It's a magical world

I got a booster shot yesterday afternoon--Moderna, when I'd gotten Pfizer for my first two jabs. I was expecting the side effects to be worse even though the Moderna booster is a half dose (50mcg as opposed to 100), and I was right, but thankfully though they aren't fun they aren't too bad so far. Arm pain at the site, woke me up at 6am when my ibuprofen wore off, but I took some more and was able to go back to sleep. Muscle/joint aches from when I woke up and a very mild fever, which I think broke around dinnertime and has perhaps ticked up again slightly. I planned to take it easy and spent chunks of time horizontal in bed and that seemed to make it possible to get up and do a few things in the between times. Hopefully tomorrow this will be over with; I'm going to bed very shortly to try to facilitate that. Thanks daylight savings!

In all seriousness, I was practically dancing my way out of the pharmacy after my 15 minutes' observation were up, and I couldn't help but do a fist pump as well. Not sure when I'll have this kind of uncomplicated yay feeling again; I wasn't really expecting it. But it was nice.

Anyway, I am not a doctor but if you're over 16 I do recommend getting a booster--looking at data from other countries and listening to Fauci's comments (to say nothing of the plateau in cases that may presage a fifth wave) it seems clear that the U.S. vaccine regimen will be upped to three shots eventually. Personally I wasn't willing to wait for the FDA's weirdly conservative vaccine committee to decide that decreasing breakthrough infections is worth the risk of "increased uncertainty" when their inaction constitutes a direct risk to my health (and when California is discarding more than half a million vaccine doses unused). It's a pandemic! We're all used to uncertainty at this point. But now, about this, I have a lot less.

As the year draws to a close (and not a moment too soon) I've been thinking a bit about all the ways things have changed since the pandemic. Many of these changes are terrible, and I hope most of them don't stick around, but there's definitely changes I've made in my life that are here to stay. I'm interested to hear what other people think will become permanent too.

Things I started doing that I didn't anticipate

• Getting toilet paper and tissues on subscription – I signed up for Who Gives a Crap because I was over the toilet paper hunt and because I appreciated that their products are made from bamboo, not from actual trees. Bonus: not having to haul huge quantities of paper goods around, something I hadn't realized was a drag until it freed me to make shorter trips to the closer Target on my bike. (Also: if you want a referral code for a subscription, let me know.)
• Grocery shopping by bike – It's more feasible in summer than in winter, but hoo boy, it's some good exercise to haul self and twenty pounds of groceries up the hills.
• Ordering coffee in ten pound quantities – For years now I've found buying coffee in the grocery store deeply tedious, and in the pandemic I just said fuck it and started ordering ten pounds at a time from the roastery in Utah that makes Condor Coffee for Tracy Aviary. It's women owned, fairly traded, and certified bird friendly. And I don't have to constantly buy expensive coffee that I maybe don't even like very much in the grocery store.
• Dried beans – They are better than canned and they're more efficient to transport. Win-win.

Things I haven't done since March

• Worn makeup – I enjoy it, to be clear, but it seems silly to bother between Zoom and the masks. I have worn lipstick a few times, and I think I did put on makeup for a webinar I did. Maybe.
• Starbucks – I wasn't a huge consumer since I started working from home in 2017, but I was a pretty reliable customer on my travels. I had one pumpkin spice latte in August, and that was it.
• Haircut – I was just starting to consider getting one in October when the cases started to turn and it quickly became something that seemed like a foolish potential risk. In the meantime, my hair is as long as it's ever been, which is about shoulder-length because it's curly and it won't grow any longer. It appeared longer when I was in high school and I was torturing it to be straight; it only got to wavy, because it's curly.

Things I'll never do again

• Blow-drying my hair – I'm kind of surprised I thought that frying my hair with an electric appliance was a good idea for as long as I did, but no more.

Still here. It's week seven now? Word is that restrictions are going to start loosening soon but we are not out of the woods yet. I plan to stick pretty close to home for the time being.

I made one new thing this week, the Smitten Kitchen blueberry muffins, in honor of my quarantine drama club tackling The Importance of Being Earnest, and they are delicious.

Perhaps it's because the new Dune movie is being talked about on Twitter etc, but since quarantine started I've been thinking of that scene at the end of one of those Dan Simmons novels--Wikipedia tells me it's The Fall of Hyperion--where President lady Abraham Lincoln (actually named Meina Gladstone?) severs the instantaneous teleportation network because of the evil AIs (???) and the super rich people who had each room in their houses on different worlds are suddenly cut off from one another. Simmons is fucking weird, I read those books in high school and they are deeply 80s and deeply weird, to say nothing of their extremely deep problems. But, yeah. It feels a little like that.

 It has, indeed, been nearly a month. Cripes.

• Spring Salad with New Potatoes – I make this with a tofu and it's pretty good, though given how cavalier I am about the quantities of veggies I should probably 1.5x the dressing. 
• Red Bean and Green Grain Taco Bowl – I had azuki beans, so I used a can of kidney beans instead; I used farro instead of wheat berries. The red bean half of the recipe in particular is pretty tasty.
• Asparagus & Jammy Eggs with Pounded Pistachio Kumquat Sauce – I don't doubt that finding pistachios and kumquats in a pandemic will be a PITA; it was for me and I live in Berkeley. But it was so worth it; the sauce is so good. That said I simplified the recipe quite a lot: instead of pounding the ingredients in a mortar and pestle I just pulsed everything in the food processor. (Life is too short, even in quarantine.) I cut the asparagus before blanching them and I blanched them in the same water as the potatoes, and I never bother with the ice water baths for those ingredients either; I save it for the eggs, which actually need it. Again, life's too short. But the sauce is delicious and it was 200% worth all the rigamarole.
• Asparagus with Chorizo and Croutons – I got a large package of chorizo at the store and I've made this twice. Yes it is the time of year when I eat my body weight in asparagus and I regret nothing.

Other than that, more repeats and leftovers. What have you been cooking?