I am tirelessly interested in Grocery Store Shelves Updates, and so I will just jump to assuming you are TOO, and tell you what my most recent trip was like:

• Raw meat was limited to two of each type per customer: i.e., two beef items per customer, two pork items per customer, two poultry items per customer. This made me feel a little stressed, especially because the meat sections had been consolidated, leaving a vast white empty unit. Also, I was not totally sure I understood the rules, because it looked as if ground beef might be counted as different than non-ground beef, but I couldn’t tell if that was just a signage issue.

• They had flour again! Only one kind but a fair amount of it on the shelves and another pallet in the aisle. Limited to two bags per customer.

• Still no yeast.

• Sugar products limited to two per customer, but they seemed to be in good supply.

• They had rice, several different kinds in several different sizes, encouraging amounts though nowhere near full.

• They had a lot more pasta brand/type variety than before. There’s been only store-brand elbow macaroni and store-brand spaghetti for awhile, but this time there was Prince, there was Barilla, there were shapes other than elbow/spaghetti. The shelf still looked very gappy, but so much better than before.

• Still very low on pizza sauce. Almost no canisters of Parmesan cheese.

• They had some tortillas and taco shells again—not many, but some.

• They had somewhat more soup brand/type variety than before. It still looked very empty, but instead of having nothing except, like, 99% Fat-Free Cream of Onion, they had some family-size cans of cream of chicken, even some cans of chicken noodle and tomato, some cans of other reasonable flavors. Still no packets of Ramen, just a few of the microwave cups of it, and only in the odder flavors.

• Plenty of beans, canned and dried. Those have been well-stocked for weeks, but I’m still jumpy because of earlier shortages.

• Plenty of eggs, plenty of butter, plenty of cream, plenty of milk. Those have been well-stocked for weeks, but again I’m still jumpy because of earlier shortages.

• Yogurt was curiously depleted, with a bunch of kinds missing.

• Plenty of bread but, interestingly to me, still not the kind we usually buy, which is just the store brand whole-wheat. It’s been absent for weeks and weeks. I have chosen a new kind of whole-wheat, and that’s been in stock each time.

• Still no SmartFood kettle corn. It’s such an oddly specific thing to be out of. They do have a couple of other brands of kettle corn in a different aisle, so I’ve been buying those.

• No limes. Perhaps we are not the only ones eyeing our dwindling bar supplies and thinking if we had some limes we could use up that tequila.

• They had RUBBING ALCOHOL and HYDROGEN PEROXIDE for the first time since well before lockdown. Limited to one of each per customer.

• After weeks of zero toilet paper, and then two or so weeks of just 4-packs of toilet paper, they had quite a few 20-packs of the store-brand. Limited to one pack of any size per customer.

• After weeks of NO bleachy/disinfecting cleaning products, they had several different bleachy/disinfecting cleaning products. Not tons of them, and the shelves were still pretty bare-looking.

• No disinfecting wipes, no hand sanitizer. A better supply of hand soap than before, but still pretty diminished.

I am very interested to hear what things are like at your store: things that are hard to find; things that used to be hard to find but seem to be back; things that are rationed; odd little shortages of a specific type of thing.

Every morning I wake up and think “The debauchery cannot continue: there must be less eating and more walking! less Candy Crush and more cleaning out sock drawers!” Those goals are apparently too high. Yesterday I had freezing feet for four hours because I felt like if I went upstairs for warmer socks I should really clean out the sock drawer, which currently cannot be closed. Finally I just got the warmer socks.

Paul told me yesterday evening that he had ordered the 50-pound bag of flour we’d discussed a couple of weeks ago and then casually decided not to order. He said he hadn’t wanted to say anything until it actually shipped, because it appeared he’d basically ordered the very last 50-pound bag of flour available from a company that may not have realized it was still offered on their site. Normally I would say I am not keen on situations where a couple makes a decision together and then one of them goes ahead and does a different thing. But in this case I was so happy to hear the flour was on its way, I cried a little. (And am half-imagining it will be a Downton Abbey situation and the bag will be full of plaster dust.)

I am very, very worried about the country starting to re-open.

