Cuddling: A Dog's Guide to Next-Level Loafing

By Special Guest Blogger, Bilbo Baggins

In our last post, we mined the wisdom of expert canine, Bilbo Baggins, as he shared some napping tips he's learned over a 2-year lifetime of lazing about. Today he'll continue in that thread by digging deep into a subset of loafing that is beloved by humans and dogs alike!

The first half of my life was pretty awesome. I chased squirrels and balls and ate dog food and sometimes even human food! My human also left me alone every day, which gave me plenty of time for loafing. Then one day, my human stopped leaving! And, I didn't think it was possible, but my life became even more awesome!

As you can see, she has a thing she calls a "computer" in our house, which she uses for a thing she calls a "job," which she says means she's working. I don’t know how she can call it “working” when it doesn’t involve a bone, but I do know that it requires sitting in front of the computer, which is easy enough. If your human is working, you can help! The best position for working is with your chin on the desk and your booty in the human’s lap. Everyone is comfy this way! Working is so great!

Sometimes when I am loafing in another room, I will hear a dinging sound from the computer that means my human is probably going to have a meeting. I don't know what that is, but I do know it means my human will probably be talking. I love it when my human is talking! The best position to help your human while she is in a meeting is on her lap with your paws on her chest, so that you can easily bite at her face whenever she speaks. If you ever hear that funny ding, you should come running. You don't want to be late for your meeting!

 
Other ways you can ensure you don't get excluded from the workplace – and still get your loafing done at the same time – are: 

1. Surreptitiously interpose yourself between your human and her chair.

 

2.  Take up the entirety of her chair. At first, you might feel a bit guilty about this, because you are a dog and your human is glaring at you, but I have it on good authority that working is important for humans, and working means sitting on a chair, so you are definitely being helpful!
 

3.  Drape yourself over your human while she is on her chair. This is apparently the most effective of working postures. My human is always telling me to get off when I do this, which must mean that we have completed all the work! What a team!

 

One of the best ways to ensure lots of joint loafing time with your human is to have an out-of-control furry coat like I do. This means that once a month, she will have to sit down on the floor and groom you. The clippers will feel a little weird on your ear hair, but it’s worth it, because it means over an hour of non-stop cuddling and hand-feeding! This is a relaxing and cozy time for everyone involved!
 
By far the best way, however, to spend quality time loafing with your human is to do it when there are no distractions: no meetings, no tickly clippers, just you and your bestest favoritest friend! This is easy: just find your human when she is lying down, and position yourself on top of her.

The chest and back are classic options, but if you haven’t learned to cuddle with human legs, you’re missing out! When the legs are positioned properly, you can be fully surrounded on all sides by a secure, protective friend. Legs are way better than a dog bed, which is perfectly sized to your body and has no pokey bones and was designed exclusively for you to sleep in, and I’ll tell you why: because the legs are made out of your beloved human! How could any nest be more perfect!?

 
And that, my friends, is the pinnacle of dog comfort and lying-down mastery. I have no more to say...except a small reminder to any humans who happen to be reading this. It is inspired by a wise saying I would have seen once on a pillow, if I could only read:

“If you want the best seat in the house, you can’t have it, because it’s you!”

A Lazy Dog's Guide to Loafing

By Special Guest Blogger, Bilbo Baggins!

Life is hard when you're a domestic dog—so much human food to beg for, so many balls to chase, so many suspicious characters to bark at! Sometimes it's enough to make you just want to lie down and nap! But how?

Don't worry, our special guest blogger and expert on being a dog, Bilbo Baggins, has your hindquarters! With his vast experience in strategic lounging, he will guide you through a compendium of possible poses and get you well on your way to Doggy Dreamland!

A question I get from a lot of dogs is, “When I get the urge to loaf around, where should I do it?” 

The answer is easy: Any time your human puts something on the floor, that is an invitation for you to sit down on it. Outfits she has laid out for the next day and her yoga mat are the best of the best, but don’t overlook the less cushy objects either. Even the smallest shopping bag is a gift from your human and must be sat upon! 

Empty cardboard boxes don’t sound very comfortable, but what the human wants, the human gets! She will always take a photo of you when you sit in a box, so that’s how you know you’ve been a good boy!

