Category Archives: pandemic

This Is Barely Even ABOUT Pandemics, and Is More About Snacks and Dinner (in a Pandemic)

I have been eating a lot of popcorn and pretzels and chips, and so has everyone else in this house. I added a couple of bags to an online order—and they arrived in the same box as the cans of soup and the boxed 16-pack of Ensure Plus drinks (for Edward, who has trouble keeping his weight up), so they were pulverized. I am absolutely not doing any complaining about such things at this time, to anyone: not to the store, not to you, not even to my own secret heart of hearts. I will eat my delicious chip fragments and be truly, genuinely, deeply grateful for them, and for the people who shipped them to me, and for the people who delivered them to me.

BUT: I was thinking next time I might place an order that is all the lightweight things together: just the chips, pretzels, popcorn, tortillas, and snack cakes. And perhaps some soft stretchy pants, I think those would be lightweight enough not to squash anything.

Tonight we are having the leftover spaghetti sauce I made/froze last week, with the spaghetti noodles I was lucky to find at the store on Thursday, and I am going to make Italian Herb bread in the bread machine again. I was going to try the bread on the Dough setting this time, and then take it out and put it on a baking sheet or in a loaf pan, because the bread machine makes such a ridiculously tall, torn-up loaf—but I am too worried I’ll mess it up and ruin the bread; and at a time like this, the loss of dinner bread can be truly devastating. I’ll experiment another day, when it isn’t something I’m counting on for dinner. “Practice bread”—there, I added it to the list of all the other things I was going to do while we were home all day, none of which I have yet done.

After dinner we will have the chocolate pudding pie Paul wanted for Easter. We remembered why we don’t usually make a pudding pie for Easter anymore, and it’s because NOBODY WANTS PUDDING PIE after eating candy all afternoon. So we will have it tonight. If we can stop eating Easter candy all this afternoon.

Still Thinking About Pandemic Grocery Shopping

Yesterday when I went to the grocery store, one of the stressful things was the fill-level of the cart: it was getting so high, and each new item had to justify its space. By the time I finished, the cart was absolutely at capacity, and the rack underneath was also nearly full. This makes sense: the reason I go twice a week in Normal Times (plus I used to pick up some groceries during my once-a-week Target trips) is that once a week isn’t enough. But it made me very glad I had ordered a number of non-perishables online: it really made a difference to be able to skip things like soup, salsa, rice, peanut butter, and pasta sauce. Also: the store was still very low on all those things, so it was nice not to have to take from the store’s reduced supplies.

Here is my current goal: with a household of seven people, order enough online to make it possible to go to the grocery store only once a week. I went nine days between grocery store visits last time, and we were getting pretty desperate, and I couldn’t fit everything on the list into the cart. Grocery shopping is stressful enough without adding the stress of What Should I Skip.

Also, I want space for the Emotional Health items. I wanted Snyder’s Cheddar Pretzel Pieces and Entenmann’s Brownie Chocolate Chip Cakes, but can I justify those when space is so tight? Paul doesn’t ask for much, food-wise, but he gets significant comfort value out of diet Mountain Dew and Stacy’s pita chips; can I get those, or do I need to leave room for the more important foods? The kids seem to feel a lot better if I get the granola bars they like, and some snack cakes; if I can get some things online instead of putting them in the cart where I need the space, that makes my life easier and their lives a little cheerier.

I am shopping a lot more from Target instead of Amazon, as you may have noticed from the links. First of all, I am mad at Amazon right now, with their whole…*waves hands incoherently*…not-paying-taxes, owned-by-multi-billionaire-but-trying-to-crowdfund-fair-wages/benefits THING. But more importantly (I’m not saying it SHOULD be more important, but also I want to be frank, and also I’m sure Target has their own not-so-great stuff), right now Target seems to have what I want in stock (or in and out of stock, so I get it if I keep checking), with brisk free shipping, while Amazon has almost nothing I search for and has weird postponed delivery dates.

