lockdown stories - Let there be milk

As we went through suggested stay at home period we did have option to go get groceries but I stopped doing that after mid March and decided to cut risks by just ordering stuff online. This worked fine by using Amazon Fresh ( for groceries) and Costco / Instacart for bulk order of larger quantity stuff. All this went fine initially in March but as we moved alon so many other folks in the area had decided to go down the same route and Online delivery companies could not scale up to the increased demand.  I found that Amazon was not able to pick up any online grocery orders from nearby whole foods store because of high demand and there went the easy option of getting stuff from a store I was used to.  I switched to online grocery orders through Instacart and tried an order and it worked fine but by April first even that was not available immediately, there were dates out in future through this platform.

We were set for a while with basics and staple foods but milk was one major issue and  with instacart ordering from local stores delayed and Costco online order had a wait time of 5 days because they did not have enough delivery folks we were facing rationing challenge. To be clear - I'm indeed extremely lucky and privileged to be where I'm, being able to live in a first world country and having a job that can be done from home which enables me to live through even such crisis without much of an issue, so in reality it was not a huge deal compared to what lot of folks without this privilege face. But again as someone who provides for a family, having a young child who needs 3 glasses of milk, it was strange to be staring at a scenario where you cannot get milk. To top it further we lost a can of milk which was within its expiry date but the milk had gone sour ( something that I have never seen before in last 7 years! ).  We converted the split milk to paneer and it did work out well to an extent but given our lifestyle where we consume lot of milk and curds this loss of a can of milk ensured we hit end of our milk stock earlier than anticipated. So we decided  its not biggie we will skip Coffee / Tea for a couple of days to ensure our daughter has milk  until one of the online orders gets picked up. Just as soon as we made the decision, I got a text message that my Costco order has been picked up by 'Jesus C'.  Somehow the order which was due only the next day evening got picked up early the previous day morning and got to me when I needed.

There surely is a God somewhere out to help out and listening to you, Jesus did deliver milk that day and the paneer from split milk actually turned out to be pretty good.