A Helpful Pandemic Review

Again, Scott is not chatty tonight. I did get lots of friend time in today. Two of my more spontaneous friends with short notice went to Boehms Candy in Issaquah with me to support a local flower family. We got gorgeous custom farm to vase bouquets for 20 bucks. I figured if I was getting myself flowers for my anniversary I must get chocolate too. We then sat socially distanced in a lovely shady garden and ate hand dipped Ice Cream bars rolled in almonds. For you local folks, you can support New Garden Farms on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 9:30-3:00 in the Boehms Parking lot in Issaquaqh. You can then very safely support Boehms. For more information on New Gardens click here.

I was telling Scott that people seem to really like my Amazon Review Post. I asked him what I should review next. Several inappropriate suggestions were made. One did stick with me; Toilet Paper. I thought about it and decided, why not? It is a pandemic related topic. It truly is a first world issue, but I do live in one of the wealthiest communitys in the Nation, Sammamish, so it seems fitting. This is my Pandemic Toilet Paper story.

In January, when I still had a job with a non-profit that shall not be named, I was scheduled to attend a conference in Orlando during my Birthday week. I knew that there was no way I could fly across the country and NOT go to Disneyworld. Hayley would be ashamed of me. But everyone I asked did not want to fly that far for Mickey Mouse. But another spontaneous friend now lives in Boston, it was worth a try. I was surprised when she said an enthusiastic “Yes”. She has been one of my biggest supporters this past three years in spite of the fact we were not friends before Hayley’s death. We knew each other’s names because our boys were in the same grade. Shay organized a troop of women that first December to come decorate our house. Besides kind, she is very funny! We discussed sharing a hotel room or getting our own. I am not sure if we had even gone out to lunch together ever. But we agreed to go for it, all in. We agreed worse case scenario we won’t be compatible and agreed to be honest if we annoyed each other. Plus we could do anything for three days. This is what a good sport Shay was. I suggested we have matching outfits for our two days at Disney. I offered to plan it. I had hats embroidered that said “Dawn and Shay do Disney 2020”. Found a Disney shirt that said “Made in the Seventies”, we were 1970 and 1971 babies. I also got us two shirts from Etsy that said “I am done adulting, I am going to Disney”. I had Birthday themed Ears. We arrived on the same day, by bedtime we were not sick of each other yet, so we had that going for us. We spent two days at Disney during a record breaking cold front. In fact it was so cold that Iguanas would lose consciousness and fall out of trees. We were super disappointed only to witness this phenomenon on the local news. We waited in line at 6 am to get tickets for the brand new Star Wars ride. Totally worth it by the way, best ride ever. I was sad when she flew home and the conference started. On my birthday my Mom drove from her home on the west coast of Florida and decorated the hotel room. I don’t remember the last time I spent my actual birth date with my mother. She had been really sick in January including laryngitis up until a week before. She had also surprised me by saying yes when I suggested she drive over and go to Harry Potter Land with me at Universal Studio. She doesn’t do rides or amusement parks. She clearly needed to get out of her house. After the conference we moved hotels, I had already started to feel bad. I was losing my voice and felt like shit. We powered through. Guess who wanted to keep going on the new Harry Potter motion ride and roller coaster? My mother! She surprised herself. We didn’t go so far as buying the Hogwarts robes they sell but we had a great time. I was getting sicker. I was due to fly home on a Tuesday night. On Monday I asked Scott to please make me a doctor’s appointment for first thing Wednesday morning. I flew home on January 28th. At that point, Mom and I had seen a story on the news about a powerful virus spreading in a province in China. In fact while heading home the first case was found in Washington State. We should have known. A freeze in Florida, falling Iguanas, grown women doing Disney and Universal without kids, my Mom riding roller coasters; me super sick on vacation, we just should have known that 2020 was taking a turn.

