Report by Trentin Quarantino
I wake up at 9.30am - I'd prefer to sleep longer considering it was 5am before I finally got to bed, but Harley and I have a plan to get out to the forest for a few hours, and there's no way I want to stay home and miss the chance of a few hours of fresh air with my woman.
At 10am exactly we walk out the front door, determined to make the most of the three hour window we have to go out and experience somewhere other than the flat or (not my) home office. After a short ride on the metro we're at the forest, and more than happy to practice social distancing while enjoying some fresh air for what seems like the first time in weeks.
We have a secondary reason to be out here - Harley wants to see if we can find some nettles so she can make nettle spinach for the first time this year. It doesn't take us long to find a small stream, which I'm informed by my resident nature expert is a good place to search, but we have a brief moment of panic on the way when we see a police car and are not wearing our masks - the cops are about 200 metres away and there is nobody else in sight, so it's not like we're in danger of infecting anyone out here.
We quickly pull the masks back up though, and that's enough for the police who drive away. And then we can get down to collecting nettles. Or Harley can, anyway, as I act like her butler and hold the bag ready for her. The joy she gets in such simple tasks is something I can only aspire to - on the surface I treat everything as a joke, but in reality I'm a very sad and melancholic person.
But seeing her happy makes me happy, and I smile to myself when I think of all the excursions like this we're going to have together in the coming months and years.
When we get home Harley sets about prepping the nettles to cook them, which starts with giving them a bath. This is when we start to think that maybe she got a little carried away with her collecting as the bath is half full, but they'll reduce down when she starts cooking them so it probably isn't as bad as it looks now.
As she does this I work on prepping the duck I bought yesterday for dinner. I stuff it with grated apple and sweet potato, and we decide to add some mushrooms that we have in the freezer from our foraging last year - no idea if this will work as a combination, but we'll find out in a few hours I guess.
Harley is on a mission to be productive today, so as well as helping with the duck and cooking the spinach, she also sets about making some face masks for a friend. I try to read for a while as she makes the masks but have difficulty concentrating, and I know the reason.
Today should be my brotheres 45th birthday, but he didn't even live half that long. And the thing that hurts the most is that even now, after all these years, I still don't know what happened to him - I know he went to London with some friends, and I know his body was pulled from the River Thames at some point after this. But I know nothing about the circumstances of WHY he was in the river, and never will.
It sucks...
So my head is in a shitty place with that, but there is something more important happening - duck. By 7.30pm it's finally cooked, and we have it with Harley's freshly made nettle spinach.
And it it fucking amazing. So good that I find myself literally grunting with satisfaction as I devour it as fast as possible, somehow and stupidly worried that some poultry-geist will steal it if I don't eat it quickly enough.
This is, without doubt, the most enjoyable meal of my life, and I feel so happy and content after eating it that my brain just stops working for a while. I'm honestly useless for the rest of the night - Harley calls her friend for a while, and then we head to bed with a few videos from our favourite Aussie Youtube channel to put us in a mood for sleep.
Additonal reporting by Harley Quarantinova
This Sunday is one hour shorter than any other Sunday of this year but I'm determined not to let that spoil my mood. We're leaving the house to see nature today!
I get all the stuff we need for collecting nettles ready, do the new rutine arrangements - iron the facemasks we boiled yesterday, and check the time. In 30 minutes my hours of (relative) freedom begin and I'm getting nervous as Trentin is still snoring and doesn't look like he's getting up anytime soon. After I wake him up it turns out the time on his phone didn't update so he had no idea he already wanted to be up. We still make it in time and leave the house to breathe the fresh forest air once again.
We only have to go two metro stations but it's enough time to weird me out a bit. I'm doing my best not to leave the house in the last 3 weeks so I'm not at all used to the sight of all the masked people. Or to seeing how much effort everybody puts into this social distancing thing...
It doesn't take us long to find a stream along which I hope to find some nettles. We've left frequently used paths some time ago so we actually put the masks down to breathe in the refreshing air. And then we see a police car driving by some 200 metres from us and we both instantly panic and put our masks back on. My heart is pounding even 5 minutes later and I keep swearing a lot for a while. The car wasn't even going our direction! What a fucked up world we live in that we feel like criminals just because we decided to breathe some air freely in the middle of nowhere?!
Luckily, we find enough nettles on the bank of the stream to keep us occupied for the next 1,5 hours (and also hidden from anybody's sight). When I'm satisfied with our plant-hunt we head home.
We instantly start cooking. Trentin brought all the needed supplies from the store, I covered the bottom of the bathtub with all the nettles we picked so while I'm sorting those out to make spinach from them, he prepares the duck-stuffing.
We decide to go big. The duck pan is soon overflowing with all sorts of goodness and we have several busy moments trying to clean the duck fat from the oven, floor, cabinets and ourselves, but eventually, another best duck of our lives is done. The meal looks so amazing we actually go and take pictures of it. And it tastes wonderful. I've never seen the man happier. He's like a kid who just had the Christmas of his dreams.
Meanwhile I started making some facemasks for a friend. I enjoyed it up to a point when I went to properly wash them. That's the kind of mistake I often make - use new fabric and only wash the final product. So, of course, it gets discoloured. Stupid. Well, they're still quite nice and definitely can serve the purpose. I'm a bit annoyed with myself though because I could have thought it through better. Next time.
After having a few days break from the black cock fights we make a very satisfying one happen before we head to bed to watch more silly Aussies. Trentin pissed me off by being a selfish jerk so he got what he deserved. And he didn't spare me much either.
I hope to get some sleep before going for the doctor's appointment tomorrow morning, I'm nervous about that...
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