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

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*

Sorry to hear that...I guess it’s possible that by next weekend he might be on the same page?

Mine too, aps. He's humoring me for now but I'm bumping up against his need to keep working and making $ or it all falls apart. I asked if he'd rather be dead. Answer inconclusive. I'm trying to decide whether to self-iso here in the city where I can control my environment or up w him where it's nicer to be there but not if he keeps going out.

I called him an hour ago. He was wandering around Lowe's Home Improvement just for fun.

I guess we've expanded our quarantine bubble to include our next-door neighbor (in the same building) AKA my gf's friend, which is probably good inasmuch as it means she can go visit and not have to deal with my ass 24/7/???. I think she's increasingly accepting that we really shouldn't be going anywhere for a while unless absolutely necessary. I'm checking in with myself to see how I feel about voting on Tuesday (it's a block away, and I figure I can cart gloves and wipes and sanitizer and perhaps manage not touching anything directly, but I'm still feeling real iffy about jumping back into that level of exposure).

Karl, maybe so but perhaps only if it gets closer to home in a way I don't really want to wish for! some of his coworkers are smart people who work on bio-adjacent stuff so I'm hoping they'll have thoughts on the matter

I would like to both thank and curse this thread, the latter for encouraging worry spirals, but it's also nice to be around fellow worriers online since the 1 person I ever talk about personal stuff with irl thinks I'm a lunatic & actively ruining his life by voicing any worries at all

(felt quite anxious about things earlier and also cursed the interview with a survivor saying she'd mainly just felt run down, so those of us who feel run down just from worrying about it can now also have an exciting vicious spiral of worrying more that that means they already have it and are infecting their loved ones, etc)

in orbit: *solidarity elbow bump or maybe only a mimed elbow bump from 3m away*

Update: I predicted that his clients would stop asking him to come to their homes to do his restoration work but one of his clients just asked him to come fix something. He said, "My girlfriend won't let me out of the house for two weeks but I'm not taking this thing too seriously" and she said, "Oh no, my daughter is a doctor. You should absolutely take it seriously, but I've already been self-isolating and it's very safe" but she STILL WANTS HIM TO FIX SOME BROKEN FURNITURE DURING A PANDEMIC. People really are amazing.

io, I believe I'm in the same county, and I'm not going anywhere! Well, except work.

Work finally made the call to send us home for two weeks. Of course I’m a bit nervous as I now have a sore throat and my wife’s temperature is elevated

wow, io! people are amazing, indeed.

I'm also not feeling like my work is taking it that seriously yet either: lots of talk by management about us working extra hard to get contingency measures in place for next term's teaching but all staff still supposed to come into the office, still got a big meeting booked on Tuesday

the latest email about it said that the latest govt advice was that potential cases would not be treated any differently depending on whether the person had recently been to a(nother) affected country, which makes sense as we have several student cases here already and I hope will mean there'll be more widespread testing (although the email said something confusing about "no testing for suspected cases in the community" which I hope I'm just misunderstanding?)

but my work's spin on this was that, ahem, "Please note that this also means that anyone who has been self-isolating without symptoms because of their return from overseas or because of contact with a confirmed case can now immediately return to their normal activities", which, really, do we really want to tell people who've been in active contact with a confirmed case of something apparently infectious before symptoms show up, "hey, get yr ass back in work, the boss says no more excuses!"?

It’s challenging for us to stock up on food all that effectively so it’s likely someone will have to go to the grocery store every day or two for the duration, as usual, but we’ll see.

this is maybe a weird thing to think but i'm glad that i know how to make bread, that i have a live starter in my fridge, and a fuck of a lot of flour in the pantry. what a weird time. i even picked up some branches today on the way home from the park. i have a barbecue in the back, who knows, that wood might come in handy (??)

best wishes to everybody and their loved ones.