Dishpan hands
I am NOT faulting how our grocery stores have handled the panic buying. I KNOW they don’t have systems in place to do anything but react to the constantly changing shopping conditions. But in a perfect world, we would have closed all grocery stores to customers. I mean don’t let the general public in the doors at all. Let people order online, by phone, even by handing a paper list to an employee. Groceries would be available *outside* the doors. *Reasonable* rationing would be in place. If you know you can come back again when you are outta terlet paper, then maybe you wouldn’t feel like you had to buy a year’s supply.
Same kind of thing with restaurants. We have driven downtown a couple times (not getting out of the car) and I am amazed at how busy our downtown is. Restaurants and bars are all open and people are all over everywhere. Our governor has banned all gatherings of over 250 (or is it 100?) people for the duration. I don’t see the difference between a planned gathering or a busy restaurant. And do NOT get me started on the bars. Yes, these kinds of drastic changes would be difficult for businesses. But they would likely save lives.
Us? We did various chores off and on throughout the day and took a long drive “down south” where the land flattens out a bit. Not that The Planet Ann Arbor is mountainous but it does have glacially-created hilly terrain. It was a glorious sunny day and I guess I will take it.
My skin is normally on the oily side and we won’t even talk about my hair, let’s just say I STILL shower at least once a day and ALWAYS wash my hair EVERY day. Despite that, the happy birthday hand-washing is taking its toll and the backs of my hands are getting chapped. Fortunately this is a small thing because oily skin and an ancient tub of vaseline (that I liberated from the moomincabin to use it up) is mitigating it.
We turned off NPR jazz a bit before five o’clock when our grocery/whine delivery person arrived so we could hear each other talk. (The store is out of chicken in all form factors but apparently not whine – or shrimp.) When that person left, I was gonna turn the radio back on but then I read that the Orange Baboon was scheduled to speak at five so we turned on satty-lite radio folk music instead. I did not want to listen to that idiot rave about the economy and how wonderfully he and his “team” (or whatever, I mean Jared Kushner? really?) has responded to That Virus and blame everybody on earth (“fake” news, Obama, you name it) for his own shortcomings.
March 16th, 2020 at 9:17 am
I am singing “I’m gonna wash the germs right off of my hands,…. and send them down the drain!” I sing it twice and sometimes, if I’m feeling ornery, will sing it with the original words.
March 16th, 2020 at 5:09 pm
I’m sure that the closures are coming. Hopefully the curve will flatten with the measures we’re taking, but if not, we could end up like Italy or France. I would not enjoy that since I don’t generally keep much food around my house.