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March, 2020:

Hamsterin’

Mar 24th, 2020
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments

Hamsterin-500 Wide.jpg

Well. The Great Toiler Paper Famine of 2020 may be subsiding. We got a package of six rolls (one package only!) this morning, and we should have enough now for a couple of weeks.

We have the stores to thank for that. Both Fry’s and Safeway are now limiting quantities on hoardables and even non-hoardables like milk. One per household is the general rule. We know that Fry’s usually gets a truck on Monday nights, so we were there first thing in the morning. Like many other grocers across the country, Fry’s reserves the first hour for people over 60. We got there at 5:50, and there was already a considerable line. At 6 AM sharp, they opened the doors, and everybody made for the toilet paper aisle at a dead run. And lo and behold: Piles and piles of toilet paper! And paper towels. And baby wipes. And rubbing alcohol.

Alas, no bratwurst. What, they’re hoarding bratwursts now?

So we got our one package of TP and one package of paper towels. Carol got a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a few other things before we ran through Mickey D’s drive-thru for breakfast. All in all, a good and useful morning.

Oh–and at 5:45 AM when we backed out of the garage, I remembered that this morning is Mercury’s maximum elongation, so we jumped out of the Durango and searched for that most-difficult planet. Even at max elongation, the little snot is unholy hard to spot, but spot it we did. (It helps to have few trees and no two-story houses in our neighborhood.) Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn were in a tight little group much higher in the southeast.

The lockdown here in Arizona has been cordial and mostly voluntary. Local government is not harrassing people who walk for exercise. My barber shop closed last Thursday, but others are still open, so if I get a little too pointy-haired, I have options. The Jewish Community Center is closed, so we’re not doing our usual weight training every Monday. I’m going to buy an 18-pound ketttlebell if I can find a store still selling 18-pound kettlebells. You can do a lot with an 18-pound kettlebell. We had to cancel our writers’ workshop because restaurants can’t provide indoor or patio seating. We meet in a biggish sandwich place, so we’re out of luck. We’re trying to figure out a reliable teleconferencing system for the interim.

We no longer go to Costco. That’s a shame, since I like their frozen blueberries, but with conventional grocery stores limiting quantities to stop hoarding, all the hamsterin’ is now being done at Costco. People line up around the block to get in and buy truckloads of TP and cart-sized bricks of plastic bottled water. I’ve seen photos. It’s surreal.

We’ve learned the secret: Go to small stores. I don’t mean convenience stores. I mean specialty stores, like the little Polish/Russian grocery down in Mesa. We bought six bags of their excellent hand-made pierogies a few days ago. They had a lot of other stuff I couldn’t quite identify, since I don’t read Polish, much less Russian. But nobody was hoarding pierogi.

Our days are heating up. It’s still snowing in Colorado Springs, but in Phoenix our daily highs are beginning to creep up into the 80s. We’re about to engage in an interesting experiment: Warmer temps slow down most viruses. There’s a debate raging about whether or not that’s true of COVID-19, but we’re going to find out. Arizona is not a virus hot zone by any means, with only 326 cases and 3 deaths. (New York has 26,000+ cases and 271 deaths.) Is it the warmer temps, or just good clean livin’? Nobody knows…yet.

One thing I’m pretty sure of is that UV light can kill viruses, and we lead the nation in the production of UV light. In fact, when we get a package from Amazon, I put on gloves and take it out to the backyard, and set it down on the pool deck. I turn it a couple of times to make sure all surfaces get a dose, but if 15 minutes of Arizona sun can cause sunburn, it will damned well kill viruses.

So here we are. I read books, or write them. I program. I tinker in my workshop. I throw the ball around the yard for the dogs. I cook. And I wash my hands. Hoo-boy, do I wash my hands. So life goes on. Don’t let the panicmongers mong you any panic. We don’t know how bad COVID-19 will ultimately be, but it will almost certainly not be as bad as the media are insisting. I see a lot of people on Twitter trying to stir up panic, and they sure sound and act like paid operatives. If you catch them with a question they can’t answer, they vanish. If you ask them for their credentials, they vanish. Do whatever you can to discredit such screamers. And carry on. This too will pass, perhaps sooner than we think.