When I went to the doctor I had lost my voice completely, Scott seem to think this was not a bad thing. She said I had a throat infection, two ear infections and a sinus infections. She tested me for the flu, negative. I mentioned this new virus I heard about. She said that she had been reading everything she could find on it. I asked about testing. She suggested I not get testing, but ordered me to quarantine myself for 2 weeks. At that point testing was only available through the CDC. She said it was not going well and by the time the results came back she was sure I would no longer even be sick. She gave me a week’s worth of drugs. Cough syrup with Codeine, antibiotics, ear drops and a prescription decongestant. I took my stash and happily made myself a home with the dogs in the master bedroom. I told Scott about the quarantine orders. He anxiously asked if I would be okay if he slept in Hayley’s room so that my cough didn’t keep him awake. That is so cute, he was worried I needed him. I pretended to be sad and reluctant, but really I was super happy. The dogs could all sleep on his side, I could watch what and how much TV I wanted, hello, King bed to myself! After a week I was worse. I got a chest x-ray and some more antibiotics. That was the sickest I can ever remember being. Two weeks without being able to talk! Just as I felt like I was turning the corner I got a call on a Friday that I needed to have my pacemaker replaced the next Wednesday. WTF? I explained that I still had a cough. Not a good thing when you are having surgery not on full anesthesia. They had a solution for that and were not willing to postpone. They don’t like it when your battery runs out. I went back to work less than a week after the surgery. Thank goodness it didn’t get postponed even a day as most surgical rooms were shut down by the second week in February. Again, I should have known. Iguanas, laryngitis, and a dead battery. 2020 had arrived.

For those that can remember this far back but February/March was about the time people started to freak out. Most corporations moved to remote offices by the end of the first week in March, schools began to close. Trump said there were only 15 people that were sick, don’t worry he said. We REALLY should have known the minute “China Virus” came out of his mouth. So here is where we move into first world problems. People were going nuts at Costco and Grocery Stores. If you live in the Northwest it was like when we are predicted to get an inch of snow. People lost their minds. Instead of buying all the wine, milk and bread; it was wine, milk, bread and TOILET PAPER. I made fun of those people.

In January, before Orlando, we had a big first world problem in my household. I always buy my toilet paper at Costco, but I had not been that month because work was so busy. We got down to our last roll of paper. We have three bathrooms and the three of us each use a different one. We would have to hunt the roll down. We argued over the roll. We used Kleenex. This is when I learned the awesomeness of Costco Online. If I ordered $75 dollars I would get free two day shipping. Seriously? I never get out of Costco under a hundred bucks, who does? If YOU do, you have issues and we might not be able to be friends. I was able to order a hundred dollars of our toilet paper and it arrived the day I left for Orlando, everyone was happy. God forbid one of these two men would have to go to the store. I vowed we would never run the toilet paper down that low again. So when March hit and the great Toilet Paper insanity started, I was very smug admiring my two huge packs of Charmin, the good stuff. I thought about sharing with some friends, but nope I am not that nice and this was now labeled a Global Pandemic and the McCutcheons would not run out of toilet paper. (did I mention this is a first world problems article?)

Do you have interactions from your past that you just have never forgotten? Things that are not even very important but for some reason they stuck with you and always remind you of that person. Let me give you an example; when I was 20 and attending UW, I was a teller at Washington Mutual. I loved my supervisor, Jill. She was amazing. So funny, big personality, she was over six feet tall with coke bottle glasses. One day during a break in the conference room I was reading a Cosmopolitan Magazine. For you younger folks, a magazine is like a cross between a book and a newspaper. You had to wait every week or month for it to arrive in the real mail. Instead of subscriptions to Spotify, most young women had a subscription to Cosmo. It was a guilty pleasure. We passed it around the Sorority like it was illegal. The entire purpose of the magazine was to make women feel like shit about themselves. The magazines intentions besides advertising every beauty product made, was to tell you how to dress, how to do hair and make up, but most of all how to catch a man and keep him satisfied if you know what I mean. The best part of Cosmo was the monthly Quiz. Topics like, “Are you enough of a bad girl?” “Can you keep him intrigued?” “Is he thinking fling or long-term?”. We are not talking the height of feminism. So there I sit on break reading my issue when Jill walks in and joins me. She said “anything good in there?”. I said I was currently reading an article about how to deal with unwanted hair in unwanted places. Waxing was not really main stream at that point in history. She said “what does it say about nipple hair?”. I did a double take. “WTF, you get hair there?” Jill said “honey you have no idea, you just wait until you are over 30”. I was like ooookkkkaaay, whatever, I will never have nipple hair. So now when plucking my nipple hairs as that 1991 Cosmo suggested, I always think of Jill. Every single time.

