Author Archives: Swistle

Hospital

It is very weird to me that if you were to think of me at all, you would imagine me going about my usual life: working at the library, doing dishes, playing Candy Crush, scrolling Twitter, fretting at the grocery store, doing laundry, procrastinating phone calls. You would not know (and would have no way of knowing) that actually I have been here at the children’s hospital with Edward since Wednesday morning. We left our house at 7:15 a.m. to drive to the big city for a morning appointment with an ENT doctor, and at that appointment the doctor checked him over and then admitted him to the hospital, and he got surgery that afternoon on an abscess in his neck.

This is his sixth abscess in 2.5 years if I am counting right, and sixth surgery (one of the abscesses didn’t need surgery; one of them needed two surgeries), and I am hoping that now we can finally start talking about PREVENTATIVE MEASURES or something, because abscesses are gross and scary and the post-surgical care involves drains/wicks that are gross and uncomfortable, and my child is getting increasingly scar-covered. I think it’s been a little difficult to figure things out because the abscesses have been far-flung: first he had a sinus abscess, so that just seemed like maybe a sinus infection gone bad; then he had one on his rear, so that seemed Crohn’s-related—but then he got one on his leg, another on his rear, and then two on his NECK?? and so I think it’s taking awhile to see this as An Abscess Issue as opposed to a collection of random unconnected situations for different specialists to deal with separately.

Anyway, this is the third day in the hospital, and I am very glad that the LAST time we were here, I made a LIST; and also that I resolved that ANY TIME we were here for a check-up on any sort of Concerning Issue I would pack a bag. So I have changes of socks/undies/shirts; I have shampoo and dry shampoo and deodorant and baby wipes; I have books and my laptop; I have chargers for everything; I have (well, had) a giant chocolate bar and a can of Pringles.

It is not happy or comfy to be in a hospital during a Covid peak, but we do not seem to be in a Covid-patient area of the hospital—not, I guess, that I’d know. But the floor is not crowded, I’m not seeing any big warning signs on doors, everyone seems normal and relaxed except that we’re all wearing masks. If you are interested, the rule here is that Edward does not have to wear a mask in his room; I have to wear one if anyone comes into the room but not when it’s just Edward and me; we both have to wear masks anytime we leave our room. Edward was given a Covid test on arrival, and was asked about his vaccination status; I was not tested or asked.

I have found that even my fretful brain is willing to go mostly into Whatcha Gonna Do mode about this. We have to be here. This air is our only option. My brain has instead turned its fretting toward Edward’s Covid booster shot, which is supposed to happen in two days. Probably I should reschedule it. We might not even be home by then. Well, we’ll probably be home by then. But they don’t want to give a vaccination to someone who just had surgery and is on antibiotics, do they? Or do they? Maybe I should give poor Edward a little break between one Medical Thing and the next. But maybe this recent hospital stay shows just how important it is to get him anything that can protect him, and it’s just a booster shot. fret fret fret fret fret fret fret [Update: I asked one of the doctors, and she said it was indeed a balancing act, and that she would give it more thought and get back to us; but that her initial thought is that he should wait until he is done with this infection, for a reason I wouldn’t have expected: it’s because we need to watch him very closely for fever, and if he got a fever from the booster, they would need him to come back to the hospital just in case it was abscess-related.]

There is no aspect of a hospital stay that you have not already heard discussed by every single stand-up comic—but it really is uncanny the way they wake you up just as soon as you go to sleep. Yesterday we had vast stretches of time in the afternoon when no one came in—and then Edward drifted off to sleep, and five minutes later someone came in to check on him. They left; a stretch of time elapsed; he drifted off again—AND SOMEONE CAME IN AGAIN. And yesterday evening, we spent a long time alone waiting to go to bed until after his vitals check, then we got into our beds and turned off the light—and WITHIN A MINUTE, someone came in; and then ten minutes later, SOMEONE ELSE CAME IN. Also, the ENT team does their rounds BEFORE DAWN and it is not my favorite alarm clock, to have six people come into the room and turn on all the lights and start asking questions. I understand there must be reasons for the timing. But.

A Quest for Non-Depressing Tall Men’s Clothing

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I am hoping to access our hive mind. I have a child who is 6’4″, male, wears a medium or large in tops but it HAS TO BE Tall sizing, absolutely HAS TO BE. And he says all his clothes depress him, and he is expressing interest in things such as lilac sweaters with daisies on them, and colorblocked pastel hoodies like from the ’90s, and Keith Haring dancing-guy shirts, and rainbow-striped sweaters, and sweaters like this one:

(image from vibeheat.com)

But I am having trouble finding these things in his size. Elizabeth has a friend who wears things of this style and she asked him where he shops, and so I got this:

(image from asos.com)

But only a certain number of their items are available in Tall sizes. And every other path I’ve gone down the last hour looking for Keith Haring hoodies/tees has led to frustration. We found a GREAT site with TONS of good stuff, including that shades-of-green sweater—but it said it had “Asian sizing,” and I know that is not going to fit a 6’4″ medium/large man.

