off. And it comes out looking and tasting like REAL fancy, smancy, bread!

I keep seeing articles written by astronauts and researchers who go to the antarctic with advice for how to handle isolation. I haven't actually read one yet, but I should. I sense that we're passing into a new phase - a sort of 'what is the point of it all' phase - and some new way of thinking is needed. The novelty is over. The new hobbies and resolutions started a few months ago have faded, replaced with these new 'make-work' jobs of keeping things alive. 

I move through the day humming "We'll do whatever just to stay alive." I water the seeds I planted recently and check on the various plants in pots around the place, feed the birds that I pretend are dependent on me for food, order/prepare food for humans and cat, save drowning bees that have landed in the pool, check that the kids are feeding their animals. Stay alive little Ziggy the Frog, Plumpkins the hamster, goldfinches and chickadees and squirrels, stay alive. 

Then a humbling moment when I scrolled down through some of the comments on a youtube video for José's song Stay Alive:

Nurse Juss: I am a nurse taking care of covid patients. Sometimes I feel like giving up. Like I can't do it. But everytime I play this song before going to Work, it gave me strength to serve and be the nurse my patient needs. Be the light in their darkness and their hope through this trying times.

Stay alive Nurse Juss. We're doing whatever just to stay alive, and just so you can stay alive too.