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Quarantine, Day 58

A comedy in one act:

Dramatis Personae: Me, a gentlewoman and a scholar, a loving mother and wife, a voyager exploring this island earth Ring Phone App, a phone app

Act One: (ME walks through the front door, destination, anywhere) SFX: LOUD BUZZING NOISE from phone (ME pauses in the doorway, looks at phone) Ring Phone App: There is motion at your front door! ME: ... (ME refrains from throwing phone over the horizon) (Repeat ad infinitum)

So I helped my mother in law configure her new doorbell camera the other day, that's fun, right? It is kind of entertaining that I can be sitting in the bathtub or in an entirely different town and watch the kiddo going in and out the door on his many adventures, but every time I go out the door it alerts, and every damn time I think it's a text message and stop. It's downright Pavlovian.

I went out only one time today, to pick up the groceries at Harris Teeter. MIL placed a grocery order from them several days ago but unfortunately checked out prematurely, and unlike the Walmart app, the HT app does not appear to let you edit your placed order. If they do, it is not at all clear how and the FAQ is unresponsive. I tried to call their support line, but was informed I'd be on hold for 25 minutes, so we just got most of our groceries at Publix instead. I am not sure why the more expensive a store is, the shittier their pickup service seems to be. Walmart is always super-busy, but they've got that shit down to a science. I have ordered 300 dollars of groceries from them for pickup during this pandemic and bam, in and out. They open your trunk, put in the stuff, give you your eggs and bread for the front seat, and you go. Kroger is okay, they have pull-through lanes and you can't check in from the app, but it's all right. Their biggest problem is that they don't indicate what items are out of stock on their app, so about half my fairly short list was unavailable, with no substitutions available. Kind of a bummer.

Harris Teeter, on the other hand, is its own thing. They don't have parking spots, they have a lane in front of the store so you can wait in line for however long, then get up to a little speaker and press a button so they know you are there and you can contaminate your fingers all at once. Then you pull forward an awkward amount, because it seems weird to just sit at the button when cars are behind you, but you can't pull forward enough without being back in traffic, and you get out of your car and open your own trunk. Harris Teeter apparently believes their intercom button is not germy, but the gate latch for my minivan is basically the Blarney Stone on St. Patrick's Day. Then you get back in your car, then the person comes out to tell you what they did not on the intercom, which is that your order is not ready and come back in 15 minutes. Then you get back out of your car and close your gate and go and park for fifteen minutes. (You may already be in a chancy mood after spending the entire trip to the store on the phone trying to explain why Plandemic is a bullshit piece of bullshit that really deserves to be deplatformed and that YouTube is not a government entity so making a first amendment argument is specious, but this is optional.) After fifteen minutes, you go back and wait in the line again, open your gate again, get your groceries, close your gate, get back in your car, sanitize, and try to back out of the line around the person in front of you who is still waiting in that awkward post-button place in line. I was very nice to the workers, though, because it is not their fault that pickup at their store is extremely stupid or that their groceries are stupidly expensive. Anyway, the Amazon guy showed up while I was away and I knew because the doorbell told me.

Sauerkraut and sausage for supper again tonight, twice within a month! I'm so very pleased. I even did up real mashed potatoes this time, which really are so much better than the flakes even if they are a lot of work. I don't care what we cook for any meal tomorrow because I have a whole box of leftovers in the fridge. While I was cooking, the rest of the household watched Sully, chosen from my MIL's DVD collection as being one the kiddo has not seen and that is not likely to give him lasting mental scars from historical evidence of the harm man can do to man. Lots of historical documentaries in the collection here. I did not watch because I am already scared enough of airplanes, thank you. Kiddo is up to 600 words in his fanfic as of today, is making more effective use of autocorrect, and is accepting constructive criticism on his tendency to shift tenses within the same paragraph and sometimes the same sentence. We're making progress! Also Pikachu appears to have framed Bendy for unspecified heinous actions; what a twist!

Not too much new information on the whole father-in-law thing, except that the visit today was very good and the evening phone conversation was better than yesterday. Those are both encouraging signs, as it would really suck even more if he were freaking out these whole two weeks in the rehab center. Kiddo has learned several origami forms now and made him a waterbomb with a peppermint candy tucked inside as a present. Today we worked on cranes, which I have not made for a long time. We're both getting better at them. There's some traditional folklore that says if you fold a thousand origami cranes, you earn a wish. If I could fold that many cranes, of course my wish would be for this virus to just disappear. It wouldn't end our problems, it wouldn't even end most of them, but it would make these choices much less agonizing. Plus my sister and her family are in town this weekend and we can't even visit them and it sucks so much. We're going to be in the same town on Mothers Day with our kids for the first time ever and we can't even get together for lunch or something. Ugh. But we have to be careful.

#quarantine #ring #harris teeter #origami