Books: The Ten Thousand Doors of January; They Left Us Everything; The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

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Before books, I have a product to recommend. It’s my new favorite keto candy:

(image from Target.com)

Reese’s Zero Sugar. Like most keto treats, they are startlingly expensive. Some days, I would rather just wait for my next Day Off and eat regular, normal-price Reese’s peanut butter cups. But some days are dreary and bleak, and a little bit of expensive candy can help considerably.

Okay: books! I finally read The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Target link) (Amazon link).

(image from Target.com)

There were some things I didn’t like: the cutesy title; the way toward the end it seemed like it was just one thing after another, as if to meet a page requirement. But overall I liked it very much and would recommend it. I like when a book puts magic into the real world. I kept wanting to get back to reading it. I don’t try to figure things out as I’m reading, so things dawned on me gradually in a way I found pleasant. I came to like the name January.

Next I read They Left Us Everything, by Plum Johnson (Amazon link).

(image from Amazon.com)

This was a great book to get out of the library: it was about 50% interesting, and the rest I could skim and be glad I hadn’t bought it—but the part I did find interesting has continued to be interesting to me, and I’ve thought of it many times. The book is about a woman dealing with her parents’ possessions after their deaths. The part I found interesting was where she was talking about things she found and what she decided to do about them; I was also interested in the help she received from other people (it seems very appealing to have a friend come help, or to be that friend helping someone else). And I was interested that, in the end, she came down on the side of saying people shouldn’t try to clear out their own possessions before they die, but should let their children do it—which flies in the face of some of the other books/articles I’ve seen on the topic, so that’s been some food for thought.

The part I didn’t find interesting was all the Family Tree Bragging. I think she probably wrote this book in part for her own family to use as history/keepsake, so it was excusable/understandable. But I found the stories boring at best, cringey/embarrassing/basking-in-reflected-glory at worst. And it seems like it would only take one charmingly unscrupulous story-spinning ancestor to invent a whole bunch of boastful stories, and who would ever know?

I also had trouble identifying with the overall Boomer nature of the book. There are a lot of the sort of jolly stories many Boomers tell about their upbringing, which sound to my Gen X ears like disturbing emotional/physical abuse. I would love to read a memoir on this same topic written by someone from my generation, and another written by a Millennial, and so forth.

Proof-reading this, it sounds like I didn’t like the book, but I definitely did, and would recommend it! (Get it from the library, though.)

Next I read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton (Target link) (Amazon link).

(image from Target.com)

For quite awhile I had this book confused with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, a book I found mostly boring; plus, in general I’ve been avoiding books by male authors. When I finally decided I’d read it, if only to get it off my list, I found certain elements obnoxious: the dialog, for example, where someone seriously says “It will little profit you.” That’s Drama/Cape Phrasing: anyone else would say “It won’t do you any good.” Also, people in this book SNARL their words, and many of the women have TUMBLING CURLS and so forth. And there is one extended scene where the (thin) author writes some JAW-DROPPINGLY fat-phobic/anti-disability stuff that almost made me put the book down on principle, and is still making me mad. But the good plot prevailed, and soon I was having trouble stopping reading it when it was time to make dinner. I might start it over again at the beginning to see if everything makes sense now that I know what’s going on.

Grocery Store Report

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One reason I am attempting not to panic about groceries is that I often go quite early Sunday morning, when it seems reasonable to assume the shelves might be depleted from Saturday shoppers—particularly if the grocery store is having staffing issues and is low on stockers. Sometimes on Sunday I will have a series of “Oh no, they’re out of ____!! and _____!! and _____!!!” moments, one after another with rising panic, and then I will stop by again on Wednesday mid-morning and they will have plentiful supplies of all of those things. So quite possibly they had ALL those things on pallets in the back all set to put out when I was there on Sunday, and it’s just that I was Little Miss Up Before Dawn and they weren’t ready for me yet.

Still. It was looking very Early Pandemic at my grocery store. There were a lot of empty spots on shelves; a lot of shelves where the items were only one unit deep, with empty shelf behind. They’re not just low on pasta varieties anymore; the pasta shelves are nearly empty now. Pasta sauce is also weird and depleted and spread out.

They’ve been very low on orange juice, sometimes having only a couple of specialty varieties (e.g., one organic kind with extra pulp, three of the kind where it’s like orange-pineapple or orange-mango or whatever), but today they had much more of it, and they had the kind I usually get.

They had Pillsbury canned crescent rolls and Pillsbury canned cinnamon rolls again.

Still no cream cheese shortage at my store. (I’ve been hearing about national cream cheese shortages but haven’t seen it locally yet.)

Chicken nugget-type things were low on variety again.

They had SOME quick oats, but no regular rolled oats—and the quick oats were spread out and only one canister deep, and it was mostly the smaller canisters. Further down the aisle I found four canisters of regular rolled oats that had been part of an attempt to fill in another product gap, and I felt very lucky to get one, and resisted the urge to buy TWO. (I do not NEED two.)

There was no Raisin Bran Crunch, or even regular Raisin Bran—and the whole cereal aisle seemed very depleted, lots of areas where a single type of store-brand cereal was occupying a bunch of slots.