Our government was supposed to be doing things while we were closed: we all got out of the pool so they could clean up the toxic spill. But then they didn’t do those things: we all got out of the pool, and nothing happened. We can all see that what was supposed to happen didn’t happen, but apparently those things are not going to happen, and that’s the plan: to just not do those things. The first people back in, the ones who say “Oh thank goodness, they’re letting us back in the pool so it must be safe to swim again!,” and the ones who are shoved into the pool by the re-opening, are going to show us whether this was a good plan or not. Not that it will keep the rest of us from having to get into the pool eventually too. What a mess. What a stupid, avoidable, wasteful, fatal mess.

States are starting to re-open, which is freaking me out considering our government has done little during the shutdown to justify reopening. The radio DJs were talking this morning about how they already had haircut appointments scheduled. I think there is going to be an unfortunate confusion of “permitted” and “safe”: like, if haircuts are allowed, then I have a haircut pass I can show to the virus, and the virus cannot infect me! I am feeling very unhappy about all the additional people who will be forced to go back to work in these conditions.

Paul and I were talking about the effects the partial re-open will have on our household. We are extremely, extremely fortunate that we can continue to stay home until we find out if the re-open is as bad an idea as we think it is. Originally I wrote the rest of this paragraph as a list of all the ways we were fortunate, but when I proof-read it I thought it sounded like boasting rather than the Acknowledging Privilege I was going for. It reminded me of the Christmas letters we get from Paul’s aunt: it is clear she is attempting through heavy use of the word “blessed” to communicate that they know how lucky they are and that they consider the luck unearned—and yet she manages to make it sound as if God has singled out their family for these blessings, and that she really couldn’t tell you why God didn’t do the same for your family when he clearly had that option but evidently decided not to bother for some reason, *shrug*.

Anyway, I think we’re about to go into a Very Bad Time, virus-wise, so let’s not talk about it anymore, let’s instead fulfill a request for pictures of the cats. You’re going to raise your eyebrows at my concealing their names, but “cat names” is EXACTLY the sort of dumb little thing that gets a Secret Blog discovered.

Here is Cat #1, a boy, age 9, all orange with pretty fur patterns, long and slim like a ferret:

He is a sweetie-pie and suuuuuuuuper dumb. We have a downstairs floor-plan of the sort that would let children run endlessly from room to room in a big circle, and we don’t think this cat has figured out what’s going on yet: we often see him pass through the living room, looking all around him, and then after awhile he comes all the way around again and you can just see him thinking “Oh, ANOTHER living room! With MORE people in it! Wow!! I wonder how many MORE rooms there are??” He sleeps on Edward’s bed almost every night, and we’re surprised he manages to find it so consistently. During the day he likes to sit behind me on my computer chair, so that I have to perch on the edge.

Here he is on the windowsill where he likes to watch Chipmunk TV:

That chair is there specifically for his convenience and comfort, but he often balances uncomfortably on the sill instead. With him is Cat #2, a boy, age 9. Cat #2 is a large-framed cat, a polydactyl, with extremely soft plush fur, grey-brown tabby and white. He is a Giant Baby. We have treated him with persistently gentle love for 7 years, and he still frequently winces and flinches and runs from us. If you talk to him, he will meow back. He lovvvvves Elizabeth and is usually in her room or sitting near her. He likes me, too, as long as no one else is in the room with me: after Paul gets up in the morning, he’ll sleep in Paul’s place, and then he likes to come into the bathroom and sit on the carpet while I take a shower. Here he is again, with Elizabeth:

And again, looking pensively out the window:

Here is Cat #3, a girl, age 7, orange with white tum, white knee socks, and white gloves:

She is a bossy little queen, small and fat. She bullies and menaces the polydactyl, who is much larger and stronger and could easily beat her up if he’d only realize it instead of running away from her. She is very affectionate with people in a possessive/claiming way, and will make the rounds from lap to lap. She follows us around the house, supervising and judging. She is my favorite cat we’ve ever had.

Here’s a rare photo of all three cats together (normally you’d see the two oranges together, or the two boys together, but never the girl-orange and the polydactyl unless they’re about to fight); this was possible only because they were having Wet!! Food!! which blows out their circuits:

The polydactyl looks smaller than he is, partly because of the weird perspective and partly because he is hunched in as small as he can make himself. The girl-orange is mad because she can’t eat out of all the bowls at once. The boy-orange is oblivious to all drama.

