This is a thread for talking about what you’ve overcome. In these extraordinary, unprecedented circumstances, when everything feels like an anxious struggle with uncertainty, it’s easy to lose sight of what we’re succeeding at. But we are — YOU are, all the time. Let’s talk about that. Anything from keeping yourselves fed to keeping yourselves entertained.
For my part — I’m back home in Ottawa, with Stu, on our first day of self-quarantine after travel. Today I woke at a sensible-for-this-time-zone hour, went through a week’s worth of parcels and post, made Roberto, and cried on my husband while listening to Phil Collins. It’s been a lot. I expect I’m going to be feeling just how a lot it’s been for a while.
We’re all doing our best. I want us to recognize that and celebrate it and each other.
I managed to turn around the edits for a novelette that's going to be published in a couple of weeks. It was a godsend to have a deadline this week, when I've been so completely distracted and worried.
Coronavirus panic was in full-force until a 5.7 earthquake woke me and my children up on Wednesday. We were shaken out of bed, the epicenter about twelve miles from our home. The day was followed by over a hundred aftershocks. The ground was literally shaking under us. No injuries or deaths, thank goodness, but man, I am still rattled. On the upside, coronavirus lockdown now seems like no big deal!
I am proud that I kept a calm face for my family, updated our earthquake preparedness bags, talked to my husband about procedures when we get hit by the Big Earthquake that Utah is due for, and managed to sleep that night, even though I wanted to stay awake and vigilant waiting for the next horrible thing.
This is my tenth day of working from home and things are pretty straightforward. The main difficulty is when the fierce, independent forest predator insists he wants a cuddle and demands both lap time and attention when I'm supposed to be coding.
Ohh I am so glad you two are home and safe together. <3 <3
My library, where I work, has closed its buildings but the team I work with is all digital. We're working mightily to support all the digital initiatives that need to happen to support our patrons. I'm no longer used to 12-to-14-hr days and few of the ppl I work with have done them at all. So we're on a learning curve here, made steeper because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentioned us in an Instagram story a few days ago and we weren't prepared. Anyone remember the /. effect? Like that.
Plus I'm on antibiotics for an abscess on my shoulder that I can't get to a dr's office to look at. Telemedicine worked, though, and my antibiotics were delivered, and I'm so so grateful that this is the world I have, vs 15 years ago.
I'm pleased I'm in self-quarantine with my spouse. We laughed a lot yesterday, and it was sorely needed. Plus the cherry tree in the wee courtyard we share with 13 other apartments is blooming!
(Trying to find the beauty and pleasure where I can, and share.)
I'm glad you're home; I hope you're both well. Panic buying has hit this place - queues outside Lidl an hour before they open, "like Black Friday but worse." But there's plenty of food where the crowd don't think to look, in those great wee stores on Great Western Road. Although I think I'm going to have to learn to make bread. I found a simple soda bread recipe on Jack Monroe's site so I'll start with that.
Jack's site is here - https://cookingonabootstrap.com/ in case you've never come across them: brilliant low-cost recipes by someone who has been pushed into poverty by the system and had to survive on a few pounds a week.
GSFWC are doing what they can - Beth is organising a charity antho and I've donated a story to it. Here's hoping it does well and does some good.
And I've picked up a game that I never finished writing and I'm trying to figure out how to finish it. Most of my problem has been headspace - it's a Twine game but Twine is so clunky on my cheap laptop that it's actively driving me away from using it. Scriv with its notecard view is the best way I've found to visualise it.
Which is good because once I've done that and posted it as a demo I'm going to work on a bigger one set at the Beltane fire festival. Beltane has been cancelled this year of course, but if I can work on bringing that magic and experience to a game, that'll do for me this year.
Time has lost all meaning for me, working from home. I feel like everyday is a Saturday I am being forced to work on. I'm an extrovert with a really social team at work, so losing all of that social connection has been really hard. So my win today is that I haven't taken my feelings out on people who don't deserve it, and I haven't cried yet. I'm also on the frontlines of my company's response to COVID as the project manager for Marketing/Communications so as new work comes it, I am the central point it all filters through. So I have been doing some overtime and a lot of priority management. It has been NUTS, and I still have to attend an online class tomorrow AM. On top of that, I am feeling kind of defeated because I need to go grocery shopping tonight, since the soonest I can get grocery pickup scheduled is Monday, and we're out of basic things like dish soap and olive oil. I am usually so prepared and feel like I let myself and my spouse down. I bought myself the new yellow TWSBI as a reward for all the cooking at home and being not-a-jerk I have been managing. I am slowly tackling some of the clutter in my office, now that I am actually using it more than occasionally.
