I went grocery shopping today, experimenting with the “lunchtime on Sunday” timing. There was a long line to get in, but it moved almost comically fast: a whole bunch of shoppers left all at once, and the whole line just filed right in within a couple of minutes. I was alarmed to see fewer people wearing masks than the last time I went; I’d been expecting to see it at near-total mask usage by now. Because I’d seen the news and knew there were small nationwide protests about the social distancing and the shutdown of non-essential businesses, I wondered if what I was seeing was people Not Wearing Masks (as opposed to just not wearing masks), which made me feel unhappier than the last time I went shopping. Last time there was a “This is scary, but we’re all working together to keep us all safer!” feeling, but this time there was a “Some of us are trying our best to keep us all safer, but others of us are deliberately thwarting and sabotaging those efforts” feeling.

I saw quite a few people wearing N95 masks and I reminded myself that just as they don’t know I am shopping for seven people, I have NO IDEA why they’re wearing an N95. They could have found out they were exposed recently to someone confirmed to have Covid-19. They could be living with someone who has a confirmed or strongly-suspected case. They could be healthcare workers. They could have an immune disorder or some other medical situation, and also be very stressed right now because there were no delivery/pick-up slots available and so they had to go into the store. They could have one mask they used for something else long ago and hung onto it because maybe it would come in handy for something else some day, and it can’t be donated because it was used, and look it HAS come in handy! They could be wearing something that to my untrained eye LOOKS like an N95 but IS NOT. So many reasons for me to keep my eyes on my own work!

I also saw quite a few people shopping together, and I had a harder time thinking of good justifications for that, not that I am the Grocery Shopping Judge and/or Jury (PLEASE LET ME HAVE THAT JOB). I did think of one or two: maybe one member of the pair can’t be left home alone, or maybe one of them knows what groceries they need but can’t do any bending or gripping or lifting. There are probably other good reasons for it, too. Still, there were so MANY people shopping together and I would very much like it if as many people who COULD shop alone would shop alone. The grocery store is a scary place right now, and I am doing what I can to keep myself and other people safe, and then I am passed much too close by a mom and a teenager, neither of them wearing masks, casual and chatty and walking the wrong way down a one-way aisle, while on the other side of the aisle a mask-wearing woman’s non-mask-wearing male companion is bored and wandering around picking things up and reading the labels and being in the way, and CAN WE PERHAPS EXPEND A CERTAIN MINIMUM INDIVIDUAL EFFORT FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE GROUP.

Mine did not seem to be the only attitude that was slipping a little. One woman joined the line outside the store, sighing loudly and saying “Aw GEEZ.” The cheerful woman in front of her made a friendly remark about how the line was moving nice and fast, and the woman who had just joined us said that SHE had to WORK all week, and she would appreciate it if everyone who “didn’t have to work” could do their shopping during the week. Well. I mean. There is a lot to pick through there, if we felt like picking, which LET’S NOT, IT FEELS SO UNPLEASANT.

The woman in front of me in line was not wearing a mask, was rolling her eyes and sighing and shifting impatiently from foot to foot in a showy way, was much too close to people once we got into the store, was putting her cart in the middle of the aisle, and wasn’t paying attention to the One Way signs. I was going to use the word “ignoring” for how she was interacting with the One Way signs, but fortunately for the ongoing and badly-needed development of my character, I found myself at one point accidentally going the wrong way down an aisle. In my defense, it was a double-aisle with a lower shelf down the middle, and I started the correct direction up one side, then incorrectly assumed the other side was the other direction since everything else was back-and-forth like that. But, to hand some material over for my prosecution as well, another customer came up the aisle the other (and, as it turned out, correct) way, saw me and hastily backed away, and I thought to myself with exasperation, “Oh my god, people, one-way aisles, just LOOK at the SIGNS!” Then I got to the end of the aisle and saw the one-way sign, pointing at me. It took my potential judginess down a couple of pegs, I’ll say that. Mortification can be so immediately and intensely constructive.

