Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

yeah I am very concerned about going stir-crazy, I'm already too socially isolated

xpost Butter freezes well too (you may already know this). Also, I am not a hoarder but since it's hard to get things here sometimes we just kind of buy a lot of some stuff when we see it go on sale which is why I have like 8 blocks of kerrygold in the freezer.

if anyone wants some tips on how to survive being at home for months on end without really talking to anyone irl, hit me up. i did it for a couple years recently, in preparation for coronavirus. the trick is to be high all of the time and be totally fine with getting really depressed

Surprised to see my local diner (which is a pretty small space) doing brisk business this morning, as was the neighborhood bar last night.

I’ve continued to patronise my local cafe, where the staff have been wearing masks for a couple of weeks now and where they have a hand sanitiser station with a sign saying “clean your hands before you eat”, so my isolation is not total

Yerac I already know all of that because I am a hoarder :D

the trick is to be high all of the time and be totally fine with getting really depressed

:( i am not ok with getting really depressed. again. it's why i am aware that this will be a challenge for me. i at least need to talk with people on the phone or something.

Just realising this is why the AIM chatz thread got revived

well, looks like my office is now remote until at least march 30

went out with friends last night, taking some precautions. it was the first time they’ve had a babysitter in months, and the number of recorded cases in our metro area is still zero but... I still feel a little guilty. but it’s not like I’m going anywhere any time soon. might be ordering takeout from a few favorite restaurants to make sure they get some
business

a friend posted on facebook about how her daughter has symptoms that seem similar to what’s been published, and even though it’s unlikely she called the local county info number. the operator referred her to the department of health, and the person that took that call referred her back to the first number. yikes

xp

sorry LL, my post was tongue in cheek. (but not funny either!). i'm worried about it too - getting a job helped my depression chiefly because it got me out of the house! my house is like a warm inviting trap. it always seems comfortable and i'm drawn to it all the time, but the mood subtly shifts after a few days of isolation

I’m starting to wonder if I’m a weirdo because I never buy milk, eggs, or butter unless I’m making something in particular

it’s all rice, vegetables, meat, and broth/stock

hmmm maybe we should start a covid picture thread soon. I may need to straighten up my pantry so it's visually appealing.

i never buy miljk and only recently started buying butter because of one pasta recipe. I am obsessed with eggs. xpost

I require soft butter to be available at all times for spreading on toast, so I keep a stick in the cupboard.

I'm sorry to folks who are less okay right now. I was already enjoying unemployment and I do well staying at home with books and coffee and gardening. If it goes on long enough I might even get back to sewing, which I used to do a lot more of.

oh yeah, i have one block out for current use. I am not a monster eating frozen butter for thrills.

lol that does sound like something you would do

I don't buy milk or eggs often but that's mostly because I am too rarely able to cook to be able to use them up before they go bad

(obviously, that has changed a bit for now)

After I posted, I was considering if there would be something to it xpost

Last week I did just eat some eggs that had been in the freezer for two months.

my friend's new business has now just posted what I feared, asking for people to buy e-gift cards because traffic is slowing and may be non-existent soon. as I mentioned earlier, it only opened in November, and very quickly got fucked by a city construction project that took away all of the parking on its street AND blocked one of the two entrances. It was becoming a popular hang, but they barely got off the ground to begin with. I gave them a $1,000 loan to get across the finish line.

It's been his wife's dream, and the entire family works there, and I will be devastated for him if it goes under. His family owns another business, an organic food delivery service, but after the Great Recession, they lost so much volume that they almost went bankrupt.

the social network for this place is great so I'm a little more confident that if a fundraising campaign was run, it'd do well. but well enough? I don't know.

I bought a six pack of Victory Golden Monkey and might start posting drunken ukulele videos to FB

sounds like it’s time to finally add neanderthal on fb

I recorded "Rodeo Song" yesterday...but wasn't drunk

conversation i had with my elderly neighbour this morning:

- wow sally, i didn't know you had a dog!
- oh i'm just looking after him for my daughter's friend, he's a bit of a nuisance because he's not properly house-trained yet
- haaa, sounds like you've got your work cut out there!
- [neighbour nods and smiles]
- look, um i er... i just wanted to say - what with everything going on at the moment, please do just knock on our door if there's anything you need over the next few weeks, anything at all!
- oh don't worry, he's going back tomorrow
- um ok nevermind

Been baking bread with what bread flour I have left and cutting it with cornmeal. Historians are already calling it the cornbread spring.

― whistling (brownie)

historians should be spending less time coming up with pithy nicknames for a crisis that hasn't even fucking happened yet and more time hanging out on pornhub, imo

the brother i was worried about is actually doing ok employment-wise, he's back into social work and out of the restaurant biz, which means more income security. main issue is, as alluded to upthread, people not being able to get to their aa meetings. i'm feeling like a lot of people are gonna be relapsing these next few weeks :(

La lechera - can you do group Skype or FaceTime with some friends? Go for a walk with your dogs and FaceTime with a friend?

