Pandemic Hurricane Prep: Get Started Now

Serious advice for anyone living in places where hurricanes and similar natural disasters are a possible threat during certain parts of the year: start washing and saving the plastic bottles (caps included) containing soda, juice, iced tea, Kool-aid and similar non-dairy beverages, even if you're usually wont to throw these bottles out with the garbage or recycling. I say this based on concern that, if supply chains and business overall remains wonky when hurricane season starts in June, buying the recommended 14-day supply of bottled water will be a HELL of a lot harder than it already is under those conditions.

Do not, however, save and re-use plastic milk jugs or any other containers that once held dairy drinks (which includes a lot of coffee beverages); no matter how many times you wash and sterilize it, you can never be entirely certain you got rid of ALL traces of milk proteins, which make microbes grow like crazy.

I already have a large collection of one-liter and one-gallon bottles (which originally held Jeff's preferred brands of club soda and unsweetened iced tea). If I had a big house and basement with lots of storage capacity, I'd just buy pallets of bottled water and be done with it; however, I live in an apartment which simply does not have the storage space (or strong-enough shelving) to hold 48 gallons of water at approximately one cubic foot and eight 1/3 pounds per gallon. So instead, I keep only a 4-day supply of pre-bottled water on hand, plus enough clean plastic bottles to hold another 11 or 12 day's worth. Here's a list of tricks I've learned over the years:

1. If you don't have enough shelf or floor storage space to easily hold all those bulky (though lightweight) bottles, you can put them in large unused garbage or lawn bags and hang them from the ceiling of a storage closet or some other out-of-the-way space. Weight is not an issue with all those empty plastic bottles; only actual volume of space is an issue.

2. Easiest way to wash and sterilize bottles (assuming clear transparent plastic): rinse out each bottle, then give it a squirt of liquid dish soap, add hot tap water full blast until the top of the soap suds start coming out the mouth of the bottle. Then cap the bottle and give it a good shake several times, enough for the soapsuds to get a chance to go against all interior surfaces.

3. The difficult/annoying part of washing bottles is actually the rinsing, and making sure not a TRACE of soap remains in any of them. The least-annoying method, I've discovered, is: dump all the hot soapy water out, then fill it with cold tap water slowly enough that the traces of remaining soap are NOT agitated into suds. Do this until the water overflows the bottle, then dump everything out. Depending on the shape of the bottle, you might need to repeat this process anywhere from two to four times to make sure every last bit of soap is gone.

4. Of course, drying out the inside of the bottles is the part that takes the longest, because YOU can't actually dry them; you can only wait for the water to evaporate out of those narrow bottlenecks. Weather permitting, I've found the best way to do this is to arrange the bottles on a drying rack by a window, with direct sunlight shining in/on the bottles. Otherwise, I set up the drying rack in an out-of-the-way part of the house.

5. If you are going to partly fill bottles of water to freeze, DO NOT use bottles or jugs with irregular shapes; stick with symmetrical bottles, ideally cylinders rather than squared-off bottles or anything with angles. I learned this the hard way when I prepared for a hurricane last year (which, luckily, did NOT hit me after all): took a hollow-handled jug which originally held a gallon of iced tea; filled it about 80 percent with water (leaving room for the ice to expand, of course); and due to the irregular shape of the bottle, the ice ended up expanding in ways that completely split the bottle. Since I did not lose power, I only had to discard a giant irregularly-shaped ice cube plus a bunch of plastic shards; had that ice melted it would've been a LOT messier.

6. I reserve the right to add to this list later if I remember anything else.

Covid-19: Euphemisms for the Duration

Sociology poll (preceded by an explanatory personal anecdote):

When I was a young kid -- single-digit age -- like all members of Generation X I lived a life of extreme cartoon deprivation, compared to kids today: other than Saturday morning cartoons, the only ones I could watch on a regular basis were old (1930s through 50s/earliest 60s) shorts which originally aired in movie theaters, but by the time I came around you'd find them on local indie TV stations that mostly aired whatever syndicated content could be had cheap. Since a lot of those cartoons (Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry, Max Fleischer's and Tex Avery's oeuvres) came out in the early 40s, I actually got a "feel" for certain aspects of daily life in World War Two before I had any inkling of their contemporary equivalents -- for example, I had a vague understanding of how "ration points" had to be considered whenever you'd buy food at the grocery store, loooong before I knew anything about the importance of checking the unit price of an item in order to get the best deal (e.g. "Paying $1.50 for the 20-ounce bottle is a better bargain than paying $1.00 for 10 ounces").

