How are you today?

I’ve been very lucky. Work moved to 100% working from home easily, and I’m enough of an introvert that I didn’t mind lockdown. I am however stuck in a flat with both my elderly parents, and we’re doing the traditional “absolutely opposite on politics to the point of all-out war” and trying not to explode. They’re both medically isolating, so my lockdown has been much stricter than a lot of people’s. I’m the one that does supermarket runs, but they also mustn’t catch it from me, so it’s all maximum caution.

The UK is not doing well. Lots of “worst in europe” records about covid. Hospitals weren’t overwhelmed in the end, but just about everything else is bad and will continue to be so much longer than some countries. So naturally while I (who trained with PPE and science labs) am not leaving the house and being super cautious and masked when I absolutely have to, hundreds of idiots are going to the beach.

That’s where the feeling like you’re being gaslit comes in. You’re living one life and half the country seems to be in an alternate reality. Now schools are restarting despite the UK’s R number going up, and I’m expecting a second peak in mid-September. My girlfriend is an actress, and if you think anyone else is doing an impressive freakout then you need to look at the theatre industry. Every one of them has been screaming daily since March. So it’s fun times.

But yeah, I’m mostly very lucky. I wasn’t furloughed or fired.

I bought Azul: Summer Pavilion at Christmas just in time to not be able to play it with anyone, so it’s sat on the shelf. (Online wouldn’t have the satisfying clicky pieces). I’ll mark the official end of the pandemic when I can get that out and play it with friends.

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I am doing okay. And I do sincerely mean it. I had an awful 2 years before where my mental health was doing badly and I was a toxic person to be around. In comparison, this lockdown felt relatively insignificant. It has done good to me and I was happier. The world felt moving too fast for me, and suddenly it slowed down. Today, I am the happiest I’ve been since 2.5 years ago. I’m glad that I didn’t left my job this year, as I planned to do. And that I still have my job, rather than furlough.

I still am aware that a lot of people are dying or suffering (many will carry permanent damages in their bodies for life). And I made sure to be careful, as I am more concern about other people than to myself. I am glad that no one close to me suffered.

The lockdown gave me the recovery that I needed, but at some point the small confines of my room is getting into me a week or two before the gov loosen up restrictions on going outside. As I am living with some flatmates in a shared flat, I still need to be careful.

If Autumn is in full swing and restrictions going back, I’ll be okay with that.

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It’s the ones that go, insert themselves in a gap and complain everyone is there. But when a government official can get off Scott free driving 264 miles and then a further 30 to test their eyesight they’ve lost the confidence of the public.

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My friend’s Dad is the ‘retired chemistry teacher’ who shopped Cummings to the Guardian.

The beaches here are much quieter than the ones on the south coast of England. Seeing (and being in) the sea is one of my favourite things in the world. We’ve tried to go in the evenings when it’s quiet and hope to keep going as far into autumn/ winter as possible - the surf gets better as the weather gets worse.

I’m resigned to the boys going back to school now. They’re both desperate to go, not just to see their friends but to be taught as well. I trust our school and the Welsh Assembly to put their physical and mental health first.

We’ve not done anything indoors in nearly 6 months, but occasionally venturing out, particularly to get exercise.

We make our patients wear a mask when they come in, 95% are fine but some make such a fuss about it. I forget I’ve got mine on now.

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My sister is struggling with that from the other side. She’s probably in her final year at the private school where she teaches. And her subject is instrumental music, which is really hard to teach remotely or with social distancing.

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I am not even sure how to answer this. My life is always pretty stressful, and my wife’s moreso. Most of it due to our kids. We have been open about our two kids, ages 6 and 8, having ASD. Due to this, the younger one is still considered non-verbal and the older cannot really talk enough to hold a conversation. Both are still in diapers and are resistant to toilet training. Neither ever sleeps much longer than 6:00 AM, and usually are up more around 5:30, with the occasional 3:30-4:40 wake up time (like last night -_-) Covid lockdown did not help with their behaviors.

Along with school, their therapy center closed, and though they quickly worked out a schedule for home sessions, it was not the same and the disruptions to their routine was hard for them, and us by extension.