If you haven’t tried sitting in the suitcase, you really must! This opportunity only comes around once in a while (usually when the human is planning to abandon you!), so act quickly when you see it! Your goal is to get your fur all over the human’s possessions so she doesn’t forget about you while she’s gone.

If the object you are lying on is too hard and flat for your liking, you might want to employ a trick I learned from my ancestors. Simply poke and pull at it with your paws and turn around a couple of times until it is no longer flat. You will have a bed of perfectly arranged lumps in no time! Definite improvement!

There’s one thing you shouldn't ever bother lying down on, though: your dog bed. Basically, if it’s got the word “dog” in it, you don’t want it! Freshly folded laundry is a better choice every time!

For some reason, my human doesn’t like me to sit on the couch (she says it has something to do with my tendency to puke on it! As if!) If your human is the same way and does mean things like put metal grates on the couch so you can’t sit on it even if she’s not looking and there’s absolutely zero chance that you’re going to barf up that combination of grass and dust bunnies you ate earlier, you can at least let her know how you feel by sleeping mournfully as close to the couch as you can possibly get. Much sad!

 

Pro Tip: One of my favorite places to get some shuteye is behind the toilet. My human thinks that’s because it’s a nice cool spot in the dog days of summer, but really I’m just trying to make her feel sorry for not letting me on the couch. Someday she’ll catch on!

 

In case you, too, are trying to guilt your human into sharing her couch with you, and the toilet trick just isn’t reaching her, try pressing your face into the leg of a chair. This sends a sure message of pitiful imprisonment. It’s a metaphor any human should understand!...except mine. I’ll keep working on her.

My friends, I am a dog of few words (in fact, I have said zero in my entire life!), but when it comes to loafing, I've barely gotten started! My human says she knows a thing or two about blogging, and that I'd better split this into two posts. So just steady... steady... 

And come! (back tomorrow, when I'll have another helpful guide to my favorite kind of loafing of all!)

Dog Mom Level: 500?

You might recall that last year, I rigged up a stroller to be a wheeled dog carrier and trained my little pupster to enjoy riding around in it. That was a great solution for conveying him around a public transit system, but since I haven't ridden Metro since March and don't plan on doing so in the foreseeable future, the stroller hasn't really seen much use. Well, he still loves to jump up and sit in it for no reason, though, so I guess that's an accomplishment I'll never undo!

This year, I decided to up my dog transport game and find a way to bring him with me when I ride my bike. My first idea was a trailer, like some parents use to carry their human children. I actually salvaged an abandoned bike trailer from the curb, but it was missing so many parts that I never got around to converting it for use with a dog. And that's just as well, because my second idea was a better one—I'd carry my dog in a backpack!

There are companies that make special backpacks specifically designed for dog transport. For a few months, I had one of them on my Amazon wishlist. But I could just not see my way to spending 50+ on something that might not even work. So I decided to test out the concept with a backpack I already had.

In a months-long process involving lots of treats and tennis-ball-chasing sessions, I trained Bilbo to love sitting on top of the backpack, then tolerate being inside the backpack, then tolerate being carried in the backpack, then carried on a bike in the backpack. 

 

Training in progress!

It was a big accomplishment this summer when I was able to bike with him all the way to campus where I work, because that meant I'd henceforth be able to bring my dog to the office whenever I wanted! You know, whenever the office reopened, that is.

Well, the office reopened, and today was my first day back. Naturally, I took my dog, which means we, together, have survived a full day at the office and a round-trip bike ride using a dog backpack! I have been so successful with my trial backpack, that I decided it's not necessary to invest in a special dog backpack from Amazon. The regular-old secondhand backpack (with a few slight modifications to make it easier to get a dog into it and harder for a dog to fall out of it!) is quite sufficient.

In spite of it being a success in almost every way, I can't help but feel that my dog backpack is a little anticlimactic after creating the dog stroller (which was a much more impressive feat of craftsmanship at very least), so I decided to construct a comparison chart to lay the matter to rest, and maybe help other DIYers out there decide where to invest their energies when they feel the need for more dog mobility!

