Category Archives: pandemic

Exhaustion/Fretfulness Continues; Getting Good Value Out of Small Amounts of Motivation

I continue to be exhausted and fretful and overwhelmed. We went back to Urgent Care for Edward’s abscess, and he DID make progress, which was encouraging if it lasts: the doctor put in a much smaller wick, and said after 48 hours he can take it out and let the incision heal, and start taking showers and so forth. But this is with the warning that things may then get worse again, and then, because we’d let the incision heal, it would mean making a new incision. The doctor also gave him three more days’ worth of antibiotics, so I have to go into the pharmacy again to pick those up. Is there no way to modify this system? I AM GOING SO MANY TIMES INTO SO MANY PLACES WHERE PEOPLE ARE SICK. [Edited to add: we picked up the prescription, and it’s for the same medication but half the strength, which matches what is printed on the discharge papers, so it’s not a pharmacy error. So now I have to figure out if I want to somehow track down that Urgent Care doctor on a holiday weekend to see if it was a mistake or if he wanted a lower dose (which surely he would have mentioned, rather than just saying he was going to extend the prescription by three days), or just give Edward the lower dose, or give him the dose he’s been taking but for one and a half days instead of three.]

Also, the Urgent Care doctor said that when we got home (this would have been Friday around lunchtime) we should call the pediatrician and make sure we got a follow-up appointment for the next week. I called as soon as we got home, and got put on hold, and after an hour of waiting I gave up and hung up and had some lunch. I waited another hour or so, then called again, got put on hold again, waited another hour, and hung up. This is a fully automated system, so it isn’t as if I can hang up and call back and tell the receptionist what’s going on; all I can do is listen to the 5-minute repeating loop of advertisements for the same medical center I am currently on hold for, and wonder if something is wrong with the system, or if they’re that busy, or if they’re closed but forgot to turn off the system, or am I hanging up 15 seconds before the nurse would have come onto the line.

Meanwhile, the same day I took Edward back to Urgent Care, I dropped the cat off for his ultrasound at around 8:30. The vet’s office called around noon to say I could come pick him up now, but that the vet wouldn’t be able to call to talk to me until late afternoon. I waited all afternoon and into the evening (I know doctors often make calls after their last patient of the day), fretting as I made dinner that she would call right in the middle of that and I would have to leave things stranded, but she never called. Now we’re in a long holiday weekend, and the cat doesn’t have the antibiotics the vet mentioned, or the subcutaneous fluids she mentioned, and I don’t know what the ultrasound showed. I’d thought at least we would have information at this point, even if it was very bad news. Instead we are not only still waiting, but also wondering if mistakes were made: like, maybe someone forgot to put our file in the vet’s call pile, and when she called she was going to have us come back to pick up the antibiotics, or whatever.

And Edward has his MRI appointment on Monday, and they haven’t called to confirm it or to give the instructions about fasting, so I’m wondering if maybe it was canceled and no one told us? We made the appointment before the pandemic, and there were a couple of other appointments, such as with the orthodontist, where we got an email saying all appointments were canceled and they’d be calling individually to confirm cancellation and reschedule, but then we never got a call. You’re tempted right now to tell me I can call the hospital and ask, and I know I can: the fretful/overwhelming part is that I feel like I’m being expected to manage something that someone else should be managing. AND I AM ALREADY DOING SO MUCH PHONE STUFF AND PHONE WAITING. [Edited to add: The MRI department called a few hours after I wrote this, and they confirmed the appointment and pre-registered him and told us about the fasting. Whew.]

And a few days ago I cancelled two routine dentist appointments that were scheduled for next week, one appointment for immunosuppressed Edward but the other for Henry who has braces and could really use the cleaning—because EVERYWHERE I was seeing news that Covid-19 cases were SKYROCKETING; and also because the appointments were for just a couple days after the July 4th weekend when so many people would be getting together and causing further skyrocketing; and also because I hadn’t heard anything from the dentist yet about whether they were still acting as if the pandemic was in progress or whether they were in the “Hey, we’re legally allowed to be open, so the pandemic is over and everything is back to normal!” category; and also because I had just been to Urgent Care where the registration nurse took off her mask to chat at length with the screening nurse, and then a different nurse took us back to a room and said “Oops, I forgot my face shield! I can tell because I can SEE for a change! Ha ha!” and then continued working with us, without going to get the face shield; so I was feeling as if it didn’t matter WHAT the protocols were ANYWHERE, it DEFINITELY wasn’t worth the risk of having someone putting their hands and breath right into my child’s unmasked nose and mouth for 45 minutes for just a routine cleaning, especially after that same someone could have spent the weekend getting together with large groups of people but not yet realize they’d been infected. And I felt so, so, so much better after I cancelled the appointments. So much better! So relieved! Until then, over the days following the cancellation, I was seeing EVERYWHERE that the dentist was considered safe, and that furthermore dentist appointments should be done NOW RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW because soon they won’t be safe; and then I got a belated letter from our dentist explaining their protocols, which sound pretty much like what you’d expect in an operating room, and made me feel like the appointments would have been absolutely fine and I was being ridiculous. It feels like every decision I make is wrong.

And the electric bill came, and it is MORE THAN TWICE what it was last year at this time, even though the average daily temperature has been four degrees lower, and I can think of nothing to account for this. We didn’t add several large new appliances, or any new appliances. We didn’t set the a/c lower. We have only 1/7th more people here compared to last year at this time. The water heater is oil, not electric, so it’s not the increased laundry or showers. [Edited to add: Paul has gotten into this mystery, and is now doing things like changing filters, plugging an electricity-measuring device into various things, and so forth.]

And no one at our house is even seriously ill! No one in our extended family is seriously ill! And I don’t have little kids, or a full-time job, and we haven’t lost our primary source of income! My stressors are LOW, relatively speaking, and I still feel like I am having trouble coping. I am trying to imagine the impact of these stress levels on all of us, over time. It seems like it is not going to be good.

