I know this has happened to all of you. You hear the faint sound of an alarm. Bink. Bink. Bink. Bink. And you can’t tell where it’s coming from. You think it’s your imagination. But the binking sound is incessant. And it’s driving you crazy.

There are certain noises that explicably drive me nearly insane. Noisy fans. Car radios that aren’t turned up loud enough to hear and are only background noise. A rattling car window. And a faint sound of an alarm that you can’t find.

The thing is, Bill’s hard of hearing. There is a range at which he can’t hear a thing. An example is every morning when the coffee pot turns off, there is an alarm alerting us that we’d better go grab our last cup before it gets cold. He simply doesn’t hear it. Nor does he hear the sound the smoke alarm makes when the battery is low. He is completely unable to hear that extremely annoying sound. Woe betide him if he’s ever alone in the house and an alarm goes off alerting him to something dangerous.

So, we’re sitting quietly in the living room, and I am reading. All of the sudden, I notice a binking sound — three shorts binks and a long bink, a pause, and repeat. And repeat.

“What’s that sound,” I asked him.

Of course, his response was, “What sound?”

“Seriously?” I asked him. “You can’t hear that noise?”

He couldn’t. So I am running around the house like a madwoman, putting my ear next to everything that could possibly have an alarm. Our phones. Our pads. The water dispenser. The refrigerator. The alarm clock. I’m getting warm. I’m getting cold again.

“Please help me,” I said. “I know you can’t hear it, but just help me know what could possibly be beeping.”

He got up to help. I was standing by the water dispenser and the noise was louder. It had to be the dispenser. Except then it wasn’t. By then, we were both wandering around.

“The smoke alarm,” I said excitedly. We both ran into the den and sure enough, the sound was coming from the smoke alarm.

“I’ll have to take it down,” Bill said, and wandered off to gather tools.

And the sound became faint.

And a light bulb went on over my head, just like the cartoons.

“Come here,” I shouted to Bill. “I think it’s you. I think it’s your pump!”

As you will recall, Bill has participated in a study since September 2018 in which his very important Parkinson’s medication is continually pumped into his body. The pump runs via a battery. And though he wears the pump for probably 12 or 13 hours every day, the battery has never indicated it was getting low. I have commented on it many times to his nurse. She always nods, telling me they last a long time.

But it’s time was up. So I put on my face mask and ran to CVS to get the necessary battery. When I got home, we opened up our handy dandy instruction manual. The first instruction was to turn off the pump. Only it wouldn’t turn off because, well, the battery was dead.

Plan B: We called our helpline and talked to David, who frankly IS the helpline. I wrote a blog about it. And when we told him our predicament, he said, “Oh, oh.”

Oh-oh? It turns out the pump should have alerted us that the battery was running low. It did not. The bad news was that if it has to be reset, that can only be done at the doctor’s office. You know, the one in Denver.

I quickly envisioned packing up our car yesterday afternoon, and driving all day today to get to the doctor’s office in Denver before Bill had to go cold turkey without his meds.

But once again, God provided. David (who is one of God’s angels) talked us through a procedure that he HOPED might work. And it did. Bill is happily hooked back up to his pump, and we can return to Denver this weekend as planned and at a normal speed limit!

I’ve had a lot of time to think for the past 40 days and 40 nights (or however long this quarantine has been in place). I let my mind wander a bit between watching Inspector Morse slam his third or fourth glass of whiskey as he solves the murder anyway, and seeing Miss Marple figure out who murdered the seemingly harmless college professor without ever putting down her knitting.

And one of the things I have been thinking about is what three people I loved who are now in heaven would think about what’s happening in our world right now. One is my friend Megan, who died 11 months ago from cancer. Another is my mother-in-law Wilma. The third is my own mom.

Megan was one of the smartest people I have ever known. But she was more than just smart. She had a way of looking at things more clearly and objectively than most people. Politically, she was a registered independent. And she really was an independent. She liked President Obama, but she also liked former Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. She loved statistics, and even more important, she understood them. She made her living that way. I would give just about anything if I could sit down at the Imperial Café in Denver and discuss the coronavirus and our world’s reaction to it over some sesame chicken.

Wilma was another very smart woman, who faced life and its challenges head-on. I asked Bill the other night what he thought his mom would think about the quarantine. He thought for a moment and said that he would guess she would compare it to other health scares she faced in her long life. She was born in 1917, about the time that the Spanish influenza was hitting the United States. That pandemic lasted 36 months, and some 500 million people were affected. Death toll estimates range from 17 million all the way to 100 million. She would have been just a baby during the worst of it, so likely didn’t remember the fear that the world felt. However, her parents probably talked about it. She would have thoughts, for sure.

As for my mom, I hardly can imagine what she would think about all of this. While she wasn’t particularly an outgoing and social person, she loved her family. I don’t know if she would have embraced the technology available to us now that could have connected her to her kids and grandkids while we all sheltered-in-place. I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t easy to understand, she wouldn’t have had the patience to try and figure it out. But I’ll bet she would have had a thing or two to say about sheltering-in-place. I’m pretty darn certain my dad would have gotten an earful. Every day. Perhaps he does anyway.

There is that age-old question: If you could have dinner with five people, who would they be? For me, at least today, I would choose those three, and forget the other two. More food for us.

Last night I took a stab at another treat from my new favorite cooking-for-two website. I made a caramel chocolate cake for two. I’m not clever enough to have thought of this myself, but I found this recipe to be quite ingenious. Using their recipe, you make a one layer chocolate cake, ice it with chocolate frosting, and pour caramel sauce over the top. You then cut the cake in quarters, and lay one quarter on top of another, thereby making two pieces of two-layer cake……

My chocoholic husband,of course, was very happy about this cake. He even took the lead on icing the cake. When he went to open his beer, here’s what he saw…..