Life in the Time of Quarantine

Mar 17th, 2020
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

“Social distancing,” heh. It’s basicallly what Carol and I consider ordinary life. We’re retired, we’re home a lot, and don’t have the energy to cope with huge events like concerts, parades, political rallies, and so on. We don’t go to bars. Ok, my writers’ group used to meet in a sports bar, but then they repurposed their party room and we had to move to a sandwich shop across the street. (Yelp now reports that the sports bar has closed.) But that weekly writers’ group–with at most ten or eleven other people, usually fewer–is most of the social anything that I do these days.

So we’re doing our part by basically keeping on keeping on. I’m working on different techniques to avoid using my hands as much in public places. If I’m going through a door that simply pushes open, I push with my shoulder. When I take a drink from a water fountain, I press the bar with my elbow. (This is easier than it might seem, if you’ve never tried it.) After I wash my hands in a men’s room, I dry my hands on a paper towel and then grip the door handle through the towel. If my nose itches, I scratch it against my upper arm. I’m going to use Michael Covington’s technique to keep rubbing alcohol with me while I’m out in public: Fill one of those little eyeglass-cleaner solution push-spray bottles with ordinary drugstore isopropyl alcohol. Squirt a little on your palm, rub it around for a few seconds, and it dries without stickyness. You can buy little belt-holsters for pepper-spray cans, and I suspect an alcohol spray bottle might behave a little better if it’s alone in a holster than in my pocket wrestling with my car keys and pocket change.

Although the locusts are still out there, the stores are starting to get wise by placing limits on purchases of certain popular items, like toilet paper, paper towels, eggs, bread, milk, etc. Fry’s set this up over the weekend. We went to Safeway yesterday and whereas there are still a lot of empty shelves, there weren’t as many locusts and their carts weren’t especially full. (We haven’t braved Costco yet.) My guess is that everybody who intended to fill their chest freezers has already filled them. We bought two packages of boneless pork chops, some dental floss and a tube of Pepsodent. The supply chain is still out there, and once people realize that civil order isn’t going to collapse, they may return to their accustomed shopping habits.

Then again, there’s another possible explanation for hoarding, which occurred to me once I began hearing about municipalities shutting down restaurants, bars, libraries, concert halls, movie theaters, and so on. People may be afraid of government-enforced quarantine. This is happening in other countries, especially Italy. How far the feds could take it here is an interesting question. I don’t see federal involvement as a likely option, especially now that the decisions are being made at the local level. Rumors have it that Phoenix will shut down restaurants here in a day or two. If it happens, it happens. We go out to eat on average once a month anyway.

Nobody’s suggesting that we shut down grocery stores, nor prevent people from shopping for groceries and prescriptions.

The real issue with shutting down “non-essential” businesses, of course, is that businesses without customers will go under. I don’t know what the solution to that is. Restaurants that do drive-through and carry-out will get a lot better at it, and restaurants that don’t do it will learn how in a big hurry. Government isn’t always behind such things; just yesterday McDonald’s announced that it would close seating areas in all company-owned restaurants. What bars are going to do is far less clear. I’m all for flattening the pandemic curve. What I don’t think is a good idea is flattening the economy.

Another question occurred to me last night: To what extent can a CPAP machine sub for a medical ventilator? The adaptive kind (like mine) may be less useful than the ones where you dial in the inches of pressure you want, and that’s how much the machine pumps. (There may be a setting on APAP machines for fixed pressure, and I’ll investigate that later today.)

So we’re kicking the beachball around in the backyard for the dogs to chase, reading, writing, working on the garden, pulling weeds, and so on. Life continues. I’m less worried about the virus itself than about government screwups that make things worse. Government is incompetent because there are no penalties for incompetence. If the penalty for screwing things up were a jail term or a $100,000 fine, I’ll bet that government would work a lot better.

It is to dream, alas.

