Every day, my wife Wendi, the founder of this blog, and I work together … in our house. I started Wooster Media Group LLC in January 2018 and Wendi joined me full-time in mid-March 2020. I started working out of the home until I got an office on the Wooster campus of The Ohio State University. However, OSU President Dr. Michael Drake and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine both told me the same thing: Stay at home. Drake didn’t want me in the buildings on campus, and DeWine didn’t want me outside. So, Wendi and I work together in our home.
Every day Wendi and I relive Groundhog Day. Our routine is the same every day: Wake up, work, eat breakfast, work, eat lunch and watch a little TV, work, eat supper, work, watch a little TV, go to bed. There are other things involved, like walking our dog, Owney, feeding our cats Mr. Thomas, Nikki and Izzy, and showering. But, every day that is our routine.
After a couple of weeks of this, Wendi said, “We need to do something different on Saturday.” So, we did. We lived it up. We traveled, we went on an adventure, we went out to eat, and we simply enjoyed getting out of the same pattern we follow every single day.
Well, to be honest, Saturday did begin like this: Wake up, work, eat breakfast, work .. and we took a nap. After our nap, Owney started barking because he wanted to go outside. (You really need to read Wendi’s blog post about why she gave our dog the title: Chief Scheduling Officer. I guarantee everything she wrote is 100 percent true.) Wendi and I already had a plan for what we were going to do when Owney wanted to go outside. It also happened to be how we were going to make Saturday different from every other day in our house.
Wendi, Owney and I traveled to Orrville to go to the dog park. The trip would get us out of the house and let Owney be off leash. When we arrived, there were about three small dogs on leashes walking away from the dog park … they were done for the day. That left Owney by himself in the small dog area, while Sammie had the large dog area to herself.
While Owney loves to play with big dogs, we were a bit reluctant to let the dogs play together. Not only did we want to maintain social distancing, but we really don’t trust Owney around people he doesn’t know. Also, Sammie has only been with her new family for a couple weeks, and they were not sure how she would react.
So, Owney meandered around the dog park, and finally, the two dogs got together, separated by a chain link fence. Then, they started running down the fence row. It was nice to see Owney playing with Sammie. Owney goes to the Cleveland Road Animal Hospital and Pet Hotel every Wednesday for doggie daycare, that is, until Gov. DeWine told Owney he needed to stay home, too. The governor does not realize how essential doggie daycare is to Owney.
It was late in the afternoon, and we were ready to eat. Wendi loves gyros, and as luck would have it, Ryan Kuzma was set up outside Minglewood Distilling Co. with one of his Linn Enterprises concession stands.
He was selling traditional and chicken gyros. Wendi stuck with the original, and I opted for the chicken because I don’t eat lamb. We would eventually take the food home and eat it while watching a little TV (some things never change).
However, while we were waiting for Ryan to prepare our food, Mark Morrison (one of the partners of Minglewood) and I struck up a conversation. He started telling me about how the distillery was able to switch over to making hand sanitizer. Because the distillery produces food-grade alcohol, it was no problem to make the switch to producing hand sanitizer. Minglewood follows the “recipe” supplied by the World Health Organization.
Minglewood has been churning out hand sanitizer 16 hours a day, he said. I wanted to go in and take photos of the hand sanitizer being made, but Mark said he could not allow me in there. However, he did take a few photos and sent them to me.
I have long wanted to visit Minglewood and check out what they did with the old ice house. However, Wendi and I don’t drink, so there is not a lot of attraction. (We did visit a distillery in Minerva during a visit a while ago.) So, it was nice to go in and purchase some hand sanitizer and see what they did inside. It is beautiful. Even if you don’t drink, stop in and check it out. It’s amazing what they did with the space.
When I purchased a 16 oz. bottle of hand sanitizer, I was informed there was a limit of one bottle. However, if I wanted, I could purchase a second one and donate it to the Wooster Police Department. It was a nice gesture, so we went ahead and helped out the PD and Minglewood.
It was a nice change of pace to get out of the house, enjoy ourselves, and act like things were normal.
We lived it up, for a while, in Ohio under Gov. DeWine’s stay-at-home order.