No bagged Splenda again. No baking cocoa again.

Soups looking very depleted again. Canned fruits looking depleted again.

I got the last bag of sugar-free cough drops, and the whole section was mostly empty pegs. One flavor of store-brand cough drops was filling almost all the pegs that weren’t empty.

Very low on menstrual pads, and out of the kind I usually buy.

Very low on cat litter. Very low on cat food. That whole aisle looked stressful.

Still no plain or mini M&Ms.

No regular Hershey’s syrup, just store-brand and Special Dark.

Very low on popcorn kernels: only two bags of them, plus maybe half a dozen bags of an expensive organic kind.

Frozen french fries looking a little better again—more of them, more variety. But still on the sparse side.

Still no Gardein beefless ground and no Morning Star faux-chicken nuggets.

Signs up in the produce department about difficulty getting bagged salads.

Some of this is probably just my specific grocery chain and their specific supply trucks, though: I had to pick up a prescription at Target the other day, and they had the Gardein beefless ground and regular Morning Star faux-chicken nuggets, they had plain AND mini M&Ms, they had plenty of the soups we usually get. Their site says they have Raisin Bran Crunch and Always pads and our usual cat litter. They too are out of sugar-free cough drops, though, and very low on cough drops overall.

(They also had these sweet little bowls, which I put into my cart in a green floral and a pastel floral, and then turned around and put them back because I DO NOT NEED ANY MORE LITTLE BOWLS RIGHT NOW. The kids broke, like, four little bowls during the pandemic when I didn’t feel I could go out and buy any, and it’s true that bowls were then scarce at our house and so I felt justified ordering a set of Modern Look With Elk Design bowls, and then when I COULD go out and buy bowls in person I bought maybe six more bowls, so we are ALL SET on little bowls.)

One of my Coping Thoughts is this: “Even with all the alarming gaps, this store is still VERY VERY FULL OF FOOD. There is LOTS OF FOOD here. Some of my USUAL FOODS are not here; some of my TOP-CHOICE FOODS are not here; but there is still ABUNDANT FOOD AVAILABLE.”

Bonus Alcohol Task

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Backstory that will temporarily feel irrelevant but later I will tie it in: When we moved into this house, three years ago now, Edward’s hoodie (the one he wore daily as a light jacket) disappeared—which shouldn’t have been THAT big of a deal, but I was already finding the entire move so emotional and overwhelming, and I HAAAAAATE the feeling of not being able to find something, and also WHERE COULD IT BE. I opened nearly every box, even ones that made no sense (maybe I’d lost my mind and used the hoodie as PADDING or something??), and finally gave up, thinking of it as just one more thing the new house had swallowed: money, joy, memories, coping skills, mental stability—and now Edward’s hoodie.

Finally someone thought to mention the issue within earshot of Paul, who, as it turned out, had inexplicably taken two large plastic bins and shoved into them: snowpants; several random pairs of our winter boots; some extra coats; AND EDWARD’S HOODIE—and put them in an awkward, unheated, difficult-to-access rakes/shovels/equipment-type closet in the barn where no one would ever go to put on snowpants, boots, an extra coat, or a hoodie. He had ONE SMALL SURGE of unpacking, and he somehow made A DELIBERATE CHOICE to put those things INTO BINS and then into an HIDDEN/BAFFLING PLACE; and it was even MORE unfindable because WHO WOULD EXPECT HIM TO PUT ANYTHING AWAY; and it caused me to waste SO MUCH TIME AND EFFORT for NO REASON. I found this so discouraging, so disheartening, so metaphorical, and so symbolic, I couldn’t face dealing with it; and so I took out the hoodie, and left the rest of it there (TO ROT IN HELL WHERE PAUL COULD TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR CASTING IT).

I may have mentioned before that I have an Alcohol Policy. My Alcohol Policy is this: if I have alcohol on a night I was intending NOT to have alcohol, I (with qualified exceptions) MUST do chores with that alcohol. I wish the dieting comparison didn’t spring to mind, but sadly we are part of this society whether we like it or not, so what it reminds me of is when someone on a diet might decide that they ought not to have the extra cookie—but if they DO have the extra cookie, they need to do exercise to burn it off. Though—it seems like in the case of the cookie/exercise, that’s generally considered a punishment/penance; whereas with me, and alcohol, it’s more of a feeling of let’s not WASTE the extra cheery motivation. It would be like reframing the diet thing so that you were saying let’s not WASTE the food energy of the cookie, and instead let’s use it to build strength and stamina, which is something we want to do but sometimes have trouble finding the energy for. Like that.

Tonight I had alcohol when I had planned not to have alcohol, and so I asked myself what chore I was going to do, and I decided to do the one I most dreaded, which was working on putting away Christmas. I HATE putting away Christmas. It’s a big chore, and also it’s so sad: the worst chore combination, and the perfect chore for being under the influence. Christmas dishes, Christmas mugs, assorted Christmas decor, the Melissa & Doug advent calendar—boxed up and brought to the barn. Wrapping paper and gift tags and ribbons and one stray box of Christmas cards—boxed up and brought to the barn. Empty ornament storage box brought down from the barn and put invitingly NEAR the tree at least.

