I am baking a cake for the joint birthday party of two of our cats, one of whom has a birthday on April 5th and the other on April 7th. Last year, the first year of the pandemic, I baked them each their own cake; this year I am toning it down in anticipation of a return to Somewhat Normal Times. (Another idea I have used in previous years: bake one cake mix in two round cake pans and serve one round on each of the two evenings. Still one cake, and one cake-baking process, but two parties’ worth of cake. I didn’t do it that way THIS year because yesterday I was thinking I would not bake any cat cakes at all, and then today I changed my mind, and so now it is a Combined Cake to cover my change of heart.)

In selecting a cake mix, I discovered I owned two boxes of mix that had best-by dates in 2018, and I’m sure they’re fine, but I clearly need to stop buying cake mixes so far ahead. It’s just, I’ve had a few times when I was extremely grateful to have a couple of cake mixes already on hand, and those times have lodged compellingly in my brain. Similarly: the time a box of mixed crackers and a couple extra bottles of wine allowed me to discreetly save an awkward party-food situation, so now I ALWAYS have a box of Pepperidge Farm Cracker Trio and at least one huge cheap bottle of white wine in the cupboard, and always will.

I just finished a book that has left me feeling wan:

(image from Target.com)

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, by Mona Awad (Amazon link). I requested it from the library after reading about it on Hello Korio, where it was described like so:

I think just about every woman can see some example of her own personal youth, or her own young adult behaviors, or her own motivations in these stories, in ways that don’t pull any punches. It’s harsh. It is a harsh book. I really liked it, and I really recommend it.

And yes. I agree, except I don’t know if I recommend it. It put little sad truth burrs all through my joie de vivre. It made me feel sad for all of us, and all of our daughters, but without feeling like there’s any way to stop/fix any of it.

Anyway. Right before that, I read a book that made me happy, so let’s do that one next:

(image from Target.com)

Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Amazon link). Looking at this book, and reading the description, and looking at its WHOLE VIBE, I would never have chosen it. I read it ONLY because first Miss Grace recommended it to me, and THEN Hello Korio mentioned a DIFFERENT book by the same author, and described it as a book where all the mysteries and so forth end up making impressive logical sense, and that is CRUCIAL to me, and so then I put the Spinning Silver book higher on my reading list, and I finished it right before the other book I just mentioned, and as it turned out it was EXTREMELY MY THING. I don’t even want to tell you about it, because if someone had described the plot to me, I would not have read it. It was already hard enough to get past the font and illustration choices on the cover, all of which loudly communicated that this book was Not For Me. BUT IT WAS FOR ME.

Do you remember awhile back, when I said I’d always thought I disliked science fiction, but it turned out what I disliked was science fiction written by middle-aged men? This book caused a similar insight. Now I have to finish my other library books so that I can go on to read LOTS OF NAOMI NOVIK.

I got my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine yesterday. (If you are interested: the one I got was the Pfizer kind.) I didn’t mention it to you ahead of time because I felt there were many opportunities for it to Not Actually Happen. For one thing, I had friends who were eligible ahead of me, and some of them ended up with appointments in late April; but when my group became eligible and Paul made our appointments, the appointments were at the end of March: weeks earlier than the earlier group. That didn’t seem right at all, and smacked of Something Has Gone Amiss Here.

For another thing: well, you can see above, PAUL made the appointments. He is not the appointment-maker of our household. I am the appointment-maker. So I get real TWITCHY when someone else makes appointments, just as he gets real twitchy if he’s not home and I have to be the one to start the pizza dough in the bread machine, because he is the pizza-dough-maker in our household. But I was much, much twitchier, because I follow the recipe when I make the pizza dough, and the pizza dough has never come out wrong when I’ve made it, whereas Paul does not have a similarly stellar history with making appointments. So I had Concerns on several levels.

