My parents have started to go shopping out to grocery stores on a regular basis. Just today my mother was telling me she was popping casually over to Whole Foods to pick up a few things, and asked me if there was anything she could get for me. It almost feels like 2021 might actually end up in a passably normal state for all of us.

I have an excruciatingly boring diet. This has just been exacerbated by the pandemic. Early on, I was living in a densely populated urban area in San Francisco. There was a Safeway within my building, but this was almost always crowded, and it was impossible to maintain proper social distance, partly due to spatial limitations, but mostly because nobody seemed to give a rat's balls about keeping social distance. So, my shopping trips were minimal and infrequent, of necessity.

Most days I start with oatmeal and peanut butter (yes, I'm going to blog my food for once), then steam a bag of vegetables, and lunch it up with smoked salmon. Dinner is a bit of wildcard, but it's usually one of these things repeated, and if not, it's something else equally boring. I had a piece of cheesecake last night and the rush of sugar kept me up all night. If I ever get a social life or start dating again, I'm going to be one insufferable prick when we're trying to figure out where to eat.

My mother picked up some smoked salmon for me a few days ago. She found some top shelf stuff, much better than my usual brand du rigeur, and she bought two pounds of it for me. She actually misread the label, reading the "price per pound" as "this is the price for this package, which is a pound". We actually ended up with close to eight pounds of the stuff, which is currently burning a hole in the freezer and which I'm taking pains to spoil myself with.

It's the little things. The announcement of the lockdown in San Francisco actually happened exactly one year ago today. I'm generally an introvert by nature but all of this social isolation is beginning, steadily, to take its toll on me physically. Fortunately I remain psychologically resilient.