I’m like you, IO, I do quite well when left to potter around at home alone. If I was forbidden from leaving my house for a month I’d be pretty stoked.

historians should be spending less time coming up with pithy nicknames for a crisis that hasn't even fucking happened yet and more time hanging out on pornhub, imo

p sure that was a joke, hold ur fire on the fictional historians

never! hari seldon can go fuck himself

(Marge Simpson’s mom voice) I don’t know who that is

Porn star iirc

Queens NYC grocery store completely stocked, no more overpriced than usual. I mostly bought garbage to stress eat and salt to gargle with. We are reasonably well set for the week.

My neighbourhood is very Asian (Vietnamese and Cantonese mainly) and the local supermarkets are brim full with everything you can imagine it’s going to take a lot more than this to empty the hood of rice. Assuming we do go into lockdown I’m feeling pretty good about being restricted to the contents of the massive Minh Phat Supermarket round the corner.

Doesn’t seem to stock TP though, Aldi and Woolies still mobbed with people queuing for their rationed 1 packet.

Got a sack of soybeans on order, if I’m getting locked up I’m really going to work on my tofu making, plus lots of okara based tasties. Also must get some chickpea flour. Life is better with farinata.

We're already at each other's throats in this house and it's been, like, a day.

and itt

Grocery Outlet had more people in there today than i have ever seen there at any one time - but they were still well stocked on everything except tp.

I saw a young couple with no kids take *two* 12 packs of toilet paper *each* & take separate checkout lines, i wanted to call them out but i was too chicken :/

meanwhile the woman in front of me stood in line for a good 20 minutes to buy one (1) jar of pickles for $1.

i mean, we have always bulk-bought tp at costco since we were first married but a supply like that lasts us like 6 months or more easy.

i think the publicity of it being stockpiled is just making ppl have toilet paper FOMO

My mom told me that she wore big gauntlet-like dish-washing gloves to the store and then washed them at home before she touched anything. Bless her. Whatever it takes.

atta girl

heres hoping surgeons have a better fallback but otherwise 👍

My husband has been trying to figure if he should skip the gym for awhile, but it’s a small local place and they sent out a great plan for dealing with the situation so he’s still going.

Today he comes home from the gym and says “oh I’m meeting up a bar with a few ppl from the gym later”.

(Don’t worry, I reminded him that’s not how social distancing works)

Apparently my brother, who works for a major healthcare concern, called home yesterday and gave our parents an earful. He works in tech/communications and has been setting up videoconfs for very high-level discussions between hospital & research staff. I don't know verbatim what he said but he's been aware of these discussions for a couple of weeks and it made him start a text thread for the family to check in on. It's nice not to be the only one considering how bad it could be.

met two of the achill boys for a virtual pint tonight using zoom

not too bad tho they made me take down the fb post showing one of them in a tinfoil hat and a superman onesie

My parents cohort in the UK mostly think this is a lot of fuss about nothing, but they've stopped any external contact and aren't going to anything.

In Lisbon everyone just opened all the windows everywhere and started applauding and cheering the medical staff. I saw on twitter same happened in Spain.

i checked out the neighborhood grocery store and it was calm if a little bare. i got a bag of bread flour in honor of brownie. i might make a pizza later this week.

My father was in Madeira two days ago; other travelers around him bugged out via London (so as not to be coming from the EU), but he held firm to his plan to go via Lisbon to Newark.

Yesterday he arrived in NJ, apparently smoothly. From this I gather that (as of yesterday) US citizens returning from Europe are ok if they go to the right airports.

They used to say to actors who couldn't relate to playing a killer, "Have you ever stepped on an ant?" Now they can change it to "Did you hoard like a maniacal asshole during C virus?"

“No, I hoard like this all the time”

Which is to say there’s everyday hoarding and there’s hoarding during a global emergency

I currently have 1.5 Sams Club packs of TP in the house but it's not my personal record.

I really deeply hate the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers, but this entire global shitshow confirms my suspicion that humans were a mistake.

my bf thinks it's a fuss about not much and doesn't see the point in stockpiling or social distancing - I thought the latter would be fine seeing as we barely go out and do anything anyway, but he announced that the weekend would be wasted if we didn't go out and that I was a miseryguts for not being enthusiastic, so I'm not looking forward to repeating that argument many times over the next however many weeks/months

on our way back we went to the big Asda on the other side of town, and we did not gather any lockdown essentials or even much food (just a few things for the weekend), and various people seemed quite keen to be standing what I would regard as way too fucking close even in normal circumstances, and then he told me off for being a miseryguts again when I got anxious

e.g. on the way in there was an old (80+?) and slightly frail-looking couple near the door, and I very deliberately gave them an extra wide berth, and then seconds later the woman was practically crawling over me to get to some groceries. *shrug*