The REASON Paul made the appointments is that registration was not supposed to open until 8:00 a.m., but he was up at 5:30 a.m., so he checked the website just to see, and it DID let him register for appointments, and I was still asleep, so he just went ahead and registered us both, which I grudgingly admit was probably the correct course of action. But on the other hand (as I started worrying within 30 seconds of waking up and being told I did not have to spend my whole morning trying to make an appointment), what if that was a glitch and the system didn’t actually accept those appointments? What if the state was running a little test before opening for real at 8:00, and they didn’t even realize people were able to interact with it while it was being tested, and when they took it out of test mode those appointments vanished? What if he somehow made appointments for a town with the same name as our town but in a different state? What if he accidentally made appointments for Covid-19 TESTS instead of Covid-19 SHOTS? Also: he registered himself, and then put me down as his “plus one”; what if he did that wrong, and so now HE gets his vaccine but I don’t get mine, and when we find this out and I have to make a new appointment, I find that the system is now booking into JUNE, and then it turns out I can NEVER LET THAT RESENTMENT GO AS LONG AS I LIVE? These were some of my myriad concerns.

My concerns increased when we arrived for our appointments and the line of cars for the appointment site was backed up for over half a mile, with a police officer directing traffic. AND the line doubled into TWO lanes’ worth of cars in the line up ahead. This was about 20 minutes before our appointment time.

Well! We waited about two hours altogether, from “20 minutes before appointment time” to “shots done and driving away,” staying in the car the entire time (this was a drive-up thing), and I needed to pee for about one hour forty-five minutes of that time, enough to be cranky but not badly enough to use the portable pandemic toilets, and in the end WE DID GET OUR SHOTS (AND I DID NOT PEE MY PANTS). There was no trouble with Paul’s appointment, nor with mine, nor with the “plus one” appointment concept. He had put my information in correctly, or at least correctly enough for me to get a shot. The appointments were indeed for shots and not accidentally for tests. The appointments were for shots in our own state and not another state. Etc. And we had not missed our appointments by being in line for so long: the appointment times seemed to be more of a way to pace people throughout a particular day, and the workers were fully aware of the line and its limitations.

The shot itself was no big deal. I had heard that it hurt surprisingly little, but it turned out I was too wound up to notice one way or another: my brain did not see fit to record that part of the experience. I remember the name of the guy who gave me the shot, and I remember what design of mask he was wearing, and I remember what he said while he was giving the shot (“You might have some soreness here; it might be sore to sleep on tonight; you might get a little fever”), and I remember him putting the bandaid on afterward, but I don’t remember the shot itself. I do think I would have remembered if it hurt MORE than I’d expected.

On the other hand, shots don’t bother me a whole lot. They DO bother Paul a whole lot, so I can report that he said he definitely felt his and that it hurt, but that it was “…okayyyy” compared to a flu shot (i.e., not as bad as what he thinks of as a typical flu shot). But he also said he had not been able to relax his arm for the shot: I can make mine dangle limply, and that’s supposed to help with pain at the time and with soreness afterward. Also: when we were back home and he got out of the car he yelled “ARG, OW!!!!” and I said “GAH WHAT IS IT??!??” and he said “My butt is sore from sitting for so long,” so let’s let that little anecdote adjust our Pain Experience Translators accordingly.

Two small things did not go quite right with the shots. One: They did not have us wait 15 minutes afterward, and in fact moved the line out with a hearty wave goodbye so they could deal with the next batch of cars (the line had not shortened when we drove past it on our way out), and we didn’t know what to do about that. Pull over into an adjoining lot and wait on our own? What we did was, we just drove off like everyone else was doing (possibly because everyone else also REALLY NEEDED TO PEE), and I fretted about it for 15 minutes, and then at that point stopped fretting because by then we would have been done waiting anyway. But Paul and I agreed afterward that if we’d had more time to think, and hadn’t been surprised by it (we’d thought we were in the waiting phase, but then the line suddenly moved), we probably would have pulled into an adjacent lot and waited there, just in case.

The second thing that did not go quite right is that they did not book our second appointment. Fortunately, we had heard from friends that SOME vaccine sites/workers were booking the second appointment on the spot and SOME were not, so we knew to be ALERT for that, and we knew to go home and go back to the vaccine website and book our second appointments. I fretted about all the people who will NOT know to do that. If I hadn’t heard about it from someone else, I might have thought vaguely that we would Hear Something From Someone About It.