This is kind of stream of consciousness, and reminds me that I should probably start journaling again because of all of this.
My first first-author paper was accepted recently and last night a preprint of it went live. It feels good to have work that started about 5 years ago in college finally out in the world. I am particularly proud of coining the word "Necroplanetology" (I think Gideon the Ninth would be pleased).
I'm so glad you're home with Stu and everyone is OK! <3 Please continue to take care of yourselves, I am thinking of you.
Everything is more or less OK here, we're mostly staying home, leaving only to walk the dog and shop for groceries. Things are surprisingly social, with lots of Zoom calls and online hangouts! I'm trying to not be too anxious and take my mind off of things by reading / watching / playing / writing. So far it's working out OK.
I'm glad you're home safe. My victory this week is making it to Friday without letting the stress get inside my head. :D I thought I had my life pretty well together and then my sense of routine and schedule broke in so many ways, and there was this constant background buzz of global anxiety. But I got a full day of work in each day, my husband recovered from his flu, and I got to bring joy to others through a series of Instagram stories, which I loved creating. I've written down a new daily schedule to adopt during this period. It's time for a new normal, which can be scary, but this too shall pass, the world will continue, and we're gonna come out of this on the other side. I want to come out better and stronger.
Almost two years ago, I had a heart attack. (I wrote about it shortly afterward: https://karlht.dreamwidth.org/15665.html) Now, nearly two years on, I have managed 6000 steps/day for fifty-five days in a row, with no palpitations and no more than normal shortness of breath. I can walk anywhere between five and eight kilometers a day, and it's normal.
Welcome back! I'm so relieved you and Stu made it home together. The update to Canada's international travel advice on Friday came just in time to tip me in favour of not going away for March break, for which I am grateful. After a couple of difficult work shifts (my team is considered essential staff and can't work entirely from home) I had some time to check on my family and get groceries for my parents' post holiday-isolation. I'm really happy I got to have a virtual "coffee date" video conference with some friends so we could check in from afar. Still reeling somewhat from all the changes over the past week and mentally preparing myself for it to get worse before it gets better.
I’m glad you are safe and with your husband. I am home with my husband and two young adult kids in San Jose. Due to our county’s shelter in place order my son cannot see his girlfriend, which, as a person with borderline personality disorder, sent him into a emotional tailspin earlier today. I got his consent to make him an online therapy appointment with a newly recommended therapist for Monday and now he is more emotionally level. I don’t like joining him on his emotional roller coaster. It’s scary because he feels so hopeless sometimes, but here’s to not giving up!
I'm so glad to hear you're home safe <3 I've mostly been overcoming small things like 'a consistent sleep schedule', send F in the chat please. BUT ALSO I'm doing spring gardening and the soil smells lovely and the new leaves are tiny copies of their future selves and I'm gonna try to overcome my fear of potato-herding this year.
I feel too tired to write it all out. But am joining in on the solidarity of, we did it everyone. We survived this week, and we made lots of hard choices along the way.
Yesterday, I was reminded of the Down + Safe podcast, and am listening to it for the first time. Bubbly conversations, that do not require looking at a screen, are keeping my spirits really up.
I am glad you are home with Stu, will go to see if you photographed your Roberto, and Wish everyone here well wishes. I’m glad you’re up there in Canada with Justin, Amal. Because seriously, you can’t imagine down here.
In 45 minutes at midnight we go on full lockdown. We can only go on the street to but food, keep medical appointments, work in certain professions. We can go for walks but only with people we live with. If we don’t have a definite reason then we can be fined up to €25,000.
It was coming. They tried the cooperative route but too many people were still congregating (the warm weather hasn’t helped).
Even though I work at home and we’ve been on personal isolation for about a week, this really hit me psychologically today. I felt the same a bit last week when the schools closed and everything slowed down. Today it really hit me. Like a winding back of the world.
I'm the coordinator of a university food pantry. The last week has been just as wild for us as for everyone else. I'm pretty proud of myself and my supervisors for our response, though. We conferenced, put out ideas, made calls, and finally found a good solution. I spent a few hours today with my supervisors packing reusable shopping bags with food and taking them to the campus police department so that the students who remain on campus--mostly international students who have nowhere else to go--can still access our pantry's services, in at least some fashion, when the rest of the campus is shutting down.
As classes transition to fully online, I'm proud of continuing to hold up my 4.0, and I'm extra proud of how resilient, dedicated, and self-sacrificing my professors and fellow students are. Everyone is coming together and supporting each other.
