Would you like to join me in some hand-wringing about voting?

Our area is allowing Covid-19 as a reason for voting absentee. So Paul and Rob and William and I all sent away for absentee ballots. And those absentee ballots have arrived. And between ordering them and receiving them, the president of the United States has made many, many remarks that indicate that he intends at least to TRY to have absentee ballots considered fraudulent/invalid. I have read more than one article saying He Cannot Do That, but excuse me I have been alive and conscious for the last four years and I have heard “He cannot do that” followed by “Well I’ll be darned, he DID do it! Huh, weird! Guess there’s nothing we can do” TOO MANY TIMES. Which makes it seem like it might be better to vote in person on Election Day, just in case. I think ahead to ballots being questioned, and I don’t want to be kicking myself thinking that my vote is in question and might not count.

On the other hand, we are in the middle of a pandemic. I HATE that we have a president who would try to scare people in order to force them to vote in person during a pandemic, but we do. We do have that. It is obviously better and safer if as many of us as possible vote absentee to lower the risk for poll workers and for people who do vote in person. And surely, SURELY, with so many absentee votes—SURELY that would be too many to overthrow? Surely there would be too many of us tracking our ballots and demanding to know why they weren’t counted? In the past when I needed to vote absentee, I never thought to track it: I just assumed it would arrive and be counted. I assume a lot of other people were the same. BUT NOT THIS YEAR.

Also, if we would like to turn dark for a moment, and why on earth wouldn’t we, after all it is Friday night and we know how to spend it: between now and the election, some of us might become too sick to vote; or, less dark, might be quarantined on Election Day. I would feel happier if my vote were already on its way, Just In Case. And even without that worry, I would feel some relief to have the voting over with, and the Waiting To Vote tension relieved.

But as one of my friends says, the risk of voting in person is relatively low as long as everyone is masked (and our city is requiring masks and, perhaps even more importantly, has a system in place for people who refuse or cannot wear masks); and she says she personally feels she really wants to be there on that day and push that button herself. And I can see that, too.

If I’m going to vote absentee, I want to do it as early as possible: our city has online tracking, so I can make sure our ballots arrived, and with plenty of time to do something about it if not. (Dropping it off in person is an option, but one of the scare tactics is that a postmark will be important to prove it was sent before the election, so I would probably prefer to mail them.) But that means making a decision as soon as possible, when my usual method would be to dither longer.

What are you thinking about voting in-person vs. absentee? (Assuming you have that option. If you don’t have that option, you can answer based on what you think you WOULD be thinking, or what your friends/family who DO have the choice are thinking, since “I don’t know, we don’t have that choice in my area” makes for very dry reading—and, as we’ve noted, it IS Friday night.)

You will remember, because it was only a week ago and we have not yet lost our minds though who could blame us if things were getting a little precarious, that about a week ago one of my feet swelled up for no reason. It swelled Friday evening, stayed swollen all Saturday, then unswelled by midday Sunday, leaving me feeling perkily relieved that I would not need to see a doctor after all, and that’s when I blogged about it. Then some of the comments on that post made me feel kind of panicky, so I decided what I would do is if my foot swelled AGAIN I would see a doctor.

Well. That’s so easy to say, when the foot isn’t swollen and one’s mood is confident and carefree as a result of feeling freshly grateful for painless walking. A week later, when my OTHER foot started swelling up, I wanted to wiggle out of that promise. I spent two hours trying to do so, but failed, particularly when the foot surpassed the level of swelling the first foot had achieved, and was seriously difficult to walk on—to the extent that I used my computer chair to roll myself to the bathroom before we left for Urgent Care. (I looked into doing a telemedicine appointment, but the screening questions left me pretty confident the doctor would want to take an actual look at this.)