Actually there was a third thing that didn’t go quite right, which is that there was an area on the card for them to write the date after which we should get the next shot, and they had not filled that out. Again, I fretted about people who would not know what to do about that. We’d looked it up, so we knew we needed to wait at least three weeks, and that three to four weeks later was considered typical and/or ideal for the second shot. (Paul had read somewhere that since the second shot of Pfizer is supposed to be three weeks later and the second shot of Moderna is supposed to be four weeks later, a lot of places are just using four weeks later for all second shots, to avoid confusion and mix-ups.)

And a fourth thing: we did not get stickers. I realize this is minor. But I was hoping for a sticker. It is the same when I vote: I do not NEED a sticker, but I REALLY WOULD LIKE TO HAVE a sticker.

I haven’t looked much into side effects or when they might happen if they were going to happen, but I’ve been braced for a couple of days of feeling pretty bad. It’s been just over 24 hours, and I can say I had just enough soreness in my arm that when I woke up in the night and was lying on it, I decided to switch to my other side; but other than that I wouldn’t know I’d had a shot. And yesterday evening I felt a little extra tired, but that could have been the aftermath of all the vaccine-appointment-concern adrenaline. Paul reported more arm soreness, and when he woke up this morning he took a pain killer for joint pain—but he said he didn’t notice when the pain killer wore off, and didn’t need any more. But, like, maybe that joint pain was vaccine-related…or maybe it’s that we’re in the age group that is eligible for vaccines, is what I’m just sort of wondering aloud about here. And also, remember that little anecdote I told you earlier.

And most of all I am stunned and amazed: THE VACCINE is into THE ARM. What mostly surprised me was how very quickly we went in our area from “We are still not eligible, and we have no idea when we WILL be eligible, and maybe we won’t get an appointment for MONTHS, maybe not until JULY or AUGUST” to “Wait—already the first shot is done?” There has clearly been a big shift UP in vaccination speed, and if it has not yet happened for you, and you are thinking “I am genuinely happy for others because every shot makes us all incrementally safer, BUT ALSO I WANT A VACCINE TOOOOOOOO,” I hope you end up feeling similarly about the speed of that transition.

I have not yet been among those wailing because a child doesn’t get to have an 8th grade graduation or a birthday party or whatever; I would say I have been a combination of stoic (these disappointments are happening to everyone; there is no reason my own special child should be exempt from disappointment) and lucky (so far there have not been many missed events that were Very Important to us). But now we are approaching one that is giving me, while not the urge to wail, a good-sized TWINGE, and it is the twins’ 16th birthday—or, more specifically, Elizabeth’s 16th birthday, because Edward doesn’t care and because I think of Sweet Sixteen parties/gifts as being A Thing for girls but not for boys.

We are not big Party People, but I had been thinking we would do something special for her 16th. She’s at the perfect age for sleepovers: she had one a few months before the pandemic and it was the perfect kind where they all stayed up in her room most of the time, and everyone was old enough to make their own arrangements for drop-off and pick-up. So I guess I was picturing a birthday sleepover, but maybe with something else, too: our local movie theater will rent you a whole room for a pretty reasonable price and that seemed like it would be fun; or maybe they’d all like to dress up and go for a sit-down dinner somewhere, with Paul and me at a different table; or maybe they’d like to do something appealingly silly and retro-babyish like going to Build-a-Bear.

Well. Just like everyone else, we can do a belated celebration. And in fact, since all her friends are turning 16 in this pandemic as well, maybe it can even be a fun thing where we do a whole month of Sixteenth Birthday celebrations, one or two per weekend, once everyone is 16 and vaccinated.

But also, while I have you here, I am looking for ideas for a Special Gift, and I am thinking along the lines of jewelry. When I turned 16, my parents bought me a silver bracelet from a local arts/crafts fair (like, the fancy kind of fair where the artists have to belong to a guild to participate, and everything is Pretty Expensive), and had it engraved, and I really liked that and wore it every day for years and years.

ANYWAY. Something like that. Not super expensive, but expensive ENOUGH.