I had a whole list of things I jotted down to remember to write about, but looking over them now they seem to justify the theory that if I don’t remember it later, it probably wasn’t worth remembering. Still, here we are. I have no better ideas.

I attended a Facebook Live concert, an hour of piano by my cousin who is a music teacher and performer. This would not normally have been my thing, and in fact I’d never done anything with Facebook Live before, and it took me until almost the end of the concert to figure out how to make little thumbs-ups and hearts go floating up the screen in response to things she was playing/saying, but I DID figure it out. And the reason I jotted down the idea is because I wanted to recommend trying something like that, if you have the opportunity, because I was surprised to find it replenished my Social Buckets considerably even though I was not really interacting socially per se. But even just seeing my cousin on the screen, and seeing the little marker that indicated the hundred or so other people who were there watching with me, and seeing them leaving comments and hearts and thumbs-ups—well, I found it worth doing, is what I am saying, and also curiously touching, and perhaps you would find you had a similar reaction to such things, even if in pre-pandemic times you would not have been interested.

This next thing is about dreams; I will keep it brief. I’ve read that a lot of people are having particularly vivid dreams, and that it is in part from stress and in part from isolation. I keep having dreams that I’m adopting children, or considering adopting children, or assisting in the adoption of children. They are so far, luckily, always happy dreams, even though I am sure they stem from a news article I saw about countries very affected by the pandemic. One night I dreamed we were adopting a toddler and an infant, and I thought how nice it was that everyone in our family was home right now so we could get to know the new members together. Last night I dreamed I was holding a baby girl and trying to figure out how old she was based on how much talking she could do, so that I could add her approximate age to her adoption profile. I was holding her on my hip and carrying her around and pointing to things and asking what the things were, and she was pointing and saying “bahbah!” for bottle and so forth, and I was trying to remember what the corresponding age range was for that ability, but also I was thinking how nice it might be to keep her myself.

Also last night I dreamed a cute guy wanted me to marry him and move into his house, and he showed me his house which was exactly my style of house plus some bonus stuff I hadn’t thought to want until I saw it, and I very much liked both the guy and the house but decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to switch.

We are in an area where it is relatively easy and safe and in fact encouraged to go outside, and we are taking advantage of that and doing family walks. While acknowledging that this is something many people CAN’T do and are PINING to do, I will also say that I find walks very, very boring, and even more so now that we’ve gone all the directions many times in many ways. Upside: we sure know our new neighborhood well now! Downside: on one boring walk we impulsively diverted into a town cemetery, which anyone would have known was a dicey idea during a pandemic. There were all these families where someone age 2 died in December and then someone age 9 died that same month, and someone age 7 and someone age 4 died the following month—and then the same thing for another family a little further down. I wondered aloud what had happened, since all of these deaths seemed to have happened in the same winter, and speculated idly that perhaps it was some sort of virus. Then we walked straight home.

I think frequently of my sister-in-law saying that one of the upsides of a coffee habit is that it gives her something happy to look forward to every single morning. It is very common for me to wake up feeling a little grim—and then the sudden happy remembering: “Oh! Coffee!!”

Or in the afternoon, when things are feeling a little grim again and it is starting to sink in that I am going to have to make dinner again. When we would visit my grandparents, my mom would turn to my grandmother and say, “How about a fresh pot of coffee and a Little Something?,” and my grandmother would Fully Brighten and say “YES!” It’s a question I ask of myself now, when it is about 2:00 in the afternoon: “How about a [microwaved] cup of coffee and a Little Something?” YES. Yesterday I had a slice of banana nut bread with my coffee. Today it’s going to be toast with Nutella.

I have had two more Mother’s Day gift ideas (previous idea: custom care package). Both are more expensive than I would normally suggest, but I know a lot of us are accustomed to relying on quality time and meals out and acts of service as gifts for Mother’s Day, and now we are looking for material items that can be shipped, and I don’t know how that translates dollar-wise. Anyway, something that keeps catching MY eye (and I am a mom) is the tiny Keurig, which I thought of because I WOULD like a fresh-brewed cup of coffee in the afternoon but I’m not going to brew another pot [Edited to add: Ohhhhh nooooooo see Amy’s comment below, though, for a heads-up that this particular Keurig may have put all its eggs into the cuteness basket while neglecting to reserve any for the quality basket]:

(image from Target.com)

One of the things I didn’t like about my one-cup coffee maker when I had one is that I also have a regular coffee maker, and there was not room on the counter for both. This one takes up almost no room. If I could make up my mind between the blue and the pink I might have already put it on my wish list. (It also comes in grey and black; those tempt me ONLY because they have been cutely styled in the photos with a bright yellow mug.)