	Dog Stroller	Dog Backpack
Allows you to bike with your dog	❌	✔️
Allows you to take your dog on DC Metro	✔️	❌
Takes up very little space	❌	✔️
Protects your shoulders from carrying a squirming 20-pound burden on your back	✔️	❌
Elicits reactions like "Aww," and "Hahaha" and "I love your dog!" from random passersby	❌	✔️
Unequivocally qualifies you as a "Dog Mom"	✔️	❌
Costs nothing in supplies (assuming you already have a backpack and a stroller and some basic sewing notions)	❌	✔️
Is an impressive feat of craftsmanship	✔️	❌
Allows you to feel like a dog trainer extraordinaire	✔️	✔️

 

Well, folks, looks like it's a tossup! The relative merits of the different methods of canine conveyance are highly situational, but one thing is clear: You're more of a "dog mom" when you're pushing your dog around in a stroller than when you are carrying him in a backpack! So if having that status is important for you, then by all means go for Dog Mom Level 1000 and make yourself a stroller. But if you're like me, and your present lifestyle is more suited to biking everywhere you go, then you might be happier with a backpack.

Bilbo and I clearly leveled down, but we're upwardly mobile and ready to work like dogs at the office! That is, once I can get him to stop barking his head off at every person who comes down the hallway. Next training project: Social Skills!

Fighting Backslash (An Illustrated PSA)

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the typographic character above is not a backslash.

 

Now, it's not inconceivable to hear a web address spoken aloud as something like "WWW dot mycoolsite dot com backslash mypage," and you might have even used "backslash" in that context yourself, but...well, how can I say this?

It's pretty certain you're using it wrong.

That slanty character that's used to separate sections of a URL is never a backslash. You can call it a forward slash if you need to disambiguate, but fortunately, it's got another name that's even simpler to remember and faster to say: It's a slash.

Though a slash can look confusingly like a backslash, it's pretty easy to tell them apart once you notice which direction they're leaning—a slash leans to the right, a backslash leans to the left.

If telling left from right isn't your talent (raise your left hand if you're still using your thumb and index finger to make the "L for left!"), there's yet one more way you can remind yourself just which type of slash you're seeing—just consider where it's heading!

If you're reading a line of text, at any character where you stop (a "/" for example), you can be certain that the words to the left of that character are words you already read,* and the words to the right of it are the ones you have yet to read. Said another way, the words you already read are the past, and the words yet to be read are the future. And look which way the forward slash leans!**

If the superhuman effort of trying to memorize which is a backslash and which is not proves too much for you, never fear! There is a simple rule of thumb you can follow in 99% of situations: Just don't say "backslash."

I can't think of a single place where backslashes are used, except in Microsoft Windows file paths, and how often do you narrate one of those aloud?

So the next time you're telling someone about a web page on your cool site, don't make your mouth do any more work than necessary! The word you're looking for is probably "slash"—no "back" required.

Footnotes

*That is, if you're reading a left-to-right language, which I assume you are, since I wrote this post in English...but best to head off any smart alecks at the pass!

**That is, if you're imagining the slash to be an anthropomorphized figure which stands on its bottom end and has its face in the same approximate position as that of a human, which I assume you are because that's how it looks in all the illustrations....Smart alecks, I'm watching you!

A solar system for the planet

There's always some ecological endeavor going on in my existence, but since January, I've been keeping mum about my biggest, most serious investment in the environment yet. It's something I've been hoping to do ever since I moved into this house, and it finally happened! Can you guess what it is? I'll give you a hint: you probably won't find it too shocking, but it will certainly be electrifying!

Do you give up? (I'm pretending you haven't read the title of this post).

OK!

It's that I got my house hooked up with solar panels! I'm officially running on renewable energy!

Here's me sunning myself on my newly multipurpose roof!
(I really was up there for a legitimate reason, not just a needlessly risky photoshoot!)

The plan had been in the works since summer of last year, but good things take time. It wasn't until late January that I had a functioning rooftop solar array. I'm now almost 7 months into my solar-powered life, and I can tell you it's stellar.

Get it? Stellar? Huh huh huh?

The actual process of getting solar panels was so uninteresting that I won't detail it here (it mainly involved signing a lot of contracts and forking over painful amounts of money every few months), but I'll happily field questions from anyone who's interested in setting up their own home solar system (planets not included!).

