Category — Uncategorized

One of the things I miss during the pandemic is something I didn’t think about at all until I read Anne Helen Petersen’s piece on errand friends. You know those people that you roll catching up into grocery shopping or swinging by the post office?

Most of the stuff you do with an Errand Friend, it’s unremarkable. It’s just life, but with another person there. I tried to look for a picture from my past to accompany this post, but there was nothing to be found. You take photos of special events, of dinners, of nights out and camping trips and hikes and weddings and dress-up costumes. You don’t take a photo when you’re in Target browsing dishtowels for the seventeenth time.

I have several friends who are errand friends, especially when they come into town. They need to entertain their kids or get something for their parents, and I accompany them because we can talk while we’re being productive. (Usually, even if it’s their errand, I end up accomplishing something, too. Such as last spring when I bought matzah for Pesach while my friend was helping stock her parents’ house with groceries at the start of the pandemic. Back when we thought this would be two weeks.)

I miss that. I miss errand friends. The people that you’re so close with that even grabbing groceries is fun because you’re talking as you walk down the aisles.

Because we cannot go anywhere, I have put all of my “new experiences” budget into making new recipes. I go for about two or three new ones per week, and I repeat whatever people are in the mood for on the other four nights.

Because we only go shopping once a week or once every other week, we need to plot out ingredients well in advance. So I can look back to March and see what we’ve eaten every week of the pandemic. Isn’t that bizarre? I’ve seen recipes grow in popularity and then disappear altogether, and other recipes pop up in almost every single two-week PDF.

Every once in a while, we’ll plan for a meal and everything will fall apart. We’ll be left with an ingredient that has no culinary home. For instance, I misread a recipe, asked Josh to buy ricotta, and had to figure out how to use said ricotta in something else.

Someone brilliant made a database where you can put in an ingredient, and it will tell you recipes that use said ingredient. Like two million different recipes.

So I put in ricotta. You can narrow things down by using the options on the left sidebar. For instance, I knew I wanted a pasta dish, so I started choosing other ingredients that would be in a pasta dish (olive oil) and skipping ones that may go into a dessert (vanilla). And a bunch of good options bubbled up to the top.

Brilliant.

Wired had an article about a group of risk experts and data specialists who set up a pandemic risk budget for themselves. Or, “Six nerdy roommates used public health data to create an online Covid-risk points system for every activity—and protect their pandemic pod.”

The point was to protect their group house because the actions of one person affected all six of them. (Just like any home with more than one person.)

Living was simple at first. The government had ordered everyone to stay home, so the housemates stayed home … Then the world started to open back up. This was accompanied by the reemergence of a thing called “desire.” In its wake came strain. Olsson describes what happened next as the “everyone-needing-exceptions problem.”

Sound familiar?

Because everyone had a different comfort zone with taking risk, they returned to the concept of the micromort and the contact budget. Everyone got the same budget (a yearly budget broken into weekly amounts). How they chose to spend their risk time was their choice, but each activity had a cost. Some activities were over budget—such as hanging out at a party without a mask—and some used very little budget (walking a dog). But everything used some budget. Once your budget was gone, you stayed at home. They worked to “develop a system for weighing and budgeting viral risk. Olsson called their risk points microcovids, in a tip of the hat to Howard, and one microcovid equaled a one-in-a-million chance of catching the virus.”

Because they were working with a budget, they thought about ways to lessen risk so they spent fewer risk points on activities they didn’t really love doing—such as grocery shopping—and found ways to see people they wanted to see. Calculating risk and making decisions became as easy and automatic as putting on your shoes before leaving the house.

And now they’ve opened up their tool for anyone to use.

While we’re not counting activities because we don’t leave the house often enough or see anyone beyond my parents from afar (and always outdoors), the tool gave us ideas for lessening risk even more. It’s brilliant, so I’m passing it along to you, too.

We are at the point in the pandemic where I have bought Beorn a 10-square-foot guinea pig playpen. This means that we don’t need to leave each other’s side. I can sit next to his habitat while working or reading, and then we can move into the kitchen when it’s time for me to cook. I showed him how to make pita, dry-roast garlic, dice tomatoes. I’ve walked him through my favourite cookbooks, showing him recipes that I think he may enjoy watching me make. I shared green beans and slices of cucumber.

Without human interaction beyond the Zoom screen, I expected myself to arrive at this stage at some point. I didn’t think it would happen so soon, before the one-year mark.

Along with the playpen, I got Beorn a ball that you fill with treats. When he pushes it with his nose, the treats drop out of a hole. He learns that playing with the ball yields treats. So far, he has stared suspiciously at the ball and then suspiciously at me, looking between us until I move the ball and he gets the treat sans work.

I want to build him a guinea pig playground.

I tell him 38 times per day: “You are my best friend, Beorn.”

He says nothing in return.

But maybe he’s thinking it.

“It may seem counter-intuitive, but the way to make someone feel better is to let them be in pain.” —Megan Devine and Refuge in Grief (:34 in the video below)

This is three-and-a-half minutes of brilliance, and I’m setting it here in case you want to help someone who is hurting. As her hashtag states, #itsokthatyourenotok