My work stayed open as an essential business, though my supervisor was out for about a month and a half due to illness and being ordered by our boss to not return until he had no symptoms for two weeks. Don’t think he had Covid, but it is possible. We’ve enabled many people to work remotely and taken measures to distance employees in the plant and have made it mandatory to wear face masks when in public areas. My supervisor and I have been forbidden from being at the plant at the same time, as we make up the IT department and they don’t want us exposed to each other should one of us get sick.

All this means is my wife, who is a stay at home mom, was stuck with our kids all day, every day, with no real break from the kids. The older kid is on medications which are intended to help him regulate his emotions, as he was getting more periods of manic aggression, throwing things at people while laughing, kicking and hitting, etc. These things still happen, but are less frequent, but it had gotten so much worse during the lock down. The side effect of one has caused him to gain a lot of weight (~100 lbs now), so he is a lot harder to manage physically than he used to be when doing things like taking him to his room for a time out. Our younger kid will pinch and scratch when upset or overly excited, and his nails seem to regenerate like Wolverine, so I tend to have a bunch of scabs on my hands, arms and legs. Both like to climb and jump to the ground, or onto you, especially our younger kiddo, who will climb up on furniture, the kitchen counters, sinks, toilets, closet shelving, the refrigerator, basically anything. Our older kiddo believes that anything in the world he could possibly desire exists in our garage, so often tries to dash out there to look for whatever. Of course, our garage is practically a death trap since I never have time to fully get it organized and we keep getting more stuff, so that’s not a good thing. Dealing with all of that is just maddening, especially when you can’t really get away from it for any length of time, so my wife is essentially a super hero for surviving it.

Thankfully their therapy center re-opened in June, with really strict measures being taken to prevent any outbreaks there. Unfortunately they moved to a block scheduling system which is not as convenient for us time-wise, and worse, they stopped having weekend sessions. Sundays were MY break from the kids while at home, our chance to go see a movie or go out to eat (not now, obviously), or just get some chores done around the house. Luckily I am working from home Mondays and Fridays, which are the kids’ longer days at therapy, so I do get a bit of a break then. Otherwise, going to work is my break, and that’s just not right.

We’ve seen our friends just a couple of times since things started easing up, which was nice, but we’re still taking things slow. We get takeout quite a bit, but never eat out. I indulged in a bit too much retail therapy during the lock down, so I’ve got a number of new games, though surprisingly, most of them have been played by now, considering how the kids often interfere. Usually need to take the average time to play a given game and add 25-50% to get what our play time will likely be. If we wait until they are in bed (at 8:30), we can play something uninterrupted, but with all the various chores that tend to need doing by then, it just does not happen often.

So really, my life has not changed much with Covid, it just kinda sucks in general.

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I feel this in my soul. I know it’s not right, but it’s the truth (and my kids aren’t nearly as much of a handful as yours).

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Generally i’ve been really fortunate here.

In Scotland my daughter has been back for 3 weeks now. So far it seems ok. The one thing I would say is 5 months of relative isolation has meant that the common cold is rife among the kids once they’re exposed to some new germs. Half the parents i’ve Spoke to (including myself) have a cold (no covid symptoms mostly running noses and headache).

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Generally okay. Fortunate enough for both my wife and I to have been working throughout. Juggling remote working with childcare has been a challenge. It has proven impossible to do both simultaneously without neglecting one or the other in some way, so the last six months have comprised of a lot of guilt over not looking after my daughter properly whilst failing to put in the hours I’m paid to work.

Fortunately she has just started school, which is another new routine to settle into, but she’s loving it. The ‘back to school’ bug has done the rounds, but with the additional wrinkle of some symptoms matching that of covid. Adopting a better safe than sorry approach, we had an extremely stressful time to get tests booked (it took about seven hours to get us all registered at the hospital drive through test place five mins from our house). My test results have then vanished somewhere, which doesn’t give me much faith in the system. (All my family returned negative results, and since they were the individuals presenting symptoms I was in contact with, logically I must therefore be fine. Plus I have no symptoms).

We live out on the west coast of Scotland, so it has been easy to get outdoors in spaces where people are absent/thin on the ground. I’m not great with crowds at the best of times, but very anxious about popping into town having seen the lack of consideration some people have for others. It is good to see an increase in visitors for the sake of the local businesses, which are all being very sensible with measures inside cafes/shops/restaurants etc.

