joke's on me, I used to chuckle at my mom wearing a headlamp and gardening in the dark

...but I am definitely headed in this direction, so I might as well become the eccentric gardener I want to see in the world

First step is obviously a seance to discuss bringing characters back from the dead with Conan Doyle

Excellent!

I know a lot of people who use a 3M aura N95

They're pretty affordable and widely available at a bunch of different stores (linked from manufacturer website). Latex free.

Definitely more protection than a "surgical mask"

www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d...

I personally use these masks because they are very comfortable and fairly durable, and also I can wear them in an MRI

But they're a little pricey (although not so bad if you're me and it works out to like $7/month)

I am disabled and tbh I'm mostly at home and only masking when I'm at the doctor, library, grocery store, pharmacy, etc

Or if a household member is sick or has been, say, unmasked in the hospital because anesthesia

I go through ~2 masks per month

I don't know where I saved the link to the study, so take this with a grain of salt

But IIRC, for N95s the elastic is typically going to wear out before the face mask does

I reuse mine quite a bit. I generally have two "active" N95 masks at a time and alternate which one I'm using