Dispatches From the Transfer Station

I’m not going to lie, I’m old enough that I sincerely do look forward to a Friday night grocery shopping trip at Wegman’s. But these days in quarantine life, the weekly grocery store really is the only thing going. I can totally understand why all these online group hangout games are popping off, because what fun stories am I going to report back new-wise on the O’Chapin front? “This week, we went to Aldi. Joe purchased some knockoff DingDongs. They were simply called “Cupcakes.’”

In that vein, let me tell you about going to the Fairfax dump. Or as it’s properly referred to the Fairfax I-66 Transfer Station.

I already told you about one of my ill-fated design choices, and I ended up having to dispose of another — I couldn’t even give my jute rug away! I originally got it from a lady on Craiglist, and it’s always funny when you pull up to a house that turns out to be a mansion to come collect their refuse. Although it had the overall look of burlap, the rug served me well before it began to disintegrate.

The owners of our house left a lot of their old paint cans behind, and I’ve been wanting to throw it away for a year and we finally got it done. But if I knew how cool the dump er transfer station was, I would’ve done it sooner.

The whole experience was very orderly: you drive up and tell a worker what you have to throw away and he or she tells you what line to get in. We joked that the guy would see our old Subaru and say, “Sir, we’re not accepting cars at this time.”

That didn’t happen, but we did get confused going through the lines and went through twice the guy in charge of the whole operation was like, "I thought you had some more crap back there in the backseat.” But he said it in a much nicer way.

I was kind of heartened by the fact that we put so much thought into sorting all this stuff. Paint goes here, batteries go here, scrap metal over there. I remember when I went to the dump as a kid at my grandparents house in Upstate NY and you seemed to just hurl everything into a ditch.

There was an entire pile of lawn mowers! And another one of bicycles! With a bicycle-shaped statue to boot.

We sorted our hazardous household material and then drove up to this spot where you take your trash and hurl it down into a dumpster below. There’s no way people don’t get hurt doing this. As we drove up, some bros threw a round glass top to a table and it shattered in the most spectacular way. And that’s what passes for entertainment these days.

Tune Tuesday: "Hell N Back," Bakar

I obviously like a retro throwback and I really like a song that involves whistling. Hence, I love this track from this British artist. So sweet, especially with lyrics like: “She had green eyes, like Mountain Dew.”

Modern Farmhouse

Ok, now back to frivolous things because we all need a distraction.

Our old house in Del Ray was something else: it was a little rowhouse in terrific location, a fact which blinded us to its many flaws. The day Joe and I moved in, we realized that it didn’t have a dishwasher. File under things that that would’ve been helpful to know.

The house was close to the metro. So close in fact, that it butted up against the train tracks and at 3 a.m., the walls would shake and it would feel like a freight train was right in the next bedroom. My mom was convinced a train was going to derail into our backyard and strike us down while we were grilling.

I broke so many dishes because we had basically a single countertop of work space. The microwave was on a shelf at waist level and one time I tipped up a bowl of hot soup and the entire bowl splattered into the wall (and the ceiling!) and Katie came over and started eating soup off the wall. Normal O’Chapin things.

I really wanted to make this place look nice, despite all the odds, and the vibe that Joe and I could agree on was “Modern Farmhouse.” You know, like a Chip and Joanna project or the Vanderpump Rules kids’ houses.

Of course, I wanted it to be way colorful, like this awesome blogger’s house:

View this post on Instagram

Weekend, have a good one 😘 . . . #weekend #color #splash #splashofcolor #home #dining #zilverblauw #umbra #vintage

A post shared by Liesbeth Disbergen (@sloppopyeah) on Nov 2, 2017 at 10:48pm PDT

We desperately needed storage so I found this cool vintage pie safe from Miss Pixie’s (like the inspiration photo, right?). The note on it said it was straight from a farmhouse, but they could’ve been pulling my chain. It was handmade, that’s for sure. And very fragile. The nice movers just barely got it in the house. This cabinet was absolutely massive.

When we found our current house, there was no place for the gigantic vintage pie safe. But I thought: I wanted it, surely someone else too. Then I did the thing I always do when I’m selling on Craigslist, which is like haggle with the first person who emails over $50 and acting all indignant, then a week later, I’m basically offering to pay someone to take it off my hands (which I ended up having to do with our old couch).

I got close, but by moving day, I had no buyer. And good thing because once the movers tried to pick this thing up, it started falling apart in their hands. It was so sad. They ended up tearing it apart to get it out of the back of the house, and I could barely even look as the glass shattered and the cornice part fell off and oh God, the humanity. It went from farm family (maybe) to D.C. store to me, and I wrecked it.

It was a goner. We left it out for the trash by garbage cans. I could tell it stayed there for awhile, because if I sat on the right side of the Metro car, I could see my sad, broken down vintage farmhouse cabinet out the window as the train passed by, a sentinel and vestige of my home design folly.

A Prayer

I get so upset with people framing COVID-19 as saving lives vs. saving the economy. Clearly, we have to try to do both. We have to figure out a way to do both and it’s going to be hard. I really pray that I’m overreacting, but we stand to lose everything: our jobs, our houses, and our lives.

I never thought I’d turn to Joe Rogan in a pandemic. But his interview with epidemiologist Michael Osterholm is what made me feel like I halfway understood what’s happening with this disease. Joe actually gave him the space to talk and to raise questions that don’t have a pat answer. Now every morning I google “Michael Osterholm” and read whatever i can find. It’s bleak, but he’s straightforward and I very much appreciate that.

Today I found an interview that’s even better, because it’s Osterholm talking to a doctor, instead of Joe constantly asking him about whether saunas can help prevent coronavirus.