Anyway, today is a happy grocery day: the shopping is done for another week, and I am enjoying the treasures. I got two dozen eggs! Last time they were low on butter and I didn’t want to take much, but this time they had plenty! I got two packs of bagels, which were out of stock last time but this time were bountiful! There was a limit of two bags of flour per customer, and there was only one kind of flour available, but there was TONS of it (shelves completely full and a full pallet sitting in the aisle) so I went ahead and got two! They had baking powder, which they were out of before! They didn’t have our usual bread, and I had to loop back around and try the aisle again before I could choose, but I DID choose! And I got a bag of coffee, because I really do not even want to run somewhat low on coffee.

How I Go to the Grocery Store in a Pandemic

(I want this for later.) (I’m not sure I’ll remember to write down all the steps the first time, and may need to come back and add some things.)

Some of this stuff is probably overkill! Some is probably underkill! Who knows! The United States government wasted two months going “La la la, this won’t happen HERE!,” so we know very little about what we should be doing to protect ourselves and others! (Here’s an NPR article I found useful: No, You Don’t Need To Disinfect Your Groceries, But Here’s How To Shop Safely.)

So! On a grocery shopping day, I get up and I skip my shower and I get dressed. I wear lighter clothing than I normally would for whatever the weather is. (Between the mask and the stress, I am generally sweating in the store.) I put my hair in a bun. (A ponytail gets tangled in the lower mask tie.) I take everything I don’t need (nail clippers, tweezers, lip balm) out of my pockets and leave those things on the bureau. I take my credit card out of its usual location in my phone case; I put my credit card and keys in one pocket (the soon-to-be-contaminated pocket) and my phone in another pocket (I try not to touch it at all during the trip; it’s just in case of emergency, and also it has my driver’s license in it).

I have breakfast and coffee and I check email and mess around for awhile. In my very limited experience, my grocery store is busiest early in the day: first there is the designated seniors/high-risk time, and then right after that there is another huge rush.

I gather up: my mask; one facial tissue; the shopping list. (I have hand sanitizer in the car.) I always feel like I’m forgetting something important, because normally I have to remember to bring the reusable bags, but those are banned right now. The shopping list goes into the “contaminated stuff” pocket with the keys and the credit card. I wear old shoes I don’t mind not wearing for anything except these errands. If I am wearing one of my pairs of jeans with a too-long inseam, I roll them up a little so they won’t touch the floor. I drive to the store.

Still in my car in the store parking lot, I tuck the folded tissue against the inner upper edge of the mask (this seems to reduce glasses-fogging), and I put the mask on. They’re limiting the number of customers inside, so I go stand in line outside the grocery store, staying at least six feet behind the person in front of me. When it’s my turn to go in, I take a cart; I used to sanitize the cart, but they’re sanitizing the carts at the store now. (Though if hand sanitizer and sanitizing wipes weren’t so scarce, I would still go ahead and use one or the other.) I don’t touch my face or my mask AT ALL, and I am getting pretty good at that, I think, especially compared to the early days when I thought it might be impossible.

Our list is already sorted by aisle, which is very helpful: it’s hard enough to keep track of things while feeling stressed and trying to avoid other customers. I get what I need of anything that appears to be well-stocked; I adjust and take less if something appears to be in short supply (or of course if there is a sign limiting it). I am not at all good at thinking on the fly, so this part is hard for me, but if they don’t have something I need, I am working on making a FAST decision about what to do instead: getting another brand if possible, getting something remotely/adjacently similar if not, or deciding to skip it. If I can’t think fast enough and there is another customer waiting, I loop back around and try the aisle again. I remind myself that part of my panicky feeling is because I am breathing through a mask.

