Yes, it has been awhile since I have posted to the blog. And you would think that this is when I had so much time to blog, plus all the cooking I have done these past 3 months of being quarantined. But I did use this time to work on the new book which I hope will be out in the Fall. It will be full of dessert recipes and stories from ladies who have gone through some difficult journey’s in their lives.

But, as we have lived through this pandemic of this most awful virus, I can now look back and see some things I have learned. Both Randy and I are pretty positive people. We just seem (me even a little more than him, so sometimes I have to remind him to not get negative. Actually I did have to do that quite a bit these last 3 months when he was forced to work form home and had to be around me 24/7, but I won’t go there right now). But when this all started and we were being told to stay home and restaurants began to close, except for curbside pick-up, we choose to look at it through rose colored glasses (and a mask, of course). I remember the first time in March when we decided it was safe to go pick up Chick Fila. So we hopped in the car, being sure we had our masks in the car and headed out to Chick Fila out in Plano. Because there were several more thousand that had the virus in Dallas County, we decided to only frequent businesses out of Dallas County for a while. So on our way out to Plano to pick up lunch, we had a great little conversation which went something like this,
“well, this could be fun. Remember when we first married and I would come to your office and pick you up and I would have a picnic all packed with sandwiches, chips, homemade cookies or brownies and ice tea and we would go sit outside in Thanksgiving Square and just dream about our lives together? Well, let’s do that again, only with Chick Fila, because I’m so very tired of cooking.” So we get to Chick Fila and order. Now because of Randy’s Parkinson’s, his speech is a little hard to understand sometimes, especially when trying to order over the speakers at drive thru’s. So after the 3rd attempt to give our order to the sweet young lady, Randy just looks at me and says, “will you tell her what we want?” So after I try to yell our order from the passenger side of the car and she still can’t hear me, I end up climbing over the console, trying to fit between the steering wheel and Randy’s stomach with my head hanging out the window, yelling our order. It is times like these that I am so grateful that AFV are not anywhere around, because I know we would win the money for the most hilarious video, but would never be able to show our faces in public again.
We get our order, pull over in the parking lot and begin our picnic. As we dine and talk, we begin to think of different places we would like to go to for our Virus Picnics. Since one of our son’s got food poisoning after eating at Sonic, we have decided not to get food there anymore, so that is not an option anymore. Costco wasn’t open for hot dogs, so we figured out quickly that our main picnic joints would be Wing Stop, Chick Fila, Caines Chicken, In & Out and of course, my favorite, Whataburger. So with stars in our eyes, we began to plan having one of our picnics once a week until the pandemic passes and we are once again allowed to eat inside restaurants.

Well, lets fast forward a few weeks of these precious planned picnics. They aren’t so fun anymore. We did finally learn to let me drive when we would be ordering via the loud speaker. Didn’t take us more than 3 times of me leaning over him to learn that one. But we did learn that the fish and chips places just didn’t work for us for picnics. I had dropped a piece of fish between the seats and forgot about it by the time we drove home. So after a couple of days sitting with windows rolled up, well, you can imagine the cats that were circling our car. Mustard is a hard condiment to get out of car carpet. Catchup packets fall easily between the seats and are very hard to find. French fries dry and get pretty hard so they are easy to vacuum out.
Pizza made a pretty good picnic. We just placed the cardboard box on the dashboard, and the sun kept it pretty warm for us and we were able to get our shirts to the dry cleaners quickly so they got the pizza sauce out very well.

So, lessons learned during this pandemic is this:
Should the need arise again for us to not be able to to into restaurants, learn which ones have the best foods to eat in the car.
Have dry cleaners as one of your fav GPS locations
Vacuum your car out every few days to pick up the pieces of fish, french fries, small bits of hamburgers which fell from your mouth as you were trying to talk on the phone as you ate. We did learn after one attempt at having Rosa’s Mexican food for a picnic that it works better to pick it up and bring home, because tacos are not the easiest thing to eat in a car. Shredded Lettuce is not your friend in a car, nor is salsa. But a positive is that we have so many broken chips on the floor of our car that we just go and sit in the car barefoot. They make great exfoliates.

#Haveabutterfulday