I have made maybe seven loaves in the bread machine. I'm pretty much at "weekly." What I've discovered about flour is that the big box stores tend to have extremely uneven distribution. For example, Fred Meyer had zero eggs on Friday but on Saturday they had eggs sitting out unrefrigerated on pallets. I think our excuisitely efficient logistics chain has been shot to shit. Smaller grocery stores seem to experience the flood a lot less and mostly what I've noticed is the cheapest brands are gone but the more expensive brands remain. For example, there was no flour to be had last weekend (and no sugar, and no brown sugar) but there were maybe 50 lbs of premium bread flour on the top shelf where people were too cheap and lazy to reach up that high to pay that much. How are things going out there? We did five babies in 25 hours and things are nucking futz but it kinda looks like they aren't getting worse per se.
People took everything here. Kroger, TJ's, Meijer... flour is straight up gone at every price point. Cake flour, even. Who uses cake flour? Do you even know what you're buying? Do you know what that's going to do to your recipes? Things here are fine. Our governor did an incredible job of taking this seriously early in the game and then enacting incremental changes over the course of ten days to lessen the blow to quality of life. By all reliable accounts and metrics, it's made a difference. Our cases are still increasing across the state, but not exponentially. Our hospital is experiencing its projected peak right now, and we still have space in our ICU and inpatient areas. We'll see if that holds, but for the time being, it means we still have gowns, gloves and goggles. We're still recycling masks. The joke about ER nurses is that we don't generally give a shit about precautions, so the biggest change has been going from laughing in the face of certain C. Diff to sob choke actually having to gown up to see patients. About 75% of what we see now is rule-out COVID, given that it's presenting as everything from SOA to broad abdominal complaints. And for the most part, that's fine. But it gets scary when you have to deal with a critical. Going into the negative pressure rooms wearing the garb plus CAPR feels like diving into the hot zone. It's eerie. And then I go home and count out the days and look for symptoms. I was scared a month ago. I'm still scared, but now I'm used to being scared. So I've got that going for me. Humans are so resilient. We can get used to just about anything.