One classic possibility is A Charm Bracelet, with a few charms to get started. Do people still wear them? I have one that I think was my mom’s, and it’s an item I enjoy owning but don’t wear anymore (almost all of the charms are Christian symbols), and I think I added maybe one charm to it myself, and received maybe one additional charm as a gift. I don’t want to do the Pandora kind, because (1) too expensive and (2) they seem like they’re more for older women. Like, they do sell charms that look like they’re for younger girls, but my impression is that it’s so that older women will get the idea of buying them for younger women, not because younger women like them. I could be completely wrong about this entire thing.

Talking about charm bracelets is making me feel weary instead of excited; I wonder if maybe something less complicated would be better. She has a few inexpensive necklaces she chose, and each of them has a very simple pendant (a small circle, one single rhinestone, one single faux pearl). I could get her a real silver version of one of those.

Or it appeals to me to get her a silver bracelet similar to mine. Or…what if I passed that bracelet down to her? Hm. That has some appeal, although it would appeal more if it had already been passed down a few times: my grandmother’s 16th birthday gift, passed down to my mom and then to me and then to Elizabeth. Perhaps I should wait and get that going by passing it down to a granddaughter on HER 16th. Or let one of the kids decide to do that if they want to, after I die and they inherit it.

Back to the SIMILAR, though: I just went to the website of the art/craft fair, and they have some things online, and they have MANY bracelet options that are the same basic gist as mine!! In fact, it may very well be the same craftsman: his little bio says he’s been doing silver work in our state since a year that is before the year I was born, so. This is my bracelet, which is pretty tarnished but you can get the gist of the style:

It has a hook closure I find appealing, and I used to endlessly pop it open and closed in a fidgety way. So I could get her a SIMILAR one, and get it engraved, and possibly start a little tradition of daughters getting a silver bracelet for their 16th birthday. Or not! Which would also be fine!

Or maybe birthstone earrings, with real versions of the birthstone? Hers is pearl, which seems nice for a special jewelry gift. Pearl would work for a nice simple pendant necklace, too.

Well, what do you think? Did you get something like this for your 16th birthday, and if not, would you have liked to, do you think? And/or what did you do for your daughter’s 16th / do you have anything in mind for your own daughter’s 16th?

I have just over a dozen pages left before the end of A Prayer for Owen Meany and I have put it down. I feel the need for Emotional Preparedness, which may never occur. At the very least, I am going to need a room containing no one who will make fun of me for crying.

I need to mention, by the way, that the book was published in 1989 and makes use of the R-word. [Edited to add: plus at least one instance of a person described as “Oriental.”] Also, it is a men’s book: it is about men, and things that happen to men. All the female characters are there only as accessories to the men: a man’s grandmother, a man’s girlfriend, a man’s cousin, a man’s teacher, a man’s mother. They are only there to help tell the men’s stories. I am not really reading books like that anymore, so I thought I should give you a little content warning so you won’t be surprised. This book is getting grandmothered in because I THOUGHT I HAD read it, so this is more like going back in time to keep me from being a liar. (Spellcheck knows the word grandfathered but not the word grandmothered. Click “Add to dictionary”/”Gradually reduce automatic patriarchy”—there, that’s better.)

And I have to skim a lot of the stuff about the Vietnam War and the political things that were going on at the time. It’s depressing to see how similar politics are now, and to realize that it’s not just that things got abruptly worse with the election of our 45th president (though they did), it’s also that I didn’t tune in until it got that bad—but it had been Pretty Darn Bad at many times earlier. Well, a lot of us are paying attention NOW, so good strategy, politicians! Fun idea, to see just how far you could push it!

I went grocery shopping today. We were getting low on a lot of things so I went in twice: first for things that don’t care about temperature, and then for everything else. That kind of trip is satisfying, because I can get EVERYTHING, and also have room in the cart for Bonus Items such as an impulse pack of bakery cinnamon rolls, and a box of unnecessary-but-the-kids-enjoy-them fruit snacks; but also stressful, because I do different aisles each trip, and I’m always worry that doing so will undermine the part of my list that is only in my mind and is triggered by walking past the items. That is, no one has to put milk on the list, because I remember it when I walk past it. But if I alter my route, who KNOWS what I might not walk past!!