“Ah,” he said. “The best of all worlds.”

Have a good weekend.

Here’s how I know I’m coming close to hitting rock bottom. Yesterday, it was all I could do to convince myself to get dressed. Spending the day in your pajamas is probably something many of you do during this quarantine. After all, what really is the need for anything other than your fleecy bottoms and a shirt that says Don’t Bother Me Until I’ve Had My First Cup of Coffee? Unless you have a Zoom call and then you need to change your shirt.

But every single day of this Shelter-At-Home-to-Infinity-and-Beyond, I have gotten dressed. I carefully choose my pants and a shirt to match. I put on some nice earrings. I even change the band on my Apple Watch to coordinate with my clothing. And then I go and sit in my chair and watch Father Brown solve mysteries in his little crime-filled English village where apparently he doesn’t need to bother with saying Mass or hearing confessions and can spend all his time figuring out who killed Mrs. Westover. I prepare a few meals. Sometime in the neighborhood of 9 o’clock in the evening, I remove these clothes and jewelry, put on my pajamas, and sleep until the next day when I do the same thing.

So see? Rock Bottom. Nevertheless, I managed to convince myself to get dressed. But first I sent a text to my sisters to whine. They both admitted they have their bad days as well, though they both are dressed when I FT them each morning. Bec said she manages her mood by forcing herself to walk each day. Jen admitted that she is having trouble getting herself to cook dinner. Nothing sounds good. Bec needs a companion dog; Jen needs a cook to prepare her meals; I need a ladies’ maid to force me to dress.

Here’s another reason that I know I’m hitting rock bottom: Yesterday, as I was looking around for something to prepare for lunch, nothing looked appealing. I allowed Bill to use the leftover steak for a sandwich. I rooted around the refrigerator to no avail. There was food there, but nothing that appealed to me. Because what I really wanted to eat for lunch was….are you ready for this?….Spaghettios.

Yep. If I wasn’t trying really hard to limit my trips to the grocery store, I would have walked over to Basha’s and bought myself a few cans of Chef Boyardee Spaghettios. But if the crabby neighbors on Next Door are going to complain about people buying nonessential things at Home Depot like flowers, there’s no way I’d be able to convince anyone that Spaghettios are essential.

Frankly, it’s my belief that both flowers and Spaghettios are essential. If I am confined to my house and yard, I need to have flowers to enjoy. I’m not kidding. Having my yard look pretty is critical at this juncture in my life.

Even I’m willing to consider that Spaghettios are not quite as essential as flowers. Still, given that I don’t remember ever craving Spaghettios before, I can’t help but think that my mind and body is telling me that it’s yearning for simpler times. Like when Court was two years old and Spaghettios were his favorite lunch. Or when my mother would heat up a can for my own lunch.

The good old days. Oh oh, Spaghettios.

When this coronavirus quarantine first started (was it nine or 10 years ago? I can’t remember), the objective, as I understand it, was to flatten the curve. We all stay home in our pajamas watching streaming television programs and working on puzzles that we’ve finished twice already, and the bell curve of new cases will flatten, thereby making it easier for medical professionals to do their job.

But is it working? Is the curve flattening? Admittedly, I avoid the news like the plague. Or I guess nowadays I should say like COVID-19. If I do watch the news, it’s only the last five minutes when I’m pretty sure they are only talking about funny things like grandmas crocheting masks for their parakeets. It’s all my heart can handle.

Maybe every night, Lester Holt is telling all of you who are brave enough to listen that staying home and watching our pedicures peel and trying to think of one more thing to make out of the 20 lbs. of ground beef in your freezer, that day by day, the curve is in fact flattening. Our boredom and loneliness are paying off.

Just throw me a bone — a dibble of good news. Are we flattening the curve?

On the first Sunday after Easter, the Catholic Mass always offers St. John’s gospel passage about poor old doubting Thomas. I love that gospel. I heard it twice this weekend because I watched two different Masses online — one offered by the pastor at our Denver parish of Risen Christ and the Mass offered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC. Each of the celebrants offered a homily with his own personal take from the gospel. Every year, my take has focused on the fact that Jesus told Thomas (after he saw and felt the wounds) good on him that he now believed, but the real heroes are those who don’t happen to be able to put our fingers into the wound, but still believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Yay me, right?

But this year, I found myself thinking about another thing that Jesus said in that gospel. He enters the locked room where the disciples (minus Thomas) are hiding from their enemies and says, “Peace be with you.” And he doesn’t say it just once; he says it twice. And he says it again a week later when Thomas is present. “Peace be with you.”

In other words, no worries. Stop freaking out. I’ve got this. You’re safe. Which, of course, didn’t mean that there weren’t rough roads ahead for the brand new Christians. Catholic Christians believe that all of the apostles except John died as martyrs for their faith. So when Jesus greeted them with that beautiful phrase, he was suggesting that they believe that things are going to be okay at the end of the day.

I guess this is how I need to approach this quarantine. I’m getting frustrated and I will admit to having some anger at what seems to be unending restriction. I know that God is with us even though it’s hard to see. And I have to make myself believe that the curve is flattening, even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.

Peace be with us all.

My sister Jen sent this cartoon to me and it made us both laugh at ourselves. It’s not that we want to go out. It’s that we want TO BE ABLE to go out. Have a great weekend.