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I got out of the house after work yesterday. Even though it kind of seems like with every passing day just leaving home is a riskier proposition than the day before. Of course, Shobhit still leaves for work nearly every day. At least his store is limiting the number of customers at one time inside the store to five; I felt slightly better when I heard that. Turns out, though, his blood pressure is also a bit high. I bought a bunch of stuff with our yearly balance on my FSA account with Navia—including two bottles of sunblock that we took with us to Australia—and one of the things we got was an electronic blood pressure reader, and Shobhit has been checking it regularly. It's pretty much always high, and he only told me the other day that our doctor told him that if it remains high, he may put him on medication or it. So now that's one new thing Shobhit is constantly worrying about. He's treating the pandemic like it's some kind of delightful game, but he's worried about his blood pressure. The man has no sense of priorities.

Anyway! I needed to take my receivers into the office and exchange them out for the new stack. I might have taken the car once Shobhit got home from work, but apparently the night manager called out so Shobhit had to stay until 7:45, and I didn't want to have to wait that long. I really waned to ride my bike, honestly, get some exercise, but it wouldn't stop raining. So, I walked up to the Safeway and caught the #8 that goes down Denny Way. The few people on the bus sat as far away from each other as they could, and yesterday more than ever I noticed people wearing face masks of one kind or another. I just made herculean effort at not touching my face until I got to the office and could wash my hands again.

I swiped another couple of mini peanut butter cups from the jar at the front desk and a candy bar from the pantry. Next time I'm there, if that last candy bar that's the flavor I like is still there, it will be it for those. There's another kind but they have coconut in them, yuck.

Steven was there and had been at the office all day. The official directive was to work at the office only if absolutely necessary and to stay there no more than four hours at a time, but I had the sense he had been there all day. We had a Zoom meeting last week about divvying up his excess of Health and Body Care receivers, but he took is one weekly ferry ride into work from his new home on Vashon Island to spend the day burning through the stack, so thankfully the rest of us won't have to pick up on any of that slack this week. He even showed me his stack he'd gotten through, which was fucking huge. He's still afraid April will be a mess and we may have to help him next week. But not until then, at least.

I had to take two buses home, as the #8 wasn't coming soon enough. First the Rapid Ride D to 3rd & Pike; then I waited 8 minutes for the #11 at 4th & Pike. This dipshit young man walked past me at one point as I was waiting, he could easily have created a wide berth and he walked past hardly more than a foot away from me. I wanted to kick him in the head.

Nobody is paying to ride the buses right now, because unless you are elderly or disabled, you have to board through the back door, as a perfectly reasonable safety measure for the drivers. I got home and immediately washed my hands again. I'll probably wash my hands like a maniac now for the rest of my life.

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— चार हजार सात सौ बारह —

Then I made veggie burgers for dinner. I made Shobhit's with a bunch of cayenne pepper added to the spicy ketchup that's in the fridge just for him, and put it on a plate with the last of the leftover salad from the night before last. It was waiting for him when he got home from work, and he was surprisingly impressed with it: "What was the sauce you used?" (It was ketchup with cayenne.)

I actually told him when we sat down to eat, "I missed you today." He doesn't often get to hear me say something like that to him, but it was especially true yesterday. Maybe it was that it was the first day of a new work week home alone while he's working his own shift at a store. I mean, he worked on Sunday too, but somehow that was different; it was easier for me to amuse myself on one of my own days off.

We watched the last two episodes of the original 1993 miniseries of Tales of the City, which I really liked quite a lot, even though certain parts of it qualified as dated, bordering on problematic. That D'orothea character who turns out to be a white woman pretending to be black? What the fuck. And worst of all was the scene when DeDe is admitting to a friend in an art gallery that "it would show" that her baby was not her husband's, and when the friend asks "what color" she points to a yellow painting on the wall? Yikes! That probably played as amusingly benign in 1993, but it struck me as pretty terrible by 2020 standards.

That said, the way Mrs. Madrigal being transgender was dealt with was far beyond its time. I'm sure some trans people have some issue or another with it, and legitimately so, but both for its time and compared to some of the other problematic elements, they handled it extraordinarily well. And Olympia Dukakis was inspired casting. I did really enjoy the reboot Netflix released last year, but now I kind of wish I had seen the original more recently before watching it.

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In other news, I'd say my Birth Week is all but officially scrapped and waiting to be postponed in one way or another. Not only did Dad cancel the overnight stay on Long Beach on the 28th, but due to work shift rescheduling, Lynn had to request just this morning that we reschedule the day we had set for visiting a state park as well. She has even requested that date off of work, but everything is up in the air now. And I get it. I haven't done it yet, but what I will probably do is cancel the Outlook vacation at work for that whole week, and change it to just a day off for my birthday. Then we'll see if I can manage a week of state park visits late in the year or not.

Also, Beth posted to the "Grandma and Papa's Covid Page" Facebook group with an invite to an all-family Zoom meeting tomorrow at 5:00. That's going to be odd, but just having it scheduled makes me happy, and maybe it can serve as a dry run for something we can do on Easter Sunday since we can't all get together for that anymore. As always, it's just nice having something positive to look forward to.

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[posted 12:26 pm]