Looting (6 of 9): Fairy bread.

The first night at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, I decided to go ahead with my recent plans to make up some "fairy bread" as an unexpected treat.

Basically, as a(n Australian) colleague had told me about it years ago, it's the prototypical (Australian) kids birthday party treat, where you put butter on crustless white bread and then sprinkle ice cream sprinkles all over it, and the shittier starchier cheaper white bread that you use, the better it is.

As I've heard it, it sounds gross, but it's actually really good, and since I had gotten the leftover ice cream sprinkles from when we had had an ice cream treat one day at the resthome, I thought I'd try using them for that, as a fun thing to do with my client and so that no ice cream sprinkles went to waste.

(I checked first with my client's lesbian sister by text if my client likes sprinkles, and she does, so I told the sister my surprise plans in confidence, and she said that fairy bread actually sounds really tasty, which surprised me, since no-one seems to have that reaction the first time that they hear about it.)

Anyhow, "This tastes like frosting," my one client said, when she tried her half of the fairy bread piece that I had whipped up, after I ate mine first to show her that I wasn't pranking her.

The next night at work I told my one (biracial) coworker and my one (white) (townie) coworker about fairy bread, when they were sitting around talking about having sex in cars with the men who would become their husbands.

"Oh yeah, that stuff is good," my one (biracial) coworker is like.

"It tastes like frosting!", I was like.

"Oh year it does," my one (white) (townie) coworker was like, "Buttercream frosting is basically like butter and sugar, it's the same thing."

As it turns out, both had actually tried it before!

Looting (5 of 9): Grocery store giving in.

So, the looting made me give in with my trying not to go to grocery stores for as long as possible because of Covid, which I had begun on like March 11th.

I made it till June, and I still had some potato-pea curry that I had made up, and some frozen black beans and some frozen cabbage-tomato stuff to eat, as well as ingredients for another batch of pea soup, but basically since I had to go stay at the resthome and then my one assisted living client's with disabilities, I had to stop into a store and get some fruit for snacks and some stuff to eat, for while I was staying away from home every night.

That first morning, I was like, "Fuck it," and I got some cherry-chocolate ice cream that I ate out of the container for breakfast, as I sipped my coffee and read a book some while sitting out on the bit of lawn by the curb outside of the apartment building where my one assisted living client with disabilities lives, before I had to go in and start up my shift.

All in all, I made it almost like 12 weeks, which is pretty good, I think, though I'm sure I could have made it 12 solid weeks, and I might have even been able to make it like longer than 3 whole months, through like at least June 11th or so, like longer than the same date I went to the grocery store back in March.

It's quite something to go into my pantry, now, the few cans I had are pretty much used up, there's like almost no ramen or pasta there, two huge bags of rice are almost used up, there's like barely anything left at all.  It's quite impressive...  Part of me almost thinks I would have made a good (Mormon) stockpiler, keeping a lot of food and using it all from the bottom, so that you always have a lot of food on hand to keep in reserve, and none of it goes bad.

Also, I forgot, one of my prep things that I did before leaving my apartment was putting all my curry that I had made up into containers and freezing it, so it'd still be good to eat whenever I got back to my apartment.

Looting (4 of 9): First post-looting subway ride.

My first subway commute after the looting was odd, at best.

This (shaky-looking) (thin) (out-of-it) black guy came on the train at like noon, and went to the end of the car and lit up a cigarette to smoke, at like noon.

Me and some other people switched cars, and then this (late teens? early 20s?) (black) guy with dreads walked through the car and ripped off these official taped-up posters about wearing masks as a precautionary measure to protect yourself and other passengers, that the subway agency had put up.

A few stops later, these (like mid teens?) (black) kids without masks, one boy and one girl, both skinny and with looks on their faces like they were getting away with something, come on and are way too close to each other like they had just started sleeping together, and they walk through the car and then pass through to another car through the between-car doorway that no-one is supposed to go through.

All this, like at noon, on a decently full car full of quietish people wearing masks.

Such weird energy.

Looting (3 of 9): Resthome prank.

