Plague Update

So here’s a thought -  For those of us who have finally adjusted to sneezing into our elbows, what are we to do now with the elbow-tap greeting?
Unless you have forearms the size of The Rock, isn’t the inside of our elbow what?, no more than three inches from the outside?  Or maybe we need to employ both elbows, reserving one for hygienic, and the other for unhygienic functions. Kind of like Middle Eastern dining, in which the right hand is for eating and the left hand for activities that are better not described.

Schools are closed now here in Venice, as is the community theatre, along with lectures and anything that involves people gathering. I actually got a parking place today at the YMCA within seconds (unheard of on a Saturday), and in my yoga class we could all going into warrior pose without hitting the person next to us. We all bellied up to the hand sanitizer dispenser on the wall afterwards, I noticed.

I finally got to the grocery store yesterday morning at about 9:00. This was not a hoarding trip; I hadn’t been in weeks and my fridge was beginning to echo.  I will admit to checking for the availability of toilet paper. Here’s what I found:

At the checkout, I told the lady I’d thought about coming in the late afternoon the day before, but then thought the store might be too full of people coming home from work.

“Wouldn’t have mattered,” she said glumly. “It was awful all day. Before the store had even opened, there were 30 people waiting outside.”

She did look pretty spent. I noticed her interaction with the register wasn’t exactly smooth, plus fellow store employees kept coming up and making jocular comments like, “Hey there! Been demoted, ha, ha?” So I'm guessing she may have been wrenched from the front office to ring me up.