Lockdown Day 18: An almost duplicate delivery of groceries, more household supplies, and more water
This morning my entryway woke up to a hopeful, congratulatory, yet cautious message saying that finally we didn’t have to do a PCR test today, because for the moment our community was safe. But that we should not let our guard down, and continue to stay indoors to protect ourselves and those around us.
After that, I had my breakfast of sweet potato, steel cut oats, chia see, and flaxseed. Very nice combination, and easy to make with the timer function in the Xiaomi instant pot! I tried this breakfast concoction, because I wanted to use up part of a sweet potato (bought from the expensive Citysuper supermarket) whose end had gone moldy.
I noticed my neighbor across the way had her household supplies shipment outside.
For lunch, I had the Chinese chive pesto with roasted carrots and chickpeas from yesterday. I just love this pesto!
I had lunch outside…
Towards the end of the workday, I got a phone call. I don’t get a lot of these these days! It was someone from the water buying group telling me to pick up my water at the front gate. Wow - I had almost given up hope on this group buy, my first successful one!
The scene outside was surprisingly normal, since our community’s gate has been open. The main difference were the big stacks of boxes from all of the group buys.
It took a couple trips to my entryway, and a couple trips from the entryway upstairs, to lug all of these 5L bottles of water into the apartment.
Those 12 x 5L jugs of water, combined with the 8 x 4L jugs of water that I bought from my upstairs neighbor, means that I’m pretty set for 6-7 weeks! And the group buy was a lot cheaper too - 36.9 RMB per box of 4 x 5L bottles (~$5.80) which is pretty much the regular price for that brand of bottled water.
Later that evening, we got another delivery of supplies. There was a box of groceries, and some supplies on top. The box of groceries was was just about the same as Friday’s delivery three days ago, only just one package of white mushrooms instead of one white and one brown, and white potatoes rather than sweet potatoes. Otherwise it was all the same (though cleaner than last time).
Literally on top of this box, we also got two packages of alcohol-based sanitizing wipes, two bottles of alcohol hand spray, a package of laundry detergent, and a bottle of body soap. These supplies continue to make me feel like we’re going to be here a while.
After taking care of the delivery, I had a snack of oranges.
At around 8pm, I heard a loud buzzing noise, and went outside to look what was going on. Gross! It was a small cart with people using a powerful spray to spray our buildings with disinfectant! I could see that the ledge of my balcony wall was damp. I had just put my new vegetables out onto my table to “air out” as the lady across the way encourages me to do (“放外面，吹一吹“), and just as she did herself. She yelled out at the workers to tell them that we had our vegetables out! They said not to worry, it’s just a little damp, but she said to wash them anyway. I smelled my cabbage and it had a faint smell of bleach. Just awful! So I then spent more time to completely wash all of my vegetables. Then dry them. Then store them. More work on top of everything.
Then I did my workout of the day. Yes, I did make a special effort to do that, even though I had my taxes to finish up, and a lot more work to do!
After my workout, I had a nice dinner. First, because I feel confident now with the amount of water I have, I finally feel free to wash vegetables with drinking water. So I had salad! I used up the remainder of a head of iceberg lettuce, and some of the tomatoes that were more soft. I used up the rest of my whole wheat loaf of bread, and toasted the slices with cheddar.
And I reheated the last of my beef stew, chock full of big, tender pieces of beef chuck.
This evening, I worked pretty late, and made sure to do my PCR test this evening, to count towards tomorrow’s results. I’m so glad our entryway leader now allows us to do this - she said it’s for all of the 夜猫 night cats (not night owls!) of the building. Very nice, and finally something that is human-centered! I sent my results in at around 3am.
