I know a lot of you are bored. I'm pretty bored myself. I find that being bored makes me more tired than being active. I think it should be the other way around, but that's not what happens. Boredom causes more of us to be tired and hungry than anything else.
A lot of you are nodding your heads in agreement. Boredom makes me hungry and tired. I don't know how I can eat a dozen donuts when all I want to do is take a nap, but I have done just that. Was I particularly hungry? Nope, I was bored. I am certain there are some activities that we can do now that we are all stuck at home. I don't mean a honey-do list. I never liked those and it just made me angry when my wife would remind me every six or nine months to do what she had asked me to do.
I figured, as a public service, I would come up with some ideas that might help you in this time of social distancing and quarantine. To be honest, I'm quite disappointed in some of you. After all, this is a state that throws a party when a hurricane is coming. I thought for sure you would have some great ideas for the quarantine. Someone out there is begging to be the Martha Stewart of the Great Pandemic.
Meals can be especially challenging when you forget you can actually go out to the store and you remain in the house with your cats and a Netflix account. For variety, swap meals with the cats. After a couple of meals, you might just realize the grass is not greener on the other side. Your cat will be delighted, and you will have strong bones and teeth and finally get that hairball problem taken care of. Don't totally swap roles with the cat. A litter box is not as convenient as it looks.
There are plenty of movies to be watched on Netflix. About five of them are good. Put those five in your list and hope the guy you are mooching the Netflix account from has paid his bill. Tell all your friends about the five movies and then they will watch them and you can talk about them on social media until everyone is sick of talking about them. Repeat with friends that have Hulu and Amazon Prime accounts. You might as well get your friends' money’s worth out of those accounts.
Choose a random person on Facebook and send them a friend request. When they ask how they know you, tell them you met them “at the wedding.” They won't remember if it was yours or theirs, but they will accept the friend request. Once they do, you can tag them in memories and events they have no clue about. Once they catch on, move along to another person.
Engage the telemarketers that call your house in conversation. Give your name as “Jacques Trappe” or “Amanda Hugginkiss” when they ask for your name. Ask random nonsense questions that have nothing to do with their sales pitch. You can keep this going for a little while until you get bored with it. Most of the time, they don't pay attention to the name anyway.
My wife and I have been going to all the auto manufacturers’ websites and doing the “build and price” thing. This was fun until we realized the car we built and priced was exactly the same as our current car and $3,000 cheaper. We fought about it, but at least we weren't bored.
Yesterday, we decided to call Cooper by a different name. Just for fun, and just for the day, Cooper was Rufus Excalibur Goldstein. He didn't seem to mind and played along for a while until he got either hungry or bored. He really doesn't listen much anyway, so you really could call him anything you like as long as you fed him at the correct times.
We have been window shopping on the real estate sites. We have done a few things. We have realized we cannot afford a new house, there are some people with very questionable decorating ideas, and our house isn't so bad after all.
I don't know how long this is going to last, but we might as well have fun while we are riding it out. We have exhausted our Netflix suggestions, our Scrabble games have become steadily more profane and Rufus Excalibur Goldstein is getting restless. We will all do just fine and we'll see each other soon when all this is over.
Joe Weaver, a native of Baltimore, is a husband, father, pawnbroker and gun collector. From his home in New Bern, he writes on the lighter side of family life.