Another perhaps mommish thing I want is a set of Chrissy Teigen’s frying pans, and I want them about 50% because of the green color and about 50% because I follow her on Twitter and love her.

(image from Target.com)

I have had those on my wish list for ages and Paul keeps not buying them because he says it’s too boring of a gift idea, which is something we can discuss another time, but long story short I have these in the back of my mind as the thing I will buy for myself if my family skips Mother’s Day again this year.

I went to the grocery store yesterday and, because I have been so stressed at having to leave stuff behind when I run out of room in the cart, and also stressed that people will see me taking what I need for seven people and think I am taking too much, I tried the system of going in and getting all the stuff that would be perfectly fine sitting in the car for awhile (cat litter, cereal, canned stuff) plus half of the amount of some of the things I feel self-conscious about appearing to take too much of (meat, cheese, butter, eggs), and then going back for a second trip to get the more perishable stuff and the other half of the self-conscious stuff. This worked well (I easily filled two entire carts to what I’d consider comfortable-not-stressy levels) but wow, that is a long time to spend grocery shopping. Still, it was satisfying to get home with all the available stuff on the list, instead of coming home and immediately making a new list of all the things there weren’t room for, plus already being stressed again about running out of meat and cheese and butter and eggs.

My store had flour the last two times I went shopping before this one, but with restrictions: one bag per customer two trips ago, two bags per customer on my last trip. I was hoping that meant everyone had gotten well stocked up on flour and wouldn’t need to buy much more (especially since there’s been no yeast for weeks and weeks) and soon supplies would be back to normal—but this time the store had no flour at all. That kind of thing makes me fretful and a little panicky, especially with so long between shopping trips. But I did find a canister of Clorox wipes, which felt like some kind of miracle: the first time I walked down that aisle, that whole section was completely empty; the second time I walked down it, there were two containers of wipes just sitting there. An employee was stocking the aisle, and I looked to see if he had a whole bunch of the wipes, but no: he was working on unpacking air fresheners and furniture polish.

I will put this other whole fret in one big paragraph to make it easier to skip if you don’t like to read hand-wringing (though in that case what on earth would you be doing HERE). There is a guy near the entrance to that shopping plaza, and in Olden Times I liked to pull over and give him money if he was there and I was passing by, but I have been unsure how to do it safely during a pandemic. Here is what I did do: I took a plastic baggie and put in a disposable water bottle (for weight, but also for the water), a granola bar (because it seemed weird to do just water), and an envelope with the cash in it. Then, instead of leaning out my car window as usual, I parked the car nearby, walked over to the median where he stands, and put the bag down about ten feet away from him. I fretted ahead of time that ANY of the ways that didn’t involve just handing it out the window as usual (throwing it to/near him, putting it on the ground for him to have to pick up, etc.) were a bad look for one human being giving something to another human being. I also fretted that ANYTHING I did would give off “I think you are diseased!” vibes rather than the “I’m protecting us both as recommended!” I was going for. I had to give up both those frets because I couldn’t think of a good way that would avoid those issues entirely, and “just don’t give him the money, then” didn’t feel like a good solution. I also fretted that it would make him nervous to see someone approaching on foot, and I still fret about that. Paul dismissed that concern, saying that I don’t look dangerous to anyone, especially approaching with a clear plastic bag obviously containing food and water. Still, I suspect people who are panhandling get approached in a number of ways by people who don’t look dangerous per se but either ARE dangerous or else want to do other things the person doesn’t like (including things like giving advice or evangelizing, probably by people who look very much like me), so I didn’t like making him wonder. I also didn’t originally like Paul’s idea of using a extendable robot arm (like this) to extend the envelope out the window, but maybe that would be a better idea for next time, I don’t know.