Anyway. I can’t remember if I’ve said that recently my GERD/reflux, which is normally easily controlled with a daily dose of omeprazole and hasn’t required me to modify my food/drink intake at all, has been BEYOND acting up, to the point where out of desperation I have cut out COFFEE, and also most alcohol, and also have been trying to eat smaller meals. What a time for this. I mean, it makes sense that the stress and exhaustion would increase the stomach acid, but on the other hand at the very time I most need coffee and alcohol and big hearty sustaining meals! Why, body, why! (Also: because the way I experience GERD is not as Classic Acidic Heartburn Feelings but instead as a persistent cough and a feeling of heaviness in my chest and a feeling of having difficulty breathing ((before the diagnosis, I’d thought I was developing asthma)), I have been getting a lot of laundry done as I prepare the family for my Imminent Death from What I Thought Was GERD But Was In Fact Covid-19.)

Without my usual housecleaning method of maintaining a pleasant level of tipsiness as I spend an evening cheerfully cleaning, the household cleanliness is diving, which further increases stress. I have been relying very heavily on Well, What CAN You Do and on Just Do One Thing. I have also added a method that doesn’t always work, but CAN work if employed carefully, which is to try to get VALUE out of my very limited motivation. This is the very thing that can backfire, and in fact attempting this method is what originally resulted in the development of the “Well, what CAN you do?” alternate plan, because sometimes trying to choose/do the most important thing sends me into a complete fit in which I can do nothing, NOTHING, and it’s crucial to instead be able to just do whatever I feel I can cope with, and let those little manageable less-important things bring down the Household Squalor level in their own way.

But sometimes, if I wake up to another day where I think it’s likely I’ll barely have the oomph to make sure my Candy Crush streaks are kept up to date, it’s better to have a plan to use my limited motivation to tackle one thing that has been driving me more crazy than anything else. FOR EXAMPLE. Our bathroom has one of those shower fittings where two big pieces of shower surround were brought in and snapped together, meaning there’s a slight gap between them, causing an ENDLESS WAR ON MILDEW. (IS THERE NO WAY TO MODIFY THIS SYSTEM. This is like how so many metal things in bathrooms are made of a kind of metal that rusts/corrodes if exposed to moisture. DID NO ONE THINK AHEAD.) From the toilet, there is an excellent view of this mildewy shower gap. So that many times a day, including first thing in the morning and last thing at night, I see the mildew gap and it makes me feel tired and wan, and like I can’t manage anything, and like the housework is beyond my control. Then I wash my hands, and I notice the gunkiness building up around the little gap under the faucet handles. Many times a day, this happens.

And so in the interest of getting the best VALUE for my cleaning time, this morning before showering I got up and dealt with both of those things. Maybe that’s it for the day, maybe I won’t do any more cleaning, but every time I use the bathroom I will notice that those things have been handled. For like a week until they need to be done again.

Exhausted and Fretful

This post has a fair amount of medical stuff in it, if you’d rather not.

At the very end of last week, Edward developed an infection that, after Urgent Care evaluated it and sent us on to the Emergency Room for a CAT scan, turned out to be an abscess that needed draining. It was a brutal process. He was shouting and crying while pitifully apologizing for doing so. There was a scalpel, there was rinsing out, and then there was putting gauze into the wound, leaving a little tail of it out to keep the incision from healing in case there was more draining. He was given IV antibiotics, and a prescription for a week of oral antibiotics.

So already that would have been a tiring day, emotionally and physically. But doing it during a pandemic, going to two separate medical facilities, breathing and talking through masks, being close to health care workers, breathing that air for hours, worrying that handling this medical situation would result in a more dire medical situation—even more stressful.

And then he had to go BACK to Urgent Care a few days later, to have the wound checked. The hope was that at that point the gauze could be removed and a bandage could be put on and it could be over—but it was not quite done, so the gauze was taken out of the open wound, and fresh gauze was put in, and there was more crying.

And we have to go back to Urgent Care AGAIN, today or tomorrow, and they might finally take out the gauze and let the wound heal, or we might do another cycle of gauze/check, or the doctor might find the abscess was not fully removed and there will have to be another incision and more rinsing and more gauze. Back to the medical center again and again and again; contact with health care workers again and again and again. During a pandemic.

He hasn’t been able to shower since Saturday; he’s always in a certain amount of pain from having the wound still open; he’s grossed out by having it still open; he can’t comfortably move around; he feels grim and grubby, and he’s dreading each next step, and it makes it worse not to know how many more steps there are. He’s lost several pounds, and he can’t afford to lose any. I’m fretful and exhausted, and worrying about the next steps too, and worrying that one or both of us will be exposed to Covid-19 during all of this. I’m also worried because he was due to get his Remicade infusion this week, but it’s had to be postponed to next week.

 

Meanwhile, one of our cats, the one with big paws, has gone from his usual weight of 11-12 pounds (he’s a large-framed cat) to 7 pounds 12 ounces at his appointment this week; we called for the appointment two weeks earlier when he was down to 9 pounds, but they have limited staffing because of the pandemic, and this week was the earliest they could see him.

They did blood work, urine tests, and x-rays. They found a bunch of things, but nothing yet that explains the weight loss. He’ll have an ultrasound tomorrow to see what the deal is with his mismatched kidneys. It would be pretty good news to find that they’re differently-sized because one of them has shut down. (The bad news would be to find out one of them is bigger because of a tumor.) But his bloodwork isn’t showing the serious news the vet said she’d expect to see. (I’m worried this means it’s more likely to be cancer.)

The three times I’ve had a cat with a major medical issue, each time the cat was 16 years old when we heard the diagnosis, and 16 years is a pretty nice full life for a cat, and so each time I’ve had them put down rather than pursuing expensive treatment. But this cat is only 9 years old, and the dear favorite of Elizabeth, who calls him her son. And you know how when you get a larger tax refund than you were expecting, you try to guess whether your car will need an expensive repair or whether a major appliance will go? This time our cat broke.