I’ve found that I struggle with video conferencing. I find it hard to properly read people without physically being in the same space (judging the unspoken words from people’s body language doesn’t work as well), conversations run on too much, and they are mentally exhausting. I miss having quick chats with work colleagues that are much more effective ways of passing on information. I miss just grabbing a coffee with friends and having a natter without having to raise my voice due to the distances involved.

Honestly, it’s small stuff, but it is hard to see any of it going away in the near future.

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Well that sense of having control of the situation lasted for 4 hours since my last post. Now we have house restrictions back in place here (no one in your home or into other peoples). Not that I was leading a massive social life but all the same it’s a bit depressing.

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Sorry to hear that. It’s not like we do some of those things like meet people at home or leave the couch but as soon as we aren’t allowed that’s different.

When I read about all the scenarios that will make you have to self-isolate for two weeks, I immediately went into “how much food do we have at home and do I need to buy things?” mode. My pantry is well-stocked and we have standing offers with friends and family to go shopping for each other. But never mind all that, my brain still makes a shopping list–just in case.

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Well, we’d made some preparations for January this year, and we’re keeping them up at least till next year: even if the whole business were being managed by competent people of goodwill I’d be expecting some supply chain disruption and shortages. This isn’t large-scale survivalism; it’s keeping 20l drums of rice and flour in the garage rather than buying a packet or two when we run short. Similarly, we usually buy a big pack of toilet paper rather than little ones, so we weren’t affected by the shortage back in March/April.

So we should do all right through a few days of disruption as long as power and water stay on; with a gas hob we can manage without power for a bit; and of course we have lots of books.

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I see we have different views of what amounts to “well-stocked” :wink: I feel it’s well stocked when I have 2kg of rice, and maybe 1kg of risotto rice and maybe some brown rice and… and lentils and dried beans. On the other hand as a regular bread baker I easily keep 10-15kg flour right inside the kitchen (edit: 15 types at current count, though there are 3-4 exotics in there I am expecting to use up soon and probably not restocking).

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We have the great advantage of a relatively large house (because we both have space-consuming hobbies) so we can afford to expand the usual reserves a bit.

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2020 has been super weird…

I was having a really stressful year right from the get-go, for reasons unrelated to the pandemic. That has improved somewhat, but I can’t help but feel like the world has gone completely bananas in the meantime.

Around the beginning of March, one of my gaming buddies got sick - cough, fever, pneumonia, the works - but he hadn’t been to China, so no test for him… Shortly afterwards, having previously spent a day playing TI4 with the aforementioned sick friend, my husband got sick and was confined to bed for a week or so with what we thought was the flu, but he decided to self-isolate anyway, just in case. We spent a week sleeping in different rooms, cleaning everything, and communicating via text from opposite ends of the house. As you might expect, that was not enough to prevent me catching whatever mystery respiratory illness he had, and I spent several days in bed with a cough and extreme fatigue, followed by two weeks of coughing and needing to nap mid afternoon.

Sometime in the middle of all of that, after my husband got sick but when I still felt fine, I went to Airecon. In retrospect this was a terrible idea, and I was extremely anxious about it at the time, but this was before the extent of asymptomatic transmission was widely known, and the government were still only recommending isolation for people who were sick, not members of their household :woman_facepalming:

Since just before the start of lockdown, we’ve both been working from home (having fortuitously computer-based jobs). We’ve done a lot of video calls, and I’ve played a huge number of online board games. The garden isn’t looking too bad either. The stressful situation from earlier in the year is still ongoing, and I have no idea whether being confined to the house has made it better or worse!

One thing I have noticed is that the feeling of time passing has become weirdly distorted. March feels like a couple of weeks ago, but then I remember that I haven’t seen my family since Christmas, and my husband hasn’t seen his children since February.

In the grand scheme of things, we’re fairly fortunate, and I’m sorry to hear that some of you have lost people that are close to you, or are worried about the long-term effects on your children’s development. I hope that you have people around you who you can lean on, and that you can hold on to the thought that this will eventually be over.

