The Plague Diaries: First Week in Semi-Captivity

You'd think that being told to work from home would free up a lot of time.  You'd be wrong.  (A lot of you are probably nodding in agreement.)

Since the schools are now on-line and I can work from literally anywhere, I decided on Wednesday to go to Albion for a couple days, and that was nice.  But on Thursday, we got word that the governor was considering a stricter lockdown. (Spoiler: this turned out to be rumor only, and the next day, the governor gave a press conference refuting it.)  I also realized that Darwin hadn't really done any grocery shopping, let alone plague shopping.  So I ran over to Kroger in Jackson to stock the house.

Here I saw a major difference in stores.  In Wherever, Oakland County, the Kroger is regularly stripped bare. Very little on the shelves. The hard-working employees restock overnight, and with an hour or two after opening in the morning, the shelves are bare again.  Shoppers thunder down the aisles, their carts piled high. The checkout line stretches across the aisle and into the canned goods section.

In Jackson, it's a different story.  The shelves have taken a hit, but there's still plenty of most stuff. (Though rice was gone.)  They even had some toilet paper. 

I couldn't figure out what the difference was for quite a while. Then it came to me.  Oakland County is wealthy.  A big chunk of the population has a job that lets you work at home, so they haven't been laid off. People have large houses with plenty of storage space.  It all adds up to a burst of plague shopping.

Meanwhile, Jackson and Jackson County are blue-collar. Houses are much smaller.  People are being laid off from jobs they can't do at home.  They simply don't have the resources to buy an extra month's worth of groceries.  It's another example of inequity in our society.

At any rate, I bought a pile of groceries while keeping my distance from the other shoppers.  (The store had replaced the usual antiseptic wipe station with an employee at the front of the store who wielded a bottle of cleaner and handed out spritzed paper towels for customers to wipe their carts down. I suspect people were stealing the wipes and this was the alternative.)  I piled my cart high, like a good Oakland County resident, and got up to the checkout.

I was expecting a long wait, but the clerk whipped people through right fast.  There was no bagger, so I handled that chore.  I noticed the same thing was going on in several other lanes.  In Oakland County, many people are reluctant to bag their own groceries and will hold up the line until the cashier does it.  (I just want to get out of there, so I always bag.  Just like they do in Europe.)  But in Jackson County, it was customer bagging.

I got the stuff back to Albion and decided, in light of the rumors, it would be better if I went back to Wherever. I didn't want to be trapped in Albion, separated from Max. Darwin agreed with this and off I went.

Meanwhile, my online classroom continues.  It's a LOT of work, let me tell you.  I can't simply tweak existing lesson plans. Existing material simply isn't suitable.  I have to create new content, new activities that will work at home, new ways to assess student learning.  It's hours and hours of work between answering student emails and messages.  As an example, usually it takes me two or three hours per week to put together lesson plans for all my classes for the following week.  I start planning on Wednesday, and I'm usually done by Friday, working on my hour-long prep period.  This week, I was working four hours a day, EVERY DAY, just to get lesson plans created and activities posted.  It's mentally taxing and it's often tedious--a lot of the work is doing the same thing over and over and over at a computer, and by the end of a school day, I have a neck- and headache.

Back home, the governor refuted the rumors, and I ground my teeth. I missed an evening with Darwin in Albion, and wasn't happy about it.  He came up here on Friday, but didn't arrive until almost 9:00 because he'd had to work so late.

And now--the weekend! Just like the weekdays...

The Plague Diaries: Escaping to the Kitchen

This weekend, I stayed away from school stuff except to remind my seniors that a bunch of them hadn't turned in their projects yet.  I decided it would be good idea to stay away from the computer for a while, so I took refuge in the kitchen. It was time to make boeuf bourguignon!

I did have to pop out to the store for mushrooms and a couple other ingredients. It was only 8 AM on a Saturday, and I was rather hoping the store wouldn't be a madhouse.

Hopes dashed.

The parking lot was crowded, and a steady stream of people was entering and exiting the store. I accepted a spritzed towel from the employee station out front (apparently this was a Kroger-wide thing) and zipped through the store. As a bonus, I found seven jars of sunflower seeds in the nuts section. Sunflower seeds are a snack Darwin can reliably eat without spiking his blood sugar, and he can go through most of a jar in one sitting. Our household consumes enough sunflower seeds to keep an entire farm afloat for a year. They aren't all that popular as a snack, though, and often I have to hunt for them in the store--the store doesn't bother to shelve them prominently.  I initially thought, "At least this thing will be easy to get, since few other people want it."  Nope.  Sunflower seeds have become as difficult to find as toilet paper.  But today I found a seven of them lined up like chess pawns.  I thought about grabbing all of them, then said, "You don't need to be selfish," and I took three instead.

I had only a few things in my cart when I was done, and I headed up to the front of the store. The despised self-checkout line was long, long, long.  The cashier lines were a little shorter, but people had more stuff.  I lined up for a cashier.  Good choice. Like the cashier in Jackson, this woman whipped through the people ahead of me with the speed and efficiency of a drill instructor on cocaine.  And the customers actually bagged their own stuff! You know it's bad when a bunch of wealthy entitleds bag their own groceries.

So I got out of there pretty quick. Yay!

Back home, I spent several hours in the kitchen, following Julia Child's recipe, but with modifications of my own.  (The "flour crust" she insists on for the meat simply doesn't work, and I've abandoned it. And Darwin isn't a big onions fan, so I scale back on those.) It came out deliciously!

And I stayed away from the computer.