The doctor at Urgent Care said he didn’t think it could be a blood clot. He said first of all, if it were a blood clot my leg would be hurting (it was not), but that also, it was Not A Thing to have a blood clot first cause swelling in one foot, and then the other. He found a large hive on my instep and diagnosed Allergic Reaction, Cause Unknown, and he gave me a dose of methypredisolone and benadryl while I was there, and a prescription for a methylprednisolone pack to start taking the next day. Methylprednisolone is a steroid. It can cause anger, insomnia, and huge appetite. Let’s check in with Swistle on Day 2 of this medication (which was last night):

The benadryl DID knock me out, for five hours; then I woke up, lay awake for an hour, and happily did get back to sleep for a couple more hours. Today I feel Fairly! Perky! Which is good, because you know how we just talked about the urge to lay in provisions. And then the U.S. president was hospitalized with Covid-19, and suddenly I was VERY VERY INTERESTED INDEED in going grocery shopping, but there I was with my STUPID FOOT, feeling I’d wasted the WHOLE week when neither foot was swollen and I could have shopped ANY TIME!! And we were low on milk! LOW ON MILK!!!

But! The medications have been working beautifully: even yesterday I could walk almost normally/comfortably, and today I can walk without thinking about it at all, so I went to the store. They still didn’t have baking chocolate. And they did not have Diet Mtn Dew (until writing this post, I did not know it was “Mtn Dew” and not “Mt. Dew”), and that is one of Paul’s Emotional Support Foods so I am feeling a little anxious about that, especially because they were LOW on Diet Mtn Dew for the last several trips, so it seems like it’s not just a brief hiccup. Fortunately, that lowness had inspired me to get an extra 12-pack each time, so we’re okay FOR NOW.

And I got LOTS of milk, and plenty of eggs, and got us re-upped on all the normal things we use (cheese! yogurt! bread! meat! french fries!), and got a bag of new fall apples even though we still had a nearly-full bag of new fall apples, so now I feel better.

The U.S. president is in the hospital with Covid-19, and it is easy to get caught up in discussions such as the one Paul wanted to have last night, about whether this is GOOD or BAD for the election (he says bad, because of The Sympathy Vote, which is not something I’m familiar with). And I have seen articles about how our country doesn’t have a system set up for what happens if a candidate is no longer a candidate when there is an election in less than a month, and about what MIGHT happen, given that we don’t have set rules. It’s dramatic, unsettling stuff.

Stuff like that is interesting to think about, and I do think the people who have the power to do so should fix that gap in election policy, especially now that we’re apparently trying to beat our record every year for Oldest Candidate, but I found I was getting caught up in it as if this were a strategy game in which I had to FIGURE OUT and then HOPE FOR the path to the best outcome. But…my thoughts and hopes have no effect on anything. So I don’t have to figure out what would be best and root for that—and in fact, none of us KNOW what’s best, we can only guess (and how many things in our lives have seemed Bad at the time, and then turned out in the long run to be Good, Actually? And vice versa, where something that seemed so Good ended up being Bad, Actually? LOTS), and none of us would be able to influence things for the best even if we did know. All we can do is wait for things to unfold. It can feel like powerlessness/helplessness, but it can also feel like we can stop trying to keep the airplane aloft with our minds.

In the days before we went into lockdown back in March, I remember having a feeling of gathering everything in and closing the shutters. We went to the grocery store two days in a row, and I felt like a squirrel in autumn. I went to Target, and there was no hand sanitizer and no hand soap, and I bought laundry detergent and shampoo and toilet paper and ibuprofen and Dayquil/Nyquil, and wondered what else I should bring into our burrow. We picked up one college student and then the other, and as I came up the driveway with the second one, I thought, “There. Now we are tucked in. We can lock the doors and hunker down.”

I am having that gather-in feeling again now. Instead of considering my grocery store’s month-long paper-towel shortage no big deal, I ordered some online—and, when they arrived this morning, I brought them into the house with that squirreling-away-acorns feeling. When I placed another order last night, I got an extra box of cereal, extra cans of fruit, extra peanuts and raisins. Not hoarding, but provisioning: buying the things we will need, and will use. Preparing.