I may get better at this with time (I notice I am a little calmer with each trip), but right now I find I don’t have any mental space for anything more complicated than finding substitutions for something out of stock. For example, Paul mentioned the idea of having a pudding pie for Easter. And in the safety and comfort of home, I thought, “Oh, what a great idea! We could do a chocolate one—or I’ll see what other flavors of pudding they have, and maybe we’ll try something new! Do I maybe remember seeing LEMON pudding? That would be nice and springlike for Easter!” But in the actual store, it put me at MAXIMUM CAPACITY just to pick a graham cracker crust (TWO EXTRA SERVINGS OR REGULAR? EXTRA OR REGULAR???) and find two boxes of chocolate pudding. There was no additional processing available for looking at different flavors. Plus, there were other customers waiting to get at that section.

Anyway. I pay for the groceries. I thank the clerk and bagger for being there (I choke up each time, which is embarrassing but at least adds to the earnestness/sincerity). I put the groceries into the car. I get into the car, take off my mask and drop it on the floor of the passenger side, and use hand sanitizer on my hands and on my keys. I drive home, feeling gross but also appreciating being able to breathe normally again.

I bring all the groceries to the floor of the mud/laundry room, except the ones I bring into the garage to put into the stand-alone freezer. I drop the mask into the washing machine and the tissue into the trash. I wash my hands. I take a sanitizing wipe, and I wipe everything I touched on my way in/out: doorknobs, door edges, car door handles inside and out, the edge of the back door where I touched it to close it, the car door lock, the steering wheel, the radio buttons and volume control, the freezer door handle, the garage-door remote button. My guess is that by the time I drove again, all those things in the car would be safe anyway, but I still do it.

I go back inside, take off my shoes and leave them with the winter boots no one is wearing right now, and wash my hands again. (It’s handy that there’s a sink in the mud/laundry room.) I take a couple of bags at a time from the mudroom to the kitchen, and I load everything into cabinets/refrigerator; I don’t put any bags down on countertops. I put all the empty bags inside one bag, and put those with my errand shoes; I will eventually use those bags for litter box scoopage and so forth, but I give them a cooling off period.

I wash my hands again. I use a sanitizing wipe to wipe down the fridge/freezer door handles, the cupboard handles, the edge of the cupboard I used to close it (next time I plan to use the wipe to do the closing, but I forgot this time), the sink handles. I try not to lose my mind on this. I wipe down my credit card, and the outside of my phone even though I didn’t touch it while I was at the store. I wash my keys with soap and water. I wash my glasses with soap and water, while giving my hands another washing.

I go upstairs and put all of my clothes into the laundry basket. I don’t know if it’s necessary to shower after shopping, but I feel Contaminated if I don’t, and Happier if I do, so that’s why I postpone my morning shower and take it after shopping. I then put my towels into the laundry (this is more a way to make sure I’m remembering to change my towels, rather than an actual decontamination thing). I put on all clean clothes and put my stuff back into my pockets. I take the rest of the day to recover, and to imagine that my throat Already Feels Weird.

Boring and Unproductive Fretting

When I was upstairs getting ready, I had a sudden alarming thought about something we would soon be out of, something I should look for online. I almost sent myself an email from my phone, just so I wouldn’t forget, and then I thought, “But I won’t forget!” Why. Why would I think that.

(Happily, I DID eventually remember. It was deodorant.)

I’m so tired. I woke up at 2:30 to go to the bathroom, and never got back to sleep. You know how sometimes you feel like you didn’t sleep, but you’re actually sort of dozing in and out? It was not like that. It was like lying down in the middle of the day when you’re not tired, and just being wide awake and excruciatingly bored. I would have gotten up, but our two older boys have been staying up most of the night, and they were still up, and I didn’t feel like being up in the middle of the night with them. Also, if Paul wakes up and I’m not there, he comes to find me, which I find irritating, but also he has trouble sleeping later than 4:00, so when he IS successfully sleeping I don’t want to increase the chance of him waking up and not being able to get back to sleep. He got up at 4:45, and that’s when I did too.

I spent most of my awake time fretting about the next grocery shopping trip, which is certainly a boring and unproductive thing to fret about.

