When the quarantine started and we packed up for the cabin, Cal said he was packing for 10 days. Ha ha I thought, such an optimist! I’m going to pack for 2 weeks! Yeah.

After more than 5 weeks up here, we decided to go down as a family to our actual home Friday to Monday. Because we left at night, things just didn’t seem that different to me. Fewer cars on the road, yes. But that seemed like it.

Our house looked like a bomb went off. Honestly when I left with the kids, I was just throwing stuff into bags and shoving it securely in the car. But returning, yikes. And it was also like returning to a strange yet familiar place. I’d been gone so long (Cal had come down a couple of times for supplies and mail but this was my first trip down) it was like my house belonged to someone else. Also the mess.

Holy crap, what happened to my house?

The first night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t figure out why the bathroom was in the wrong place. My own bed was comfortable, but in the daytime I realized we’ve taken so many things up to the cabin that there wasn’t much to do at home.

Except fast food. Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize what a fast food addiction I had but after almost 6 weeks of zero, I was like “Can we hit Del Taco one more time? How about the burger place?” Not gonna lie, we ate fast food for basically every meal. Except for breakfast which were donuts.

No regrets.

I mostly stayed inside because of my extreme fear of the coronavirus (see: heart condition), but Monday I decided on a big day out. With my fantastic girlfriends, we decided to do a virtual beer tasting. We have a local microbrewery close to our house run by a really cool couple who actually live in our neighborhood, so I ordered a mixed 6-pack for everyone. Monday I went around delivering–two to Klara and two to Grover who were going to arrange pickup for the others.

I also had placed an order at Michael’s online. Now for some reason, I’m kind of obsessed with art supplies right now. I feel like the more I buy, the more inclined my children will be to use them. That hasn’t panned out for me so far but I have hope. So I donned my facemask drove over to Michael’s for the curbside pickup, then slid on some gloves and bought a few things at PetSmart. My big shopping trip was to Dollar Tree next door because art supplies. For the first time in over a month, I wandered the aisles of a store in person, avoiding other people and just buying stuff. It made me miss Target deep in my heart.

Coming back and seeing everyone’s face masks and social distancing and curbside pickup was so weird for me. There’s just not that up in the mountains so I have essentially been living in a bubble where COVID-19 doesn’t exist. Going home was a real Rip Van Winkle experience. Like I’d been asleep and woke up to find that breathing on each other was fatal and we’re all supposed to make our own masks, which is actually so accidentally environmentally friendly.

That said, I’m looking forward to the time ahead. The girls and I are going to have our beer tasting, split up in groups and solve a virtual escape room, do more painting with our kids, and attempt a drunk Bob Ross experience. Happy trees. There will be happy trees.