I will end this on a more cheerful note by saying that the store had toilet paper for the first time in a month. They did not have a ton of choice, and it was all the small packages, and there was a limit of one package per customer—but it was heartening to see it.

It’s been one month and one day since our household started quarantine/isolation/stay-at-home. The buzz has worn off, as of approximately yesterday. Yesterday I thought it might just be a regular low/down day, but then this morning I woke up full-on discouraged and floppy. I listened to the news and heard that our president is still itching to “re-open the country” before we have anything near adequate testing or treatment. The gap between now and January is too wide, and already that narrowing gap was a very optimistic thing to be counting on. My mental imagery is of a plane going down: we can’t reach the runway in time, and it’s always been possible the runway wasn’t even there.

I heard that a lot of people got their stimulus checks yesterday; we haven’t been able to log into our account to see. When I say “we,” I mean Paul, who kept trying and trying until I suggested we maybe NOT do that, since we don’t need to know THIS VERY MINUTE and obviously the site is overloaded. We’re going to use our check to continue to pay our housecleaners not to come. That is, we were going to pay them anyway, but that is how we are mentally allocating it. Somewhere in the recesses of my flopping, exhausted, discouraged brain: “so lucky! you are so extremely lucky!” To have a bank where the check can be automatically deposited. To be able to wait to see if the check is there, because the need for it isn’t urgent. To be able to spend it without having to decide between rent and food and medical care. To be able to spend it on something optional.

Thinking about people who can’t buy groceries because they can’t find them AND CAN’T PAY FOR THEM is. Well. It is as terrible as always, multiplied by pandemic. We can all do what we can to help, but individual donations to charity don’t even come close to meeting the need, and it gets discouraging to be a bunch of individuals trying to pick up the slack of an ENTIRE GOVERNMENT. As a former Christian, it is even more maddening to know FULL WELL what Christianity specifically and extensively instructs Christians to do for the poor/sick/oppressed/refugee, and see a government claiming to be Christian but ignoring all of those instructions, and in fact actively making things much, much, much worse for the poor/sick/oppressed/refugee.

We have so little power, as individual citizens, despite all the pep talk about how we can change the world or whatever. I hope we can keep that in mind when we see things happening in other countries and wonder why the citizens “let” it happen. Bad people look for power, and they get it by whatever methods work for them, that is how this happens. We can try to make some little bits of good despite the bad, and that’s about it. I mean, let’s still do that, we should definitely still do that. But it’s discouraging to see how little we can do from the cabin to affect the falling airplane, or to change what’s going on in the cockpit.

(Alternate title for this post: “What If Just as an Experiment We Tried a Cockpit Without a Cock In it.”)

Your comments on the breakfast post put me in the mood for baked oatmeal. I have been having trouble sleeping (I know from Twitter/blogs/Facebook that I am not the only one), and when I woke up at 4:45 and couldn’t get back to sleep, I thought happily, “I’ll get up and make the baked oatmeal!” It is in the oven now.

You were all more interested than I’d expected in the topic of breakfast, so I will add that one of my OTHER favorite breakfasts, which I think I could eat every day for the rest of my life, is half of a toasted/buttered/salted bagel, plus two scrambled eggs. Something about that combination is almost magical.

It made me very happy to read how many of you appreciate a good Second Breakfast. I too appreciate Second Breakfast. One of the benefits of waking/getting up too early is there is plenty of time for Second Breakfast.

I had a down day yesterday, with a particularly down evening. I’m fretting about whether I should go back to work part-time at my mostly-closed library. I realize I am extremely lucky (on multiple levels) to have the ability (on multiple levels) to make this relatively low-stakes decision. Those of you with less choice, more stress, and more at stake may want to skim, or skip entirely: there’s nothing on any other topic for the rest of the post, so you won’t miss anything.