Now that I think about it, the period after going solar was also uninteresting. My panels basically just sit up there on my roof and, well, sit there. The first few months, I wasn't sure they were even working because I was unclear on the complex financial dance between me and my solar cells, the power company, and the free market. But after a short delay, my electric bills went way down. And then a few months after that, I began receiving payments for all the surplus power my system was generating!

You'd think that with all that free money rolling in, I'd be ready to cut loose and burn electricity like there was no tomorrow, but, if the initial estimates hold true, I still have 8 years before I'll break even on my initial investment. So until then, it's business as usual. In fact, I'm bound and determined to conserve electricity more than I did before—because once you go green, why not go greener? So it's been an interesting summer—thanks to coronavirus quarantines, I've been home twice as much, but trying to use half the electricity.

2020 is the year we'll all remember as the one where COVID-19 ruined everything. But at least I'll also be able to remember it as the year I finally achieved my goal of going solar. I kind of always thought of it as a pipe dream, but now it's real! So 2020 does have a bright side, and that bright side is as bright as the sun!

In case you were wondering what I've been up to...

What do you get when you cross a DIY-obsessed homeowner with a state-mandated stay-at-home order? A long list of home-improvement stories, broken down by difficulty level!

Stuff that was easy

When I first received my stay-at-home orders, I was initially a human whirlwind of activity. Spending 18 hours a day staring at the dirty surfaces in your house is enough to get even the most unmotivated among us to start wiping things down.

I swept floors, mopped floors, and polished floors. I scrubbed walls and baseboards, I scrubbed greasy light switches and door handles, I scrubbed bathroom tiles until they were almost white again! 

Even after a good scrubbing, I realized that the walls in the guest room were never going to lose all their stains, so I painted them instead!

One wall painted, 3 to go!

This was a fun project because I mixed the paint from a collection of cans I've been accumulating for years, collected from Freecycle and the side of the road. I ended up doing blue on three sides with a darker blue accent wall! I've never painted a room before, and I surprisingly enjoyed it. Who knew that cutting in edges (the part that initially gave me the heebie-jeebies!) could be so gratifying?

The handrail brackets on the basement staircase snapped in half sometime in the spring, so I took a trip to Community Forklift and found delightfully cheap replacements. This time, the handrail didn't require a handyman—I was able to fix it myself in only a few minutes.

I ordered a clothesline online and set it up in the backyard. The only hard part was drilling holes higher than my head for what seemed an eternity, but it was worth it! I'm so excited about it that I'm probably going to devote a whole blog post to it!

The threshold for my front door has been cracked for some time, so I made a new one out of some wood I had lying around, varnished it, and nailed it in. Another successful task with a minimum of effort!

Unfortunately, that was the last of the minimum effort. Some of the other things I attempted did not go nearly so well.

Stuff that was hard

If you recall from the last time I fixed my kitchen sink, the faucet would only turn off if you angled the very wobbly handle just a little left of six o'clock, and that meant it was usually dripping. I was nervous about this fix, because my kitchen sink was only held onto the countertop by a slapdash contraption attached to the bottom of the faucet, so a replacement faucet was probably going to require a replacement contraption. But I went ahead with it, because the sink was getting more annoying to use with every twist of the handle, and being home alone with it 24 hours a day was not improving our relationship. The faucet removal was a challenge, but the installation was surprisingly easy (although the manufacturer forgot to include an important rubber washer, it was fortunately the same size as the one from my old faucet). But the foretold new contraption that holds the sink to the countertop is even more slapdash than the last one. It involves levers made of wood blocks that put pressure on the cracked countertop and rotting cabinet. So I fully expect this fix to only last another year before something falls apart. I have learned one lesson from all my frustrating repairs, though: keep the manual! The faucet manual is wrapped in plastic and taped to the underside of the sink so I'll never lose it!

My house gets no shade, so every summer, I cover the skylights with a solar screen to block some of the heat. For years, I've been wanting to do the same to my bay window, but I couldn't come up with a practical way to do it. I wanted to go all fancy with a roll-up screen...but finally this year, I decided any jury-rigged screen was better than none at all, so I hung the screen on suction cups! It looks silly, but maybe, just maybe, it helps a little with the heat.

