Weekend Plans Post: A Breath of Fresh Air
I went to the grocery store again. We still get groceries delivered, but the pharmacy called and I went in to pick up the prescription. While I was there, I noticed two very, very good things:
Thing the first:
Oh my gosh! They had it! We still have one of the giant packs from Kirkland sitting in the storage room but they had a pack of our preferred brand. And they had SEVERAL. So I didn’t feel guilty about getting one. (And I only got one.)
But this is the thing that excited me the most:
THAT’S RIGHT THEY HAD MY SPAGHETTI!!!
I still have the American Beauty spaghetti. It’s unopened because I used the sauce on homemade Boboli pizzas, as topping for scrambled eggs, and for a well-intentioned (but disappointing) Italian Hot Dog. So I didn’t NEED the Barilla spaghetti… but, man, after months of not being able to get it, putting a box of it in the cart felt wonderful. I then had a handful of other things to wonder about… did they have dishwasher detergent? Yes they did! So I got my dishwasher detergent. Did they have hand sanitizer? Of course not. Did they have Clorox? No… oooh, but they did have a full selection of off-brand bleach.
This time, I didn’t feel the need to fill my cart. I mean, sure, it had a bunch of stuff in it… but it wasn’t panicky. More importantly, it didn’t FEEL panicky. The store was (more or less) fully stocked. I am confident that the day is coming where I’ll go in there and they’ll have Lysol wipes again, and Clorox, and hand sanitizer. And we’ll buy a bunch and put them under the sink.
That will be nice. In the meantime, it’s nice to see my toilet paper is slowly coming back. It was WONDERFUL to see my spaghetti.
And so, on Wednesday night, we ate the LAST of the panicky “oh, my gosh, we’re going into Quarantine!” pre-made meals from March. Frozen Orange Chicken. I made my own rice in my own rice maker, heated the chicken, heated the sauce, and mixed everything together and it was downright delightful.
So I’m thinking that we can, through attrition, start paring down all of the other emergency stuff that replaced all of the other early panicky purchases in the following weeks. Perhaps go back to only keeping a half pound of cream cheese on-site. We may never go back to having a freezer that has more ice cream in it than ground beef for at least a year or two… but it’ll be nice to go back to seeing the fancy-schmancy frozen pizzas as a compromise for when we don’t want to cook rather than as a luxury that needs to be saved for a special occasion.
And that means that this weekend will be devoted to Laundry! We’ll have a game night on Saturday, over Discord, and that’s always fun too and, in many other weeks, would have been the highlight… but this week?
I got my spaghetti back.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is Tiger, enjoying a postprandial catnip with Sock Monkey. Photo taken by the author.)
Now that we seem to be committed to moving, every day, weekend or no, will be spent on the thousand-and-one things that have to get done.Report
Mom is moving. She’s moving out of her “empty nest” condo into a “mom, you need to stop going up and down stairs all the time” ranch-style gramma-appropriate house.
Which means that she’s spending a lot of time with my sister and nephews packing. Sigh.Report
Tomorrow we’re going to do our inflatable pool for the first time this year. We get out out early and drink and chill and listen to music until the early afternoon (which is supposed to be windy). It’s relaxing and we need to blow off some stress. I have some window applications (curtain replacements for smaller windows–light gets in but you can’t really see inside) that I’ll probably put up on Sunday.Report
Like, a two person who are dating inflatable pool or, like, 4 people who have met before pool or what?Report
The first, I think. It’s a kiddy pool. Just me and the wife–it’s good couple time and you know Colorado–nice blue skies, music, cool water, and some drinks help ease the week’s tension.
(it’s a kind of cross shaped pool, not more than 20 inches deep)Report
I should probably, uh, unfish my habitat (clean). It’s gotten bad again. Other than that, IDEK. It’s going to be death-hot here this weekend so I doubt I will even go out to mow the lawn.
I had a couple tiny bits of human interaction (a “distanced” meeting outdoors of a group I am in, and something for university today) and they were both stressful and unsatisfying and I am wondering if either I am misremembering interactions with other people as being more enjoyable than they actually are, or if I’ve just been so broken by isolation that I can’t cope with other people any more.