Then I reached an impasse: I was not done, but the rest of the Christmas dishes/mugs were in the dishwasher. And I was not quite ready to de-ornament the tree. But I still had cheery alcohol motivation remaining.

While walking back and forth to the barn with boxes of Christmas stuff, I had noticed The Closet From the First Paragraph. I hadn’t thought of it or noticed it in literally years—but the other day Elizabeth wanted to go sledding, and was looking for snowpants, and she asked if we had any, and I Thought Of It. I sent her to go look, and she reported that the bins had not been latched closed (FOR SOME REASON) (WHYYYYY) (NO BUT WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY), and so had been infiltrated by dust and spiderwebs (JUST WEBS, I AM SURE JUST WEBS AND NOT WEB-MAKERS), so she had to borrow snowpants from her friend. I decided that alcohol and I would finally tackle this project that had been hanging over my head for three years.

And so now the snowpants and coats are in the washing machine. Items that are too small for anyone in the house AND non-spiderwebby are in the Goodwill bag, waiting to be joined by the items that are too small for anyone in the house but were spider-webby so are in the washing machine. My forgotten hot-pink polka-dotted rainboots are back in my life, though I don’t know how I can ascertain if there is anything spider-webby IN them, without putting my HAND or FOOT in there with, maybe, spiders. Elizabeth’s long-lost winter scarf is on the hook with her backpack. Several new items purchased to donate to a charity drive (where did Paul even FIND them?) are back in the donation pile. Two giant empty bins are newly available for storage, this time in a place that makes sense.

Monday

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Probably I should have done this earlier, but today was the day I told the kids to stop eating lunch at school, since they have to take off their masks for it. It’s worse than eating in a restaurant (SO MANY MORE not-in-the-same-household people, sitting SO MUCH CLOSER), but I couldn’t think of any way around it. But last week I heard on NPR it’s estimated that 92% of in-school spread is happening in the cafeteria, and today was the day I thought “It is not COMFORTABLE or PLEASANT or NORMALLY A GOOD IDEA for children to go 7 hours without eating, but it is absolutely DOABLE and SURVIVABLE and IT IS PAST TIME.” I hate this. I am trying to think of a way I could make this better/easier, like maybe cooking something that would be ready for them to eat as soon as they got home from school—something they really like, like chicken nuggets or pizza.

(Incidentally, our school is using a “connected cases” concept for identifying when they need to level up precautions, and that is interesting to think about in the context of most of the spread perhaps happening at lunch, when the school wouldn’t be aware that the cases were connected.) [Edited to add: Today the school, which in the past has been extremely specific about the EXACT number of connected cases that justify an increase in precautions (or, more often, the EXACT number of connected and unconnected cases that let them NOT do any increase in precautions), sent an email that “due to the number of clusters” (unspecified), they would be increasing precautions, and thanking us for our understanding as they continue to do their very best in these uncertain times. Oh, yes: their very best. Yes. By not requiring masks, let alone vaccines. By redefining “social distancing” so that it was three feet instead of six, so they did not need to make ANY CHANGES to classroom set-up or population. By continuing to hold in-person EVERYTHING, including things that did not need to be in-person. By caving in every way to the angry parents who wanted complete in-person schooling, absolutely as normal, with absolutely no modifications of any kind to allow that to happen more safely. Their. Very. Best.]

We heard from the principal that both twins were identified as close contacts of people (it’s a different person for each twin) who tested positive for Covid-19. [Edited to add: Today we found out they are both the close contact of another person, and it’s someone Edward eats lunch with, so my precaution, which this morning felt paranoid and over-the-top, is too late.] They are not supposed to stay home; they are not required to get a test (though the school mentions that they CAN do so 5-7 days after the exposure); they are just supposed to keep going to school, and at lunchtime keep taking off their masks and breathing over other people. If we were trying to come up with the Covid-19 equivalent of a Chicken Pox Party, we could not do better than this.

Paul took the twins and also Henry for PCR tests this weekend. The testing place (a 35-minute drive away, but they take walk-ins, unlike the pharmacies which are appointment-only and have no appointments in the next week) says we can expect to get results “within 72 hours after 5:00 p.m. on the day of test.” When we had Edward tested by this same place back when he had pneumonia, we FURTHER discovered from customer service that “within” means “after” and “after 5:00 p.m.” means “the next day.” So for example, if you get a test on Monday, you start at 5:00 p.m. on Monday and you count 72 hours so now you are at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday—and then you go to THE NEXT DAY, which is Friday, and that’s the day you can expect to get your test results, unless they are really busy with all the tests they’re doing for air travelers, and then it might be later. THIS IS NOT A WORKABLE PLAN, IN A SITUATION WHERE TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE.

Henry is now eligible for the booster shot. Did our state spring into action with giant, efficient, easily-accessible clinics, since we had PLENTY OF WARNING that this step was coming? Did they hell! The earliest appointment I could get him was two weeks away, at a pharmacy. I took it, thinking I could maybe find something sooner as places added more appointments, but no; I check every day, and there is nothing. Our state’s vaccination website is worse than unhelpful: it didn’t even find the one that was 2 weeks out, and gave a search result of only one appointment, three weeks and more than an hour’s drive away. At this point there is no justification for this level of disorganization.