Professional window screening at its finest

Another thing you tend to notice when your office is right next to your bathroom, is just how noisy your toilet is. And when you start paying attention to that, you start to notice how low the water in the bowl is. And then you do some investigating and learn that both issues are symptoms of a faulty fill valve. Rather than buy a new fill valve (which is astonishingly cheap at seven dollars, but very bulky and plasticky and wasteful), you think maybe you can just replace the rubber washer inside the fill valve. But unfortunately, the only washer available does not fit, so you're out a couple bucks and still have a noisy toilet. Finally, you concede and buy the seven dollar hunk of plastic. You have difficulties with the locknut, but eventually you prevail. After only a few weeks of prep work, you have fixed your toilet, and you have the Instagram post to prove it! Doesn't that happen to you all the time? It happened to me!

View this post on Instagram

There's an actual hashtag for this! #FixedMyToilet #Fluidmaster

A post shared by Mostly just dogs (@valerie_n_stuff) on Jul 22, 2020 at 3:41pm PDT

Still more stuff

When I started writing this post, I was going to say that I hadn't accomplished much over the 4 months I've been quarantining, but after writing it all out, I realize it actually was quite a lot. I'm sorry for making you read all that. In fact, I'm so sorry, that I cut out the part about the three projects I still haven't completed, just to make it shorter!

Since the pandemic continues unabated, I'm sure I'll keep on plugging away at those, and have plenty more projects to keep me busy over the next few months. Until I write again, stay safe, stay home, and home improve!

Adventures in Cooking: Lazy Vegan Protein Bowl

I never realized how much restaurant dining was part of my life until it stopped being part of my life.

A year ago, I thought I was dining out less often, but just look at me now! In my geographic region, all restaurants have been closed since the middle of March, so I haven't had table service since at least that long ago. It's still possible to order carry-out, but, as I quickly came to realize, about half the fun of dining out was the company, and half was the ambience. Without either of those things, the remaining draw of the restaurant – the food – doesn't really seem worth the price any more. So I mostly stopped buying it.

As it turns out, once you your continuous influx of restaurant leftovers dries up, you have to be a lot more proactive in providing yourself with nourishment. For me, that meant actually cooking, something I've never been good at. Since I was embarking on a learning experience, I thought it would be beneficial for me to document my progress, so I kept a list of every recipe I prepared from March 16 to April 10. In that three-week period, I tried 16 new recipes, most of which I disliked (for the record, my favorite so far has been Old Fashioned Potato Salad, which I modified heavily with my usual adventurous flair!). I continued the cooking spree after that, but I stopped keeping track, because, well, no one cares.

With so many Adventures in Cooking! occurring at an unprecedented rate, they had lost their novelty factor. I decided not to blog about each and every (or even) one of them, but the one type of cooking adventure I decided was still worth recording is the type in which I invent the recipe myself!

So here is a new one for your perusal! It's an ingenious 2-minute meal that might even rival my world-famous Nearly Nachos. Sans spiciness, devoid of dairy, and absent of alliums, yet somehow still enjoyable to eat, it's a picky vegetarian's protein-packed dream dinner (at least, if said vegetarian has low standards)! It's...

The Lazy Vegan Protein Bowl!

Ingredients

• Frozen shelled edamame beans (only a masochist buys edamame beans still in the pod)
• Dijon mustard
• Quinoa

Steps

1. Measure out about as many edamame beans as you think will make a satisfying meal for you (I used about 1/3 cup. It was not quite enough!)
2. Microwave the beans until they are hot (66 seconds worked for me!)
3. Add a spoonful of dijon mustard and stir.
4. Sprinkle with a topping of uncooked quinoa* (I used approximately 1Tbsp)

Eat and enjoy!

*At last! I've discovered the secret to making quinoa somewhat palatable! Rather than cooking it into a gritty porridge of bland homogeneity, simply sprinkle it on top of other foods while still raw. The same nondescript grain that's unbearably boring when cooked becomes the very texture to complete the meal when used uncooked. Quinoa—the spice of life! Will wonders never cease?

What's Good

Since I made the decision to start social distancing just a few days before it became compulsory, I haven't blogged about anything. You'd think I'd have a lot to talk about, since, if the news and social media are any indicators, the world has gone topsy turvy. But, to be honest, up until last week, the coronavirus hadn't impacted my own life in any significant way. I'm extremely fortunate to be able to say that, but still, when I was finally ready to address the topic, my angle was all set to be my sole, very minor, very first-world problem—I'm not allowed within 6 feet of my boyfriend* any more!