Again: so much more exhausting to handle during a pandemic. There are the different procedures at the vet’s office (calling from the parking lot, speaking to a vet tech over the phone, then leaving the cat carrier in the breezeway), and it means talking to the vet over the phone rather than in her reassuring presence. (I’m GLAD they’re doing this, but it still makes it more stressful.) And they may want to show me how to give the cat subcutaneous fluids, which I am very willing to learn how to do, but it’s stressful to need to go inside and have someone show me (though easier knowing they’ve been keeping people out of the building as much as possible).

 

Today I went to the grocery store, and I made two trips into the store because I wanted to get in there before the Fourth of July weekend and then not have to go for awhile. Considering all the posts I saw about Memorial Day get-togethers and Father’s Day get-togethers, I think it’s likely there will be a ton of Fourth of July get-togethers, and I don’t want to have to shop at all in the days between the time people are exposed and the time they start to show symptoms.

But we still have to go to Edward’s Remicade appointment and MRI appointment next week. My hope is that we will be done with those appointments before all the people start arriving at those medical centers from Fourth of July exposures—and that none of the doctors and nurses and technicians we see are people who went to a Fourth of July get-together.

Emails with an Ex 2

I come from a Mike Pence-y kind of Christian background, the kind where it is understood that the apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Thessalonians about “avoiding the appearance of evil” in order to explain why teenage girls can’t have platonic male friends in their rooms and adult men shouldn’t be alone with their female co-workers. So I was a little worried when I wrote the Emails with an Ex post that some of the lingering effects of such an upbringing might be seeping through, and that I might come across as wayyyyyyy overthinking a situation that most people would be way less unnecessarily hand-wringy about. But I needn’t have worried!

If you remember, the two options were: (1) maybe not respond to the news about his not-doing-well marriage yet, and just respond to everything else for now, or (2) respond to it, but make it neutral and unencouraging and something his wife could definitely read. But some commenters went for the exciting and not-on-the-table Option Three, which looked something like:

Swistle’s Ex-Boyfriend, writing the way he has once or twice a year for decades: *news about Kid 1, and a request for my input on that kid’s relationship with a kid from a strict Christian family like he remembers mine was; news about Kid 2 and a photo of that kid in a sport uniform; general chatting about how the pandemic has affected their city and their household, and a mention of how he might coincidentally be moving soon to a different, safer city, because his marriage isn’t going well; an update on a health issue he told me about last time, plus news about a new health issue; update on his job; casual, normal sign-off*

Swistle: “NEVER CONTACT ME AGAIN.” *blocks him on Facebook, filters his email address to trash, never explains why, lets him wonder forever what terrible misunderstanding occurred*

 

My goodness, how thrilling! I can think of no better way to take a slightly delicate situation and turn it into a totally unnecessary GIANT DRAMA FIREBALL. So…I mean, obviously I’m not doing that! Clearly there was some miscommunication involved, perhaps combined with misunderstanding (Paul ((not the apostle Paul but my own Paul)) wondered if this is the kind of thing where it’s nearly impossible for empathetic people not to picture THEMSELVES and their OWN exes, instead of the actual people involved), perhaps combined with some of the same type of upbringing I grew up with—but this is not a threatening, weird relationship with someone who is smoldering with feelings for me. If he DOES have any lingering feelings, he has long since stopped expressing them to me, at which point they became Not My Business, which is as it should be. If he WERE to someday cross a line to the point where I needed to end the friendship, I would certainly explain WHY before throwing a smoke bomb and vanishing forever!

Back when neither of us were married, when we were so young our frontal lobes hadn’t even finished developing, he was indeed rather persistent about thinking/saying that we should get back together: our break-up was his fault, and when he went on to date other people, he found he very much regretted his choices—but by then I had gotten over him and felt nothing but relief to be just friends. Even at his most persistent, I didn’t feel threatened or in peril of any sort, emotional or otherwise; it was just kind of exasperating and pitiful, that’s all. After I was brutally direct and clear with him about exactly how zero our chances were of getting back together, he thanked me for it, and said he hadn’t been able to move on while thinking there was still hope, but now he could. And then he did.

He does still say little things from time to time, nothing that would have to be a line-crossing thing between every set of old exes—but he is as I’ve mentioned a little bit dumb, and also he’s the kind of guy who likes truly sappy romantic movies/songs (the movie Somewhere in Time with Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve; any Mariah Carey song), and talk-show episodes about high school sweethearts who reunite in a nursing home after being widowed, and news stores about couples married 70 years who die within a few minutes of each other—so I just like to make sure I don’t give him any fodder for that mill, that’s all. Plus, I like to make sure I justify his wife’s trust, and of course Paul’s trust, so that everyone feels comfortable with this friendship I enjoy having as part of my life.

There seemed to be some concern that any trouble with his marriage meant I was in some sort of new, fresh danger: that he would now suddenly escalate things, or that he would want to lean on me during the divorce, or that he would have feelings/expectations. I am not sure I can adequately express how calm and unstressed I feel about being able to handle any of those things if they did happen. Just for example, let’s say he wanted me to give him tons of attention and support during his divorce. Doing that doesn’t appeal to me at all, and I don’t feel any obligation or pressure to do that, and I don’t feel any stress about the idea of saying so to him. (Note: but he has not asked for that, and he hasn’t escalated contact.) Or let’s say he started suddenly pressuring me to leave my long marriage and be with him, now that he was free: doing that doesn’t appeal to me at all, and hearing it wouldn’t please me, and I feel no stress at the idea of telling him to stop being stupid, and I feel fully capable of figuring out what to do next if he DIDN’T stop being stupid. (Note: but he has not said anything of the sort, and he did not give the news in an even remotely flirty or inappropriate or hopeful way.) Going to DEFCON 2 because of the possibility that he MIGHT do some of these things feels like perhaps this pandemic has us all in a heightened state of emotions right now.

