May 13

Gail Tverberg has some interesting comments on the pandemic.

The wonders of globalization. We did our usual shopping trip this morning and noticed that the meat freezer at the dairy was nearly empty. The cashier said that their usual suppliers have been slammed as the pandemic has hit the big meat processors hard. Evidently, other factors are hitting the meat supply chain as well: like supplying the Chinese market.

May 14

I ran out of gas yesterday as you can probably guess.

As I mentioned we did our fortnightly shopping trip yesterday. I mentioned the dairy and its woes keeping up its stock of meat. We would have picked up a package of breakfast sausage links but they were out of that and almost everything else. And limiting customers to four packs of ground beef. The owner was headed out to Shipshewana to try to stock up but had no assurance he could get his whole order filled.

The local supermarket was well supplied and we got everything we wanted there. We don't by meat there because the quality has left us underwhelmed. But I didn't see any large gaps anywhere. They still limit people to using one door to come in and one to leave. We tried to follow the arrows on the floor that direct one-way traffic but usually we were too busy thinking about what we were looking for and wound up going the wrong way. Interestingly, about half the shoppers were not wearing masks. We were.

We wanted to go to our local ACE hardware store but the hours were reduced and we weren't going to wait two hours for them to open up. Evidently they had just re-opened after having closed for the shutdown. I wonder why since hardware stores were deemed essential. They had a large sign outside "Masks Required."

The dollar store hadn't changed at all. All the customers were masked though the clerk was not.

Naked Capitalism had this little piece that I think hits a bull's eye the politicians would rather we all ignored.

A new topic has entered our discussions. Yesterday we passed a bin with 20 lb. bags of rice at a good price. Should we get one? We decided not because we have 2 five pound bags already. Today, as I emptied a 5 lb bag of flour into our canisters I told Mom to put flour on our shopping list. We have another so Mom suggested we not. I reminded her of how hard it had been to get flour the last time. She put it on the list. We have gotten very flexible about what we need and what we can substitute for what we might not be able to get at the time. They say the prices are going up but it hasn't had a major impact on us--yet.