St. Louis-style thin crust (or cracker crust) pizza is made with baking powder, not yeast, if needs must. Just skip the provel cheese because that stuff’s nasty, lol.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine!

I tried to order Waterpik replacement heads for my kid with a space maintainer, but they wouldn’t be shipped until almost May. Instead I bought a new off-brand Waterpik, and it will be here next week. It could have been here sooner, but I chose the $3 digital credit with slower shipping.

LOL, we just watched that episode the other night. And the one where a bunch of them get the flu and end up in the hospital. When Rob Lowe's character is talking to himself in the mirror and says, "STOP. POOPING." I absolutely LOST it. Like, doubled over in tears laughing. Also a fitting scene for the TP issues!

We’re not gardening this year because we’re getting ready to do a few outside remodeling projects. Well, hopefully sometime this year. Next year, I’m going to go to garage sales and buy everyone’s tools and planter boxes after they figured out gardening is a PITA. 🤣

I grew up with some food insecurity as a kid, as did many of my friends and classmates, and it wasn’t as simple as not having actual food and not having money for food. I’d say that was only about 30% of the issue (and in our house, income increases generally led to more financial problems, sigh). At least in my house, the other problems were organizational deficits, extremely picky eating on the parent’s part (she’s cried because the holiday dinner salad had too many vegetables in it...), lack of energy to prepare food as a single parent, and just not being home nearly as much as the kids were. I’m sure at times we qualified for free/reduced lunch, but mom usually spun in circles like a glitching robot when it came to things like paperwork and tasks, so we never got it. The glitching robot thing was probably the root problem, but that definitely doesn’t meet the bar for neglect, and they don’t test for that before letting you take a child or two home to raise. 🤷‍♀️ If there were no school lunches, we would have had *something*. It would have had HFCS in it because my mom still thinks “natural” versions taste like dirt, lol.

It told me 119 days, but our house skews heavily male. It’ll last longer than that. Closer to 180 days or longer. In my defense, I order from Amazon in 6-month intervals, so I can combine S&S subscriptions for the bigger discount. My shipment came at the very end of January, and those boxes are still unopened because we had TP left from the previous order. I certainly wasn’t out buying six months worth of TP in the stores when the virus thing started!

Last I saw, the father still tested negative and they were complying with quarantine. I haven’t seen any other cases publicly linked to them, but ya know, testing shortages. Feels like that happened years ago. The ones we know about in the area so far have been travel-related or transmission within healthcare (docs, nurses). Pretty much everything has been shut down around here. There’s supposed to be a stay-at-home order coming soon, but I don’t know anyone who isn’t already doing that. My mom and I both have made grocery runs and the stores were practically empty. Almost no traffic. There is literally nothing to do except buy food/necessities and walk a dog. It’s like Father-Daughter Dance Rich Dude provoked everyone in my Very Much Not Rich county to give that guy the middle finger and take it more seriously from the start. ETA: I take that back, there are some cases associated with a preschool and somewhere else. It’s all getting jumbled in my head these days.

Yep. Yep. Mmmhmmm. I miss that show. DH and I still quote it all the time. Maybe we should do a rewatch binge after we are done with Parks and Rec.

I usually plan each night depending on what the activity is, but since every night is free now, I’m throwing that plan out the window. Instead, I made a list of every meal we have the ingredients for (no shared ingredients, just one meal per one meal’s worth of chicken). I put the list on the fridge, and we’ll pick and choose depending on produce freshness and what sounds good and who’s cooking. There’s about 3 weeks worth of dinners, but I only put things like tacos once (we have enough for 3-4 meals) and didn’t list our normal Friday “Junk Food Night” at all. I’ll try to keep replenishing and adding meals to the list as we go on. But other than Taco Tuesday and Junk Food Friday, I didn’t schedule anything for specific days.

We’re also flying domestically with Southwest in late May. Watching and waiting here for now.

Nooooo... finally got to the point where I’m not waiting for an hour in queue every time I log on. 🤣

NHL suspended games earlier today. MLB just officially announced they are cancelling remaining spring training games and suspending the first two weeks of the season. "Hey, we eventually found a way to suspend cheating players from the 2017 World Series!" - Rob Manfred, probably.

NBA season suspended (player tested positive), NHL statement forthcoming tonight. I’m watching the Blues/Ducks game (which is actually a makeup of a postponed game from last month after one of our players almost died on the bench), so I’m watching the ticker on the screen for other sports league suspensions or restrictions.

