Plague diary 17/03
Mar. 17th, 2020 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI'm counting 16 March as day 0, being when the government actually started getting serious about reducing the rate of infection spreading.
Will cut all these entries and tag
Day -2 (Saturday): After much dithering decided I did want to enjoy my last planned excursion before cancelling everything. Travelled to London withghoti_mhic_uait, attended a Pop-up Painting event in a fairly crowded room under a pub, and then went out for dinner in a half-empty, very nice South Bank restaurant. I suspect if that was a mistake I'll never know. Mainly I feel glad that I got three really nice dates with my three partners in the last semi-normal week. One of them involved staying in being coupley, but two of them involved trips to London probably later than was wise.
Anyway the pop-up painting was cool. They set you up with a canvas, brushes, acrylic paints, and an apron, and there's a reference image to copy. In our case it was loosely based on this Banksy, but an interpretation of it, not exactly that picture. The first hour or so, they let the participants just play around with paints, doing whatever we liked to fill in the background. I pretty much just copied the reference image's sunset sky, because I wanted to get comfortable with using the paints, mixing colours and creating textures, more than I wanted to try to exercise creativity. Then there was a break with wine, then in the last 40 minutes the facilitators talked through copying the silhouette of the girl, in a fair amount of detail, like, make a C shape here, this line should be at a 45 degree angle, etc. You were still allowed to paint something else if you wanted to, but again, I found following directions quite helpful. The audience were relatively diverse; mostly young-ish but seemed to be a good cross-section of the London public.
At the momentghoti_mhic_uait can eat basically only protein and needs a lot of meat anyway, and I'm vegetarian and tend to get most of my calories from carbs. Ghoti miraculously managed to find a place that could feed both of us, this rather lovely Eastern European place. I had creamed mushrooms with some latke-ish things, and a sort of lentil pie with cucumber salad and a lot of capers, and Ghoti had some really impressive-looking pickled herring, and some roast duck with apples and red cabbage. It was very exciting, and goodness knows if we'd ever get a table for a normal weekend. They're also very into their vodka and cocktails, which we didn't sample but I might be interested to try a more alcohol-focused event another time.
London was quiet but not completely a ghost town. Almost everybody who booked showed up for the painting, but it was the last one the organization ran, they're cancelling going forward.
Day -1 (Sunday): The synagogue ran Sunday school as normal, on the grounds that schools are still open. But two of the teachers (who are related to each other) didn't show, so I had to take two classes. And in fact, of my expected 10 children across two classes, only three showed up, and we had only 14 of our roster of 50 overall. So most likely we're not going to bother running the last two classes before Pesach, but it's not definitely cancelled yet. In the afternoon OSOs and their children came over for roleplaying, which again had been planned for a while and didn't seem dangerous enough to cancel.
Day zero (Monday): We had known since Friday that we'd been given a week to close the whole campus where I work (bar "essential" staff, mostly those working directly on Covid responses in the lab), and send everybody to work from home for an indefinite period, probably minimum several months. My team had a meeting about how we would handle the transition, and agreed that there was really no reason for most of us to return to the site after yesterday. My lovely line manager has been handling all the disaster response for the last several weeks, basically cancelling everything we do because nearly everything we do is... run international conferences. She was somewhat hysterical by yesterday, but just about holding things together. She very kindly offered to give me a lift home so I could take my computer equipment. We're allowed to take our ergonomic chairs and even our desks, or there's budget to set up home offices, though I was fine with just my laptop and a decent sized screen. Shit is serious.
We detoured via a lost property office to retrieve my wallet which had fallen out of my bag on the coach to work; the coach company tracked me down via a dental appointment card which led to the local council who called me before I cancelled the cards and before I got trapped on the other side of a quarantine barrier from my account access tokens. On the journey she put the radio on and we heard the government announcement.
I am technically in the high risk category as I have chronic asthma. I don't think my asthma is particularly "severe" but it probably would be if I got pneumonia. I haven't really fully processed thinking of myself as one of the "vulnerable" people rather than one of the healthy people who need to act to protect others. Since I'm working from home anyway, I don't have a whole lot of reason to need to go out for the next several weeks. But realistically it's gonna be months, isn't it? I had a bit of a feeling of being sent home to die when we were packing up the office. I have about the degree of death-fear that I get when my period is late; it's not that likely that I actually have Covid-19, it's not that likely that if I do get it I will get complications, and even if I do get complications I might still survive it. I'm a little scared of social collapse, but only a little, I can't really picture, like, mass starvation or something.
Day 1 (Tuesday): I worked from home. I talked tojack a lot (he's very tolerant of my extrovert need to talk things through when it's emotionally scary). We took a car trip to his (deserted) office to pick up computer equipment for him to also work from home for the duration, and didn't interact with any other humans.
I am still undecided about whether I really will isolate myself completely, though the guidelines include me in the category of people who should. I will quit teaching Sunday school and attending services, which is likely to be academic anyway as I'm fairly certain the synagogue will close within the next few days. For now I intend to keep seeing my OSOs; they are ten minutes walk away and our lives are so intermingled that we probably all have the same infection status.
Personal status: feels like the beginning of a mild cold.
Social circle tally: one case, two acquaintances with suspicious symptoms. Nobody I've been in physical contact with within a month though.
Will cut all these entries and tag
Covid, so feel free to block or ignore or filter if that's best for you.
