I like old black and white movies.  The opening scene in The Philadelphia Story (starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn), while pretty much not politically correct in these times, does amuse me in the context of the movie -which is a comedy.

We see their front porch from the outside as Dexter (Grant) is leaving for good.  He is carrying his bags and Tracey (Hepburn) follows carrying his golf clubs, which she throws at him a few at a time, then drops the bag at his feet, but she also makes a point of breaking one of the clubs in half.  Tracey starts walking back inside thinking she’s gotten the last laugh -and Dexter scowls, drops his bags and follows her.  At the door it is obvious that he would like to punch her (not the gentlemanly thing to do, of course!) but he ends up simply putting his hand on her face (open palmed) and giving her a good push backwards through the door.  (Spoiler alert: They get back together in the end.)

This scene popped into my head today which had me laughing because I started imagining Mike and me reenacting that scene as the quarantine officials arrive at our door to officially release us.  In the spirit of social distancing, I could toss his golf clubs off one of the bedroom balconies (they overlook the front door). Can you imagine the looks on their faces?  We’d all have masks on, though, so it might be hard to see the looks on their faces.

As I write this, we are on Day 11. The good news is that Mike and I are still talking to each other!  Oh we definitely have had a few brief instances here and there of eye rolling, glaring and dramatic sighing (which is a “thing” in my family)… but overall I have to say that quarantine has been a uniquely unique experience in our 40 1/2 years of marriage. I’m grateful that I have such a wonderful partner to go through this with.  Even my family will gleefully confirm (…er…shout it from the rooftops) he’s truly the better half in this marriage.

Pretty much since we arrived, we have been trying to get our exercise by going up and down our stairs.  Mike has been quite a bit more enthusiastic than I have, but I’ve been doing it too.

Day 7 – Mike on the stairs.

We are very much looking forward to being able to exercise outside.  We have bikes and a sit-on-top kayak here. Also, since our complex sits “at the end of the road” next to a very large area of undeveloped land (which I call “the wilderness) -we have a natural area we can enjoy walking in.  Our longest route back in there is about 5 miles.  At several places in the wilderness there are ways to change over to walking the beach if we like.

On day 8, we got the backgammon board out again.  We keep forgetting to keep stats for our wins/losses, but I’d guess Mike has the edge with more wins than I.  He says I don’t have any strategy -as in- “I can’t believe you won playing like that!”

We needed to place an order for groceries this week to get us through to the end of quarantine.  That actually worked pretty well in theory.  The local supermarkets are quite good.  They don’t have everything we can find in the USA, but they do try.  They also have a lot of British food items because there are many people from the UK that visit or work here.  They had to call me after I placed the on-line order for our credit card info because their on-line check out system doesn’t really jive with quarantine delivery issues.  The drawback is that if they didn’t have the specific item we requested, the choice was basically to get nothing at all or let them pick something similar.  I’d rather have nothing at all in most cases…so we didn’t get everything we wanted -but we won’t starve.

My picture for Day 8 is of one of our important grocery items!

On Day 9, we broke out the Wii game that’s here for guests to use on rainy days.  It only shows in black and white though.  Mike thinks he doesn’t have the right cable hooking it to the TV -which we may try to fix.  Much like backgammon, we haven’t played with the Wii in ages.  It was fun. We tried out a few of the simpler games and Mike won EVERY DARN GAME!  The screen was keeping score at one point and I wish I’d written it down -but we’re talking me taking a thorough pounding. At one point it said something like he’d won 30 various games and I’d won none!  NOT ONE!  But, I don’t need to win -it was fun to play.  One of the funny games was a race on cows where we had to knock over scarecrows… I think it took about 20 games of that before I finally won one.  I did eventually win a few, but Mike is very good at Wii. My first picture is of what the screen looked like after nearly EVERY game.  See how my avatar hangs her head in shame??

After awhile we went bowling.  I managed to take a picture of my fierce avatar moments before a turn.  The game ended in total annihilation for Mike.  Yay me!! To my everlasting regret, I neglected to get a picture of his avatar hanging his head in shame!

On Day 10, we didn’t really do anything new.  We did go for a change of scenery and sat out on the guest room balcony for awhile.  Before the foliage grew so tall, we had a pretty good, if off in the distance, view of the water from both bedroom balconies.  That was before the owner of the lot next door decided to build her house.  The foliage is located on her property and she wants it kept untrimmed because she prefers seeing that as opposed to seeing our complex.  I can’t blame her.  You can’t see it in the picture, but if you were on the balcony with us -you would be able to see a tantalizing glimpse of blue through the trees and easily hear the waves crashing.

For Day 11, we did more laundry, walked more stairs, made a rather large dent in the cookie stash and finished off the ice cream…. In the afternoon, we went out on the living room balcony for awhile to read and enjoy the fresh air.  Someone napped more than read…and someone else might have been driven off the balcony due to intermittent snoring.  He diplomatically claimed he went inside because it was time to watch some golf on TV.  🙂  It was a lovely day.

Categories: Cayman 2021 - Part 2, Cayman In The Time Of Covid