Waiting II

Hopefully, in the future, this will be the time when we were so unnecessarily worried because it all turned out fine.

We went camping three times this summer/fall and it was such a relief to be outside and with other people.

Blogging about groceries. I think this was twenty-something dollars. Those organic raspberries were 99cents each and delicious! I made the smitten kitchen corn soup and it was really good. In the bag are mushrooms. I've been eating a lot of potatoes lately and they make me happy.

This trip was about $60, there is ground beef in the containers and it wasn't cheap. I got some smoked paprika, which isn't something I've ever cooked with but it smells amazing. LB's new favorite dinner is pasta and chicken with pesto. I got that expensive bag of pumpkin seeds which apparently she doesn't like (super food!).

 My neighborhood has basically no political signs for the presidential race, although there were signs all over before the presidential race in the DR this past summer. Everything I do now is managing anxiety.

Waiting

 I had the most apocalyptic dream a week ago. I was standing on a street at night in a crowd of people and someone started saying the Pledge. I thought, "oh, shit. Here we go." I moved through the crowd and kneeled at the edge facing out on the street. There were people on either side of me also kneeling and we were waiting for whatever was coming. I'd stashed LB someplace safe, but as I looked up, I saw kids and realized she was out there with us. "Who brought the kids, they aren't supposed to be here!" Then there was just chaos.

I've been reading a lot of books about occupied Europe. The Pandemic has made me understand better how boring it is to live through a crisis. How much you operate without the information you need. The books have given me more sympathy for the people who do nothing in the face of evil. We are all just trying to get through, and even your biggest sacrifice can be the tiniest and most invisible fluttering of a moth's wing. Right now, it's just the waiting and hoping I'm ready and we are all ready.

Pictures:

Cat on Leash

    
                                                                    Feral children

    

                                                                        Cookie Cat: 1 year

    

                                                                    Puddle Ducks

    

                                                        Dinner for 1

    

                                            Dinner for two: dumplings, fried chicken, and plantains

Remember when we all used to post our grocery receipts back in the dark days of 2008? Maybe that was just me and a bunch of Christian ladies with large families.

$126.00 is a lot for me for one grocery trip! In the before time, I would probably spend $60 during my weekly grocery trip and buy multiples of sale items, with the understanding that I could pick up items I couldn't fit into the big trip at another time. Now it's supermarket sweep. $7.00 for a pound of ground beef is probably an okay price if this was eating sustainably, but when I made my last trip to the butcher in early March, I got the 10lbs for $20 deal. LB asked for cashews, rice cakes, and Oui yogurts ($1.49/per!) and I always try to buy her extra snacky stuff to keep her busy.

I hit the limit of what I can carry with this trip, and that's taking the bus. I walked 1.5 miles to the store, and then once I have my groceries it's a couple blocks to the bus and another couple blocks from the bus home. I have an unreasonable hatred of taking the bus to or from the grocery store, but our current situation is making me really thankful for the option. Here, compliance with the Governor's order to wear masks in stores and one public transit seems to be about 99.9% this weekend was the first time I saw a guy duck into a convenience store with no mask, I didn't stick around to see what happened after that.

I'm so thankful for my closest bodega, although I haven't been in since the end of March. They don't have everything I want (and definitely not everything LB wants) but they have everything we need, including a full meat counter. They were also the first store in the area I saw that had a travel path mapped out on the floor. I need to get back to my regular shopping.

As of today, I see that both shipping places near my house are open-not that I personally need to ship anything to the Dominican Republic, but I like the signs of normalcy:

Chinese restaurant near my house is also open. They closed in mid-March even though they are carry out and could still operate legally. I was worried that they were afraid of being targeted for their national origin. Glad to see them open, and at first they had a pretty busted set up with plastic sheeting between workers and customers, but now they have a nice glass barrier:

From my work, which includes a few businesses and organizations and the rest is work/live units for artists. I miss my landlords!

Now I can hear the ice cream truck.

Washington Park Life

I'm having a pessimistic day. Yesterday RI released information about testing at different sites throughout the state. Wealthier towns are only reporting 3-4% positive rates. The site closest to my house is reporting a 35% positive rate. So while RI looks good overall, high rate of testing with an average of >10% that's masking the devastatingly high rates of positives in poor majority Latino neighborhoods. It's frustrating that even with a really strong public health team that takes health disparities and racism seriously, here we are.

The good stuff is that I had the foresight to move a few blocks from a lovely 427 acre park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (the Central Park guy). After being closed for about a month, the park is back open and I've seen a little turtle, a huge turtle, a heron, an oriole, a guy walking a hedgehog, a family in star wars costumes doing a photoshoot.

How to Cook a Wolf

[I'm sharing on this blog things I wouldn't post on social media because it might be insensitive . Many people are struggling right now and they don't want to see pics of my extensive shopping trips. I get that. I also love seeing pictures of what people are buying in making. If you don't, I won't make you look!] Americans of means are in crisis. What the f do you mean there is no flour? Flour! This morning was the first time I've been at big supermarket in a couple months. I did a peapod order on Feb 29th and was worried then that I wouldn't get a spot. I had a 10lb bag of King Arthur flour in my cart and then put it back because it seemed like crazy talk. What is there going to be a nationwide flour shortage?!