This pandemic is going to get worse before it gets better. I'm grateful to everyone for being their best selves right from the start.
Part 2 of the interview with Powder Scofield is up, by the way, for everyone who enjoyed the first half!
My brother just called me a “rug making demon”. I made a small rug of a carrot cake slice in one day today. I just finished my largest rug project to date the other day. I have a commission to do another rug that I’m going to start tomorrow. I’m proud of how fast I’m growing with this, and cautiously optimistic that it could become something really serious - maybe aided by this extra time at home that I find myself with. Glad you both made it home!
Made some Instant pot beef stew. After a week of anxiety and tension I started exercising again yesterday and went on a forest run today to check on some blackberry brambles that were ruined by landscaping last spring. They’re recovering! Slowly!
Volunteered to be the last crew closing up our office -- if it closes - so others could work from home. We're critical infrastructure so I know I'll have my job and so my stress is a lot lower and I'm happy to help out my co-workers stressing stressing over kids and relatives.
I'm glad you and Stu are back in Ottawa. We're holed up in Cambridge - all the universities here went to work from home a week ago, and the lab I'm a postdoc in went to it a few days early, so it's been my life for a week and a half. It's weird, but my wife and I are doing it together, and that's good.
I've been doing a TON of baking for my own morale (and to solve the breakfast problem), so in the last week and a bit, I've made a loaf of bread for the first time in a decade, corn-cherry scones, brown butter banana bread and chocolate-ginger biscotti. We haven't been eating all of this (the biscotti got picked up by USPS today, and are headed to the West Coast), but the baking has really helped.
We're also dealing with the intersection of social isolation and the academic job market, which is truly weird. We both had campus interviews pushed to video by university policy, which is fine to chat with faculty... less fine when your job talk involves lots of video. But there's a lot of goodwill there, and everyone is so far outside their comfort zone that it's OK. Yes, late March is late for interviews, and there are other things in that corner of our lives that are moving forward in spite of similar disruption.
Oh, and Totoro the Cat is thrilled beyond purrs to have us home 24/7, and occupies laps / joins video calls on the regular. It's pretty cute.
Good you're back home, albeit in lockdown...I'm living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands has no lock down yet,however we must adhere to social distancing, so I'm working from now for two weeks.
In my free time I do reading (re-reading the Time War :) and cooking and staying fit.
I completed a very large, time-critical work task while working from home and co-wrangling a three-year-old with my spouse.
I managed to turn around the edits for a novelette that's going to be published in a couple of weeks. It was a godsend to have a deadline this week, when I've been so completely distracted and worried.
Coronavirus panic was in full-force until a 5.7 earthquake woke me and my children up on Wednesday. We were shaken out of bed, the epicenter about twelve miles from our home. The day was followed by over a hundred aftershocks. The ground was literally shaking under us. No injuries or deaths, thank goodness, but man, I am still rattled. On the upside, coronavirus lockdown now seems like no big deal!
I am proud that I kept a calm face for my family, updated our earthquake preparedness bags, talked to my husband about procedures when we get hit by the Big Earthquake that Utah is due for, and managed to sleep that night, even though I wanted to stay awake and vigilant waiting for the next horrible thing.
This is my tenth day of working from home and things are pretty straightforward. The main difficulty is when the fierce, independent forest predator insists he wants a cuddle and demands both lap time and attention when I'm supposed to be coding.
Ohh I am so glad you two are home and safe together. <3 <3
My library, where I work, has closed its buildings but the team I work with is all digital. We're working mightily to support all the digital initiatives that need to happen to support our patrons. I'm no longer used to 12-to-14-hr days and few of the ppl I work with have done them at all. So we're on a learning curve here, made steeper because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentioned us in an Instagram story a few days ago and we weren't prepared. Anyone remember the /. effect? Like that.
Plus I'm on antibiotics for an abscess on my shoulder that I can't get to a dr's office to look at. Telemedicine worked, though, and my antibiotics were delivered, and I'm so so grateful that this is the world I have, vs 15 years ago.
I'm pleased I'm in self-quarantine with my spouse. We laughed a lot yesterday, and it was sorely needed. Plus the cherry tree in the wee courtyard we share with 13 other apartments is blooming!
(Trying to find the beauty and pleasure where I can, and share.)
I'm glad you're home; I hope you're both well. Panic buying has hit this place - queues outside Lidl an hour before they open, "like Black Friday but worse." But there's plenty of food where the crowd don't think to look, in those great wee stores on Great Western Road. Although I think I'm going to have to learn to make bread. I found a simple soda bread recipe on Jack Monroe's site so I'll start with that.