My first thought was something like “turtling”. Like in hockey when a player provokes and antagonizes all game and then “crawls back into his shell” when the other team’s tough guy comes after him for it. I usually hear the “can’t you take a joke?” phrase meant literally, when I’ve snapped at someone for something that is personally annoying or obnoxious but not offensive. The answer is still no, by the way.

We go through one Costco-sized bag of jasmine rice every 6 weeks, plus about 1/3-1/2 of a Costco-sized bag of basmati. I also keep arborio and wild rice blend on hand and cook those about once a month each. I buy at least one bag every trip, sometimes two if I’m running low or completely out of one type. Family of 5, every single meal made at home (no restaurants), wheat allergy/sensitive tummy (me), Celiac (DH), and a picky eater who doesn’t like potatoes or GF substitutes (DS10). We use a LOT of rice.

I’ll have to reread the dates on that. But I think I still wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for taking an Amtrak train out of service and risking infection or quarantine of others if I had the means to otherwise provide private transportation, given that she was coming from an area with a large outbreak, symptoms or not. Two weeks ago, it might have been a different story. Again, I’m not personally “freaking out” and mostly going about my business as usual, but in their situation I would have taken more precautions than the average person. Hindsight, I guess. And yeah, dad’s definitely the irresponsible one here.

And this is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of the metro area, not someone taking train rides out of financial necessity. Zero reason this girl had to take Amtrak OR a flight home; they could have done the 10 hour drive to pick her up in Chicago. LESS THAN ZERO reason to go to the party and dance. (Don't quote) My kid's coach works in this town in what I assume is an essential personnel role. Wonderful. ETA: And this was a Catholic school event, pulling from MANY Catholic parishes, in a heavily Catholic city... on a weekend during Fish Fry season. Geez.

Well, criminals are getting concerned and taking extra precautions. The top headline on a local news station website was: “First Positive COVID-19 Case in Area”. Right under that: “KFC Robbed at Gunpoint by Two Men in Surgical Masks and Latex Gloves”. 🙄

I'm not completely unconcerned, but I'm emetophobic and cannot get any more anal-retentive about hygiene without seriously upsetting family and friends. There's literally nothing I can do differently than I normally do. My biggest concern is actually the quarantine issue - either DH being quarantined away from us on a work trip, or all of us being on house arrest together until we strangle each other over the 870th Monopoly game (we have eight versions of Monopoly, it could get ugly). That being said, if this was a new strain of norovirus instead of a respiratory one, I would have leaped into a volcano by now.

Is it a SANS conference? If so, are they cancelling all upcoming events or just the ones in outbreak areas? DH hasn't talked to me about yearly training yet, but I'm sure that's something he needs to figure out soon. I didn't even think about how this virus would affect conference/training schedules. (We get so much mail from SANS that even *I* knew off the top of my head they had a San Diego event coming up. SO. MUCH. MAIL.)

This is my seventh year of homeschooling and the worst February yet. So far this month, I have: 1) Decided to stop cooking anything but the same seven meals every week, 2) Considered telling DH to pack up because we're listing the stupid house and moving to I-don't-care-where, 3) Investigated the nearest Catholic private school even though we're not religious, and 4) Searched out the nearest women's ice hockey beer league to see if they'd take 36yo beginners who really need to relieve stress by hitting a piece of vulcanized rubber. I have followed through with exactly none of these threats, but it's only the 26th. I have time.

Yep. IME, there's was a perfect storm of factors. I don't want to get into specifics, because internet, but... yeah.

I’m glad she’s doing this. Because of this, my music ed career screeched to a halt before it started, and my life turned upside down, and I wasn’t even an actual victim. I’m surprised the lid never blew off publicly the way it did with the Boy Scouts, athletic programs, and the Catholic Church scandals, probably because it’s not a recognizable, unified culture you can stick a name and logo on. And it gets lumped in with other individual abusive teachers, despite the fact there’s specific cultural issues that probably make student musicians more vulnerable.

I found out that my 6yo doesn't know the order of the alphabet the other day, despite the fact that he's reading chapter books way earlier than my other kids. I felt bad for a minute, then I realized it's probably because I launched the Leap Frog fridge magnet toy into the sun by the time it got to the third kid. I instantly felt less guilty.