So now I'm carefully rationing my last 5lb bag and stretching it with a bag of gluten-free baking mix and a bag of cornmeal.  So far I've baked multiple batches of corn muffins and popovers and one batch each of morning glory muffins and brownies. I also made red velvet cupcakes for my birthday.

In addition to my peapod order (lots of canned beans, tomatoes, and shelf-stable milk, which is all getting used at quick clip and pesto and capers and such), I went to the butcher and bought 10lbs of ground beef, 5lbs of sirloin flap, 5lbs of chicken breast, a whole chicken, a dominican salami, a pack of bacon, and 2lbs of shrimp). I did a big shop at my local asian supermarket (like h-mart) and got curry pastes, rice noodles, frozen dumplings, fish sauce, lots of garlic and ginger and a napa cabbage), mochi-all the essentials.

Since then I've gotten a couple local food deliveries, which is great for dairy, apples, and greens. I've gone to a locally owned food coop that has a good mix of nice fruits and vegetables and staples (that's where I got the gluten-free mix). My goal for today's trip was to get some basics and some items specifically requested by LB (corndogs! rufffled potato chips! ice cream cones! pepperoni!). The fresh vegetables were looking pretty sparse (no fresh spinach, cilantro, or parsley, limited lettuce) but I got all the things on my list. And, maybe I should add that I still don't have a car, and I'm avoiding public transit, so this was a walking trip. It's about 1.5 miles to the big grocery store. This trip was definitely hitting the limit of what I can carry!

In terms of thinking about others with fewer resources, I've been donating to a few community-based mutual aid orgs. Food banks are good too, but I think lots of people are giving to them. With mutual aid, I feel like the money gets to people quicker, many times through cash apps, and often as cash so people can get what they want and need. I also went through my cupboards and donated a couple boxes of things we were very unlikely to use to our neighborhood free table (snacks now out of favor, canned fruit with artificial sweetner, pie fillings, some of those boxes of Life cereal that I bought on sale when LB was really into it and now she isn't).

The first stash-only things still out on the table are the coffee and dehydrated potato shreds

 Kimchi!

 First biscuit, they were not rich and flaky like I wanted and I forgot cream of tartar again!

 Dumplings, now eaten!

 Local potatoes shredded, yum!

 Fresh salsa

 Dried apples

2019 in Review

The word people seem to be using for 2019 is chaotic. And that seems true enough. I finally got a new phone with a battery that doesn't constantly die. My life is so much better, but I need to retrieve a bunch of pictures, so I'll see what I've got to work with. Two or three big things happened this year:

LB and I joined a class action lawsuit. Here's an article with a picture of us and brief quote.

We spent a bunch of time at the RI Statehouse fighting for equal parentage rights-and I became publicly gay here and here.

I bought us a house! It's a little ranch on the wrong side of town with yellow siding and brown trim and I love it.

We got a kitten named Cookie, he is now 10lbs and a wild man.

*Clearly, I started this post months ago. I no longer remember what was chaotic about 2019. Those were the good old days. It was looking like the legislation I was working on would work in this session, but now the legislature isn't meeting. Good news in a federal court ruling on a Detroit right to education case. More on all of that later, now just to get through quarantine.

What we are talking about/and not

RI is talking about how many pushups the Governor can do in a skirt (12?, 15?) and whether Nibbles Woodaway (aka the Big Blue Bug) is really wearing a surgical mask (sadly, no, just photoshop), and how mad we are at the Mayor for closing the parks (more just sad, for me).

What we haven't been talking about as much as one might think: 180,000 workers out of a pre-Pandemic total of maybe 530,000 workers have filed for unemployment. Nobody can even muster up a "We're #1!" like we did in the old days when our 1st in the nation unemployment was around 11%. It's like we are in this collective fugue state.

I have a job. I'm thankful to have a job. My whole team is still employed. When I walk down the streets of downtown Providence past every closed restaurant and coffee shop, and even some Dunkins, I remember every time my dad got laid off.

The only person who is talking about RI being trapped between two COVID hotspots, NYC and Boston, is some lady at a White House briefing. Here we don't really talk about that. The state cracked down fast on wealthy people going to their summer homes in Newport and other places coastal, staties went house to house telling people with out of state plates to quarantine. But, the hardest-hit place in the state is Providence. Most people here have family and friends in NYC. In my neighborhood, which is majority Dominican, it's got to be at least 80%. I'm not saying it would be good to have cops going door to door here, but no one was warning people in the neighborhoods not to take the bus to New York, or to make their family members who decided to come here to ride it out quarantine for two weeks. Now, like other places, COVID is hitting hard among Latinos. There seems to be a demographic split where cases among whites are mostly elders in nursing homes, while cases among younger people are among people of color.

COVID Diaries day 14

I'm so thankful for the crew working at Family Dollar on Broad St today AND seeing all the workers in maroon crocheted face masks while listening to multiple shoppers say "look, they have milk today!" was way more The Handmaid's Tale than I was prepared for. #safeathomesafeathomesafeathomesafeathome

Today was the first day I've run errands in two weeks. I have been walking to work once a week to check the mail, but don't plan to go this week because I don't think going that often really qualifies as "essential."