I also spent some time fretting about the in-home eldercare agency I used to work for, wondering how they’re handling this and how they can possibly be keeping everyone safe right now, and thinking about how worried everyone must be. That led to me feeling angry about the supervisor there, who, just for starters and particularly applicable right now, wanted us to work even if we were sick. From there I segued into feeling angry about EVERY job I’ve had where it was particularly important not to go to work sick (bakery, coffee shop, restaurant, daycare, pharmacy, eldercare) and yet there was huge pressure to do so anyway.

Then I spent some time thinking of all the categories of people who are worse off than me right now. If you are in the life stage of having little children, and right now you are operating day after day without even the sweet relief of a stroll through Target or a trip to the park or having them go on errands with the other parent or whatever, then I spent some time feeling very sorry for you around 3:30 a.m. If you are living in an apartment in a big city and it doesn’t feel safe to use the laundry room or go outside for a walk right now, and you can’t even jog in place or do jumping jacks because of your downstairs neighbor, I was feeling sorry for you around 4:10. Everyone else, I am less sure of the exact time, but I felt sorry for you too.

Well. Today we are getting another Target delivery, though I will wait a couple days to open it. And today I will finish reading Olive, Again, which is so far just as good as everyone said it was. For lunch I will have leftover crockpot chicken tacos (they turned out great). And it’s Friday, which manages to retain some of its Friday feeling even when the days are so odd.

Quarantine Birthday Parties; Allergy Season; All the Canceled Appointments; A Good (Target Shipment) Harvest

I am already seeing signs of the overcompensating for perceived losses we were talking about earlier. One of my Facebook friends was asking everyone to sign up at 15-minute intervals ALL DAY LONG to wish her child a happy birthday on video chat, in addition to having a Zoom party for her child’s friends. Another Facebook friend described the all-day celebration she had arranged, including special birthday breakfast, special birthday lunch, special birthday dinner, special activities throughout the day, extra presents, a honking car parade from all local friends/relatives, etc., so that her child declared it The Best Birthday Ever. I admire humanity’s enthusiastic and creative pursuit of celebration and joy, while also thinking this sounds exhausting and I’m not planning to do anything similar at our own house. (But I would feel differently if, for example, we’d planned a big party that had had to be canceled.) (I’m still not doing any all-day celebrations involving dozens of people.) (A Zoom party for the child’s friends sounds fun, though. It could be Bring Your Own Treat.)

Allergy season is upon us and Henry is sniffing and/or blowing his nose every few seconds—and that’s with daily Claritin and Flonase AND with some sort of allergy air quality device in his bedroom. And we’ve stopped getting his allergy shots for the time being, because he gets them at an ENT office that is in a hospital, and I am not going anywhere like that right now unless it is really crucial. The shots didn’t seem to be helping much anyway, but at least we could feel like we were DOING SOMETHING.

The dentist’s office called to reschedule some of our appointments; the orthodontist sent out an email saying she is canceling all appointments for now and will reschedule later. I have been thinking about how backed-up everything is going to be (dentists and orthodontists and doctors, hairdressers and barbers, eyebrows and mani/pedis), once we get out of here—especially since some places will have gone out of business in the meantime. Actually, you know what, let’s not think about that right now, that’s a worry for later. We’ll figure it out and we’ll all get back on schedule eventually, this is just a gigantic glitch. And during the glitch, some of us are going to find out we look great with grey hair, or that we can cut hair, or that our kids can do our nails, or whatever, and that’s going to help tremendously. And most of us can skip a dentist appointment, no big deal. It’s fine. It’s going to be fine.

We got our first shipment from Target, and I left it alone for two days because the recommendations for decontaminating things are still all over the place, everything from “No need, just wash your hands afterward” to “CONVERT YOUR GARAGE/HALLWAY INTO A MULTI-STEP DECONTAMINATION CHAMBER,” so I am taking a flailing guess somewhere in the middle. Anyway, I opened it and nearly cried, not that that’s hard to make me do, but. It felt like a care package, like an air-drop of emergency supplies. AND IT WASN’T EVEN EMERGENCY STUFF. But I was practically cradling each item before tucking it lovingly into the cupboards. Trail mix! Tortillas (our store was out, and I’ve been waiting to make crockpot chicken tacos)! Chocolate chips! Facial tissue and hankies! Mayo (our store was out)! Soup (our store was out)! Beans (our store was out)! Kraft Mac & Cheese! Crunchy Jif (our store was out)! Hand soap! It felt like bringing in a good harvest.

