covid notes 35

I realize that some of these covid posts are tedious and whiny. These days everything has an odd shadow cast over it. Everything is harder, more complicated. Things aren’t working the way they should—or in some cases, maybe just not the way they used to, and there’s a learning curve. Medical issues are harder to deal with. Grocery shopping is more complicated. There are many things that simply seem too hard to acquire. The U.S. postal service isn’t working as well as it used to, and neither is FedEx or UPS. Things we order get delivered to people who are not us, and then we need to somehow prove that we did not receive them. Awhile back, for example, I ordered a dozen bottles of a salad dressing I used to buy through my now-likely-defunct buying club. They were shipped (from California, it turned out, which horrified me) and then stalled there. Eventually I got word that they had been delivered, but they hadn’t been. I went to the post office, and apparently the shipment had been signed for, but it wasn’t there. So where was it? It had been delivered to the elementary school, it would appear, because why wouldn’t it be? I can’t recall how they figured that out, but if it weren’t for a woman with a cell phone in line behind me who knew some custodial staff there and called them, and if I hadn’t driven to the school myself, I would never have gotten that case of salad dressing with—yes, you guessed it—four of the dozen bottles broken. Which led to more phone calls and refunds. See? I can’t even apologize for getting whiny without eventually going off on a rant.