Thanks in large part to those cartoons, I also knew that during the war, many Americans referred to it as "the duration" -- certain businesses would sport signs saying "closed for the duration," people (or anthropomorphic animals) would talk about doing things only "for the duration," etc. Obviously, this was used as shorthand for "the duration of this war." And now, almost immediately after covid-19 brought about radical changes to my ordinary everyday life, I started referring to "the duration" -- I just checked the archives of a chat forum where I hang out, and in just the past three days I've mentioned such sentences as "Texas has also banned abortions for the duration" and "Jeff's workplace has [instituted various changes] for the duration," among others -- and of course, I have no idea if I came up with this phrase "on my own," so to speak, or if I am merely defaulting to a usage I learned as a very young child watching cartoons older than my parents.

So, here's a question for all of you: what phrases, abbreviations or euphemisms, if any, have YOU been using when discussing the quarantine and other covid-19 issues?

Coronavirus: the Bad Part Hasn't Even Started Yet

When I said I hoped I'd get out of jury duty, I didn't mean it like this, dammit.

The Georgia county where I live nowadays is trending on Twitter (at least for me) because today the CEO declared a state of emergency closing various types of businesses, and there were many heartbreaking replies along the lines of "I'm a restaurant server, my rent is due at the end of the month, how am I supposed to pay my bills if I can't work?"

I was just thinking the other day how relatively fortunate I am in pandemic terms, at least in the sense of being married to a spouse whose job is deemed "essential"; even if we had total Italy-style shutdowns he would still be working and earning money. And what money I make these days is all remote/work-at-home anyway. But if something like this had happened when I was in my teens and most of my 20s (rather, if my personal work/home/financial situation were what it was then), I'd be utterly screwed -- single and living alone, thus paying all bills myself rather than splitting them with someone; can't work to earn money because the dance clubs have shut down; and the amount of money I had in savings back then would NOT have been sufficient to see me through any extended dry spell.

And a hell of a lot of people these days are even worse off than I was then -- for example, 20-something me would still need to scrape together the April rent payment in eight days, but at least she wouldn't have a car insurance payment as well, because she/I always paid premiums six months at a time. But even THAT put me ahead of the game, compared to most of the paycheck-to-paycheck people I knew and worked with then. A lot of Americans are going to be seriously hurting without serious help, and soon.

Jury Duty in the Time of Coronavirus

I haven't figured out the precise variable responsible, but: this entire millennium I've gone around with a bureaucratic bull's-eye pinned to my back, compared to my spouse or certain other adults I could mention: in Connecticut, Virginia and now Georgia, I got a jury duty notice while Jeff remains blissfully unencumbered, even though he and I have each registered a car in our name, registered to vote and other activities which, according to legend, make one more likely to get called for jury duty.

I got the notice last Saturday, and after the expected obscene grumblings went online to register as required. Then the COVID-19 coronavirus came to Georgia, and suddenly I'm a minor background character in a poorly written sci-fi pandemic movie.

Did you know that Georgia has a state park called Hard Labor Creek? I didn't until this week, when I initially misread a certain news announcement as saying the state was sentencing coronavirus patients to quarantine at hard labor. Then Fulton County (one county over from where I live, and home to much of Atlanta) closed its public schools due to the coronavirus.

Jeff and I were out running our regular weekly shopping errands yesterday when word came down that our own county of Dekalb had also closed its public schools due to coronavirus concerns.

We stopped at a Target and the toilet paper aisle was completely empty, though we had no difficulty buying other things on our list. We went to our favorite (nice-neighborhood) Kroger an hour or so later -- the school-closure notice come out sometime after we left Target but before Kroger -- equally gutted TP aisle, and the rest of the store was packed with panic buyers. The checkout lines were so long they stretched all the way to the back of the store. I have only ever seen that once before in my life, in news photos of Houston supermarkets just before Hurricane Harvey drowned the city. So we left the grocery store without buying anything, since we didn't want to wait in those insanely long lines. (Fortunately, we could afford to do that since we weren't remotely close to running out of "food" at home; at worst we were running low on certain perishable foods we particularly LIKE.)

On the other hand, this morning before I woke up, Jeff went out to our local (low-income-neighborhood) Kroger and was able to buy some TP (though not our regular brand), a loaf of sandwich bread (ditto), and most of our regular everyday grocery-list items too.

I'm not too terribly worried about the virus itself, but I am concerned over how our country will respond, especially regarding the Trump administration's with the usual “deny, deflect and kick scapegoats” method of governance. And I find myself dreading jury duty even more than I usually do.