Yellow Scratch Cake Recipe; I Am Going To Have To Wait To Worry About That

Yesterday we celebrated the cat’s birthday, and not because we’re going stir-crazy during a pandemic, but because we always celebrate the cats’ birthdays. And I baked the cake from scratch, which is more than I usually do for any of my human children. We only had one cake mix in the house, and it was a chocolate one, and I’d already gotten my mouth set for yellow cake with chocolate frosting. So I went to the post about good chocolate cake, and found the comment I was remembering from Adi, who was answering another commenter’s question by asking if this King Arthur yellow cake recipe would work. That’s the one I made, even though it took FOUR of my precious, precious eggs (the cake mix called for three eggs, so the recipe was really only one extra egg).

It was good! I’ve made two or three different yellow cakes from scratch before, and what I remember about them is that they were stodgy and flour-flavored, which is why I (temporarily, as it turns out) gave up making cakes from scratch. This one didn’t make me swoon or anything, but it was non-stodgy and, most importantly, a good transportation device for the frosting. The flavor wasn’t “Yellow” like a box cake, but it also wasn’t “Flour” like some of the other recipes I’ve tried; I would describe the flavor as “Cake.” Overall I still prefer a yellow cake mix, but I was pleased with this yellow scratch cake and I saved the recipe for future cake-mix-less occasions.

 

I notice right now I have to do a fair amount of thought-triaging. The biggest pile is the one for “I am going to have to wait to worry about that.” Types of thoughts that go there: trying to plan for fall when we have no idea what that will look like or what will happen/change between now and then; wondering how college is going to work now; wondering if certain businesses will go out of business because of this; wondering what will happen if certain industries collapse entirely; worrying how the world will manage the recurring isolation schedules if we can’t find a vaccine.

I know from long experience that “Just don’t worry about it!” is not an option—but I have had some success with “I am going to have to wait to worry about that.” Like when I’m lying awake two hours past bedtime and my brain decides NOW is the moment to work on our household’s fire safety plan, and it supplies me with a dramatic vision of how it might go in the case of a real fire. If someone said to me, “Just don’t worry about that!,” that would be unhelpful and also invalid: every household needs a fire safety plan, and a certain amount of worrying is what leads us to make good plans and notice things that need fixing (like how long has it been since we changed the smoke detector batteries). Buuuuuut…do I need to worry about it RIGHT THIS MINUTE? In the middle of the night? Instead of sleeping? I can’t do what I really want to do, which is to call the household together and show them the escape routes and remind them where we would gather, and then add the right kind of smoke detector battery to the shopping list and get them the next time I go to the store and then replace them—so right NOW I can go to sleep, and I can worry about this in the morning.

Or, I remember sometimes while postpartum, I would suddenly learn something new, such as that in our school system the kids choose an instrument in 5th grade. I’d start worrying about whether we should force the child to do it or let it be their own decision. But even I, world-class fretter, would soon think, You know, we don’t have to think about that RIGHT NOW, when the baby is three weeks old. We CAN’T even really think about that right now, because so much is going to happen and change between now and then, and so many necessary factors are unknown. It wouldn’t help if I told myself to just not worry about it, but it DID help to think that TODAY’S worries could be the cradle cap and the umbilical stump and the nursing latch, and the band instruments decision could WAIT until more information was available and the fretting could be more productive/useful.

Society/plans/systems have been DERAILED for the moment. We can’t figure out right now what will happen if the kids can’t go back to school in the fall or what will happen if certain industries collapse: “school in the fall” and “industries collapsing” are band instruments in 4th grade, and the baby is still only three weeks old.