 

ANYWAY. If you want an update, what I DID do was write back to him saying I was sorry to hear he and his wife were struggling, and that I hoped things would work out for the best. I included that in a whole normal email with updates about my kids, and general chatting about how the pandemic has affected our city and my household, and an update about my job, and an update about a health situation, and a response about his kid’s issue dating a strict Christian.

 

Well. Maybe let’s talk about something else now, maybe not about exes! Actually, no: let’s still talk about exes. I would like to hear LOTS OF STORIES from other people who have a nice, friendly, non-fraught relationship with an ex! It can be your own story, or a story about someone you know. It seems like we could stand a little more normalizing of that sort of thing.

Edwardian

Edward was throwing up in the night, and first of all I would like to say how lovely it is to be at the stage of life where that is something I generally find out about in the morning, rather than having to clean barf out of carpeting and out from between crib railings and out of a child’s hair at 2:00 in the morning. Barf laundry is some of the worst laundry.

But illness is still concerning. The symptoms don’t make me worry about Covid-19, but I do wonder how he would have caught ANY illness considering he’s been nowhere and seen no one. A quick look at my CONTACT CALENDAR tells me that our most recent contact was the guy who came to give an estimate on a replacement water heater; he was here for several minutes on Friday, but he wore a mask and Paul reported that the worker pointedly didn’t touch anything, waited for Paul to open the basement door and so forth. Paul went into his office the day before that, but saw almost no one, and everyone is wearing masks and trying to keep it at one person per room, and his office has one of those machines that atomizes (is that the science verb I want here?) disinfectant and sprays it nightly, after the cleaners go through and do the newly-intensive pandemic cleaning. And none of the rest of us have been sick, and we can’t think of anything Edward ate that none of the rest of us ate, so I feel like we’re gradually ruling out food poisoning and stomach viruses, or at least putting them lower on the suspicion list at this point.

Since the symptoms are digestive, and since so far only Edward has them, that makes me suspect something to do with his Crohn’s disease. I further suspect that this is because of relative inactivity: he used to walk to and from school each day, plus walk around the school building at points throughout the day, plus have gym class—and now he’s mostly in a nest on the couch with a book or his phone. He is the Indoors Type, and that is a fine and worthy type to be, we don’t all have to be hearty and outdoorsy and covered in ticks/sunburn—but physical activity seems particularly useful for digestive health, and so I think I am going to have to work harder to make sure he is doing more of it. He can do indoorsy versions, such as Dance Dance Revolution or whatever.

In the meantime, I am glad we keep cans of ginger ale and Coke on hand for just this sort of sudden issue (I’ve found the little bottles eventually lose fizz if they sit too long before being needed, but the cans don’t seem to), and that we have saltines and applesauce, and we have bread for toast. He is…well, he is in a nest on the couch, but when he feels a little better we will start wheeling him out into the sunshine, or whatever used to be done with Edwardian invalids. (That was an unintentional play on words with his name. I searched lightly online to see why I associate the Edwardian period with invalids being pale and covered in blankets and reading books on the couch and being wheeled into the sunshine, and I still don’t know. Perhaps it is just a time period when the word “invalid” was being used. Or perhaps there was a pandemic near that time that left many people chronically ill.)

Keep Track for the Contact Tracers, and for Others, and for Ourselves

The nature of this pandemic/virus means that many of the things we can do to reduce/slow its spread are things we do for the benefit of other people, and we have to hope that other people will also do those things for us. Mask-wearing is the clearest example of this: we wear masks to reduce the harm we might do to others, and we have to hope others will return the favor by wearing masks to reduce the harm they might do to us. If we are all willing to do something that benefits others, we all end up benefiting our own selves—a beautiful, almost fairy-tale example of the theoretical natural consequence of following the golden rule.

Other choices are less obvious than masks, but similarly expose people other than ourselves to more/less risk. It’s not possible to increase or decrease only our own risk: we are deciding for ourselves and also for everyone else we come into contact with: servers, clerks, stylists, caregivers, other customers/participants, friends, family, co-workers, healthcare workers, fellow patients, people we live with or visit or take care of—and also all the people THOSE people come into contact with. And all of those people are making decisions for themselves that in turn affect us.

This is why, if you’re not already writing down where you go, and when (day and approximate time), and who you have contact with (servers, friends, family, etc.), I strongly recommend starting. It’s another thing we can do that benefits others and also ends up benefiting ourselves. If we ourselves get sick, we have a nice clear record for the contact tracer, so they can see who they need to get in touch with to let them know they’ve been exposed, which can be crucial and time-/life-saving information. If someone we know gets sick, or a place we visited is traced as the center of an outbreak, we have at least the start of the information we need to help us determine if we’re likely to have been exposed. If contract tracers turn out to be part of the sensible plans made by scientists and health professionals, but not by the U.S. government, then we are doing what we can to handle it ourselves. And we save ourselves the stressy and inaccurate scramble of trying to recreate our schedule after the fact, possibly while feeling sick.

Birthday Gift Ideas in a Pandemic: Pre-Teen and Teen

We have now had three kid birthdays during the Covid-19 pandemic/lockdown. We normally do family parties, and my parents have been living elsewhere during this half of the year for a number of years now, so the birthdays themselves felt fairly normal except that the older two kids were home (normally they’d have been at college), and we didn’t get pizza for dinner. The biggest difference was that I had to think way further ahead. For example, the ingredients for the chosen birthday dinner/cake: ideally I wanted to acquire as many of them as possible on the grocery shopping trip BEFORE The Last Grocery Shopping Trip Before the Birthday, just in case the store was out of something on my first attempt and I needed a second chance. (And I cautioned the kids ahead of time that it was possible they wouldn’t be able to have their first choice of dinner/cake—but happily I was able to find all the ingredients and/or make do with easy substitutes.) And then I had to label that stuff so no one in my household would eat it.