I drove Rob back to his college. I was glad to see a higher percentage of people wearing their masks in the Masks Required For Entrance rest stops: when I picked him up, it was maybe 50%, and many employees weren’t wearing them; when I took him back, I would see maybe one or two people without masks, and all the employees were wearing them. (I don’t count people eating at tables in my mask-noticing, only people standing in line, in restrooms, etc.)

I paid more for the motel this time and got a room that had been cleaned, which was nice. In fact, it looked to me as if they’d replaced some things such as faucet handles, which can LOOK kind of scruffy/unclean as they get older, even if they ARE clean. I still sprayed/wiped everything down, but I believe I’ll probably be doing that for the rest of my life. I believe I will also be leaving Housecleaning a big tip for the rest of my life.

I’m almost alone in the house today, for the first time in quite awhile: everyone was home for winter break, and then Paul’s workplace advised everyone who could work from home to do so (his workplace has a vaccination requirement, and in-person limits throughout all buildings, and weekly testing, and cases are still going up). But I took today off from work when I thought I’d be driving Rob Sunday/Monday, and when we switched to Saturday/Sunday I didn’t change that plan, and now I think I will also do THAT for the rest of my life: it was very nice yesterday to come home from a somewhat harrowing drive (wet roads and temperature kept dipping below freezing) and think “No work tomorrow!” And Paul had to go into work today to deal with some equipment issues that had been piling up over the holidays, and also to get his required Covid test—and, as much as I have been urging him to stay home whenever possible, I am…not sad that the day he HAS TO go in is the same as the day I am staying home. And the kids are in school, and Rob is back at college, and William is still asleep. Even the cats aren’t in the same room with me. It’s nice.

January Pandemic Frets

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I am sad and agitated about the kids being back in school this week. Covid-19 cases went absolutely bonkers over winter break with Omicron + holiday get-togethers; and my kids go to a school where vaccinations and masks are not required, and the HVAC system is ancient and the town keeps deciding not to spend the money to repair/replace it, and nothing has been done for “social distancing” except to put up signs telling students to do it (they can’t: their desks are not six feet apart and can’t be moved six feet apart). The kids reported that there was a small uptick in mask-wearing among students, and that some of the teachers/staff who were wearing masks before (most of them were/are not) have switched to KN95s.

I have seen/heard people wondering why vaccinated people are so concerned. I will list my own concerns:

• I am worried that, because of his immunosuppressant medications, Edward’s vaccines didn’t Take, and he’s not actually protected.

• I am worried about long-term effects of Covid-19, which even mild cases can lead to.

• I am worried about the continued mutation of the virus, which is already leading to forms of the virus that are better at getting around vaccinations (AS ANYONE WHO WENT TO A SCHOOL THAT DIDN’T BAN THE TEACHING OF EVOLUTION WOULD EXPECT) and may in the future lead to other unpleasant forms.

• I am worried that maybe I can’t trust the people around me to tell me about their own infection/exposure. There are so many stories of infections happening because someone knew they were positive (or that a household member was positive) but didn’t think it was a big deal and so didn’t let other people know, and then put themselves near other people. This makes me feel like it’s exponentially harder to make my own informed decisions.

• I am worried that hospitals will be overwhelmed. My son Edward has a medical condition that means he needs medical care (both routine and emergency) more often than most people, and I worry that he’ll need care and not be able to get it—or at the minimum that we will need to factor ER overload/contagion into our decisions about what to do. But even aside from Edward, I am worried about any of us having illnesses or injuries and not being able to get medical care / needing to factor overloaded medical systems into our decisions.

• I am worried about other systems collapsing. Our country should have a better system of childcare, since literally everyone understands that parents can’t bring their children to work; but right now schools do a big chunk of that care. If schools (and of course actual childcare centers) have to close because they don’t have the staff to run them, a lot of parents are going to be in serious trouble; I am not one of those parents, but I can still worry and be scared for them, and understand what a huge problem that would be, and feel distressed for them.

• And I am worried about unvaccinated people. It is hard to figure out where the “Why do YOU care, when it doesn’t affect YOU???” point of view comes from. I have given this some thought, and I am forced to conclude that the people asking the question are confused because THEY don’t care about anything that doesn’t affect THEM personally, so it doesn’t make sense to them that other people would care. (But also: we ARE all affected by other people’s decisions/outcomes in this pandemic, so there must be additional levels of confusion going on here.)

At my library, a policy has changed. It used to be that if an employee had a Covid-positive household member, the employee could still come to work (masked, with a negative test, and staying at least six feet away from everyone else). The new policy is that an employee with a positive household member must be out of work a minimum of ten days; and that for planning purposes the absence will be assumed to be twenty days to allow for the possibility of the employee testing positive themselves on any day of those ten and needing to stay out an additional ten days for their own infection. Already two of our librarians are out, starting the day after the new policy. My supervisor is scrambling to find anyone to cover any of those hours. It feels like we are waiting for system collapse: just like the school, we can’t stay open without a certain minimum number of staff.