But then I got hold of myself and realized that would be unproductive. If a moratorium on cuddling is the worst thing that's happened to me since this pandemic struck, then I'm doing all right. A more positive attitude is in order.

There are many things in my life and the world that are pleasant, enjoyable, even - dare I say? - great right now. There are many ways in which I've learned, grown, or felt uplifted over the past few weeks. Every cloud has a silver lining, and a multitude of clouds have a multitude of silver linings! Here are mine. What are yours?

The ability to work from home is something I've been awaiting patiently for years, and I'm overjoyed that I've finally got it! Some people have apparently struggled with this transition (mostly people who are forced to share their workspace with hordes of family members, and those who are easily distracted), but I was a remote worker for 6 years before taking my current office job, so to me, it feels like, literally, coming home!

I've been watching a lot of webinars that are designed to help us cope with our new situations and new technology needs. In more normal times, I typically watch about one webinar a week, but I've never before been able to sew while watching! My multitasking possibilities have gone through the roof—again, thanks to working from home.

Something that's probably not related to coronavirus, but still something that has been part of my world lately, is a newfound sense of inner peace. I've always been a high-stress kind of person, and sometimes I would find myself getting spontaneously sad for reasons that I usually couldn't pin down. But more recently, just the opposite has been occurring—surprise bouts of good spirits that seem to come from nowhere. I can't explain them, but I'm happy they're here!

I realized something interesting since I've been in quarantine. I always liked to go to restaurants and have a good sit-down meal with friends. But since that hasn't been possible, I haven't had any interest in restaurant food. I have probably been saving lots of money on dining, and as an additional bonus, like most everyone who's been cooped up in quarantine, I've been doing a lot more home cooking. As you know, cooking is usually an Adventure for me, but since I've gotten so used to it, I might even continue doing it even when restaurant meals are once again on the table (see what I did there?). Being able to customize the ingredient list to my heart's content has been a huge boon to this picky eater. One new trick I learned to satisfy my sensitive tongue? When a recipe calls for anything spicy (chile powder, sriracha, you name it!), just replace it with paprika! It's the pepper without the pain!

 

Since I've been spending so much time at home, I've been spending lots of time appreciating my yard. There is a veritable wilderness out there. I have a back-to-nature approach to lawn maintenance, which I'm sure does not impress my neighbors, but it brings me joy. 

 

My so-called lawn

Look at all the biodiversity! I even have a never-ending supply of green onions when I need them. Best of all, there's a groundhog that lives in my backyard. Since I have a great view of his den (my shed) from my desk, I always get to watch his antics, which never fail to brighten my day. Today, I saw him scaling the fence in a feat of acrobatics that I never knew was possible for such a chubby creature.

 

Hey, neighbor!

Since I no longer have to show my face in public, I've been taking this opportunity to cease washing my hair. They say that shampoo is harsh on your hair, and the more you wash it, the more oil your head produces to try to make up for it, so the more you need to wash it. The theory goes, if you wash your hair less often, it will eventually reach an equilibrium that means healthier hair and fewer shampoo expenses! I've been wanting to try this for years, but I could never see it through the inevitable greasy mess that it would become after 3 days. I'm now on Day 10. I'll let you know if the experiment was a success when I've hit 2 weeks.

I guess that's enough good stuff for me. If there's anything you're feeling chipper about today, why not leave a comment and keep the positive vibes going? Cheerio!

*Most readers who are familiar with my life will be aware that I have a different boyfriend now than the one I last spoke of in this blog. But since I've never actually mentioned him here, let me state for the record that I have been with my current boyfriend since June of 2019.

Introversion reversion

I've been having a tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle lately. While my kind of planet isn't quite getting blown up, it is definitely going through some changes. I daresay I'm living through the weirdest experience of my 36 years of existence. I speak of none but the coronavirus.

But we'll come back to that (and dispense with the gratuitous use of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy references). Surprisingly, the actual difficulty I've been having with my lifestyle is not the global disaster unfolding around me, but rather something much more mundane. It's that I've been having an identity crisis, about one very specific personality trait of mine: Am I really an introvert after all?