Jack's site is here - https://cookingonabootstrap.com/ in case you've never come across them: brilliant low-cost recipes by someone who has been pushed into poverty by the system and had to survive on a few pounds a week.
GSFWC are doing what they can - Beth is organising a charity antho and I've donated a story to it. Here's hoping it does well and does some good.
And I've picked up a game that I never finished writing and I'm trying to figure out how to finish it. Most of my problem has been headspace - it's a Twine game but Twine is so clunky on my cheap laptop that it's actively driving me away from using it. Scriv with its notecard view is the best way I've found to visualise it.
Which is good because once I've done that and posted it as a demo I'm going to work on a bigger one set at the Beltane fire festival. Beltane has been cancelled this year of course, but if I can work on bringing that magic and experience to a game, that'll do for me this year.
Time has lost all meaning for me, working from home. I feel like everyday is a Saturday I am being forced to work on. I'm an extrovert with a really social team at work, so losing all of that social connection has been really hard. So my win today is that I haven't taken my feelings out on people who don't deserve it, and I haven't cried yet. I'm also on the frontlines of my company's response to COVID as the project manager for Marketing/Communications so as new work comes it, I am the central point it all filters through. So I have been doing some overtime and a lot of priority management. It has been NUTS, and I still have to attend an online class tomorrow AM. On top of that, I am feeling kind of defeated because I need to go grocery shopping tonight, since the soonest I can get grocery pickup scheduled is Monday, and we're out of basic things like dish soap and olive oil. I am usually so prepared and feel like I let myself and my spouse down. I bought myself the new yellow TWSBI as a reward for all the cooking at home and being not-a-jerk I have been managing. I am slowly tackling some of the clutter in my office, now that I am actually using it more than occasionally.
This is kind of stream of consciousness, and reminds me that I should probably start journaling again because of all of this.
My first first-author paper was accepted recently and last night a preprint of it went live. It feels good to have work that started about 5 years ago in college finally out in the world. I am particularly proud of coining the word "Necroplanetology" (I think Gideon the Ninth would be pleased).
I'm so glad you're home with Stu and everyone is OK! <3 Please continue to take care of yourselves, I am thinking of you.
Everything is more or less OK here, we're mostly staying home, leaving only to walk the dog and shop for groceries. Things are surprisingly social, with lots of Zoom calls and online hangouts! I'm trying to not be too anxious and take my mind off of things by reading / watching / playing / writing. So far it's working out OK.
I'm glad you're home safe. My victory this week is making it to Friday without letting the stress get inside my head. :D I thought I had my life pretty well together and then my sense of routine and schedule broke in so many ways, and there was this constant background buzz of global anxiety. But I got a full day of work in each day, my husband recovered from his flu, and I got to bring joy to others through a series of Instagram stories, which I loved creating. I've written down a new daily schedule to adopt during this period. It's time for a new normal, which can be scary, but this too shall pass, the world will continue, and we're gonna come out of this on the other side. I want to come out better and stronger.
Almost two years ago, I had a heart attack. (I wrote about it shortly afterward: https://karlht.dreamwidth.org/15665.html) Now, nearly two years on, I have managed 6000 steps/day for fifty-five days in a row, with no palpitations and no more than normal shortness of breath. I can walk anywhere between five and eight kilometers a day, and it's normal.
Welcome back! I'm so relieved you and Stu made it home together. The update to Canada's international travel advice on Friday came just in time to tip me in favour of not going away for March break, for which I am grateful. After a couple of difficult work shifts (my team is considered essential staff and can't work entirely from home) I had some time to check on my family and get groceries for my parents' post holiday-isolation. I'm really happy I got to have a virtual "coffee date" video conference with some friends so we could check in from afar. Still reeling somewhat from all the changes over the past week and mentally preparing myself for it to get worse before it gets better.
I’m glad you are safe and with your husband. I am home with my husband and two young adult kids in San Jose. Due to our county’s shelter in place order my son cannot see his girlfriend, which, as a person with borderline personality disorder, sent him into a emotional tailspin earlier today. I got his consent to make him an online therapy appointment with a newly recommended therapist for Monday and now he is more emotionally level. I don’t like joining him on his emotional roller coaster. It’s scary because he feels so hopeless sometimes, but here’s to not giving up!
I'm so glad to hear you're home safe <3 I've mostly been overcoming small things like 'a consistent sleep schedule', send F in the chat please. BUT ALSO I'm doing spring gardening and the soil smells lovely and the new leaves are tiny copies of their future selves and I'm gonna try to overcome my fear of potato-herding this year.
