Mild Amusement

 Continuing on with the general theme of amusement during quarantine, today's post involves a microcosm of life during COVID-19. It's not so much that I'm trying to focus on that as the topic, as it's a daily part of our lives, like it or not. Many of the things that happen, laughs and all, happen with that as a backdrop, and many of these anecdotes are actually precipitated by the quarantine itself. For example, today's post involves masks. We try very hard not to leave the house unless it's absolutely necessary, but every now and then, something comes up that requires us to leave the house. For those occasions, we want to take every precaution to keep ourselves safe, so we needed masks of some sort. My first instinct was to buy some, but as you can probably imagine, lots of people thought the same thing. The end result was that finding a mask, at least initially, was not particularly easy. So, we figured we'd try to make our own. The Mild Wife and I don...

I can't remember where I saw it, but there was a funny graph about the relative importance of socks and sweatpants in 2020. It looked sort of like this: With credit to  https://accidentalfire.com/2020/04/03/relative-importance-2020/ The general gist of the graph is that as people have quarantined, the need for comfortable, "at home" clothing has gone up, and other things have become less important. I definitely chuckled when I saw this. In that vein, I recently got myself a new pair of shorts. Much like the sweatpants line in the graph above, my desire for comfortable clothing during the summer heat has gone up quite a bit. I actually don't own tons of pairs of shorts for everyday wear, so it was nice to pick up a new pair. Now, we ordered the shorts online, much like every other purchase we've made in recent times. That meant that I didn't get a chance to try them on first, or to see how they fit. I wasn't particularly worried about this because men's...

 Today's post is going to be short and sweet. It took place over the span of about two seconds, but it was too perfect a quip not to write about it. So, let's start with the setup: I was on a call with a bunch of other people from an organization. That's a pretty common thing these days, since the pandemic has forced remote work for a lot of people. However, this was the first time that many of us had met, virtually or otherwise. So, we were doing a round of introductions. When it came to this one lady, she gave her name, and said that her goal was to "stay employed so I can continue to do this." We could all tell by the tone of her voice that she was joking, and many of us erupted in laughter. Like I said, it was a good one-liner. However, the next bit was the part that prompted me to write this post. I asked her if it was possible to win a meeting, because, if so, she had just won. That drew even more laughter, and I suddenly imagined a scoreboard or people prac...

 Recently, the Mild Wife and I decided to give the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA, for short) thing a try again. If you've never heard of the concept, it's basically a delivery of produce to your door, only the providers are local farms or providers. It's sort of like supporting your local farm instead of the supermarket chain down the block. As you can probably imagine, the notion of having stuff delivered to us rated highly on our list, and the fact that we could support local agriculture seemed like a pretty good idea, too. In this case, we decided to give  Imperfect Foods a try (I could've sworn they started out as "Imperfect Produce," but their website seems to say otherwise). The idea is that there is produce that won't make it to a grocery store shelf because it looks, well, ugly. The carrots might be gnarled, the fruit can be small, or a bruise might appear on a vegetable. So, you're not guaranteed to get pretty-looking food, but, as yo...

It's a bit of a broken record at this point, but the Mild Wife and I are doing everything in our power to do the social distancing thing. I'm a numbers guy, and both the number of deaths and the rate of infection are trending in the wrong direction. It's just not worth it to mess around at this point. Still, we have family and friends, and the days keep coming. So, people's birthdays and special events pop up on the calendar, regardless of where we happen to be that day. This has already created at least one amusing instance where a balloon delivery for our niece caused a bunch of confusion. Considering how common deliveries have become, I'm not entirely surprised that some of these interactions are causing some chuckles. In this case, however, the anecdote wasn't funny because of the delivery itself, but because of the reaction to it. You see, Peruvian independence day happened recently, so we sent some flowers to my folks. In years past, we have all gathered...