Also: most of us at my library don’t get paid sick time. Even the ones who do get paid sick time don’t get 10-20 days of it. The “stay away for 10-20 days” is a GOOD POLICY for limiting the spread of the virus, but it needs CORRESPONDING FINANCIAL UNDERPINNINGS to make it work. One of my co-workers said she literally can’t miss 10 days of work, let alone 20, and still pay her bills / keep her house. She said this policy was an incentive to lie, or to avoid testing.

While I was writing this, the kids came home from school. Elizabeth reports that one kid in one of her classes went to the nurse mid-day, tested positive for Covid, and went home. She overheard another kid from another of her classes talking in the hallway to friends about how she was being sent home because of a positive Covid test. A friend has suddenly started wearing a mask after not wearing one, and it turns out it’s because the friend’s sibling tested positive. Another friend went home with a cough and a fever and a negative test. Elizabeth said a few kids just noped-out mid-day, calling parents and getting themselves dismissed because things are going too poorly.

I stress/comfort-ordered prism duct tape for sealing up care packages (FOR PEOPLE I MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO SEE IN PERSON), and some pretty green 10×13 envelopes for the next ten years of our tax stuff.

New Year’s Eve 2021 / New Year’s Day 2022

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New Year’s Eve went well! I was successful in avoiding last year’s issue of discovering I was doing all the work while everyone else had a nice relaxed time. It meant I had to keep delegating/instructing, because no one leapt in to help unasked, so it was better than it could have been but not as good as it could be.

For dinner we had homemade bread (a dear friend gave us a jar of the ingredients plus a recipe for Christmas, and Paul baked it), with homemade jam (a dear friend gave us a jar for Christmas) and homemade apple butter (Paul’s sister gave us a jar for Christmas), which made me think this could be a fun friend-group Christmas gift idea: each person buy one thing that would work well for New Year’s Eve dinner a week later. We also had: cheese and crackers; grapes and blueberries and watermelon (the grapes are tradition, the blueberries and watermelon passed the “What looks good in the produce section today?” test); spinach dip as another option to go with the homemade bread (I like this jarred kind); potato chips and French onion dip (Paul re-learned that he doesn’t like the jarred kind and needs to make the kind where you mix the powder with the sour cream; he made a mental note for next year, but I’ll make a written note here). I had the kids help me put everything out on the table, and we ate while watching one of the Christmas movies we didn’t get around to watching this year.

Then I had the kids help clear everything away, and we had a little break before starting the second stage, which is Party Snacks and Staying Up Late. I had Paul make the first round of oven snacks, because he is the one who MOST loves mozzarella sticks. While he did that, I had the kids bring out the other snacks: Pringles, Doritos, M&Ms, chocolate-covered pretzels, several kinds of odd popcorn (Oreos, Butterfinger, Snickers) found at the grocery store, fudge-covered mint Oreos, fudge-covered Nutter Butters, savory pretzel twists, peanut-butter-filled pretzels. It seemed to me that the kids did not Absolutely Demolish these snacks the way they have in previous years; it could be that they’re getting older and less thrilled by such snacks; or maybe they have not yet learned, as I have, to go light on the first course in order to save room for the second.

I made pizza rolls next, and never got around to making the egg rolls: I asked everyone, and no one felt strongly about having them, and I didn’t feel strongly about having them, so we skipped them; I’ll make them as part of dinner another night. Paul went to bed, and the kids were sort of lounging lethargically as if no one could think of anything to do and maybe everyone was feeling like New Year’s Eve was not as fun as it used to be; so I thought about what I would like to do, and then asked if everyone would like to watch one of the Christmas movies I’d meant to watch on my own this year but hadn’t gotten around to (The Holiday, with Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz), and everyone said yes, and we did that, and it was fun.

By the time the movie was over, it was time for the last half hour of the countdown on TV. I’ve thought of the Dick Clark New Year’s Rockin’ Eve as The Standard, but the last few years it’s been disappointing and odd (it feels to me as if Ryan Seacrest wanted this job very badly and then discovered he doesn’t like it but now he feels stuck with it; and his co-hosts are often yelly and unfunny and trying very hard to be Fun!! and Cool!!), so next year I think we’ll try something else, or we’ll at least channel-flip to see what else is available.

My resolution last year was to buy more fun clothing. I was thinking along the lines of all the fun t-shirts available in the kids department, with a picture of a llama or a big flower or whatever, and how I wished those were available for adults as well. Through a combination of Christmas, birthday, and gin-inspired impulse ordering, I succeeded admirably in this task. It is unfortunate that most of these ended up being from Amazon, since I am trying to decrease Amazon purchases; but Amazon is the place where I can find these shirts and have them fit me, as opposed to having size choices of “unisex” (i.e., men’s fit, which does not look nice on me) or else “women’s” (i.e., babydoll/juniors fit, order two to three sizes up and STILL too tight and too short) as on many other fun t-shirt sites. For size comparison, I order a XL Tall in t-shirts from Old Navy, and I order a 2XL in the Amazon t-shirts (I can also wear the XL, but it’s more fitted than I want for wearing to work). Some of the acquisitions:

(image from OldNavy.com)

Thermal long-sleeved shirts (sold as pajama shirts) to wear under t-shirts, for cute patterned arms. (Link to individual shirts; link to two-packs.) These are getting pretty thoroughly sold out in most patterns/sizes, so I will try to remind us all of this idea next year when they are freshly in stock again.

