Mad World

With the chain supermarkets still jammed and mostly empty (There's no social distancing when you're elbow to elbow fighting over that last box of pasta or 6 pack of soda!), and lines waiting for hours to get inside to the few chains (like Target and Costco) that are stocked and restricting, we've (Well, my son and husband - I haven't been out since my last doctor's appointment) been doing all our grocery shopping at a little grocery store (belonging to a chain of 5 stores in the NYC area) within walking distance. They have some fresh produce, but not much - nothing green and leafy in veggies, nothing juicy in fruit; usually stocked with their usual supply of what few frozen veggies they did carry - if you want peas & carrots, peas or carrots, they got you covered; but like all other stores around here, nothing in the line of paper products, sanitizer/wipes, or even soap.

Now they don't even have frozen veggies. They carried 3 brands - Krasdale, Bird's Eye, and Goya - but just a handful of each. Each time my guys shop they buy out half their stock. The other day when my son and husband went, they had none, not one bag of frozen anything vegetable. I assume they sold out of it all for people needing to put something on the table for Easter dinner and their distributor didn't send them any new stock last week.

Thank goodness for all the dehydrated stuff I have from Harmony House. I check what they have in stock every day (FRUIT! They have fruit ready for delivery!!) and have been getting deliveries at least weekly since all this began. Those sliced potatoes arrived over the weekend, after taking almost 2 weeks to get here thanks to post office delays, and they should have my blueberries in the mail any day now.

In other news, thanks to all those beans I purchased, we've been having beans made this way frequently, either over rice, cornbread, and even over (GASP!) potatoes (Yep, hubby managed to nab 4 last week). That's my new favorite way to eat beans.

And my sewing adventures - very frustrating. My reliable old Kenmore machine is dead, probably from neglect all these years. I tried taking it apart, cleaning and oiling, but the mechanicals are still partially frozen. With no sewing machine sales or repair place within 50 miles, even if they were open, it's as good as gone to me. My mini machine, the one I taught my son to sew on when he was 6 years old 30 years ago, needed a bit of TLC to get it going again, and it's so weak it can't sew through more than a few layers of thin cotton fabric, but if I use the right mask pattern it can muddle its way through, especially if I use my serger for the bulk of the sewing. I now have 3 masks made. Hopefully this week I can get through a few more, now that masks are mandatory just about everywhere outside our apartment. My son will need one a day to get to then work through his shifts, even though they moved him and his team to the night shift and there will be less than 20 people in the entire Target store, nobody within 20 feet or more of each other. With his asthma, he finds breathing through a mask to be very hard and makes is job that much harder. I'm afraid he's going to start running into more trouble breathing with a mask than he'll ever encounter without one if he got sick. In just the few seconds I wear one to make sure the ties are the right length and it covers everything it's supposed to cover, I'm panting. And that's without the added filter layer! My masks have pockets for them and I have a few different things that can be used as filter material. I can't imagine going 1o hours in one of them, at least 8 doing heavy labor and a half hour or more walking to and from the train stations, even without the filter.

Mad world!