planning for the future

[lauradi7dw]

I mentioned to Arthur yesterday that if we hope to have Flo come to our house for Thanksgiving, it will need to be picnic style, which might be awkward in late November. I have a drawer full of long underwear, but am considering investing in more, because anything social I want to do for ages will need to be outdoors or at least inside with many open windows, throughout the winter, to make me feel safe(r).
How long in general will it be before I am willing to be in a large crowd? I registered a long time ago for a race in October that has been cancelled. We have been offered the opportunity to transfer the registration to races in the future, and have been offered 2021, 2022, or 2023. I originally picked next year, but who knows?
I am staying at home right now (six nights out of fourteen done), so I can't just head out to the H Mart to get a small tub of doenjang, a fermented soybean paste made in Korea (apparently different from Japanese miso) for a recipe I decided to try. I also think it's kind of silly to get something all the way from the other side of the world, although I admit that I buy clementines, rice, and bananas often. I found a video about how to make it at home. It takes a year. That really is advance planning. I suppose people who make their own wine think ahead too, but that's not a product I'm interested in.

Comments

[sorcyress]

I feel like (in the modern era) people who make their own wine are not necessarily doing it from a thinking ahead perspective so much as a hobby perspective. I lived with a homebrewer for a while, and he was pleased to drink his accomplishments, but also would drink other beers --he wasn't depending on the beer he made to be his (reasonable!) beer consumption, and it seemed like enough of a pain in the ass to make the stuff that it wasn't necessarily saving him time or money over buying nice local stuff.

Which is all to say, in your shoes I would buy the deonjong, unless I was really psyched for the new hobby of making it.

[lauradi7dw]

I wildly misspelled it in the original post - it's transliterated doenjang. 된장

I do a lot of cooking from scratch because it's often the best way to get vegetarian food that we like, but I'm not going to make a hobby of it. In 1977, I gave a tofu maker to friends who were cooking hobbyists, because at the time it was hard to find fresh tofu except in a few specialty stores. I made my own yogurt at that time, too. I'm happy to support suppliers, but clearly a lot of people just assume homemade is best. The long-gone mother of one of my mother's friends made her own ketchup well into the 1970s, at a time that one could easily buy it (which must have also been true as soon as WWII rationing ended) but she was convinced it was better.

[nosrednayduj]

So, there's testing now. Apparently you can even get some immediate-read testing. Why don't you go do that instead of quarantining? 3 days is enough for the test to know if you've been infected. We're going to have Jocelyn tested as soon as she returns from San Diego, which is a hotbed of Covid and where apparently you can't get tested for love or money. Of course, she can't quarantine. She's only going to be home for 8 days between San Diego and going to college. OMG!

[lauradi7dw]

I got PCR tested via nostril swab about a month ago, when I thought I might have to go to NC to cover for the sick caregiver (wasn't Covid. The others did extra shifts). It was fairly cheap ($65) and easy, at First Parish in Bedford, which is hosting the testing site and I think subsidizing the cost, but only on Tuesdays. I got the results in the mail on the following Saturday, which is faster than many people get results. Supposedly if you're actually sick you'll get a call from a contact tracer in 36 hours or fewer. We talked a lot about me getting tested yesterday, but the timing wasn't perfect. From the research we did online, that test is most accurate from days 5-8 since becoming infected. Yesterday would have been day 4.5 or so for me, presuming that I was most likely to have been infected in the evening on the way home (taxi, airport, plane). If I go to an urgent care place on Friday (day 8), by the time I get the results in the mail, it will be almost the whole time anyway.
The speedy throat test has a lot of false negatives and the antibody test seems to be close to pointless.

I have been checking my pulse oxygenation every couple of days. So far so good.