But also, the gift shopping. Shipping delays, and unpredictable shipping times, meant I had to think further ahead. And I haven’t been shopping in my usual stores, and one of my usual gift-buying techniques is to notice things in stores and think “Oh, I’ll bet they would like that!” I have also been known to wrap the pile of presents, realize it’s too small or something is missing, and go out the day before (or the day OF) a birthday to get one more thing—and that isn’t feasible right now. (My plan if that had happened was to write an I.O.U. and wrap it.) And finally, I have been trying to dramatically reduce how much I buy from Amazon, though that proved to be more challenging when some of my usual alternatives were unavailable, or too overwhelming to figure out right now.

All of these things together meant I had to start thinking about it a lot earlier and do a lot more careful planning. In case you have some medium/older-kid birthdays coming up in the next couple of months, here were some of the things I bought for my kids turning 13 and 15:

 

(image from Amazon.com)

Wireless bluetooth headphones. I have four people in my household who like over-the-ear headphones, and we have tried a few different kinds and these are hands-down the favorites. (The people in my household who prefer the in-the-ear kind favor these.) They do eventually break (especially when people keep DROPPING THEM and/or YANKING OUT THE CHARGING CORDS), and then I buy another set of the same ones. They come in a bunch of colors, and each person has their own color so we don’t get them mixed up. It drives me a little batty to have to get the attention of family members who are wearing headphones/earbuds; but on the other hand, during lockdown togetherness, widespread headphone usage is probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting of keeping us all civil.

 

(image from Amazon.com)

Jewelry box. Elizabeth needed one, and I had no luck finding something that seemed right: everything looked dated, or else too old or too young for her, or else didn’t have any compartments big enough for her giant hoop earrings. This box was a compromise: it’s not quite right, but it’ll hold MOST of her jewelry, and the cat on the top looks like her cat, whom she often refers to as a lovely gentleman. When I can shop in stores again, I will attempt to find an upgrade to give on a future gift-giving occasion.

 

(image from Amazon.com)

Cat stroller. I don’t know if this will ever arrive. I ordered it the first week of May, and it has not yet shipped but still says it’s supposed to arrive by tomorrow night. Well, we’ll see. This was originally going to be a gift for Elizabeth, but it became clear it wasn’t going to get here in time for her birthday, so now it is going to be a Pandemic Family Gift and we’ll have it when we have it. When I ordered it, it was not available in pink, or else I definitely would have ordered it in pink; I ordered it in navy blue plaid, which is now in turn no longer available.

 

(image from Amazon.com)

Whimsical purse. Before the pandemic, Elizabeth was starting to routinely meet friends in coffee shops and doughnut shops and so forth, and she needed a way to carry a phone plus money plus a couple other little things. Classically, this is solved by POCKETS (rare in women’s clothing, as we know) or a PURSE. But she squinched her nose at standard purse options. I got her this one, hoping it would hit the right note of “I am carrying a purse but NOT REALLY.” We will see if she is still at that stage of life when she is allowed to go to coffee shops again.

 

(image from claires.com)

• Assorted stuff from Claires.com. Faux fur scrunchie. Giant organza scrunchie. Big heart-shaped hoop earrings. Little polka-dot scrunchie. Wave ring. A cute snake ring I NEVER would have thought to choose for her, except she saw it while we were browsing the site together (both of us pretending it was just for fun and not because her birthday was coming up) and exclaimed what a cute little snake friend he was.

 

(image from Target.com)

• Terry Pratchett books. Henry has been on a Terry Pratchett kick. We own a fair number of them, and he was almost done reading them, so we bought him two we didn’t have yet: Monstrous Regiment and Equal Rites. (We are certain we used to own a copy of Equal Rites, but we can’t find it anywhere. It’s probably tucked into the bottom of a still-packed box of wall art or something.)

 

(image from Target.com)

No Thank You Evil game. Henry had seen a bunch of good stuff about this game online and really wanted it. It looked surprisingly expensive to me, and also maybe too young for him, and our family does not really PLAY board games much—but it was one of the very few items on his list, and the name felt Appropriate For Our Times, so I bought it.

 

(image from Amazon.com)

Phone tripod with remote. For those doing art projects and/or making TikToks.

 

(image from Topataco.com)

Meow Meow Meow shirt. Edward likes this kind of thing. I ordered it really early, and it came in plenty of time. (The link takes you to the “Pay attention to me” version, but the pull-down menu for Title offers the “Meow meow meow” version.)

 

(image from Target.com)

Some Very Interesting Cats Perhaps You Weren’t Aware Of. Ordered within perhaps fifteen minutes of seeing the title. Silly cat books are very popular at our house.

 

(image from Target.com)

Take It Away, Tommy. We are all fans of the Breaking Cat News cats.

 

(image from Target.com)

Candy. One year, when William was a younger teenager and was so apathetic about his birthday that I was in despair about what to get him and was all but choosing random things off the shelves at Target (sleeping bag! Minecraft periodic table!), I added a bag of candy—just to give him SOMETHING to open that I KNEW he would like. It generated SO MUCH ENVY among his siblings, it’s been a recurring idea for other birthdays. In a pandemic, when they can’t go with me to the store to get themselves candy with their allowance, it has achieved even higher levels of success.

Plumber; Grocery Shopping

Our kitchen sink faucet broke. Paul has gotten pretty handy since we moved to his dream house, and he has fixed a few smaller problems with that faucet, but he evaluated this issue as crossing over into Plumber Territory—especially combined with the smaller issues, some of which had called for repeated fixing. We were without hot water in the kitchen for a day and a half (Paul had to turn it off to keep it from trickling steadily out from under the sink, which seemed fair), leading me to first feel some despair about figuring out cooking/dishes, but then to consider what other people in other times/places would think of me complaining that in my kitchen I had only COLD clean/filtered/sanitized running water, and that to get hot water I would have to walk SEVERAL YARDS to the half-bath, or else heat some on my ELECTRIC STOVE. A childhood of reading early-settler literature has really paid off in terms of adulthood contentment/perspective.