Quarantine Stress Dreams; Shoulder Blade; Ordering Online; It’s Not Homeschooling and I’ll Tell You Why

I am having a lot of stress dreams of this sort: (1) I show up to babysit someone’s child, then suddenly realize this means we’re essentially combining our household bubble with theirs. I decide it’s not worth backing out of my commitment at the last second and I just won’t babysit again after this—and then the parents’ large group of friends shows up and I realize they’re not social distancing AT ALL!! and so I say I can’t stay, and they make fun of me and roll their eyes at how ridiculous I’m being. (2) I am hanging out with a friend, and suddenly remember WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO!! (3) I am at the library where I work, even though the director has specifically instructed all non-scheduled employees to stay out, and I am there by mistake, and she will know I was there because there are cameras, and in fact maybe I am the reason she had to send that email about staying out!! (4) I am back at work after the restrictions have been lifted, and I can’t remember how to do anything!! HOW DO WE DO MAGAZINE DISCARDS?? (I have not yet been involved with magazine discards, which is why my dream self couldn’t figure it out.)

I seem to have wrenched my shoulder/shoulderblade. It happened when, I am not kidding, I lifted my hairbrush to brush my hair.

Cleaning the house at first had a feeling of can-do spirit, but now that we’re on the second round of it (cleaning the same sinks again, vacuuming the same floors again), the thrill has worn off. I’ll say this: I am very glad we’re still paying the cleaners, not only because it felt like The Right Thing To Do in our situation, but also because I WANT THEM BACK AFTER THIS. (I wince as I proof-read this paragraph. The privilege! The whining! Yeek.)

We’re still taking near-daily walks. We go when it’s nice out. When it’s rainy, we say we really ought to go anyway, but then we don’t.

I’ve been tentatively placing more non-perishable grocery orders from Target (like, the kind of orders from the online site that come through the mail, not the pick-up or store-delivery kind), in an attempt to reduce how much I have to put into my cart at the grocery store, and to reduce how often we need to go there. I am conflicted about this and taking it order by order rather than trying to make sweeping household policy decisions. Food and other supplies must come to our houses in some way, and it is so hard to know what’s best. And I am seeing it framed so radically differently from person to person—everything from “Oh, so I guess it’s okay to RISK THE DELIVERY PERSON’S LIFE to save YOUR OWN!!!” to “We MUST support/protect these companies/employees/jobs by ordering online!” I’m still sort of waiting for us as a society to settle into what is the Right Thing To Do, but currently we’re still in the stage of hearing constant hot takes about how every single possible choice is wrong, which is unhelpful.

The kids are continuing to do their classes online. I don’t call it “homeschooling,” and I will tell you why: parents who do actual homeschooling (meaning they choose to do that instead of sending the children to school) have to figure out how to teach the information, and they have to develop lesson plans, and research/acquire supporting books/materials, and develop/find assignments and projects to support the lesson, and then grade those assignments and evaluate whether the information has been sufficiently learned, and then follow up with reviews of those lessons later—just the way teachers do. And my mom is a teacher so I know all that behind-the-scenes stuff is a MAMMOTH amount of work (especially with a whole CLASS of kids, with different learning styles), and it’s what teachers go to school to learn how to do. And I am not doing ANY of that. The kids are doing school at home, but they are not being homeschooled: the teachers are still doing the schooling. It reminds me of when my ex-boyfriend was telling me he was a stay-at-home dad, and I was surprised/impressed because I wouldn’t have thought he was the type—and then it turned out what he meant was that he had a job he could do from home, and he was doing it from his home office while a full-time nanny cared for his baby. The term “stay-at-home parent” means something, just as “homeschooling” means something: being at home + being a parent doesn’t necessarily make a person a stay-at-home parent, and having kids at home + having them do school from home doesn’t necessarily mean they’re homeschooled. Even though I think we can all plainly understand that having kids do school from home can involve a significant increase in involvement and work and hair-tearing on the parental side of things.