When I had found out that afternoon that my one (Filipina) coworker was staying in an empty resthome room next to mine that night, I right away told her something like, "I'm glad that you're staying for your safety, but please, no loud parties!", and I told her that if she did that, that I'd be pounding on the wall.

"I'm sorry, but I work long days, and I just want to sleep," I was like.

She laughed, and then later that day I went a step further, and I got some red and black sharpies from the front desk and wrote "LOUD PARTIES" with the black sharpie and then put a big "NO" symbol over it with the red sharpie, and then I went and taped it on her door so that she'd see it when she went to go to bed that night.

Looting (2 of 9): Rooftop view.

The first night at the resthome, I was deciding whether to stay or not, and I checked the local police scanner on Twitter, and it was saying that a protest just south of us had gone long, and there was reports of a looting of a pawnshop.

So, I told my coworkers like ten minutes before we were about to go clock out, and we all headed up to the roof to see what was going on, me and two of my (Tibetan) coworkers (the one with an inappropriate sense of humor and the one who's older and blocky), and my one (Filipina) coworker and my one (Mexican) coworker.

So, we watched, and we could see police lights down a ways down a major street to the south of us, and a few police cars cruising up and down and doing U-ies by us, to keep a presence on the street over by the business strip near us.

My one (older and blocky) (Tibetan) coworker was already staying the night and so was my one (Filipina) coworker, but my one (Mexican) coworker lives walking distance from work, like right down the street that the police cruisers were going up and down on.

"That's it, I'm going," she was like after a few minutes, and turned and went to go to the elevator to go downstairs and go out.  "It will be fine."

"Are you sure?", I was like, "Maybe you should wait a little bit, let's wait and see what happens."

"No, it will be fine," she was like.
. . .

She really is such an imperturbable person.

Looting (1 of 9): Preparation.

The first night after the looting broke out, it was clear to me that I'd need to spend the night at the resthome and at the apartment of my one assisted living client with disabilities, both of which had been cleared in advance, the first as part of the resthome's general emergency plans that they had in place for blizzards and stuff and that they then had updated for Covid.

I made sure to let my landlord know that I'd be gone for like a week, and I also had sent him this list from the Minneapolis city government on how you make your house safe, and we started putting that into effect.

First, we took out pretty much everything from the backyard: lawn furniture, flower pots, a detachable pipe attached to a drainage pipe, decorative bricks that were lining one flower bed.

(In retrospect, don't decorative bricks seem like a naive thing to have just sitting out in your yard?)

Then, I took some rags and an old sheet and put them up to cover the windows on the enclosed back porch, so that no-one could see inside.

He was getting his wife and kids to go stay at their in-laws for the night - they all live upstairs from me - so I then went and did the last step, putting water over the garbage and recycling in the bins next to the back couchhouse in the alley, and I made sure to let a tenant in the couchhouse know, so he wouldn't be freaked out if he saw this liquid suddenly everywhere in the alley and he wasn't sure where it came from.

The next morning when I went to go get in a cab to get to work, too - there was no public transportation in my part of the city, and the resthome was paying for a cab, thankfully! - I made sure to leave a light on in my apartment, and the enclosed back porch.

I had also left my laptop and ID documents with my landlord to keep in a closet in his apartment, so that way they were safer once they got back, rather than having them just sitting out in my empty apartment.

That seemed a little bit much to me, but better safe than sorry, if anyone broke in.

That night, my landlord texted me to see if the front light on the porch was blue, since people on Facebook were saying that rioters and looters were targetting porches that had blue front porch lights.

Resthome food stories (4 of 4): Chicken.

Sometimes we have leftover chicken for staff dinner at the resthome on Fridays, and lately there's been some Popeye's chicken too for a treat.

In one case or the other, if I get a second after I'm done eating and I don't have to go rush off to go work right away, I go and tuck away my chicken bones to take home, so I can throw them in my scrap bin in my freezer and keep them to make some chicken broth later.

Right now I'm planning to bake up some cabbage and potatoes in my oven, in some chicken/vegetable broth that I'll make from the broth.

I'll bake it at a nice low temperature for a while, so I can use my Pyrex dishes that I have.