The plumber came this afternoon and, after our experience with the water heater guy, I was pretty fretful about it beforehand. I have a partial box of disposable masks left over from my job as an in-home elder caregiver, so we put those out on the counter, and planned to ask the plumber to wear one if he arrived without one, but I was VERY STRESSED about that idea: it feels very, very hard to ask someone to wear a mask when they’ve clearly made a deliberate decision NOT to wear one despite ALL recommendations. I wished that Paul had remembered to specify when he made the appointment that we had an immunosuppressed person in our household and could the plumber please wear a mask: that feels easier to do, because it’s ahead of time instead of on the spot. If some of the plumbers are It’s My Constitutional Right To Swing My Fists Wildly Without Regard For Your Face, then the plumbing company has advanced notice that they should send one of their OTHER plumbers.

But it was all moot because the plumber arrived wearing a mask, and kept distant, and everything was just fine. Except of course that I felt for awhile after he’d left as if the entire kitchen and all the air in the entire house was contaminated. But it’s fine! It’s fine! It’s statistically probably fine, despite that graphic showing how the virus moves in a restaurant on the air-conditioning breezes! And now we have hot water in the kitchen AND no water leaking onto the kitchen floor!

 

It’s going to seem as if I JUST went grocery shopping and now I’m already reporting in again—but last time, I wrote about it several days after a trip, whereas this time I am writing about it on the same day. Not that you are standing there tapping your foot waiting for an explanation before you enter it into the Justification Log. But just if that sort of thing is ALSO as interesting to you as it is to me. (“LAST time I went ELEVEN days between trips but THIS time it was EIGHT days because LAST time I only filled ONE cart whereas THIS….”)

Today marked an important milestone: the very first sighting of hand sanitizer since This All Began. It was sold in what looked like disposable water bottles, and it was an unfamiliar brand, and it was limited to one per customer, and I absolutely bought one. And it is only at this moment I realize I didn’t even notice/check the price. Just snapped it right up.

Another change: the store had signs up saying that, per city ordinance, face coverings were required for everyone entering the store. This made me so happy. There were still plenty of people with their noses hanging out, and plenty of people pulling the mask down to talk, but still: an improvement. One woman in line was complaining LOUDLY about how RIDICULOUS it all was, but she was wearing a mask and she was complaining to a fellow customer rather than to the poor employees, so we will take it as a partial success.

However, as if to shift the scales back to a universal balance favoring unhappiness, there were THREE SEPARATE TIMES when a male customer stood or walked closer to me than would have been considered appropriate/considerate even if we were NOT in a pandemic. SIRS. GET YOURSELVES TOGETHER. OR I AM GOING TO START CASUALLY BAPPING A PADDLEBALL AT BALL-HEIGHT.

General inventory is definitely getting more normal. There were LOTS of kinds of soup—still not up to full variety/capacity, but so much better than when it was just some Healthy Choice 99% Fat-Free Cream of Onion. There were no restrictions on meats, and they had ground beef in the larger (like, 1.75-2.00 pound) packets again, instead of just 1.00-1.25 pound. They had a LOT of flour, though still very little flour VARIETY (two brands of white), and still a limit of two per customer; sugar products seemed to be stocked normally but were also limited to two per customer. They had the little three-individual-servings strips of yeast, one strip per customer; no jars of yeast; plenty of baking powder and baking soda. Still no crunchy taco shells, but plenty of soft tortillas. Chicken nuggets still plentiful in quantity but extremely limited in variety. Frozen fruit was a lot better than the last few trips, but vegetarian meat substitutes (the fake chicken nuggets, fake chicken patties, etc.) were low—or rather, the case was stuffed full, but almost entirely with fake burgers. They had hand soap, not at all up to usual quantities/selection but pretty okay; they had rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. Still no Lysol spray or sanitizing wipes.

When I was in the check-out line, I realized the toilet paper I’d added to the cart was gone. When I was relating this story to Paul, he immediately suspected Cart Bandits but, first of all, there was plenty of toilet paper in the paper products aisle, so no one would have any motivation to steal mine; and also, the thing is, when I was at the store several trips ago, I put a pack of paper towels on the bottom shelf of the cart, and it fell off in the produce section, and I don’t know how I didn’t notice it falling off (wouldn’t the cart have run into it?) but I DIDN’T notice until I looped BACK to a previous aisle, saw some paper towels on the floor, thought “Huh, why are there paper towels on the floor?,” and then noticed MY paper towels (the same kind as the ones on the floor) were mysteriously GONE. So I think the same thing must have happened this time, but without me looping back around to discover it. And when it was the paper towels, it happened in the produce section, which makes it a little less mysterious: the produce section is BUSY and FRAUGHT and there are NO ONE-WAY MARKERS, and there are people TOUCHING EVERY SINGLE LEMON and so on. So that may explain the distractedness. I’ll bet it happened again today.

Anyway, I noticed the missing toilet paper very early on in the cart-unloading process, because I also had a big heavy thing on the bottom shelf, and wanted to unload that onto the belt early on, and so that’s when I thought “Hey, but where is…?” So I had the rest of the unloading time to fret and stress about what I was going to do. First I decided I would just skip it. Then I felt very sad and stressy about that, and about going at least another week before having another chance to buy more. Then I looked around to see if by any chance there was a toilet paper display nearby: there WAS one of paper towels, so this was not an unreasonable thing to wonder. But while I was looking around, I noticed I was not at all far from the toilet paper aisle. So I said to the clerk, not knowing how well she could hear me through the mask, “I forgot toilet paper, I am going to ZOOM OVER and get some, I will be RIGHT BACK,” and I zoomed, and I was back WELL before she’d finished unloading the belt, so I consider that a 100% victory, and I felt so relieved to have the toilet paper. For the rest of our lives, I think some of us will feel relieved every time we purchase toilet paper.