Fret Items

Paul’s sister has made the emotional journey from posting on Facebook about “These IDIOTS panic-buying and freaking out over something less fatal than the flu!” to posting on Facebook about “These IDIOTS going out on unnecessary trips and not wearing masks!”

I am getting more concerned about food supplies. The few weeks before everything shut down, I was buying a few extras of things we normally buy, just in case—and I am ALREADY a person who has tends to have back-ups of things. So then when the advice came out to grocery-shop no more than once a week, at first I was able to go longer than that, and even the second trip a week later wasn’t URGENT. But this is because we were using up a lot of the non-perishables I’d bought before things got more serious, so now the week’s worth of groceries doesn’t stretch so far. And shopping for seven people looks dramatic even in normal times when people aren’t looking as judgily at other people’s carts. (I think we need those little dressing-room tags that show number of items, but to hang on our carts to show how many people we’re shopping for.) I normally go twice a week to reduce the drama, and also because food for seven people doesn’t fit comfortably in the fridge/freezer/cabinets.

What is an item you find you’re fretting a lot about? (Other than toilet paper, because I am so, so, so tired of hearing/thinking about Toilet Paper: The Official Mascot of the Pandemic.) The item doesn’t have to be the one that is literally the most important item to have (earlier on, my fret item was “Little Debbie snack cakes”), just any item you notice is generating a lot of personal fretting. For example, my answer is eggs, and we could survive indefinitely without eggs. I like to eat them every morning for breakfast, but I don’t have to, I could eat something else. I like to be able to bake, and a lot of recipes include eggs, but I don’t have to bake, and I could find recipes without eggs, and/or I could find egg substitutes. I like to make Breakfast For Dinner, but I don’t have to, I could make other things, or I could make breakfast things but not include eggs. We have two vegetarians in the household and eggs are a good source of protein for them, but there are other sources.

So it isn’t as if my Fret Item is an important prescription, or formula/diapers, or some other thing crucial to our wellbeing. And yet, I really want to have plenty of eggs, and I think multiple times a day about how many we have left and how I might acquire more. I think about how nice it will be, later on, to just go to the store without wondering how many eggs they will have or how many I can buy. I AGITATE about eggs, so eggs are my current Fret Item. I am wondering what your current Fret Items are.

[Update: Paul found a farm stand that had eggs, and bought me two dozen.]

Pandemic Hair Decisions

I am interested in the hair-related decisions facing us worldwide, and I know I am not alone in this. The home haircuts! The home dyeing! The decisions about what to do with the greys, if you normally dye them! The BANGS! I am so interested! I am especially interested in PANDEMIC-RELATED EXPERIMENTS (i.e., seeing what it looks like if the grey/natural grows out).

Elizabeth says more than half of her (high-school-aged) friends have already done a blue/pink/purple type color, but she may be exaggerating. I nearly cut my own hair, but then had the kind of perfect hair day that typically happens the morning of a haircut, and so I didn’t follow through. Then I discovered my hair was now long enough to braid it without the prickly braid-end bothering the back of my neck, so I’m leaving it alone for now.

We were a single-income family with a lot of kids, and ANY family not awash in extra money has to find the ways they personally find it easiest to reduce spending, and one of the ways we picked is that I learned to do basic haircuts. (My mother-in-law, inadvertently cementing my decision: “Well, WE were poor but I ALWAYS found money for a barber. I mean, let me tell you, I ALWAYS found money for THAT.”) I have a Wahl clipper set I can use for Paul and the boys, and I have basic haircutting scissors I can use for Elizabeth and me. In recent years I have relished having Paul and the boys go to a barber shop instead (the barber shop does a quicker, cleaner, and usually better job, and also I am glad not to have to do it), but last weekend I cut Paul’s hair in the driveway and it was nice to already know how. (Briefly I thought, “Oh! This is something I can offer to my friends and their families!!” Then remembered: “Oh. Wait. No.”)

