Hello fellow Lockdowners:

Today I broke the Hub, starting with his eyebrows.

He wasn’t able to get his hair cut before the lockdown. This isn’t really a big issue because…how to put this delicately? Having too much hair on his head hasn’t been a problem for him for decades. But at breakfast I looked up and realized that overnight two furry little animals had crawled onto his face and died. In their death throes, their scary spikey fur was standing straight out above his eyes. When I pointed this out, he got worried because he’s been doing video business meetings and classes online, and the dead animals eyebrows would certainly be visible.

So he did what anyone with a PhD in a highly complex and technical field would do. He took the electric clippers I’d gotten for the dog and gave himself a trim, hair AND eyebrows. When he came in to show me, I screamed. Apparently, his dead face-animals must have attracted rabid badgers, who gnawed his hair and eyebrows off in patches (leaving, for some reason, the respectable beginnings of a rattail at the back of his head).

Clearly, he’d had a terrific time. With the zeal of a convert, he asked if I wanted him to trim the dog’s fur next or—here he looked at my hair speculatively—maybe my hair would be easier to maintain during the lockdown if I didn’t have so much of it to worry about.

For the next month at least, he’ll be the one in the Zoom meetings wearing the full face mask and hat. The dog will probably take that long to come out from where she’s hiding behind the stove. And I’m working on digging a new flower bed that just happens to be a little over six feet long.

I’m not alone in finding myself a bit homicidal after weeks of lockdown togetherness. Check out these clips from the absolutely hysterical Chris Enss:

 

Luckily for the Hub’s longevity and my continuing life goal of avoiding enforced lockdown from within a prison, the weather here is spectacular and I continue to be amazed by my good luck in living on the Isle of Arran, off the coast of Scotland. As an American, one of the most consistently astonishing things about living across the pond, is how seriously OLD stuff here is. We’ve lived in a thousand year old castle in England. For 450 years, people there had turned left at the modest sign advising that the Rising of the North was plotted there in 1569. Here on Arran, we can hike out to see rings of standing stones, manmade mysteries which have stood here for over 5000 years.

And today, we visited Dun Fionn, an iron age viking fortress within our two-mile daily dog walk lockdown limit. We walked along deserted beaches and climbed to the ancient stones. There’s almost no information about this fort, but where I stood, others have stood for thousands of years, keeping watch over their small settlement and the death that could arrive at any moment from disease, war, starvation, and pure bad luck.

Suddenly, a bad lockdown haircut doesn’t seem so bad.