Taking my life into my hands...

[jducoeur]

... which of course means, I just got back from the grocery store.

Yes, I wore a mask (and gloves); yes, I kept a good distance from everyone else; yes, I washed my hands thoroughly after unloading everything. The anxiety was still rather literally breath-taking.

(It doesn't help that Siderea managed, as usual, to land the perfect metaphor yesterday.)

As to "breath-taking": I realized, about a quarter of the way through the store, that I was rather close to hyper-ventilating. Which is almost perfectly counter-productive: maximizing the airflow through the mask is not the point. I had to pause for 20 seconds to return my breathing to normal.

I'm really not used to fear any more: quite frankly, the process of Jane's death left me much more likely to react with anger than obvious fear per se -- more "fight", less "flight". (No, this doesn't come up too often in real life, but occasionally my dreams remind me that there's still more broken glass in my head than I like to admit.)

But the ambient sense of "there are killers out there on the street who want nothing more than to break into the house and murder us" is kind of getting to me, especially over time. I'm going to have to spend some time getting my head straight there. Granted, the terror about going out amongst uncontrolled people is useful under the circumstances, and arguably somewhat rational, but I don't want to come out of this even more broken. (And fear rarely leads to good decision-making, in my experience.)

Anyway -- as to the store itself, I don't have anything to complain about. The Porter Square Star is actually managing better than I might have expected, not just with limiting the number of people inside, but in terms of their attempts at traffic management. They've taped down the floors to try to create a one-way traffic flow through the store, so people don't have to pass in the narrow aisles. It's at best partly successful (because people are idiots who can't be arsed to follow nice clear one-way signs), but I applaud the effort.

The actual stocks reveal a lot about the panic-buying. (And to be fair, the sensible prepping.) Fresh produce is mostly abundant and high-quality, arguably moreso than usual, whereas the soup section is thin (as it were) and you still can't find a roll of toilet paper for love or money.

Anyway: lots of groceries bought, so I don't have to go do that again for a little while. How are y'all doing with it?

Comments

[galaneia]

I did similar today. Trader joes and the farm stand; I hadn't been to either since I caught a cold back in February. I have added stress due to driving in the rain (two bad experiences in my twenties).

Tomorrow I get to hit the supermarket, hopefully just the one. Looks like it might not be raining for that, and it's a much shorter drive.

[writerkit]

I seem to have, against all odds, actually come close to pulling off that "supplies for two months" thing siderea was saying back during the initial "how to prep" posts. I haven't left the house or added supplies in almost a month now, but I've still got a decent amount left, and I can stretch my ground beef by making it into meatballs with breadcrumbs and cheese. (I may need to put less Worcestershire sauce into the next batch to conserve, though.) I figure that when we get close to the end of the larger of my two big things of toilet paper it'll be time to look into acquiring more, given how long actually succeeding at finding it might take. Also probably should order some more snack foods, of the "doesn't require refrigeration so you can just order them in the regular mail" variety.

The majority of my *anxieties* are around being unable to go out without endangering others-- "I am trapped here in my house unable to run if the zombies attack and unable to go hunt more supplies for myself rather than ask my friends to endanger themselves if I run out." I'm more afraid of being a vector or cause of harm to other people than of it harming me.

I also found the most amusing line on Twitter: "The hardest part about social distancing, for Gatsby, was the dearth of opportunities to call people 'old sport'."

[cvirtue]

Sorry about the anxiety. I hope it gets better for you.

Despite my tendency to anxiety attacks (due to the PTSD) I am fortunate that the virus and its possibilities have not been triggering it -- even when the husband [likely] had it. I don't know why not.

Hyperventilation

[desireearmfeldt]

The other thing worth remembering is that masks actually do impede one's ability to breathe. This was brought home to me the couple of times I put a bandana over my face while bicycling from point A to point B. I was not going fast by any means, but even very mild aerobic exercise with a cloth over one's face suddenly makes breathing challenging.

Re: Hyperventilation

[jducoeur]

Yeah, and masks tend to make me just a *teeny* bit claustrophobic even under normal circumstances. So yes -- that certainly wasn't helping...

[ilaine]

I've been doing my shopping first thing in the morning when the store opens to under-65 customers. Besides suiting my temperament, there are fewer people and the air is fresher from getting a chance to recirculate and droplets fall out overnight. Or at least so I surmise. I prepped with ingredients to make my own soup, rather than buying tons of cans, and spent the first several weeks making vats of stuff and freezing it. I also acquired a chest freezer for the basement. This is something we planned for - had an outlet installed in the basement for the purpose, but then got sidetracked on it when we moved, so I completed that plan in Feb. I've also got various meats in there, some cheese and milk, and frozen vegetables. There is also a case of shelf-stable milk, which I wouldn't care to drink but would bake with at need or put in coffee. I got chocolate Easter bunnies for the girls (and a sheep for me!) from the lovely handmade chocolate place back when I thought they might have to close, also jelly beans, so there will be baskets.

I had hoped to be done shopping and able to hole up entirely for the next two weeks, but just realized I failed to buy sufficient flour - I have plenty of bread flour and self-rising biscuit flour, but am nearly out of the plain old regular stuff. And I just avoided buying it like yesterday - this is an item I normally buy in 10 pound increments, but I still went through faster than I thought. And yeah, Siderea's post has me creeped out to.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, this is the time when I wish I had a chest freezer. We've always resisted the idea, because it would mostly become a black hole of freezer burn for us (I really prefer cooking from fresh), but right now it would have been awfully useful -- I would have made many vats of soup...