I’ll be able to cut Edward’s hair, too, when it needs it: he just has a basic boy cut. Rob and Henry both have lonnnnnng hair: I can cut it if they suddenly feel the need to go shorter, but I wouldn’t normally expect them to need haircuts anytime soon, since it’s already been a year or two. Elizabeth has long hair too, and wears hers blunt-cut, and has already grown out her bangs, so that’s easy, and she generally just wants a trim if anything.

But I have been wondering about William. He has in the last year or so developed Style. He gets his hair cut every three weeks or so, and he has a hair dryer and a selection of hair products. I offered ahead of time to see if I could figure out how to cut it: it’s a normal clippers cut around the sides, and I think I could at least make an attempt at using the scissors on the longer top part, if I could mess with it a bit and see how long it is in various sections. But he declined my offer.

Then one morning about a week ago he took my clippers kit and used to it trim his own sides. (He also sorted the clipper guards into labeled baggies: 1-4, 5-8, and “other.”) Again I offered assistance (especially when I saw how he’d managed on the back of his head, and that he hadn’t done the edges), and again he declined. And a few days ago there was a lot of door-slamming and stomping around upstairs, and when he came down he’d scissors-trimmed the top. It looked pretty good, considering!

And then yesterday evening after dinner he went upstairs and came down with an all-over 1/8th-inch clippers cut. He does not want us to make a fuss about it. Our feeling is that a blonde-haired blue-eyed white boy should be a little careful about choosing to have a shaved head, but he points out that no one is going to see him for awhile, so…okay. This buys him some time so he doesn’t have to keep stressing out about managing a cut he doesn’t seem happy managing. He says what he’s going to do as it grows out is just run clippers around the sides and let the top grow longer.

TELL ME YOUR PLANS: What is your household doing about their HAIR? If anyone regularly dyes their hair, or regularly dyes the greys, WHAT IS THE PLAN? If anyone has a pixie cut, WHAT IS THE PLAN? Is anyone using this time to do something hair-awkward, like growing out dye/bangs/grey/pixie, or growing a beard/mustache, or SHAVING a beard/mustache? (Paul is talking about shaving off his beard/mustache, and I am squinty about it.)

Hoarding Is Not the Problem; BREAD!; Keto Abandoned

Someone finally wrote the article I wanted to see, about how shortages don’t actually represent hoarding. Many businesses manage supply/demand with little or no buffer—which means, practically speaking, that if even half of households buy one extra 4-pack of toilet paper (which we all OUGHT TO BE DOING, AS WE HAVE BEEN SPECIFICALLY INSTRUCTED TO MINIMIZE TRIPS TO THE STORE), everything collapses. Capitalism thrives in part by making the victims blame each other instead of blaming the corporations (we see this also with recycling/environmental blame), so we see endless dispiriting spitting about “hoarders.” It brings to mind that illustration where there’s a poor person, a middle-income person, a corporation/businessperson, and ten cookies: the corporation takes nine cookies, puts one cookie in front of the middle-income person, and says “That poor person is trying to steal your cookie.”

OKAY SO ANYWAY ABOUT BREAD. I used Jodie’s idea: she said her bread-machine recipe book had a good recipe for Italian Herb bread, and I checked MY bread-machine recipe book and IT TOO had a recipe for Italian Herb bread, so I made that, and it was really good. We ate it with spaghetti; and also, in honor of my childhood I made little iceberg-lettuce side salads with thin-sliced carrots and a few tomato pieces and Italian dressing. SO GOOD.

You probably already picked up on this from the sugar in the coffee and yesterday’s spaghetti/bread discussion, but I have stopped eating keto/low-carb for the time being. I kept it up for 11 days of quarantine, wondering the whole time how sustainable it was and how long I could/would keep doing it, and one evening while making dinner I was just DONE with it. I COULD keep going, but I didn’t WANT to, AT ALL. I wanted to eat the dinners I was making for everyone else, and I wanted to enjoy cooking/eating/baking instead of resenting it, and I didn’t want to have to worry so much about the egg/meat/cheese supplies. So. On that front I am having a wonderful time. Everything is so DELICIOUS.