Day -2 (Saturday): After much dithering decided I did want to enjoy my last planned excursion before cancelling everything. Travelled to London with
ghoti_mhic_uait, attended a Pop-up Painting event in a fairly crowded room under a pub, and then went out for dinner in a half-empty, very nice South Bank restaurant. I suspect if that was a mistake I'll never know. Mainly I feel glad that I got three really nice dates with my three partners in the last semi-normal week. One of them involved staying in being coupley, but two of them involved trips to London probably later than was wise. Anyway the pop-up painting was cool. They set you up with a canvas, brushes, acrylic paints, and an apron, and there's a reference image to copy. In our case it was loosely based on this Banksy, but an interpretation of it, not exactly that picture. The first hour or so, they let the participants just play around with paints, doing whatever we liked to fill in the background. I pretty much just copied the reference image's sunset sky, because I wanted to get comfortable with using the paints, mixing colours and creating textures, more than I wanted to try to exercise creativity. Then there was a break with wine, then in the last 40 minutes the facilitators talked through copying the silhouette of the girl, in a fair amount of detail, like, make a C shape here, this line should be at a 45 degree angle, etc. You were still allowed to paint something else if you wanted to, but again, I found following directions quite helpful. The audience were relatively diverse; mostly young-ish but seemed to be a good cross-section of the London public.
At the moment
ghoti_mhic_uait can eat basically only protein and needs a lot of meat anyway, and I'm vegetarian and tend to get most of my calories from carbs. Ghoti miraculously managed to find a place that could feed both of us, this rather lovely Eastern European place. I had creamed mushrooms with some latke-ish things, and a sort of lentil pie with cucumber salad and a lot of capers, and Ghoti had some really impressive-looking pickled herring, and some roast duck with apples and red cabbage. It was very exciting, and goodness knows if we'd ever get a table for a normal weekend. They're also very into their vodka and cocktails, which we didn't sample but I might be interested to try a more alcohol-focused event another time.London was quiet but not completely a ghost town. Almost everybody who booked showed up for the painting, but it was the last one the organization ran, they're cancelling going forward.
Day -1 (Sunday): The synagogue ran Sunday school as normal, on the grounds that schools are still open. But two of the teachers (who are related to each other) didn't show, so I had to take two classes. And in fact, of my expected 10 children across two classes, only three showed up, and we had only 14 of our roster of 50 overall. So most likely we're not going to bother running the last two classes before Pesach, but it's not definitely cancelled yet. In the afternoon OSOs and their children came over for roleplaying, which again had been planned for a while and didn't seem dangerous enough to cancel.
Day zero (Monday): We had known since Friday that we'd been given a week to close the whole campus where I work (bar "essential" staff, mostly those working directly on Covid responses in the lab), and send everybody to work from home for an indefinite period, probably minimum several months. My team had a meeting about how we would handle the transition, and agreed that there was really no reason for most of us to return to the site after yesterday. My lovely line manager has been handling all the disaster response for the last several weeks, basically cancelling everything we do because nearly everything we do is... run international conferences. She was somewhat hysterical by yesterday, but just about holding things together. She very kindly offered to give me a lift home so I could take my computer equipment. We're allowed to take our ergonomic chairs and even our desks, or there's budget to set up home offices, though I was fine with just my laptop and a decent sized screen. Shit is serious.
We detoured via a lost property office to retrieve my wallet which had fallen out of my bag on the coach to work; the coach company tracked me down via a dental appointment card which led to the local council who called me before I cancelled the cards and before I got trapped on the other side of a quarantine barrier from my account access tokens. On the journey she put the radio on and we heard the government announcement.
I am technically in the high risk category as I have chronic asthma. I don't think my asthma is particularly "severe" but it probably would be if I got pneumonia. I haven't really fully processed thinking of myself as one of the "vulnerable" people rather than one of the healthy people who need to act to protect others. Since I'm working from home anyway, I don't have a whole lot of reason to need to go out for the next several weeks. But realistically it's gonna be months, isn't it? I had a bit of a feeling of being sent home to die when we were packing up the office. I have about the degree of death-fear that I get when my period is late; it's not that likely that I actually have Covid-19, it's not that likely that if I do get it I will get complications, and even if I do get complications I might still survive it. I'm a little scared of social collapse, but only a little, I can't really picture, like, mass starvation or something.
Day 1 (Tuesday): I worked from home. I talked to
jack a lot (he's very tolerant of my extrovert need to talk things through when it's emotionally scary). We took a car trip to his (deserted) office to pick up computer equipment for him to also work from home for the duration, and didn't interact with any other humans. I am still undecided about whether I really will isolate myself completely, though the guidelines include me in the category of people who should. I will quit teaching Sunday school and attending services, which is likely to be academic anyway as I'm fairly certain the synagogue will close within the next few days. For now I intend to keep seeing my OSOs; they are ten minutes walk away and our lives are so intermingled that we probably all have the same infection status.
Personal status: feels like the beginning of a mild cold.
Social circle tally: one case, two acquaintances with suspicious symptoms. Nobody I've been in physical contact with within a month though.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-17 06:07 pm (UTC)I hope you and yours stay well.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-17 06:10 pm (UTC)It feels a bit like the end of the world, somehow. I'm glad I've been to Leeds, because I got a lot of spiritual nutrition from the 2 days that I will need to sustain me for the next few months, while the books are packed up and the churches closed.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-17 11:06 pm (UTC)It is. :(
I'm really glad we're all keeping in touch. Hang in there.