In the interest of full disclosure, we got a bidet toilet seat for our wedding anniversary. My youngest could not get the name straight and initially referred to the bidet as the “Dubai,” which made sense because one of the seat’s marvelous functions (and there are many) is that the toilet seat is heated. Heated! That may not sound like much but there were many winter mornings here in NYC when the kids were looking for me – they look for me by standing rooted in one spot and shouting my name over and over again, with increasing, panicked volume – only for me to shout back, “I’m just in Dubai warming up!” (Speaking of NY winters, what is the point of a sixty degree day if it’s going to be followed by a 25 degree day? The chickens woke up to frozen water and would like to know.)

I could wax rhapsodically about this Toto toilet seat (thank you Japan!), but there are times when you just don’t use the seat and its many life affirming functions and you want to go the old fashioned toilet paper route. (Sometimes you just forget it’s there, even with a warm bum.) All that is fine until you reach for said toilet paper and your hand falls onto a roll of gritty, pulpy SINGLE PLY. I do not, for the life of me, why you would install the Cadillac of toilet seats and then adorn it with prison toilet paper. Nobody owns up to putting in the toilet paper, but it keeps coming back, even after I threw several rolls of it out into the hallway. M has now hidden the single ply in the bowels of the basement, so if it returns, there really are elves in the house.

And yes, the reason we have such toilet paper is because we are apparently celebrating our one year COVID-versary by using up all the things we bought in a panic. Every few weeks we get a small package from China with a single, squashed roll of toilet paper I bought ten months ago in a complete frenzy not fully understanding what it was that I was buying. I cannot imagine doing anything with these lonely little rolls other than taking them camping and using them to make a fire.

(Also, on the subject of things we bought in a panic, I don’t think I can eat all the dried beans. There are just too many.)

I want to know. What did YOU buy in a panic that you know find yourself staring at, full of consumerish guilt and misgiving?