A quote is just rolling around in my mind all the time. “We have to continue to consider what it means to die from this virus. It's a very, very difficult and tragic situation. We also have a conversation of how we're going to live with it. We have to figure that out,” Osterholm told CNBC.

Completely setting aside the mindbogglingly tragic scenes in ERs…what are our cities going to look like after this, if it does go on for months? I think i’m in the sad and angry stage of grief. I love D.C. so much, all the arts and culture here. I don’t want it to change.

I can’t stop thinking about restaurateurs and every single person in the food and events industry. It’s been the most wonderful thing to write about them and I’m in awe of what they’ve achieved in Washington. I just wrote a story about how to get into super popular, buzzy restaurants a couple weeks ago and in the space of a few days, it went from packed dining rooms to peering over the edge of the cliff. It’s so heartbreaking, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Tim Carman’s story on how different folks in the D.C. restaurant scene are handling the pandemic really captures their loss. I so wish we could freeze everything and unthaw it later. My prayer is that we can figure out how to steer this ship to shore with the least amount of damage.

I feel like in America, we have this idea that your work ethic is paramount and the harder you work, the more successful you’ll be — and maybe this stings so much because everyone here was doing everything right, and yet they are forced out of business. I don’t want people to lose what they’ve worked on for their whole lives. I want to order takeout and help them, but I feel conflicted because I’m scared too about finances. Is takeout even the answer? Could there be a restaurant bailout? Or could the government pay restaurant owners to pay their employees to help serve food to people who are hungry?

I don’t have even a fraction of the answers, and I should probably stop staying up all night trying to figure it out.

My psychology professor friend Autumn wrote a wonderful essay for the Tennessean about social distancing coping strategies and she said flashing back to the good times is a totally healthy thing to do to get by. She writes:

“Try to take time each day to recall positive experiences from the past. Allowing yourself to re-experience that sense of connection and happiness can keep you going through difficult times. Although our social lives are on pause right now, we will have those experiences again.”

Tunes Tuesday: "Uncover the Gold," David Wax Museum

“Every day is a day/Every mountain just a small hill”

Trying to remember that right now. This band from Charlottesville wrote the most hopeful anthem for bad times (and the video is pretty sweet too). I would say we’re going to get through this, but David Wax Museum said it much more eloquently:

“Here’s my prayer for you/When the light is at its weakest 
That you’ll find something true
That you will know life’s sweetness”

Katie's Triumphant Recovery

Ready for an inspiring dog story? It starts out sad, be warned, but it ends in triumph.

On February 10, I noticed our 11-year-old whippet Katie was limping and acting strangely. She yiped out in pain and was holding one of her front legs up in the air. I decided not to go to yoga class and sat with her in my lap, which she never really let me do before.

When Joe came home from work later, she jumped out of her bed to run to see him and fell flat on her face. Her other front leg wasn’t working either.

Now it seemed like this was a problem with her brain instead of just her bumping her leg into something. We canceled the appointment at the vet for the morning and went to the emergency after-hours vet, Southpaws.

When they tried to weigh her, her back legs gave out too and I just lost it. The attending doctor told us it could be anything from a brain aneurysm to a herniated disc to perhaps she got into rat poison, and if so, she’s about to die and there is nothing that we could do.

I know she is just a dog, but we were despondent. I understood that wow, loving something can bring you so much pain. We said goodbye to her as she struggled to get up in her little crate, not understanding why her legs didn’t work.

Every dog I see now, I look at it and think, you are just a little heartbreak vector.

The next day, the doggy neurologist examined her (I never even knew there were doggy neurologists, truly a Fairfax County career). Bless him! He said he was pretty sure she had a herniated disc and the spinal fluid was pressing on her front legs causing paralysis and if she had surgery, there was a good chance she could recover. Our friend is a vet too, and we called her during this whole process and she said she would do the surgery too, so that made us hopeful.

Now if you told me before or after that we would spend this amount of money on an animal, I would’ve said you were crazy. But in the moment it seemed like the only thing to do. (Whether that is right or wrong is debatable). My parents and I have spent so much money at this vet hospital they need to name a wing after us: The Chapin-O’Donnell Campus.

Here she is at the vet post-surgery on her 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae.

The day we took her home, they brought her out and she was basically like a sack of potatoes. We were going to have to keep her on four weeks of crate rest, carry her everywhere, give her a ton of pills twice a day, and clean up after her because she couldn’t stand up to do her business.

I wondered if I could do this: could I take care of her well enough to nurse her back to health? She was so fragile. She cried all night in the crate and we ended up having to give her anti-anxiety drugs. The nurse assured me Katie was feeling no pain and indeed, she seemed pretty zonked out. Her eyes almost pointed in different directions sometimes.

The most important thing for her was to rest, and so we did. She already slept 20 hours a day, so it wasn’t a huge change, but now she was way more cuddly. Again, that could be the drugs.

I worried that this was all a mistake and she wouldn’t be able to walk again because she was so unsteady on her feet. But here’s the moment her little steps turned into an actual walk! Encouraged by treats, of course. (Click to play).

My doggy's first jaunt after herniated disc surgery #latergram #katiethewhippet #positivefeedback #triumphofthedoggyspirit

0 Likes, 0 Comments - @goshgeegolly on Instagram: "My doggy's first jaunt after herniated disc surgery #latergram #katiethewhippet #positivefeedback..."

She’s really great now. She can’t do a lot of stairs yet but she can get around and jump on the couch, all the important stuff. Her expression has never changed through all of this, I swear. And it might take her a little longer to do things she used to do, but she won’t let that stop her.

I’m so incredibly happy she is still with us!! The doctor and nurses at Southpaws were so knowledgeable and compassionate. Katie’s been cleared for gentle 15-minute walks and she continues to be the best little doggy buddy around.