Pandemic Purchases, One Year Later

Still loving Shipt, the best grocery delivery I've tried. They are friendly, courteous, and go above and beyond the call of duty (last week one of my favorite Shipt shoppers felt that it might be difficult to find narrow green ribbon at the grocery store, so she brought some from home and cut off a length of it for me; now THAT is great customer service!).

Still loving FUNimation Now. We keep finding new ones to watch, old ones to watch with English subtitles or dubbing, depending on which one we watched the first time around, and Abby even got interested enough that she downloaded Duolingo so she could learn to follow more of the Japanese. 

Still loving the other companies listed in the links above, as well as a couple of the fancier grocery stores in my area, Ben Franklin Crafts (we have a couple nearby-ish, and they are very good about Covid rules), Readi Spaghetti takeout, and our county roads, which have been getting a workout as Liz & I take a drive (sometimes to a Ben Franklin)  about once a week.

And the sheer volume of LEGO and KiwiCo products we currently have in the house is... impressive, to say the least. In this photo, we have representatives from several sets - there's a Fire Dragon, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a Sabertooth Lion, a Drone, a Space Miner, a Green Alien with Crystals, the Dragon's Treasure, several Rib Bones, and a Tiny Vulture. They're posed for this photo, but they normally live on our STEAM counter with a bunch of fun projects from KiwiCo, like the pinball machine, ukelele, and printing press... all of which Lizzy assembled herself.

Then?

Well, then there's Etsy, with its plethora of handmade products. I have a couple of favorites in the face mask area of this, as well as in other categories. But this is about pandemic-purchases, so masks it is!

The first is Freethoughtify. I got routed there looking for Star Trek-themed masks, but there is also a lot of political content I believe in, like BLM and other social justice issues. Great messages! I got the two masks I bought from them today - one is a DS9-era mask in Sciences Blue that says, "Boldly Go 6 Feet Away" and the other is a plain black mask with the legend, "I'm vaccinated and still wearing this." 

This brings me to Hookytown, my other favorite mask-maker. This one is local, a friend of mine IRL, and she makes some awesome masks with some very cool features. I bought two different styles - the 3D and the fitted, and both of them fit the round faces we have at ChezGamersBabes really well. They even fit easily over my work-required surgical masks, which is nice, and come in several dozen different fabrics. My favorite thing about them is the heavy-duty nose "wire" because these masks are not going anywhere!

Please note: nothing on Etsy is considered medical-grade; these are more for decoration over a standard surgical mask, and that's totally okay with me. I have to wear the surgical ones at work anyway, so these dress up the boring blue-or-black-or-white with fun (but work-appropriate!) gear.

So, yeah, there are a few glimpses of Good Things, even with all the crap that's out there. But then I'm Jenn, Queen of (Eventually) Finding Silver Linings.