I feel too tired to write it all out. But am joining in on the solidarity of, we did it everyone. We survived this week, and we made lots of hard choices along the way.
Yesterday, I was reminded of the Down + Safe podcast, and am listening to it for the first time. Bubbly conversations, that do not require looking at a screen, are keeping my spirits really up.
I am glad you are home with Stu, will go to see if you photographed your Roberto, and Wish everyone here well wishes. I’m glad you’re up there in Canada with Justin, Amal. Because seriously, you can’t imagine down here.
In 45 minutes at midnight we go on full lockdown. We can only go on the street to but food, keep medical appointments, work in certain professions. We can go for walks but only with people we live with. If we don’t have a definite reason then we can be fined up to €25,000.
It was coming. They tried the cooperative route but too many people were still congregating (the warm weather hasn’t helped).
Even though I work at home and we’ve been on personal isolation for about a week, this really hit me psychologically today. I felt the same a bit last week when the schools closed and everything slowed down. Today it really hit me. Like a winding back of the world.
I'm the coordinator of a university food pantry. The last week has been just as wild for us as for everyone else. I'm pretty proud of myself and my supervisors for our response, though. We conferenced, put out ideas, made calls, and finally found a good solution. I spent a few hours today with my supervisors packing reusable shopping bags with food and taking them to the campus police department so that the students who remain on campus--mostly international students who have nowhere else to go--can still access our pantry's services, in at least some fashion, when the rest of the campus is shutting down.
As classes transition to fully online, I'm proud of continuing to hold up my 4.0, and I'm extra proud of how resilient, dedicated, and self-sacrificing my professors and fellow students are. Everyone is coming together and supporting each other.
This pandemic is going to get worse before it gets better. I'm grateful to everyone for being their best selves right from the start.
Part 2 of the interview with Powder Scofield is up, by the way, for everyone who enjoyed the first half!
I love you.
Really glad to hear you're both home.
We got through a week of work + homeschooling, and tonight J and I made an outstanding beef stew that's immediately going into the family recipe book.
Every meal seems to taste better. I'm sure it's just the gratitude.
My brother just called me a “rug making demon”. I made a small rug of a carrot cake slice in one day today. I just finished my largest rug project to date the other day. I have a commission to do another rug that I’m going to start tomorrow. I’m proud of how fast I’m growing with this, and cautiously optimistic that it could become something really serious - maybe aided by this extra time at home that I find myself with. Glad you both made it home!
Making pizza, because it's Friday and that's what we do. I'm trying to hold onto the normal things.
(Although Twitter, for some reason, limiting my account has me extra isolated in the worst possible time)
Made some Instant pot beef stew. After a week of anxiety and tension I started exercising again yesterday and went on a forest run today to check on some blackberry brambles that were ruined by landscaping last spring. They’re recovering! Slowly!
Still stressed but it’s a weekend. Thankfully.
Volunteered to be the last crew closing up our office -- if it closes - so others could work from home. We're critical infrastructure so I know I'll have my job and so my stress is a lot lower and I'm happy to help out my co-workers stressing stressing over kids and relatives.
I'm glad you and Stu are back in Ottawa. We're holed up in Cambridge - all the universities here went to work from home a week ago, and the lab I'm a postdoc in went to it a few days early, so it's been my life for a week and a half. It's weird, but my wife and I are doing it together, and that's good.
I've been doing a TON of baking for my own morale (and to solve the breakfast problem), so in the last week and a bit, I've made a loaf of bread for the first time in a decade, corn-cherry scones, brown butter banana bread and chocolate-ginger biscotti. We haven't been eating all of this (the biscotti got picked up by USPS today, and are headed to the West Coast), but the baking has really helped.
We're also dealing with the intersection of social isolation and the academic job market, which is truly weird. We both had campus interviews pushed to video by university policy, which is fine to chat with faculty... less fine when your job talk involves lots of video. But there's a lot of goodwill there, and everyone is so far outside their comfort zone that it's OK. Yes, late March is late for interviews, and there are other things in that corner of our lives that are moving forward in spite of similar disruption.
Oh, and Totoro the Cat is thrilled beyond purrs to have us home 24/7, and occupies laps / joins video calls on the regular. It's pretty cute.
Your kitteh’s will be so glad to have you both back safe and sound, and so am I. Hang in there, we’re gonna get through this together. xo
Good you're back home, albeit in lockdown...I'm living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands has no lock down yet,however we must adhere to social distancing, so I'm working from now for two weeks.
In my free time I do reading (re-reading the Time War :) and cooking and staying fit.
Be careful Amal, want t read your next book!