Part of it is that I live in an area that gets a fair amount of snow, and so I am already in the category of person that memes make fun of for wanting to have adequate food in the house before we can’t get out safely for a couple of days, and that is apparently endlessly hilarious, NOT THAT I’M BITTER. And so even in normal times, fall gives me the feeling that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get a few extra cans of soup, an extra pack of toilet paper, an extra jar of peanut butter. In pandemic times, and when our school system has reported their first confirmed case of Covid-19, and when we are just over a month from a presidential election in which one candidate is already calling fraud and encouraging his supporters to turn to violence if he doesn’t win, it feels like maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get TWO extra jars of peanut butter, by which I mean ten.

I had a very bad spirally sort of mood that started Friday afternoon when one of my feet started to hurt and swell. I was going to try to make this short, but that is evidently impossible, so I will at least bracket-summarize what can be bracket-summarized.

The gist is that all Friday evening and all Saturday, including a long session in the wee hours of Saturday morning when I should have been sleeping, I was thinking along these lines: “I can’t even take my morning walk, and that has been the ONE THING that I feel has been holding me together physically and emotionally, and I’d FINALLY gotten to the point where I didn’t have to practically force myself to do it. And in fact, maybe it was my morning walk that hurt my foot: maybe I am being thwarted by the very things I am doing to make myself better. And I can’t do my daily housecleaning chore today, either, and without those daily chores, the house falls apart, and even without this injury I can’t keep doing it, I just can’t, I can’t keep this house clean, we never should have moved to this house. [Short mournful thinking session about The Old House, fairly quickly squelched by (1) not liking to think about the old house and (2) the unavoidable benefits of this new larger house in a pandemic.] And no one else is doing their share of housework, except Elizabeth, the only other girl, and that is a sad, sad, sorry state of affairs. And why do I have to INCESSANTLY NAG for anyone (except Elizabeth) to do what they OUGHT to be doing completely on their own even if no one ever nagged them, just because it is Obviously The Right Thing that everyone who lives in a place should be helping to clean that place? Why are they ALL (except Elizabeth) turning out just like Paul on this issue? It is clear I am not an effective parent. And now they will all (except Elizabeth) go on to make their spouses/housemates miserable! whereas Elizabeth’s spouse/housemate(s) will make HER miserable.

“Maybe I should go to the doctor about my foot: the online stuff said that if it’s just one foot, and there was no known injury to the foot, that’s a reason to see a doctor. But there’s a pandemic. And I canceled my annual physical with the doctor because of the pandemic, and in the past her office has been salty about scheduling sick visits if you’re not up to date with your well visits, so [long imagined argument with receptionist] [reliving of another argument with a doctor’s receptionist over ten years ago, with rehearsals of how it could have gone instead]. I could go to Urgent Care. But some of the online sources said that one reason a foot might suddenly swell was “alcohol abuse.” So they will almost certainly ask me about alcohol, and I don’t want to tell them, because when my mom told her doctor she had one measured 5-ounce glass of wine daily with dinner, he wrote “Excessive Drinker of Alcohol” in her file, and that caused so many problems. [Imagined conversations with doctor in which I try out every way of declining to answer / lying / explaining what happened to my mom / etc.] [Long upset thinking session about how my doctor, when I told her I did drink alcohol, lectured me for far longer than she has ever addressed any of my medical issues, about how I should not drink, including telling me that if I drank alcohol, it would teach my children that drinking alcohol was okay. I DO THINK DRINKING ALCOHOL IS OKAY. THAT IS WHY I DRINK IT.] [Long upset thinking session about how doctors accuse patients of lying about alcohol use, but MAYBE YOU HAVE GIVEN US ABUNDANT GOOD REASON FOR THAT, DOCTORS.] And I have already given up coffee because my reflux apparently can’t handle it right now, and I have mostly given up sugar and bread and pasta and potatoes; if I have to ALSO give up alcohol, IN AN ELECTION YEAR, then I give up. I give up!

