Day off today. All I wanted was to make some jammy bars for the husband. That’s all. I swear! *sigh* But, what I got instead was a lot of grief. Grief from the new fridge, and from the oven. Have a look: First up, we have the fridge which decided to puke out the door shelves and their contents all over the floor, but more importantly on top of my two toes. See the big bottles? They hit straight down on my big toe and its sidekick, my Morton toe, on my left foot. I thought for sure they were broken from the amount of pain, but they aren’t even achy or bruised anymore. My toes are in tact.

So, that happened when I was reaching in for the blueberry jam I was going to lay down as the middle layer of my jammy bars. I cleaned up this mess after I put the bars in the oven.

And that brings me to my next kitchen mishap:

Never in my life have I ever burned food like this that I can recall. These bars are burned from the top all the way down to the bottom of the base layer. Wow.

The oven was so hot when I reached it, it had already turned itself off to prevent a fire from starting inside its cavity.

I assume I was so distracted by the shelves and their contents falling out of the fridge onto my foot that I hit the broiler button instead of the bake button on the stove when I reached over to preheat the oven right before I dumped and smoothed the jam layer out, and continued on with the crumble topping.

I didn’t even noticed the oven temp was too hot. I was upstairs organizing a load of laundry when I smelt a burning fumes smell (I thought my husband had burned some pizza cheese in my oven again the other night as I cursed him while running down the stairs as the smoke alarm screeched out my open patio screen door.)

It was bad. Really bad. Worse than I thought it would be. I couldn’t open the oven for an hour after turning it off and letting it cool down, all the while running the range hood vent at full blast. And the smell took hours more with the front door open, too, to create some kind of cross wind to air out the house.

This is what I was faced with after I was finally able to pull the jammy bars out.

I just left them on top of the stove and turned out the kitchen light. The kitchen officially closed in the middle of the day. There would be nothing else happening in there today. I was over the urge to do some baking and cooking today, my only day off this week.

Ugh. I should’ve stayed in bed.

(I’m not really sure how I feel about this cartoon.)

So… A lot’s happened. A lot. In just the last week, but more or less it’s been happening before our eyes while we day slept. COVID-19 is real, and it’s here. It’s not showing any signs of going away any time soon, or playing nice (much to the chagrin of many of certain gender, age and generation).

A lot has changed. Daily when I get into work, I’m like a captain of a Star Trek ship asking for the status update and damage report. New policies are being introduced every day. Things are fluid; subject to change mid shift as head office fires off another email to all the locations to implement.

We’re confused, the customers are confused, and generally it’s just all around confusing. For about a day. Humans are, thankfully, adaptable. Some people are willful and refuse change, and others need a lot of time to get used to changes. We get it.

But, we all need to work together in this little corner of our world in order to survive. We need to pull together, now more than ever, to survive this pandemic with as many as we can save.

I dislike the term Social Distancing. I much prefer Personal Safety Space. It’s more accurate in terms for what we’re trying to do – save persons, or rather ensure everyone’s personal safety is respected and maintained for the time they are in our store getting their food supplies.

All we ask is customers do their bit like we do ours when we show up for work every day. Those who continue to push back won’t like being forced to walk away from their groceries and leave the store when they only think about themselves. We haven’t done that yet… But, I feel it wouldn’t be out of the question in the very near future.

Customers, by and large, have been great about helping us to help them in light of the pandemic announcement over a week ago, but I can already see the honeymoon phase has worn off of people who hate being inconvenienced. Hence the push back I have gotten in the last day.

Like I said, welcome to the new normal. Yours, ours, and mine. (Note the order. I’m always going to put others’ needs ahead of mine at work.)