Well.

This was my third grocery trip with the updated advice to double-mask (I wear a KN-95 first, with a cloth mask over it), and I really hate it, but also it does make me feel a little safer. But it’s so uncomfortable and humid. And I hadn’t realized how comfy my cloth masks were until I wore a disposable, though that’s unfair to the disposable: it’s against my face so it’s getting most of the blame for the issues caused by two masks. Still. Now I’m looking forward to wearing just one mask, a cloth one, after I’m vaccinated! HOW FAR WE HAVE COME.

Oh! A note: if your store has been weirdly out of horseradish sauce, as mine has been, it’s worth checking with the cocktail items (maraschino cherries, cocktail olives, grenadine, margarita/daiquiri mixers): I walked past that section today and there was horseradish sauce just sitting there! Although there was ALSO that one same kind of horseradish sauce in the regular section this time, so maybe it wouldn’t have been with the cocktail stuff before, either.

They were out of the little cocktail hot dogs again. They were out of those for AGES at the beginning of the pandemic, then suddenly had them in stock again Awhile Ago, and now haven’t had them for the past two trips.

Still no Lemon Pop Tarts, but that’s a new item so I might be missing a display, or my store might just not have them yet.

You know the BIG containers of spices? Like, not the usual cylindrical jar of cinnamon, but a big rectangular container? We needed a new Big Basil, and I have checked three trips in a row now, and they haven’t had it. The whole Big Spices section has been all spread out, with maybe three Big Spices taking up allllll the Big Spice slots. This time they did have Big Crushed Red Pepper, which they didn’t have last time.

Canned beans are still weird. They had the big cans of black beans and pinto beans, and those were spread out over two shelves of the missing other varieties.

Canned fruit is still weird. Cranberry sauce or pineapple or Weird Stuff, those are your choices. I’ve been ordering from Target.

Last time they were out of lemon juice; this time they had it, but just the store brand. (Which is fine, but notable.)

Almond milk was VERY LOW. I had to buy coconut-almond milk (which is fine, but notable).

The vegetarian meat-substitutes are still patchy, but at least they had some chicken nuggets and chicken patties, which we were getting perilously low on. No Gardein beefless ground, for the third trip in a row (that is the ONLY vegetarian ground beef we like; it’s that or nothing).

HAVE YOU EVER TRIED MARCONA ALMONDS. The deli section had a big display of them on sale, so I bought some just to try them. I can’t stop eating them. I told Paul to please take them away from me and put them somewhere I wouldn’t see them for awhile, because I was getting worried I would actually make myself sick before I’d stop. They’re skinless almonds, fried in oil, and then salted like they love you and want you to be happy.

I’d been seeing ads for Super Coffee (a keto thing), and thought I’d check to see if my grocery store had that brand, and they had two kinds of the refrigerated liquid creamer, so I bought the sweet cream one. It’s…okay. Very artificial-sweetener-flavored (which is fine/expected, but notable). I’m glad I didn’t order a case of it or something. I forget to check for the bottled flavored coffees when I was in that part of the store, but I’ll check next time.

Do you have a peanut-butter cereal you’d recommend? I have been eating a keto one that has put me very in the mood to have a NON keto version on my Days Off. I bought a box of Reese’s cereal, thinking that would be top tier stuff, and I ate one bowl of it and don’t want any more: hardly any peanut butter flavor at all. I know I can add actual peanut butter to cereal, but I’m checking first for options that don’t involve doing that.

I had a sudden craving for Sugar Babies, and checked the grocery store for them, but they didn’t have any. I don’t know if that’s a pandemic thing or if those are now an Old Person Candy and will have to be ordered from a special catalog that also carries the perfumes and toiletries of my distant youth. That, by the way, is how I will KNOW my peers and I are truly Old as opposed to “ha ha we’re so old!”: when the Vermont Country Store catalog starts carrying the things we love/remember. That’s the next level up from hearing your high school Top 40 played as elevator music, which is an achievement we have already unlocked.