We are not in a high-exposure area and/or large city. The library is still doing curb-side service, which I could possibly opt out of participating in (and might not even be asked to participate in, since I am a re-shelver, and they might be thinking of curb-side as more of a checking-out job); the building is closed except to employees. There is a quarantine process for returned items: I don’t know exactly what it is because I’m not there, but it looks like things hang out on a cart down in a storeroom for a week, and then are sanitized. The number of employees in the library is kept very low (it looks like four or so), and everyone stays at least six feet away from each other. What I’ve been hearing/reading is that transmission of the virus on Touched (or even Coughed On) Items is not anywhere near the concern of transmission by particles actively being coughed/talked in your immediate Face Vicinity.

That seems to me like I could go back to work. And I would LIKE to go back to work, and I would enjoy being part of this experience with my co-workers. But with Edward’s immunosuppressant medication, I wonder if that’s being foolish. The library IS still handling materials that other people have touched and coughed on and licked their fingers to turn pages of, etc. And there is a lot we still don’t know for sure about the risks and transmission of this particular virus. And being around / talking to / sharing a bathroom with co-workers is still a not-insignificant increase in risk, even if we’re trying to be safe and stay away from each other.

One test I often use for decision making is “How would I feel explaining this decision later to a police officer / ER doctor / etc.?” There are plenty of things that seem like No Big Deal until you imagine explaining them that way to an expert or authority figure after the plan has gone awry. I’ve seen that framing used in things being shared on Facebook about Covid-19: basically, if you found out you’d had the virus for a week, and the doctor asked you to please make a list of everywhere you’d been and everyone you’d had contact with, how would you feel about that list? It’s not the kind of question I want someone else to ask me in a shaming, judgey way, but it’s the kind of question I like to ask MYSELF, as part of the figuring-out process.

And so it’s a question I’m asking myself while trying to decide about the work issue. If I went back to work, and then I became sick and then Edward became sick, and the doctor was trying to trace down how Edward got it—how would I feel about my decision to go back to work at my low-wage, low-importance job, where almost anyone could fill in for me?

If I think of that same question about the decision to get together with a friend, I immediately flinch: I’d feel terrible. I’d hate to have to admit it to the doctor, and I’d want to lie. I’d feel I’d made a stupid mistake for no good reason, and against specific and clear recommendations. But if I ask it about a decision to go to the grocery store, I don’t flinch: We needed food. I didn’t go excessively, I took precautions, it’s a very, very contagious virus and we were all going to be exposed to it eventually.

Work is somewhere in between, especially because it is a low-paying part-time job and we don’t HAVE-to-have-to have the income: if I lost the job involuntarily, we would not be desperate for me to replace it (though I would start looking). But obviously we would prefer to have the income, especially during uncertain times, and when it might not be safe/possible for the older boys to get the summer jobs they’d normally get to help pay for college.

It is also harder to decide because I would LIKE to go back, and so I worry I am looking for rationalizations/justifications rather than accurately assessing the situation. I am also worried I will let anxiety (“BUT WHAT IF???”) exaggerate a small normal reasonable risk.

Another issue is that I can’t tell from my boss (the director, who is personally calling each of us every two weeks to see how we want to proceed with our own work plans, and the next call is coming up soon which is why it’s on my mind) whether they even need me or not! They’re doing a brisk curbside service, but it’s still nothing like the usual level of circulation. They might be RELIEVED if I don’t want to come in, because they don’t want to have to find things for me to do. But my boss is also very kind and understanding, and she is careful to be accommodating and low-pressure, so she could be trying to make it easy for me by down-playing how inconvenient it is for me to be out. Well. This is a question I could ask my direct supervisor: I can picture emailing her and asking her to be frank with me, and I can picture her being frank with me. But FIRST I have to decide what I want to do: no sense getting her to say frankly that they’d like me to come back, and then saying, well too bad, I’m staying home.

Well. I’ve told Paul I want to talk it over sometime soon.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.