Father’s Day Gift Ideas in a Pandemic

I am trying not to pick at my lips, and perhaps you have heard of Hercules and his tasks. I remember saying to my dad in high school that I thought I could stop if I KNEW it was harmful. And he, trying to help me, said “Actually, I think that when skin has to rapidly and repeatedly regrow like that, it can lead to an increased chance of cancer.” And I considered that, and believed it, and it was not enough. Anyway, with the pandemic and the systemic racial injustice and the seasonal allergies, my lips are a mess and I am trying to at least give them a couple days’ healing. But I was proof-reading this paragraph and noticed I was lightly picking WHILE PROOF-READING.

Shawna asked about Father’s Day gift ideas. I had a good and fun and easily-shippable idea this year for my own dad—but my own dad reads this blog. You can email me if you want, if you are not my dad, and I’ll tell you the idea: swistle at gmail dot com. (And I’ll try to remember to update this post with the idea after Father’s Day, so it’ll be here for future years.)

[Edit as promised!: A dear friend recently sent me a pair of Kringle pastries from this company: O&H Danish Bakery They came shipped 2-day with cold packs, and they were so delicious and charming and surprising, and so fun to try, so I filed away the idea for future gifts. My dad likes treats, and likes danish, and likes trying new treats, and so for Father’s Day I sent him two Kringles, one pecan and one apple. You can pick your delivery date, so I made sure to order them early before the Father’s Day shipping dates filled up.]

Another idea I considered for my dad was to make a shipped-directly care package like the one I mentioned as a Mother’s Day or birthday gift idea. Specific contents would vary by the specific dad, but something like:

• Sweet! Snack cakes, candy, whatever your particular dad likes. The weather is getting warm, so that may affect what kinds of candy you choose.

• Salty! Fun flavor of chips to try, odd little cheese things, popcorn.

• Hearty! Pricier nut mix, dried meat, granola bars, trail mix.

• The men in my life do not seem as keen to Try Fun Bath Products as the women in my life, but I don’t think that should stop us from indulging them. Harry’s is a brand I like: a little more expensive than the baseline, but not enough to overly shock one’s dad’s sense of propriety if he were to see it in the store. Duke Cannon is a fun brand with fun product names: News Anchor Hair Wash, Big Ass Brick of Soap, etc. And I know Paul likes the manliness of Working Hands.

• I am still sending hand soap with just about anything. For my dad I would get a scentless one, but foaming because I would suspect he would not normally choose foaming so it might be a new mildly fun/interesting thing.

• Now that they’re carrying face masks, I’d probably routinely add a couple of those as well.

• Definitely anything you’ve heard your dad say he is having trouble finding at the store.

• My dad likes to get t-shirts, so it’s fun to find new ones.

Good socks!

 

Or I think in general this would be a good opportunity to support any business you know of that’s trying to keep afloat and can ship things. Book stores, candy shops, coffee shops, any little specialty shop.

Realizing I still had to handle Father’s Day for Paul even when there was a pandemic made me feel like I do every time I get my period during the pandemic: SERIOUSLY??? EVEN NOW??? But at least we have already had Mother’s Day during a pandemic, which gives me a template for how to proceed. I’ve consulted to find out what he’d like for dinner etc. (groceries need good lead time these days) and if there’s anything particular he’d like to watch on TV. I will coach the children to consider what Acts of Service they might like to perform. I will probably take a bucket of soapy water and do some cleaning on the inside of his car, which is surprisingly dusty and grubby-looking. If he doesn’t mention a specific thing he wants me to bake, I will pick something from among the things I know he likes.

I also bought him a couple bags of sour candy: it’s not something I usually think to buy, but I know he likes it. I got Sour Patch Big Kids because I don’t think he’s ever tried those and it seemed mildly fun to try something slightly different; and Sour Skittles because surely he’s had them before? and yet I couldn’t remember ever having them around, so maybe not! And right now, grocery shopping is so fraught and sometimes I can’t justify space in the cart for treats, so treats feel extra special.

If Paul did not already have more t-shirts than he can cram into a drawer (going through those is one of the Pandemic Projects we haven’t been doing), this would have been a really good year for a charity/resistance shirt. I have this NPR one myself, and it’s really soft and nice:

(image from shop.npr.org)

The fit is unisex (i.e., men’s; i.e., why do we put up with this?), so I use mine as a nightshirt.

 

Black Lives Matter t-shirt:

(image from store.blacklivesmatter.com)

 

Face mask for protesting:

(image from store.blacklivesmatter.com)

 

This shirt:

(image from store.joebiden.com)


 

This shirt:

(image from shop.elizabethwarren.com)

 

This shirt:

(image from shop.aclu.org)

 

I hope you will share your gift ideas (for your dad or for your husband or for other dads and dad-role-fillers in your life), to help everyone who hasn’t yet decided.

Permitted/Safe

As this country continues to re-open during a pandemic despite not having taken any of the steps necessary for safely doing so, I am noticing huge confusion between “permitted” and “safe.” It’s understandable. It’s what we’re used to, to a certain extent: unsafe things are illegal or regulated. We have speed limits, licenses, seatbelt requirements; we’re not allowed to drive in certain reckless ways. We’re not allowed to buy cocaine. Smoking and drinking are allowed only after a certain age, and even after that age there are rules about when and where we’re allowed to do them, and what we are and aren’t allowed to do at the same time. We have to get official permits for certain activities such as lighting fires or doing construction.