Maybe Sunday if I clean house tomorrow, I bake some bread or something. I have become some kind of weird hybrid of a Hobbit and Laura Ingalls Wilder – obsessed with mealtimes and food, mostly barefoot, and it’s a major production to go into town for anything….Report
It sucks that it was unsatisfying. I find that interactions with others are greatly improved by food.
The whole “isolation” thing is getting to me as well. I have belched loudly in the middle of online meetings. I didn’t mean to! It’s just that I’m listening to someone drone on and on about the TPS coversheet and I had a ginger ale a few minutes ago and things just sort of happen.
So I’m going to have to retrain myself to only burp when management is not around again.Report
The “mute” button is your very best friend, Jay. I’m on “mute” before the nice electronic lady finishes telling me that I’m now joining the meeting.
Amd also this is hilarious.Report
I’ve given updates on mute. I then had to give them again.Report
Speaking as someone who has exclaimed, “What the fish!” in a telecon, having to give updates twice is the better outcome.Report
I was in a Zoom meeting where three of us simultaneously shouted YOU’RE ON MUTE!!! at the fourth when his lips started moving and we got no sound……
Hm. Now I have an idea for what might be (or might not be) a mildly amusing Zoom prank.Report
If you could see his lips moving, I’m guessing it’s likely that you could see his throat.
If you could see his throat, then I’m giving it 70-30 odds that you could see his shoulders.
Which means that you could see whether he was wearing a shirt (and he probably was).
I’m gonna stick with Skype.Report
He actually got up to check on something, so he was even wearing trousers.Report
Whole Foods had their own brand of hippie-dippy disinfecting wipes available. We got a tube.
Another good indicator.Report
I just picked up some name-brand body soap. As of some time tomorrow morning, my perspective on the lockdown is going to drastically change.Report
Barilla is so vastly superior to any other pasta brand we used to buy them 20 at a time when they went on sale. Now we don’t because we don’t drive into the (germ infested) city to shop, and I’m stuck with Safeway.Report
I grew up eating Creamettes, which I guess is an East-of-the-Mississippi brand, and I admit there have been a couple times when I was up visiting my parents in the past 20 years that I saw it in the store, and if I was otherwise a little emotionally vulnerable, I would tear up a little bit.
I mostly buy Barilla when I can get it, though sometimes I’ve had to settle for Skinner (“SKIN-NER!!!!”) or American Beauty, neither of which seem very good to me but that could 100% be because I had to “settle” for them.
For egg noodles, Manischewitz or nothing, and once I run through the last bag I bought in the before-times, it will likely be “nothing” because none of the local stores sell them and driving an hour’s round-trip into a county with 3x our infection rate just to go to the Kroger seems kind of unwise
(Found an online source but can only get them as a case lot of 12 bags, and even for me, that’s a LOT of noodles to use up)Report
Speaking from experience, buy one of those little pasta machines and watch pasta-making Youtube videos from Gordon Ramsey and various top Italian chefs. After a few attempts, you’ll become a fresh-made pasta snob and sneer at store-bought. Then you’ll get incredibly frustrated trying to find the right semolina flour instead of the right pasta, eventually give up, and go back to eating Barilla.
What does this accomplish? Well, whenever you want to avoid future dinner invites from someone who serves pasta, just start a dinner table conversation about how you lovingly make your own from scratch, dropping lots of foodie details and rattling off the names of Italian regions, restaurants, and chefs. Be sure to make a few subtle faces as you sample your host’s store-bought pasta. You will not be invited back. 🙂Report
It’s kinda funny because, in my noodling with pasta, I’ve found that different brands make *VERY* different shells and *VERY* different spirals and even pretty different macaroni. And, yeah, Barilla is the best. (I’ve tried a handful of brands that I’d never have tried before and Delallo is good enough for me to recommend.)
Spaghetti, however, is a lot alike across brands.
But being unable to get *MY* spaghetti? That turned it from being something I kinda wanted into a Mission.Report
For us it’s mowin’ the lawn, with a possibility of a pool party at a friend’s house (we haven’t seen them except on video for several months…)Report