For most of my adult life, I was fairly confident in my extreme introversion. From the Myers-Briggs test I took in 10th grade, on which I scored 99% introverted; to the "Party Like an Introvert" kit I designed in grad school; to the book (The Introvert Advantage) I purchased in 2012—you don't know what a statement that is, from a person who never ever pays for reading material!—I solidly identified as an introvert.

But around the same time I purchased that book, something happened. I started drinking alcohol. What a miracle drug that substance is! All of a sudden, parties went from anxiety-inducing horror shows to something I could actually describe as fun! I was fortunate enough to start dating a certified extrovert shortly thereafter, which made meeting new people a regular, and totally tolerable, occurrence in my life.

After a few years of nonstop fun, my boyfriend lost interest in the social circuit, and the friends that I'd developed in that time started to disappear into their own private lives. Everyone I knew was getting tired out and ready to quit, while I felt like I was just getting warmed up! When my relationship ended last March, I threw myself wholeheartedly into building a new social network, seeking out activities and gatherings with abandon and partying like it was my job.

It was around this time that I began to question whether I really qualified as an introvert any more. While being extroverted seems like it would be an asset, the thought of it actually made me very uncomfortable. My whole identity was built on being introverted. If I was acting more like an extrovert than everyone I knew who actually claimed to be an extrovert, what did that make me? Well, I can now say with the wisdom that comes from a year of ruminating, it was "desperate."

After an early adulthood living like a shut-in old woman, I had finally discovered the joys of being young. After a lifetime of being mostly isolated, I had found a sense of belonging. All humans want to belong—even introverts—and so, I embraced every opportunity to have a social life, and when my tenuous connections began to unravel, I doubled down! On the surface, my actions seemed to be textbook extroversion (even to myself!), but I now believe it was actually me compensating for the handicaps of being a true introvert – and, oddly enough, the thing that made me realize it was the coronavirus.

I hesitate to make light of such a serious situation, but apparently every pandemic has a silver lining...and for me, it was once again feeling secure about my antisocial side. I spent much of the last year desperately seeking human contact. I started trying to organize get-togethers among my friends; I joined Bumble BFF; I considered each person I met a potential pal; I said yes to every invitation. To be honest, though, it was all getting exhausting.

All the anxiety about reaching out, the inevitable rejections, the struggle to keep connections current, the frequent hangovers (yes, what a miracle drug and a mistake that alcohol is!)—my efforts to maintain a social life were more cost than benefit. But I had to keep doing it—I had to! Or else I'd find myself depressed and lonely, just like I was all those years ago.

Then COVID-19 arrived. When I started reading about how our best bet to keep the spread of the virus under control was to practice "extreme social distancing," I was all in. If I could finally give up the frantic cultivation of a network and just coast along for a while, how wonderful would that be? If my being alone could be, not something forced upon me by my failure to form connections, but a personal choice that actually serves a public good, why should I not embrace solitude? On Wednesday, I vowed to do my part and cut all my in-person interactions to a bare minimum, until such a time as I feel the crisis is over. And I felt relieved by my decision.

That was when I knew I was still a member of the introvert club. While I wasn't exactly looking forward to weeks of self-imposed isolation, neither did I feel particularly bad about all the activities I knew I was about to miss. I have lots of things to keep me busy alone, and I knew I could handle it. For some reason, being alone by choice is not nearly as depressing as being alone by accident of fate.

Ironically, no sooner had I made that decision, than I was contacted out of the blue by 2 separate friends I hadn't heard from in an age, wanting to know if we could meet up sometime. What is it about a virulent illness that makes people want to come together? I don't know, but I declined one invitation and had the other one conveniently negated by the cancellation of all public gatherings. I got into a somewhat contentious exchange with the organizer of one of the Meetup groups I belong to, who insisted that I should come out to small group Meetups because they were not gatherings of 500 or more people, but I held my ground (or rather, I just stopped responding to her texts, as any true blue recluse would!).

I'm so glad I got back in touch with my introverted side, because it's not only making me feel like I have a better handle on my identity, but it's also making me feel like I have some control in a scary world that's getting crazier by the minute.