Another one of these memories stuck in my brain was an incident with my Dad around 1996. My Dad and I had a complicated relationship over the years. He was not always the easiest to deal with. At this point he had recently married an employee of his that was my age. We were on the outs. Scott and I were married, we had bought our first house in Federal Way, we were trying to get pregnant, and we now shopped at Costco like real adults. We were in Costco near our house when we turned down an aisle and ran smack into my Dad and his wife. Just the fact that this Costco was not close to where they lived and we were on the same aisle, on the same day and the same time was weird enough to stick in my brain. It was very awkward, Scott was not a fan of my Dad. My Dad not knowing what to say, noticed that we both had packs of Toilet Paper in our carts. He made the sarcastic comment, “Oh you two must be doing well, you buy the expensive stuff”. We had Charmin in our cart, they had Kirkland Signature. Of course Scott nudged me because we had recently had a “discussion” about me insisting on the more costly Charmin. Clearly I had prevailed and it was never mentioned again. To this day nearly 25 years later, 14 years since my Dad passed, I cannot buy toilet paper without thinking of that interaction and my Dad. Yes, I have always bought the Charmin. My kids have never in their own home had anything but the Charmin Ultra Soft touching their behinds. Scott learned to pick his battles.

Now that you have been caught up and heard some new relevant stories I can get down to my Pandemic Review. Today I am reviewing Charmin Toilet Paper. By April I was still feeling a bit smug and a little guilty that I had an unintentional hoard of Toilet Paper. Here we sat on our soft white cotton thrones while we watched YouTube videos of people actually having physical fights over the last package of TP in Costco and grocery stores. It wasn’t even Charmin. By May I was getting a little worried. I had promised the men that I would not let them down, I would keep them stocked with toilet paper no matter what. We may not have had Clorox Wipes, but we were going to have toilet paper. I expected them to heap praise on me and express their gratitude. Newsflash, that did not happen. In May I had an 18th pandemic birthday to plan and our stash was starting to run low. Scott would ask if he should buy some at Albertsons on his way home from work where he bought wine. I said only if the brand is Charmin. I think he hurt himself rolling his eyes. Costco had let me down months before with none available online. I was not willing to risk Covid by fighting over it in person at the local Costco when it was just luck of the draw if you were there when they put the pallet out. There has to be people out there that will have toilet paper to use until 2030. I lost track of how many times a day I would check the Costco app to see if it was in stock. I honestly expected the app to have a pop up box that said “Get a Life, we don’t have any fucking toilet paper”. I was also checking Amazon daily, but I was not quite to the point of being a victim of price gouging. Let me go ahead and add now that neither Scott or Henry could care less what kind of toilet paper I buy. When I expressed my pandemic concerns to Scott he just suggested that he and Henry could just go rub their asses on the grass like the dogs do. Not helpful Scott.

Then it happened. On June 5th I had to break down and purchase on Amazon, fucking Quilted Northern. The Charmin Bears were going to be so disappointed in me. Let me tell you it was false advertising. There was nothing quilted about it. It says it is “meticulously crafted for a reliable, comfortable experience”. They lied. I would give Quilted Northern 1 poop emoji out of 5. It is narrow. I have big hands. It was not soft or quilted. Plus they said double roll and it was most certainly not a double. It was like going to an overpriced hipster bar in Seattle, paying for a double and you could still do math in your head after drinking it. These rolls hanging on my wall made me very sad. It is a hard pass on the Northern.

