This is the most exciting thing to happen in a while! As I may have previously moaned about, our lovely supermarket, Best Market (formerly Best YET market) closed down for six months to be transformed into another market, not a Best or Best YET market. Curses!

I never knew I had it so good–a pretty big supermarket with a giant parking lost one block from my house. When I was first starting to drive our car, I could drive to Best market, shop, and drive back and it was just enough driving.

As I got more confident in driving around the weird back blocks of decaying industry between the market and the turnoff to Rikers, I became more bold. I drove to Costco and back, once driving over a very bumpy curb and once getting hopelessly lost by Halletts Cove. Last summer I drove every morning to the Astoria pool, where I parallel parked by myself and only got one ticket. As a non-driver/committed passenger, I didn’t understand the humiliation of getting a ticket. It’s terrible.

Oh, the pool, how I miss you! How I miss my walking friends, ladies older than myself and so much fun. We would walk the breadth of Astoria pool and talk and talk and talk and walk and walk and walk. I slimmed down without much effort.

No pool walking with the covid. No slimming down with little effort. Just weird bursts of compulsive food swallowing, followed by no snacks and lots of seltzer. I read in the Times that the pandemic has unloosed old disordered eating patterns in people, and that made me feel so much better about my own strange eating tics. I must say that this pandemic has turned my middle into a densely packed mailbox and I do not foresee things changing anytime soon. I need people around to act regular.

But back to the excitement of tomorrow. Calvin has the morning off so we are going to Stop and Shop in College Point. I’m going to buy cottage cheese and grapefruit and plums and Irish butter and regular baking butter, and cream and whole milk–all the good ingredients you can’t really get in normal amounts from Costco, or in safe quantities from bodegas or delis.

Take last week, when Calvin was gone on a shoot. I bought cottage cheese at the good deli. It’s good because it felt safe and was very masked and had good fruit and great flowers. Now it’s mobbed and they are overwhelmed. The neighborhood feels the loss of Best Market. I bought cottage cheese there, the 4% fat kind, the good kind, the sublime kind, and when I opened it there was a little Pac-man of mold on the top. I let it sit on the counter all morning to mourn it not being good cottage cheese.

But tomorrow–Stop and Shop! Will they carry Maille mustard? Will they have a good cheese selection? Will they have dill and parsley? The CSA doesn’t even help at all, it’s all tough lettuces and middling tomatoes, with strange random good stuff. I think we’re not the right family for the CSA. The vegetables feel prescribed rather than desired.

There is nothing to report about Maggie. She has not blasted music at our wall since the one day last week. I still want to sound proof because I feel very exposed. But as our roof is apparently a disaster area, we have to sink cash into the roof. Shelter and all that bullshit.

The most fun inside thing going on is that we are watching Friday Night Lights as a family and it is the best. I told the kids tonight: “It must be so great to be raised by the Astoria version of Coach and Tammie Taylor.” It’s true. Calvin does his coaching ministry (everyone is entitled to a ministry, okay?) via producing puppet shows for television, and I spread joy and laughter by just being me, or the me ministry.

How does she get her hair to be so good, though? Astoria Tammie Taylor is not at that level of hair quality.