What Does a Celebrant Do During Social Isolation?
I asked myself this question at the beginning of the order to isolate. The answers came fast and furious.
· Video Weddings – do it online for the couple and witnesses. Logistics? Questionable… but doable. If asked, do a full blown wedding for show afterwards.
· Mini-Weddings – go ahead and do the five person limit, then do a roaring ‘real’ wedding later with family and friends. This was a reasonable answer if a specific date is desired.
· Sit and wait – as it works out, so many people that were planning weddings, simply stopped planning in frustration. Why have a wedding if you could not invite everyone? Covid-19 lock-down and isolation rules will be relaxed before long.
· And the list went on.
However, there was one option that was completely unplanned. You see, I’m an animal lover of sorts. I say ‘of sorts’ because as it works out, with few exceptions, every animal I’ve had (and I’ve had quite a few in my life) was a rescue or a ‘salvage’ that I sort of went, “Okay, daughter dear. We can keep her.” Or the, “No! You are not drowning those puppies because a lab jumped the fence and got friendly with your Chow! Oh… you won’t drown them if I take the first one. Hmmmm…. Okay.” Keep in mind, the ‘okay’ was in a very sheepish voice.
To that end, if there ever is an end, I currently had two cats. Both rescues. One was an extreme rescue as she had been torn up by other cats and spent months with the vet getting put back together and getting socialized. She's my Pirate Cat. Feral cats can be so mean! Ripley is her name. The second is Newt, so named because she seems able to (or at least when she was a kitten – kind of big now) hide just about anywhere. Mostly places that were very much unexpected.
My wife and I had previously been frequenting the ‘cat cages’ whenever we went to pick up cat food or litter or toys or whatever cat related. It’s nice to say, “Oh… kitty, kitty,” now and then and pet the cute little balls of fur.
Ummm… that’s where what I’m calling ‘Covid Locked-In Too Long Disorder’ comes to play. Spend too long locking yourself away in some social isolation scheme to protect yourself… and you get a little nutty.
Yeah… we got two more cats. Rescues, of course. Brothers. Though they are named Drax and Starlord, I keep thinking we should have named them something like Hoover and Dysan. I have never seen two little kittens so… CRAZY about food! And now, after having them for a month, I can only think someone got them wet or fed them after midnight… FREAKING GREMLINS!!!
Not a day goes by that they have not gotten into something. I forgot to put the food bowls in the sink one day, two of them ended up in pieces on the floor. They constantly try to get the pestle out of the mortar. Mind you, the pestle must weight a solid kilo and the mortar maybe three kilos or more. Massive chunks of marble. I fear one day waking to a loud bang on the counter with a stone-rolling-on-benchtop sound, followed by another loud bang. Until then, the stone on stone rattling sound makes me a little nervous.
There is nowhere sacred. Though they will stay off the counter tops when I’m there cooking, I need to be careful as I prepare their food. The two older cats sit back and watch the antics as I try to prepare food dishes for all four without the little ones trying to supervise… from within the bowls, if possible. One day I heard some rattling from the kitchen. Unidentifiable. Walking out there, I could see none of the little Gremlins anywhere… until one was spotted on top of the refrigerator… playing with an old-fashioned metal scale I have up there. A free-standing refrigerator. As in, nothing around it form which a cat could have jumped. So far, a one-time deal as I’ve not seen either of them up there since.
Anyway, that should give you a fair idea – beyond house work, painting, yard work, working in the garden, and the usual Celebrant kinds of paperwork and research – that we Celebrants do when we are suffering from the now infamous ‘Covid Locked-In Too Long Disorder’.
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