Finally on June 18th and July 1st I was able to purchase Charmin on Amazon. But there was a limit, so I had to buy all three Charmin models of toilet paper. I filled a tall cabinet in our garage with toilet paper, all kinds of Charmin. We will not run out this year. Yet still the 18 year old boy takes the roll off the holder in my bathroom when he runs out, instead of going to the cupboard like a human and getting his own pack. I had told him when storing the Charmin that he was not allowed to use the blue package because it was mine. I said you can use the red package or the green package, but do not touch the blue. Recently I saw him slinking up the stairs with a blue package, I yelled at him and started up the stairs willing to physically remove it from his hands if necessary. He smirked and locked his bathroom door. I used to change his diapers, he really should go with the red package.

The Red Package is the “Charmin Ultra Strong Clean Touch”. This model gets 4 Poop emojis. The roll is huge, so if you are the one that never wants to change the roll this is for you. It is so big it won’t fit in our recessed holder in one of our bathrooms, which is not an issue since no one in my house ever puts the roll on the actual holder. Keep in mind that you can judge a Charmin product by the adjectives used. They all start with Ultra. This is so accurate. The dictionary defines Ultra as “extremist, radical, fanatical”. If this does not describe me and Charmin I don’t know what would. Amazon indicates this is 2 ply. All you single ladies, before you commit to a partner, check their toilet paper, if it is 1 ply, I am sorry you need to “dump” them. Charmin describes this one as “designed for a wash cloth like cleaning”. This was a turn off for me. First you can’t flush a wash cloth and this reminds me of stories of fraternity friends using t-shirts or whatever was nearby when there was no TP, usually a t-shirt of a roommate. You know who you are. It also says it is clog proof. They lie. So 4 Poop Emojis, it is strong, it is a big roll, your hand will not get dirty. I recommend the red package for the men in your life particularly teenage boys, but invest in a plunger.

The Green package is “Charmin Ultra Gentle Touch”. Here we go with the word Touch again. I don’t like the word touch associated with wiping at all. It markets itself as the only one with a touch of lotion. It is dermatologist tested. How did that work? It says it is gentle enough for even frequent wiping. I give the green package 2 poop emojis. I ate Thai food several times this past week, so you need to trust me that any toilet paper mentioning the word Gentle is probably not going to stand up to what your bowels are capable of. For sure never give a roll of the green package to the men in your life. If you do, make sure none of your clothes are laying nearby the toilet. I would not even blow my nose with this crap. The lotion makes it feel waxy, it is not very strong, I didn’t measure but it felt narrow, I got pee on my hand. This is not a good toilet paper for the ladies. Don’t let them fool you with the word Gentle and the female child bear on the package. This TP is for little kids that will probably get shit on their hands if they wipe themselves no matter what kind of TP it is. I wouldn’t even TP a house with this one.

The best for last. The Blue Package. This is what Costco carries. This has been the McCutcheon brand for nearly 30 years. I guess you could call it vintage at this point. The blue package is “Charmin Ultra Soft Cushiony Touch”. Soft and Cushiony is exactly what this toilet paper is. Cushiony is not even a recognized word in the dictionary. It is that special that it needed its own word. I give this one the coveted 5 poop emojis. The marketing describes it as “unique”, “irresistibly soft” and “more absorbent so you can use less”. I only disagree with the use less part, remember Thai Food. You will want a nice handheld pillow of this stuff. The rolls are big, it is soft, it doesn’t shed (you ladies know what I mean) and you will get no pee on your hand. You will not want to spare a square of this stuff for anyone. This is toilet seat down, the best.

In closing I want to say I have figured out the purpose of the Charmin Bears. I always thought that marketing was really stupid mainly because they are not wearing pants and they use the word “hiney”. But actually it is brilliant. It is exactly like the fairy tale, Goldilocks and the three bears. Seriously, your mind should be blown right now. Each of these packages has a different bear on the front of the package. The Red, “Strong, Clean” has the Dad Bear on it. It is manly like sand paper. The Green has the little girl bear on it. It is sweet and gentle, it is a prissy little toilet paper. Notice there is none with the son bear, because he is probably using a t-shirt at the Bear Frat. But the Blue! The Blue has the Mom on it. Because who knows their shit in all families? Yes, that would be Mom. You’re Welcome.