(image from Amazon.com)

Flamingo t-shirt.

(image from Amazon.com)

Tulip t-shirt.

(image from Amazon.com)

Red rose t-shirt.

(image from Amazon.com)

Butterfly t-shirt.

(image from Amazon.com)

Daisy t-shirt.

(image from Amazon.com)

Retro Robin Hood t-shirt.

(image from Amazon.com)

Scandinavian birds t-shirt. (This one is a different brand than the other shirts. I ordered an XL, I think based on reading reviews, and that was the right fit.)

(image from RocketDog.com)

Rocket Dog shoes in Daisy and Rainbow.

My resolutions for 2022:

• Continue to buy fun clothes. That was a good idea and led to a lot of happy clothing.

• This one is hard to express, but I have noticed a LOT of areas where I have accidentally gotten in the habit of deferring to Paul’s way of doing things, even when it negatively affects me AND there is no reason for it except that it’s what he prefers—while HE does not make the same adjustments/deferrals toward me, and instead lives his life centering his own preferences and not feeling weird about that. Just for one single example: he prefers to go to bed about an hour before I do, AND he prefers us to go to bed at the same time. And for some reason, this has resulted in me following BOTH his preferences, and so I lie awake night after night listening to him snore until I can finally fall asleep. But…he does not lie in bed awake listening to ME snore when he wakes up EARLIER than I do, so that we can get OUT of bed at the same time! Nor does he seem to feel any inclination/obligation to stay up until the time I would like to go to bed. So why don’t I go to bed when I would like to go to bed, instead of when HE would prefer me to go to bed? It is a mystery, and one I intend to work on noticing and adjusting in the coming year, in many many areas of life.

• Re-write recipe cards, especially for important recipes. I noticed at Thanksgiving that one reason I had trouble turning over some of the work to others is that there are a lot of things I Just Know about the recipes, but have not actually written on the actual cards. (I’ve done the small, easy-to-write corrections; this is more about the complicated or extensive kind of corrections, or the lengthier descriptions of HOW to do a particular step I Just Know how to do.) The cards need to be re-written—not only so other people can help, but also so the recipes won’t be wrong/mystifying when I’m no longer around to make them. I don’t know if I can make myself do this, but putting it as a resolution may help.

Grocery Store Report

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We haven’t had a Grocery Store Report in awhile, in large part because I hadn’t felt the need for them: pretty much everything was in stock, pretty much everything seemed back to normal. I even went back to letting Paul come with me on shopping trips, because we were both vaccinated and because I was no longer feeling like we were in emergency mode, where we should aim for the absolute lowest possible number of people in the store.

Now I am getting pretty twitchy again. A nearby city has put a mask mandate back into effect, so I will be shopping at the branch of our grocery store that’s there, rather than the one in our city where there is no mask mandate. Even with the mask mandate, there are people in the store who are not wearing masks, which may provoke me into regrettable behavior. It’s not that I think grocery store employees should have to enforce mask-wearing (though I do think the store managers should do so, just as they would presumably do if a customer came into the store shirtless/shoeless/smoking), it’s that I CANNOT TAKE ON BOARD that there are people who, even disagreeing with a mask mandate, would REFUSE TO COMPLY AND YET STILL SHOP IN THE STORE. Get OUT!!! Get OUT OF THE STORE if you don’t want to wear a mask!!! TAKE YOUR BUSINESS ELSEWHERE, that’ll show them!! If you DO come into the store, then follow the RULES! Follow the RULES!!!!!!!!

*pant pant*

Anyway. The stores have also been extra crowded, probably because of the holidays, and so I am back to that old feeling of being too stressed to be able to concentrate or make on-the-spot decisions. I have to work from a list (on one trip I tried to buy snacks for stockings, without deciding ahead of time exactly which snacks I’d be buying, and it turned out I could not handle that); I sometimes have to circle back if an aisle is too crowded (CROWDED WITH NON-MASK-WEARING PEOPLE) and/or if the store is out of something and I can’t figure out what to do about it. I don’t think I can have Paul keep coming with me, not only because it’s seeming like we should go back to the “fewest possible people in the store” philosophy but also because it’s too distracting to have to guide him (he is a CART-SWOOPER so I have to give him warning about where we’re going or else he’ll continually overshoot and then SWOOP back, but I don’t really…WANT to do that, I just want to calmly steer the cart myself).

Here are some of the things my store has been out of for several trips:

• Plain M&Ms. They are also low on many other kinds of candy: the Twizzles and Snickers are spread out across the whole length of a shelf, to make it look full. But I’ve specifically noticed plain M&Ms because we always get them for New Year’s, so they’ve been on my list. We did finally find two bags of them this morning—but there were ONLY two bags.

