Sprouts are the new lettuce in our house until we start growing lettuce in the garden. Sprouts are pretty much THE salad vegetable in our house at the moment (we have onions and a couple of red peppers) since we stopped going to stores. I look forward to more vegetable options, hopefully soon, but for now I find joy in sprout salad with red onion, chickpeas and homemade dressing.

I have never been way into sprouts - definitely not enough into them to keep a constant production line going. Now I do my multi-jar sprout maintenance every morning and every evening, watching for their first tiny white tails that aren't there the night before and magically appear by morning. I feel a certain amount of affection for their promise and potential and their cute earnest need to grow. Then I and my family kill them with our teeth.

For a while we have been buying a lot of our packaged/dry goods from online markets, so I have just kept that up as needed. They, of course, are being inundated with people stocking up. The things that were out of stock seemed odd - hot sauce, pickles, certain kinds of tea. I couldn't help but assume that whatever was out of stock was related to this virus thing and people going wild to stay as connected as possible to their normal - to the apparent privilege they have been accustomed to. That is definitely why I was looking at the hot sauce. We use a lot of hot sauce. I was way too excited to find Cholula brand original hot sauce was still in stock on the second site I went to. Then it proceeded to go out of stock before my eyes. "Shit!" I said. Shit! My ability to sit all cozy at home and buy random shit online is being hampered! Don't worry about me, though.  I'll be okay. Another brand of hot sauce is on its way, but thank you for asking. These are such tough times, though, you know?

I have always liked to think about being ready for a catastrophe - a trait I picked up from my fruit canning, food dehydrating, wool processing from start to finish, wood stove cookbook writing, hiding under the bed from the Mormons at the front door mother). How to prepare? How to survive? It was exciting to think about being ready for...something...anything.

People around the world are living in a constant catastrophe of poverty, famine, war. Having the time and leisure to think about planning for hard times is fun. It is fun to have privilege. Everyone should have time to think about things aside from immediate daily survival.