And in countries where the officials care about the health and safety of their citizens as well as about the economy and profit, we are seeing a certain correlation between permitted and safe: the officials listen to scientists and medical experts, take steps needed to fight against the pandemic; and then, as those steps take effect, they carefully and slowly and advisedly re-open: the people are kept as safe as possible, the economy is preserved as much as possible. The United States, which has a current administration that ignores scientists, ignores medical experts, and thinks that bluster is the same as actually knowing what it’s doing, seems to think they can follow the same pattern of closing/re-opening WITHOUT doing all the things necessary to deal with the little issue of the disease. And so, since we have been very good and have stayed in our rooms for the entire time-out, it MUST be time for us to come out again, just like those other countries!

Some people have no choice. The companies they work for are re-opening, and if they don’t go back to work, they can’t pay their bills or buy food. I’m not talking about those situations. Those deserve our pity.

I am not talking about outings to acquire necessary items: food, prescriptions, urgent medical care. Those are not safe, but there is not much choice there, either: our country is not doing what it needs to do to make it safe, so we must do certain necessary activities unsafely. Other countries pity us.

I am not talking about the protests. Some things are morally necessary even when they are unsafe.

I am talking about things we don’t need to do, but that, because they are gradually permitted again, or because the words “socially distanced!” are used, are being mistaken for safe. Or restrictions, such as “No more than 10 people in a gathering,” making people think 9 or fewer must therefore be safe. It is making my throat tight to think of all the people who think that because something is allowed, it must be okay. We are going to lose so many more people we didn’t need to lose.

[Edited to add: The comments section is showing me I need to make a further clarification. I am not talking about people who CHOOSE to do unsafe things, knowing those things are unsafe. I am talking about people who are starting to do things because they THINK THOSE THINGS ARE NOW SAFE, because those things are once again permitted—when in fact those things are not safe.]

Water Heater; Grocery Store Report; Orthodontist

Our water heater broke, and someone came out to fix it, and he was not wearing a mask, and he shook Paul’s hand, and he stood at a normal distance to talk, and it was like having a visitor from another dimension. I’ve marked it on the calendar.

It was especially odd because it seems like all the service ads on the radio are hurrying to reassure us that they are taking ALL necessary Covid-19 precautions. One ad for a charity mentions that if you want to put your donation items on your lawn, they will pick them up and they “won’t even come to your door.” A kitchen design company mentions that the consultations can take place over video call. A plumbing company says not to worry: their plumbers wear masks, use hand sanitizer before entering your home, and will fully disinfect their work area before leaving—and you can pay over the phone. And then Mr. Water Heater Repairman just goes from house to house as if nothing special is happening. My good sir have you managed to catch the news lately by any chance.

I am pleased to hear that I am not the only one who does not get sick of grocery store reports. And Paul has gotten noticeably less interested as the weeks go by: at first he was very nearly as interested in listening as I was in reporting, and would come eagerly to hear of triumphs and failures; after my most recent trip, he came to the kitchen only when I’d already put half of the things away, and then after a few minutes actually CHANGED THE SUBJECT. So perhaps this can be our place to discuss it with others who share the interest.

There was no line to get into the grocery store; this is the second time in a row with no line. I don’t know if I happened to pick good times to go or if they’ve increased the number of people allowed in the store. The meat supplies were still somewhat lower than usual, but all the signs limiting two packages per customer were gone. I still only bought two packs. I had this same problem last time with toilet paper: it was no longer limited to one package, but I still FELT as if I could only buy one, or as if maybe I was missing a posted sign the way I once missed a one-way floor sign, and would be embarrassingly rebuked at the register.

There were TWO kinds of white flour AND one kind of whole-wheat flour! I haven’t seen whole-wheat flour since this began! Still a limit of two flours per customer. Sugar was limited to two per customer again, after not being limited on my previous trip. Chicken nugget variety continued to be very reduced, but they still had the dinos.

Frozen fruit was the lowest I’ve ever seen it, though they had a good supply of the much more expensive kinds, which was soothing even though I didn’t buy any (“I MAY have frozen strawberries, I am just CHOOSING not to pay so much for them”). They had Ramen soup, the kind where it’s 12 packs of noodle bricks for $2.50! I got a pack of those right before lockdown and hadn’t seen them since! And they had store-brand grated parmesan again, and still had tons of pasta options. No brown rice, but plenty of white. Only canned pizza sauce, nothing in jars; this is starting to seem like it must be on purpose. But pasta sauce is still available in jars, so perhaps not.

There was one single bottle of Clorox Clean-up, the spray cleaner with bleach I like to use in the kitchen after doing anything with raw meat, and I examined it all over wondering what was wrong with it that it had been passed over, and could find nothing wrong at all, but continued eyeing it suspiciously as it rode in the cart. My old bottle was on its very last weak half-spritzes, so this felt providential.

I did not notice ANYONE not wearing a mask. But there were still several Older Men wandering around with their hands in their pockets, blocking the aisles while their wives did the shopping. One gentleman stood just sort of admiring the salsas, and he stood there so long (even with me standing right there, getting increasingly obvious in my body/cart language), I gave up and looped around to the next aisle. You know, if our husbands need fresh air and exercise, perhaps they could be put out into the yard instead of taken along to the grocery store where they get in the way.

 

Henry’s orthodontist office called and made him an appointment for next week. He hasn’t been in months: he had an appointment in mid January, and then his next appointment was supposed to be at the end of March, but that was canceled. I am a little skittish about this, but I am also skittish about having something go wrong with his braces/teeth, so he’s going. It sounds like they have things pretty well set up, with a one-way path through the office, and patients waiting in their cars until the office calls, and parents not going in, and no toothbrushing station, and all staff wearing face shields, and a hand-washing/sanitizing station they make the patients use on their way out.

I got the calendar down to look up when his last appointment was, and it was odd to see how different it looked. Coffee with a friend! Many, many orthodontist/dentist/doctor/allergy/eye appointments! Elizabeth was canvassing—remember when the election was the main thing in the news? Kid extracurriculars, kid friend get-togethers, housecleaners, shopping trips with my mom. An art show, with CROWDS. A Galentine’s Day party with friends! who came to my house! and we ate out of communal dishes! and hugged hello and goodbye!