• Mozzarella sticks. None available in any brand, for weeks. I did find some today at another branch of the same store.

• Pasta varieties. For weeks now, each brand of pasta has had only a couple of varieties available, and those have been spread across the shelf to make it look full. In the Prince brand I usually buy, there is only angel hair and tri-color rotini. In the store-brand, there is only radiatore and rigatoni.

• The bread shelves have been VERY stripped-looking. We’ve still been able to get the breads we want, but there are often vast empty spaces on the shelves.

• Jalapeno peppers. And when they DO have them, they tend to be HUGE, which seems like the opposite of how it would be: I’d think they’d be harvesting them SMALL to get them to the store sooner. But perhaps since they’re sold by the pound it makes more sense to let them grow longer. Or perhaps the issue is that fewer trucks are going, so the peppers have longer to grow in between pick-ups. I know nothing about vegetable economics.

• Coleslaw mix, though perhaps it’s a fairly seasonal-demand item and there’s not much demand for it in winter. I was waiting for another shopper to finish looking in that section so I could get some coleslaw, and then I heard her asking an employee if there was any coleslaw, so we were apparently of the same mind. The employee said no, that there hadn’t been any on the last truck, and the next truck wasn’t coming until tomorrow, and she didn’t know for sure there would be coleslaw on that one either.

• The kinds of frozen vegetables I usually buy. There seem to be a lot of the steam-in-the-bag kind, but not the regular bagged kinds. This has been the case since well before Thanksgiving, which is when I noticed I couldn’t buy frozen corn (except the steam-in-the-bag kind) or the Birdseye Classic Vegetable Blend.

• The kinds of frozen fruit I usually buy. I use frozen raspberries for a Jell-O salad I make at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I usually buy the store brand, and there have been NO store-brand frozen raspberries since I started checking in October. I finally bought a name brand. We’ve also had trouble finding other frozen fruits (peaches, blueberries), especially store-brand.

• Haribo peach gummies

And there have also been intermittent issues where for example it looks as if an entire truck has been delayed: the dairy section almost completely empty of milk and cream, with only smallish sections of more specialty products (buttermilk, small cartons of organic milk, etc.) stocked. Or we’ll find that just about everything on our list happens to be out of stock, but it’s all there the next time we go. Just weird things, increasing my twitchiness.

I have heard reports of a nationwide cream cheese shortage, but our store has been fully stocked. I bought two cream cheeses just in case.

How have your stores been? Have you been noticing things getting nerve-wracking again, or does everything still seem normal?

December 28

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That last post was such a bummer considering how many good things there are:

• All five kids at home, staying up late playing games together, merry laughter and merry swearing

• THREE of the kids are getting Covid booster shots tomorrow (the remaining two kids are not yet eligible)

• More Christmas cards than usual this year

• SO MANY DELICIOUS CHRISTMAS TREATS IN THE HOUSE

• Mayyyybe some Christmas clearance shopping in the near future?

• A pair of jeans Elizabeth wanted for Christmas was TOO BIG—but I despaired about exchanging them, because when I’d ordered them, they’d ONLY been available in that size (which I’d thought was SO LUCKY because it was HER SIZE)—but when I looked again after Christmas, they were also available in the two next sizes down, so I was able to exchange them, and they are on their way

• A new baby coming to our extended family in the new year

• I finally feel like I am not run off my feet with busyness/stress, and there is time again to play Candy Crush and read books and not resent everyone in my household

• Even though my recent motel stay was…not great, cleanliness-wise, and it appears that’s not a rare experience these days, I am still looking forward to my upcoming trip to take Rob back to college in a couple of weeks

• Unasked, Paul took my car to have snow tires put on it, which involved a fair amount of Figuring Out How To Do That, since we’ve never done that before, and also involved Researching the Best Snow Tires and price-checking them at various locations and then ordering them, and then involved TWO HOURS of waiting even though he’d made an appointment

• Also unasked, he ordered a timered plug for the Christmas lights, so that they would come on automatically and go off automatically; and he set it up so that they would come on a little too early and go off a little too late, which is exactly perfect; this improved the quality of my life

Also, New Year’s Eve is coming! I love New Year’s Eve! But thank goodness I made a note that LAST New Year’s Eve it felt as if I was running back and forth between the living room and the kitchen with snacks while everyone else relaxed and enjoyed themselves, because that COULD NOT HAPPEN AGAIN. Instead, this year I am buying a bunch of things that anyone here can help put out on a table in the living room (Pringles, grapes and whatever other fruits look good, the frosted animal crackers that somehow became a tradition, M&Ms, Doritos, Ruffles and baby carrots and French onion dip, bakery bread and spinach dip, cheese and crackers), and I am only going to make a few Oven Things that I personally want: Totino’s pizza rolls, mini eggs rolls, and mozzarella sticks (IF we can find any! the past two weeks our grocery store has had NO MOZZARELLA STICKS OF ANY BRAND). If anyone wants anything else, they can feel free to make it themselves.

Do you want to talk about holiday loot—like, good gifts you received? Not that that is the true meaning of anything. But on the other hand, loot is fun!