By Harry Keller
Former ETCJ Science Editor
& President of SmartScience

I feel as though going to stores right now is tantamount to going out in the worst part of a hurricane.

Apr 12, 2020 at 4:54 PM: I did it again. It’s easy to score deliveries on Amazon Fresh. You just have to be sitting at your computer ready to go at midnight. Keep refreshing your screen until you see the time slots available. Ignore messages about stuff being removed from your cart. If you try to fix that, all of the slots may vanish before you’re done. You must have filled your cart earlier in the day with whatever you could find, realizing that many things are just unavailable and that you must await another time or find another source. It is becoming slowly easier to buy your necessities.

I have to admit to a weakness for fruit jams, but I don’t like sugar and cannot stand the aftertaste of artificial sweeteners. All commercial jams have some sort of sweetener, and I have been buying ones that use fruit juice. Why can’t a fruit’s natural sweetness be sufficient? The Internet is wonderful. I have found recipes for sugar-free fruit jams that use no sweeteners at all. Some use xanthan gum, and some use agar-agar, and some use another natural thickener. You can turn a bag of frozen fruit into wonderful jams for toast or sandwiches. It’s so easy! I am going for it and decoupling from jams that try to maximize profit by providing convenience but turning the concept of jam into candy. Time to start saving those jam jars. This entire virus crisis is horrible and even worse if we cannot gain something by it.

You can turn a bag of frozen fruit into wonderful jams for toast or sandwiches. It’s so easy!

My wife and I have been staying home, working, watching streaming movies, cooking, and trying our best to avoid the virus, both giving and receiving, although we do seem to have escaped the receiving part so far. We face much more time before it ends. That will only truly happen once we have a vaccine. A secondary wave of infection could erupt at any time, or we could just run into a local hotspot.

My son and his wife came here for an Easter celebration.

My son and his wife came here for an Easter celebration. They brought take-out food, including roti ready to cook. Now, we have bread for a couple of days, meaning that we can postpone our trip to a store. We can wait even longer if I can make my own bread. I have done it before, but not the lavash bread that I am planning to try. It looks easy, but you can never tell until you try.

I feel as though going to stores right now is tantamount to going out in the worst part of a hurricane. Wait for things to calm down a bit if you can. Keep yourself healthy with exercise, sleep, and good food.