[ilaine]

We had a few reasons for wanting one. Brian likes to keep stocks of film frozen for better storage, and I'm feeding four people, not two. I have long had the habit of having the freezer stocked with prepared soups and casseroles for when we return from weekend travel or busy activities too tired to shop or cook, or one or more of us have colds/flu. I freeze ham bones or poultry carcasses for soupifying some future time. Stocks of home-made chicken soup ready to defrost is an amazing thing. It will be great for keeping extra ice for summer parties, using the ice cream maker which has a bucket you stow in the freezer before use, and similar frivolities. I will have to make more of an effort to make sure the frozen items get cycled around and not allowed to get too stale now.

[cvirtue]

You probably can find an inventory system online to adapt for your own use, to solve the freezer burn issue.

My mother had a big board (2x3' perhaps) with labels and nails under the labels, and each package of whatever had a token put onto the nail, and removed when the whatever was taken out. The tokens were plastic bread bag tabs, soda pull tabs, and other things like that. There was a small open box attached to the board to keep the tokens in. ... to keep tabs on the tabs. :)

I now have an ancillary freezer and may create a similar boad.

[jducoeur]

You probably can find an inventory system online to adapt for your own use, to solve the freezer burn issue.

Heh. Remember, I'm the CEO of what amounts to a database company. *That* isn't the problem: I could build a custom inventory system in about ten minutes in Querki. (This is the sort of thing Querki absolutely excels at.)

The issue, rather, is that both of us *prefer* fresh food, and I enjoy cooking. At a fundamental level, having dinner out of the freezer feels like cheating to me. So under normal circumstances, the usual pattern would be that I would make stuff that gets put into the freezer (because I have made extra) far more often that we would actually *use* the stuff in the freezer, and most of the stuff in there would just rot. We already have this problem with the freezer on our fridge; it would likely get pathological with a chest freezer.

Of course, circumstances aren't normal now, so I'm kind of wishing I had a small one, just for this year. (If I could figure out somewhere to put it, which isn't a trivial question in and of itself.)

[cvirtue]

Oh, I have no doubt you could do it in Querki! (Although the reply was to Ilane, who of course also programs, but AFAIK hasn't written her own db language.)

The advantage of a physical system is that you do it Right Then, rather than having to remember. If you have your phone/smartspeaker set up to do annotations, you can get around the electronic vs. Right Then issue, though.

[danabren]

I know I barely knew Jane, but my memories of her were always good and kind. You are not alone in your memories of loss, although you obviously knew her much more than I.

Wearing a mask is nothing to me - Convention costuming has left me carefree about wearing face coverings so I don't give them a second thought. I'm actually pleased I can wear glasses with them and see what I am doing :D

Anger and fear are high for both of us. But we choke it down like we have since November 2016, and channel it into concern for our respective parents (with all their respective health problems)

[sporky_rat]

Right now, getting fresh produce here is the hard part and the tinned or 'just add water' stuff is easy to get. (Except ramen and tuna. Those are flying off the shelves. You're limited to ten packs of ramen.)

My biggest issue with masking is glasses fogging. I'll take that.

[cvirtue]

Although my mask has a good length of wire at the nose, I still get glasses fogging, too, though not as bad as before I put it in.

You may have found this solution already: what I do when that happens is breathe out through my mouth, angling the airstream toward my chin.

[jducoeur]

Huh -- I definitely have serious glasses-fogging problems. This solution hadn't occurred to me. I'll have to try that -- thanks!

[matildalucet]

I spent a fair chunk of the afternoon grocery shopping. I had suspected I'd have to hit both Shaws and Whole Foods. People in Shaws were mostly wearing masks and probably two-thirds were following the floor arrows. I saw two staff members wearing masks over their mouths but with their noses exposed; I mentally shook my head and moved on. Whole Foods Melrose SERIOUSLY limited number of shoppers inside. The line outside was polite. Once I got in and away from produce, I mostly had entire aisles to myself.

I then tried two Targets and a Big Y in the search for toilet paper and random things I couldn't get earlier. I got a couple of my random things, but utterly failed to find any toilet paper. Rumor near me is that one wants to check online late at night and then hit stores first thing in the morning. Might try that this weekend. I'm guessing we have a week's supply in the house now, and I'm not comfortable with that if it's going to be a treasure hunt to find more.

[cellio]

I'm getting produce boxes once a week from Imperfect Foods. Availability and, sometimes, relationship of my order to what's in the box are a little erratic in these pandemic days, but that's totally understandable and I can roll with what I get.

I had already stocked my pantry well with canned and dry goods, and my freezer is full and my fridge stays as full as I can keep it (including longer-lived cheeses). I'm also preserving food as I can (I need more jars in which to pickle vegetables; looks like that'll take a few weeks). The main reason we can't just hole up for the duration is milk and eggs (and, ok, sometimes TP and paper towels). Dani ventures out to the grocery store occasionally at low tide, and some eggs are now hard-boiled and some of those pickled.

Pesach adds a monkey wrench. Normally I draw down pasta, flour, and other not-kosher-for-Pesach foods in the month before, but this year I kept and thus sold more. But I didn't restock some things close to the holiday, so when it's over I'll need flour of various types (bread, all-purpose, rye if I can get it) so we can make our own bread again. And I have no beer (Pesach strikes again), which might have to be the state of things for a while.