I just had a little unexpected meltdown on a call to refill Edward’s Remicade prescription. It’s a call that is already silly: our current insurance forces us to use a pharmacy that ships the medication to the hospital, when our former insurance just had the hospital pharmacy provide it. So it used to be that we did literally nothing to refill the prescription (the nurses just let the pharmacy know it was needed), and now instead we receive an automated call asking us to call this remote pharmacy, and then we call them, and we spend five minutes contributing NOTHING to the process except to say “Yes, as usual, go ahead, yes, as usual, yes, thank you, yes, just do it as usual, I don’t know if that’s right, the hospital handles that part” and confirming that nothing has changed. The whole thing could be automated, but is not, and we endure it because who is going to make a big system-changing deal about an unnecessary five-minute phone call every seven weeks. Not me.

This time the call took more than half an hour, and I would have said it took 45-60 minutes except I did not actually check the time I started the call, and it is so easy to exaggerate when telling a story of high emotion. I just know it was more than half an hour because I DID glance at the clock the first time she said she was going to put me on hold, which was already well into the part of the call when I was wondering how much longer this was going to take, and I know it was half an hour after that when I finally got off the phone. Anyway, when I had been on hold twice for her to check something AFTER I had given/confirmed allllll the information I ever need to give/confirm, I asked DID she need anything more from me, because it sounded like all she still had to do was confirm things with the doctor’s office, and I’m never involved with that. She said she did in fact need more from me, but that she first needed to confirm with the doctor’s office before she could go on to that part of her form, so I would need to be on hold again while she did that. (This is not typically the case when I call. They typically deal with me, then hang up and do the rest with the doctor’s office.) Then there were two full rounds of unsuccessful attempts to contact the doctor’s office plus one session while she looked for alternate ways to contact them—all of this with me still on the phone. I finally asked WHAT information she still needed from me, and she said she would need me to confirm whatever shipping date the doctor’s office gave her.

That was apparently my breaking point. I transitioned from “somewhat impatient, but still cooperative and polite” to FULLY FLIPPED-OUT in what I would estimate was two, maybe three seconds. My voice went from normal and calm to fast and intense and shaking. In this mode I went on at some repetitive length about how they did NOT need that from me, that I NEVER confirm the shipping date after they speak to the doctor’s office, that I did NOT need to personally confirm the shipping date as long as they were getting it there in time, that WHATEVER the pharmacy and the doctor’s office agreed upon between themselves was FINE with me and I would be giving an automatic YES to whatever it was and did not need a separate call for that, that I did not CARE when they shipped it as long as it got there by the date I had already given her, that I would be happy to give that same VERBAL PERMISSION individually for every single shipping date between now and then if I could JUST GET OFF THE PHONE.

I feel bad that I said it all in that quavering losing-it voice (so contagious to other people’s moods) to someone who has very little power over the situation, and is attempting to do her job as she’s apparently been instructed to do it. (I don’t know how the other representatives avoid what happened this morning; the one I spoke to implied that they did it by not following the rules.) I did remember to say early on that I knew this was not her fault and I knew she was doing what she was supposed to do and I knew that she didn’t make the rules—which, as a former customer service worker, I can say really helped ME when someone was flipping out.

I also recommend, if you are the one flipping out, using “they” to refer to the company you’re having a problem with, rather than “you.” So you’d say, for example, in your high, quavering, clearly-losing-it voice, “I don’t understand why they need me to agree AGAIN to have it shipped!!,” rather than “I don’t understand why you need me to agree AGAIN to have it shipped!!” This helps make it psychologically/emotionally/linguistically clear that you see the nearly-powerless person you’re speaking to as separate from the entity in charge of them. Plus, you get a better answer, if there is one: if you use “you,” you get useless stuff about protocol and following orders, because the agent is hearing “you” personally and so is telling you why he/she specifically has to do it that way; if you use “they,” you might get information about why the company has its agents do it that way.

Anyway, I am not proud of myself this morning, and I’m embarrassed. Everything is weird with all the pandemic weirdness, and there is no need for me to add a meltdown to someone’s working day. (I’m still mad about being on the phone SO LONG FOR NO GOOD REASON though. If you must-must-MUST confirm with me, then CALL ME BACK. WE ARE ALL HOME ALL THE TIME NOW. GAH!)