Is a "gelatinous exaltation" ridiculous?

[todayiamadaisy]

One of my colleagues at work was telling me about her young daughter, who has learnt at school to open doors with her elbows and does it at home now too. She was also worried after seeing bare supermarket shelves. "She kept asking me, 'What will we do when the food runs out?' and I kept explaining that the food won't run out, we have plenty in the pantry to last until the trucks come to fill the supermarkets again. But she kept asking, 'What if the trucks don't come? What will we eat?" and I finally said, 'Well, I suppose we'd eat Dad first.' And I thought, I shouldn't have said that, that will upset her, but she just nodded and said, 'Oh yeah, that makes sense.'" So at least one local family is prepared for the worst.

Another colleague reported that her daughter, who has just started secondary school (the school year starts in February here), came home obviously worried about something. She eventually revealed that word in the school yard was that if a child caught coronavirus but their parents didn't, the child would be taken into foster care; if the parents got sick but the child didn't, the parents were taken away and the child left home alone. I am so glad I am no longer a child who has to listen to playground nonsense.

Weekly shop today. We found everything on the list except for caster sugar. Fortunately, pasta and toilet paper were not on the list, as those shelves are still empty. I noticed the tea bag shelves were depleted for the first time too, although only the standard Lipton and Bushells ones; expensive flavoured tea bags were still plentiful.

Some local supermarkets have introduced ID checks on entry, so customers can prove they're locals and not raiders from Melbourne. So that's still happening.

My mother had to go into the chemist to get some gel for her sore foot. I waited outside with the shopping bags, opposite the exit to Aldi. Every single person coming out of Aldi had a packet of toilet paper. Every single person. Some of them, that was all they were carrying.

After that, we had to go to Bunnings (a hardware chain store). You know things are serious when Bunnings cancels its weekly charity sausage sizzle, as they have done for the next few months. Apparently they donated five hundred dollars to each charity whose event they cancelled. We were there to get some lettuce seeds, which my mother plants on a staggered schedule, a few each week, to ensure a continuous supply. However: no lettuce seeds. No spinach, mesclun or bean seeds either. Plenty of kale seeds, I noticed. Outside in the plant section: no lettuce seedlings. No vegetable seedlings at all. All sold out.

Back home, I did a bit of weeding in the garden. I found an old packet of aster seeds a couple of months ago and sprinkled them in a tray. They grew, all of them, white and pink and purple, and they had butterflies on them today. There were honeyeaters on the fluffy dwarf teddy bear sunflowers. Whenever I moved, I heard rustling the undergrowth as skinks skittered about in the sun. I didn't expect the end of days to be quite so idyllic.

(Watching Mastermind just now, a contestant answered a question with "anteater" and the host said he was "close". The actual answer was "sloth". That is not at all close to anteater, is it?)