“Besides, my foot is just kind of swollen. It’s not a weird color, there are no weird streaky lines, it’s not hot and red, I’m not feverish, it doesn’t feel as if anything is broken—this is not a Doctor Situation yet. I would feel silly. And it’s a pandemic. But what if I wait, and it turns out I should have gone in RIGHT AWAY. Maybe this is happening because of a blood clot, and I will die in the night! [Brief thought of how nice it would be to bail on All This, quickly overwhelmed by thoughts of things I DON’T want to miss. Plus, I have to vote first.] Maybe it is the beginnings of a terrible infection, and If I Had Just Seen a Doctor Sooner, I Wouldn’t Have Lost the Foot. [Long upset thinking session about how badly I have plummeted into despair over This One Small Probably-Temporary Physical Thing, when people deal with MUCH MORE SERIOUS AND/OR LENGTHY things; and how I hope I would not be such a terrible baby if something long-term/permanent happened to me, as it so easily could, and how I hope I would RALLY rather than SINKING INTO DESPAIR FOREVER.] [Long upset thinking session about how many things would fall apart without me, since apparently no one in my family (except Elizabeth) can do a single damn thing without being nagged.] [Long agitated mental rehearsal of the things I would need to do/prepare if I knew I were dying.] [Long upset thinking session about how much I HATE to be helped and/or waited on when I am sick or injured, and how I may very well end up having to have it happen anyway—if not now, then when I am older. If I survive This Foot.] [Long resentful thinking session about how PAUL, on the other hand, LOVES to be waited on, and if HE were disabled permanently or long-term, he would REVEL in requiring my continual service, and that he and his ilk are THE VERY REASON for that part of the marriage vows, and that I should not have married him-in-particular under those terms.]”

Anyway, this morning my foot was noticeably less swollen, and almost normal to walk on; progress like that makes me think I won’t need to see a doctor. I have returned, relieved, to my relatively cheery baseline levels of This Current Administration despair.

If you, like me, are clutching at even tiny flickers of joy these days, may I recommend seasonal hand soaps? I know. But I have ordered Everspring’s Clove & Nutmeg, Black Pepper & Balsam, and Vanilla & Mulled Citrus; and, waiting for them to arrive, I have felt flickers of happy anticipation. I take those where I find them. I also ordered a bottle of Method Wild Meadow, because it is Limited Edition and has a cute bottle, and “Limited Edition” and “cute bottle” tick the same box as “Seasonal” for me. And because if we need one million hand soaps anyway, let them at least be INTERESTING TO TRY.

(image from Target.com)

And our grocery stores are still very low on hand soap, let alone fun ones. They had Arm & Hammer and the store brand, that’s it.

I went to the smaller, closer store option today, and they were also very low on vegetarian meat substitutes and they had no hand sanitizer. And no baking chocolate, which is making me a little nervous. But they seemed back to normal on flour, which was nice to see. I am buying ahead a bit for winter. Oh, and they had YEAST! Like, in jars! Also, they had a sign up saying they are allowing reusable bags again, so I will have to get back into that habit. I am so eager to be done with stupid disposable bags tipping and spilling and ripping, and digging their stupid handles into my hands.

Incidentally. Not to cause alarm. But it has been a month or so since my grocery store has had any paper towels—any at all. At first I was not very worried, because for a good number of months before THAT, my grocery store had had ABUNDANT paper towels, to the point that they were stacking them on shelves that used to have all the cleaning supplies that are still out of stock. There were so many, I almost felt I should buy some just as a favor to the store. But now the paper towel shelves have been full of packages of toilet paper for my last THREE trips to the store, and I am getting a little concerned. We have dramatically reduced our paper-towel usage, and dramatically increased our fabric washcloth usage, but I still use paper towels for (1) cleaning up cat barf, (2) cleaning toilets, and (3) anything I clean with bleach. I don’t know if they’ll still be in stock by the time you look, but last night Target had an 8-roll pack of Bounty in stock and available for shipping, so I ordered that along with the soaps.