Friday Night Locust Report

Mar 13th, 2020
by Jeff Duntemann.
14 comments

Carol was running out of cottage cheese, which she eats every day for breakfast. We shopped last weekend and forgot to get it, so I cruised up 64th Street to Greenway, where there are two supermarkets: Fry’s (the local Kroger chain) and Safeway. We were also out of milk, and since we still have half a box of corn flakes I figured I’d get a half gallon, which would see the corn flakes through to their final destination. We generally shop at Fry’s to get their gas points, with Safeway as a (rarely used) backup. (For certain things we go to Costco, if not as often.)

Well. Fry’s was a madhouse. I had to bring a cart with me from the parking lot. The store was busy when we were there a week or so ago. Now it was insane. I went to the back of the store to the dairy case, dodging frantic suburbanites with carts piled high with sodas, bagged rice, canned goods, crackers and chips, booze, and Kleenex. Nobody had any toilet paper in their carts, because there was no toilet paper in the store. There were a few packages of paper towels. No bleach. And (oddly) no vinegar.

There was no real milk. There was 1% and skim, which I don’t consider real milk. And there was almond and soy milk in abundance, but that is really not milk. There was no Daisy cottage cheese. So I picked up a bottle of the sugar-free creamer that we like, plus a pint of the expensive organic cream, with which we dilute the sweetness of the creamer.

The produce department was pretty bare. No fruit. Some potatoes and onions, plus plenty of certain vegetables that I’m not sure people ever actually eat, like squash.

I did not look for hand sanitizer. We have plenty of hand soap, and hand soap, being an emulsifier, is a better antiviral than alcohol.

There was plenty of meat, but our supply is still reasonable, and the last thing I want to be seen as is a hoarder. I needn’t have worried; I was surrounded by hoarders. The line for the do-it-yourself checkouts was long, but the lines for the real cashiers were considerably longer, I think because the carts were all piled eyeball-high with what their purchasers doubtless considered survival goods.

I still wanted milk. So after checking out at Fry’s, I went across 64th to the Safeway. Safeway is usually pretty quiet; so quiet that I’ve sometimes wondered why the store is still there. This time, it was–you guessed it–a madhouse. Same deal: Shoppers with carts up to here, the paper products aisle bare, most of the produce gone, and although there were some eggs, most of the cartons had been badly handled and had one or more broken eggs in them. However, they still had the fancy organic whole milk for $5.79 a half gallon. The cheap milk was gone. Surprisingly, they had at least the small cartons of Daisy full-fat cottage cheese. I grabbed one. I was tempted to grab two, but there were only four or five left, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be a hoarder. There are plenty of actors in this production of The Tragedy of the Commons. I refuse to be one of them.

So I came home with cottage cheese, milk, cream, and creamer. Four items. Now, Carol and I don’t eat much, and the fridge is reasonably full. I’ll probably visit Fry’s again this coming Thursday, and get some ham steaks if the locusts haven’t cleaned them out. We’re OK with toilet paper for awhile, because we get it in quantity at Costco, and picked up a big package about two weeks ago before this whole business blew up.

Which leads directly to the question: How long will this go on? The answer is pretty simple: It will go on as long as our wretched media continue to incite panic. Panic sells clicks. Panic turns ordinary Americans into hoarders. In other words, panic pays.

We don’t know the mortality rate of coronavirus. We can’t know it, because we don’t know how many people have it. Dividing deaths by confirmed cases may yield a worst-case percentage, but until we test almost everyone (which won’t happen) nobody will know the true mortality rate. Three quarters of the deaths in the US are from a single nursing home in Washington State. Fatalities are mostly people over 70, and among those largely over 80. Now, at 67 I’m edging into that demographic, but I’m a lifetime nonsmoker with no pulmonary issues and a strong exercise regimen. Carol and I are washing our hands a lot, and avoiding crowded places. There’s not a great deal more we can do.

What we will not do is panic. Nor will we hoard. Nor (I think) will we ever watch or read mainstream media news again. I’m smart enough to know when I’m being played for a…locust. Not gonna happen.