so now how even less

Saturday, I was seized with the intense desire to try to make a swiss roll cake.   I however apparently either lost my jelly roll pan or completely imagined acquiring it.  The later is more likely, because I thought I'd bought one during the apocalypse from King Arthur, but none of my emails indicate that I did so.  So I went to BB&B, walked in, located the object I wanted, which I had already located on the website before entering the store, but I had decided to live wild and actually go inside the store and find it instead of ordering it for curbside pickup.  Over the pandemic, I've missed the randomness of going into a store not really knowing what you wanted, either having a vague idea or just the desire for the tiny uptick in mood of a random Target purchase of a thing I almost certainly didn't need.  However, despite knowing exactly what I wanted, the shelves had this weird siren song of "but maybe you wantneed this too" and then those displays near registers, impulse endcaps or whatever you call them, felt a little bit like shorting out.  

It's not a big deal, it's not a unique deal, I'm sure loads people who haven't been into stores in a long time are having or are about to have all sorts of new relationships with the acquisition of objects.  And I bought a lot during the pandemic, not just endless bags of pet food, it's not like I opted out of accreting things, there's clothes and books and a lot of kitchen things I didn't have pre-pandemic.   But I'm wondering what changes about me, if anything,  and what changes about bits of the world. I know when both of the boys go back to work and it's just me and the dogs, especially if I don't have much to do but clean and cook and read, I'll probably indulge in either real shopping or just wandering the aisles of stores like a sad capitalist ghost.  

This time, however, I was in and out very quickly, scared by the process and thrilled by ability to act on that kind of impulse.  And then I made a swiss roll cake.  It wasn't successful, it split in a gazillion different ways, but the cake and the whipped cream were still delicious and fortunately, the boys don't judge on appearances.  And then today, for Light's birthday I made him his chocolate chocolate chocolate cake, which is a chocolate cake, frosted with chocolate buttercream and topped with chocolate ganache.  In less warm weather, it also includes some architectural-looking chocolate shards on top, but those just get sad in the heat and unfortunately, his early-June birthday almost always means it's too hot for that particular embellishment.   But I made what looked like a brown lump of a cake that turned out to be way too sweet for me, but well received by others.   Hands and Hips made a coconut pineapple cake, and some painkiller mix, a call back to our tropical vacations we've not been able to take in years and years, for health and pandemic reasons, mostly.   And we ate a lot, and Hips and I hung out in a room with two of their three dogs and got to vent, and make fantasy plans of sending Light and Abundance and Hands away so she and I could just hang out in the house, reading in the same place and occasionally watching horror movies or cooking/ordering food.

Over the pandemic, I've been engaging in a medium-sized Slack for local poly people.  I'm too prickly to feel like I belong, though I've been doing admin duties for what feels like a pretty significant amount of time.  I don't know what will happen next, either for the community or for how I see myself interacting with it, if at all.  But while I still have access to this kind of audience, I keep contemplating the idea of finding a large shady place and having a silent reading party, where we can all just sit near each other, or occasionally lean against someone while we read or craft, so I can get the sense of being in community hopefully without having to feel like I need to watching everything.  Probably won't do it, but at least the idea is kind of comforting.  

Tomorrow I'm going to try to drive up to the  hospital and pick up Noisy's ashes, after going to go see Delight and Spark, probably masked and inside.    I've cleared out space in the hutch, so there's room for a fourth box of dead pet cremains, and once Light is ready, we'll pick the photo that will be her portrait on what we call The Wall of the Honored Dead, where Noisy and Princess and Bucket's pictures all already are.  I'm lucky to have had the opportunity to love and be loved by so many awesome animals, but that doesn't really do anything for the heartbreak at the moment. And I'm superstitiously concerned that somehow Noisy's given all the other animals the idea of dying, so I've been spending a lot of time staring at sleeping animals to make sure they're breathing.