We, the citizens of the earth, are in an unprecedented situation right now, yet we have the power to do something about it. Introverts, unite! (Or rather, disband immediately!) Solitude will make us stronger.

Adventures in Cooking: Chocolate Covered Ginger

Most of my Adventures in Cooking! are born out of necessity—the necessity to get rid of a specific pesky ingredient in my possession. But more often lately, I've been experiencing necessity of a different sort—the necessity of having a food I can't buy ready-made.

While I can supply most of my basic needs at the local supermarkets, it recently came to my attention that certain dietary staple had become scarce everywhere: chocolate-covered ginger.

Now you might be thinking, "I never knew chocolate-covered ginger was a basic need," and you'd be mostly right. But when your will to live is contingent on satisfying your very selective sweet tooth, then chocolate-covered ginger becomes a bona fide requirement. And when my supply of it ran out this summer, I found myself in the throes of a chocolate-covered-ginger emergency!

Chocolate-covered-ginger – we'll call it CCG for short because that makes it sound like a drug, and this the story of my addiction – was the food I never knew I needed until I ran out of it. I discovered its existence when I first started working at the organic market 15 years ago, and I was surprised to discover I enjoyed the tingly feeling of ginger and the crunchy feeling of sugar granules and the euphoric snap of dark chocolate all combined in one. But I didn't eat it that often, so it took me probably two years to consume my last quarter-pound tub of the stuff.

Once it was gone, I kinda-sorta started missing it, so I put it on my grocery list to buy again when I had the chance. For months, I never had the chance. At Mom's Organic Market, my former source of it, the CCG shelf remained puzzlingly empty for weeks on end. I took a trip to the Amish market, where bulk snacks and candies of all sorts can be found, and eventually discovered a shelf labeled "chocolate covered ginger," but what was on that shelf were some mysterious chocolate spheres the size of marbles—not the oversized sheets of ginger and chocolate that I knew and loved. Surely those balls were something else, taking up the place of a product that was temporarily out of stock, just as the CCG had been at MOM's.

But then, weeks later, I noticed the CCG shelf at MOM's had been refilled...with the same tiny chocolate spheres I'd seen at the Amish market. This was not a good sign. It meant that chocolate-covered ginger slices had been discontinued and replaced with balls...and chocolate-covered ginger balls were not at all what I wanted!

Now you might be thinking, "So what? Your ginger comes in ball form instead of sheet form. I think you'll survive," and you'd be right. But my very selective sweet tooth only enjoys foods that it can nibble on, and tiny candies that must be eaten whole do not meet that qualification. I don't waste my time (or my limited carbs-quota) on sweets that aren't truly a treat in every way, so (as soon as I had confirmed that the sliced variety was not available online either), CCG was effectively off the table.

You might be thinking that would be good for my aforementioned carbs-quota, since I wouldn't be squandering any of it on chocolate-covered ginger, but alas, that was not the case. Scarcity drives demand, and I could not get the visions of CCG to stop dancing in my head.

However, it's not actually that hard to cover anything in chocolate, I reasoned. So I decided to make my own! The results of this Adventure in Craving Cooking are this very simple recipe:

Chocolate Covered Something-or-other

Ingredients:

• Candied/crystallized ginger slices (or whatever else you feel like coating with chocolate)
• Chocolate chips (however much you estimate will cover the amount of something-or-other you're using)

Steps:

1. Prepare a surface where the chocolate-covered something can cool and harden. I used a very shabby old silicone baking mat.
2. Melt chocolate chips. I hope I don't have to explain how to melt chocolate? There are tons of tutorials out there.
3. Using a spoon, spread melted chocolate over the entirety of each something-or-other (except the part where you're holding it between your fingers—it's fine to just leave that uncovered)
4. Place chocolate-covered somethings on your work surface, making sure not to let them touch.
5. Allow to harden in the refrigerator.
6. When they are fully cooled, peel them away from the surface and enjoy!

Chef's tip: If you end up with leftover chocolate, you can spread it onto a flexible object such as a plastic lid or the same silicone baking sheet. Then when it's hard, you can break it into chunks and use it in brownies, or just save it for the next time you're jonesing for chocolate-covered anything, cause now you have a foolproof recipe for making it!