The past couple of months brought out the best and worst of man’s survival instincts. All you had to do was go grocery shopping and you witnessed the worst of it…hoard-shopping! Those “front-line” store employees tried their best to limit shoppers to two packs of toilet paper, four bottles of hand sanitizer, three canisters of disinfecting wipes, etc., but when you have a crazed maniac with a cart full of soap and cleaning supplies who stares you down with bloodshot eyes and says, “Either you ring this stuff up, or I walk out the door without paying,” do you choose to A) argue with a madman, or B) ring up the merchandise as quickly as possible? (This apparently happened in my favorite local grocery, but luckily I was not there to witness it.) And, yeah, the cashier chose B. We’d all choose B, because confrontations with the crazies are more dangerous than coronavirus! Crazies aside, though, it’s all gone fairly smoothly at our house.
Besides the occasional angry mob, we’ve survived it all quite well. I make my own breads from alternative “flours,” such as almond flour and chickpea flour. I usually order those online, anyway, and they don’t seem to be hoard-worthy products. Since my husband won’t eat my bread, he had to make do with sub-par white bread for a couple of weeks, and I had to deal with a few missing ingredients, but overall, we’ve eaten as well as usual. We never suffered from the “toilet paper pinch,” since I had purchased that warehouse size package of BIG ROLL toilet paper two weeks before the virus arrived on our shores. We even have a couple of packs left from that!
Here are some other things that I’ve never run out of:
Clean underwear (because who needs to change every day when you’re going nowhere?)
Same thing with bras. Why wear a bra when you’re home alone all day? That would be like putting the horse in the stable with his saddle on – very uncomfortable and impractical!
Chocolate (there are some things that you just can’t live without, no matter what)
Virtual jigsaw puzzles on my iPad
These are some new skills I learned during the lockdown:
Making my own door wreath out of stuff I could find around the house; styling my hair; napping; procrastination; lounging; face mask etiquette; and recipe ingredient substitution
Things I wanted to do but never got around to:
Dusting the entire house; cleaning out our huge cedar closet; reorganizing our storage shelves; quilt-making; writing a book; learning a new language; reading War and Peace
What I plan to do when I am free:
First and foremost, go to Church/Mass!; plant my vegetable garden; finish planning our daughter’s upcoming (July!) wedding; visit my friends; visit my grandkids; get back into the “clean underwear every morning” habit; buy looser-fitting bras, and…get a haircut!
And, how about you? What’s on your lists?
grandma's coffee soup 