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Back in late February, I attended my best friend’s wedding. My friend works for an international (european-based) company and many of his guests had recently traveled internationally (some vacationing with family in Spain or France, some in Florida and Georgia (the state), etc). Immediately following the wedding, I started having symptoms: fever, cough, aches, and later on trouble breathing. I shrugged it off; it’s somewhat common for me to get a cold in February and it wouldn’t be the first time it riled up my childhood asthma.

Only later when talking to someone else who had similar symptoms here in Kansas sometime in February did we discuss the possibility of earlier-than-thought COVID-19 transmission deep in the heart of the US (as opposed to coastal areas and/or areas with high levels of international traffic - technically we have an “international” airport, but the passenger customs office is only staffed on an as-needed basis). Fortunately, at the time, I stayed home from work (either took paid time off or worked from home) as I had a coworker with an immune-compromised child to whom I did not want to introduce any risk. Both my daughters ended up with symptoms following mine, but my partner never did and neither did her parents (though they are both considered “high risk” for COVID-19)

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I’ve been in many ways in a fortunate position which has given me a very mixed view in the year. I was doing a bootcamp to learn web development at the start of the year and fortunately I finished that right before lockdown started.

My job changed quite a lot in January so I was starting to hate it. I went from a good work flow to a s**t one so was really ready to leave by February. I ended up hating the role. This kind of sums up the mixed, lockdown good as I worked from home so didn’t have to be surly in the office. Bad as job opportunities dried up so I couldn’t leave. Overall though having the routine was worth tons for normalcy and balance.

There were other strands going in for me in 2020. I have a reasonably severe mental illness and starting to go up from the end of January coupled with the sudden increase in work stress and the worn outness from working full time and studying 20 hours a week with a further 8 hours of extra commute a week led to my first psychotic episode in about 4 years in February. Which really helped the study :roll_eyes:. But I got through it.

I’ve been dissatisfied with my life for a long time. My illness first struck hard when I was 16. So it messed up education for me but maybe more importantly it didn’t give me enough normal teenageness to build up experiences and confidence. Doing the course having succeeded at my first proper job in ages and a sense of validity about myself was starting to coalesce for maybe the first time in my life. An ease of being that allowed me to stand up for myself and gave me a sense I could get some input in my future direction or a chance for some contentment. Lockdown and the isolation made it tough to build on that and really indenture it in to my being.

Flip side was I kept programming and even joined up with a guy from my course and we learnt React together and started projects. Crucially for myself all that time not commuting left me plenty of energy and I developed a real joy for debugging that was a big difference to me. Blasting through issues to end up with decent working programs has fuelled my new sense of being able to achieve.

I also stumbled on growth mind set literature which had helped loads. I got diagnosed as also having a learning difficulty 2 years ago and that’s been useful. Where I worked I did a lot of intelligence tests. Now they are limited in terms of how and what they measure but my results were a real surprise and an eye opener. They also matched closely the results I got at the learning difficulty evaluation. I’ve not thought of myself as stupid, but wow. I’m right up there it seems. This sort of leads in to though a lot about the dissatisfaction I’ve felt in work through out my life. I’ve felt constrained really. Frequently bored, weird weaknesses and occasionally difficult bosses. I would love to do something that played to my strengths and kept me engaged.

Remember earlier I talked about my first episode in years? Well that’s led to now a brutal period of depression. My illness is cyclical so it would happen anyway but the isolation the stress of balancing safety, doing things and so on sure ain’t helping. I talk about the job stuff so much in the previous paragraph as that’s the subject I’m struggling to keep away from my negativity currently. I also had a really bad time end of 2007 through to 2009. So rubbish timing from an economic perspective. And just when I’d got a break and was trying to build on it… I don’t think one can take recurrent crises of capitalism personally but I feel unlucky here. Then the unusual situation had removed 2 of my methods for dealing with these lows. So the last 5-6 weeks have been rough. And I predict at least that again to go before it starts to lift.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, I have picked up meditation, I’m up skilling myself and actually the strangeness of the situation has led me to meeting new gamer friends which is brilliant. I can see some light where I was totally fatalistic before.

Tl:dr :face_with_head_bandage:

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Not good. Bad, one might say, if one is not in a room with my partner, who is struggling more than I am and therefore I am struggling-but-mostly-okay if she asks because I need to be here for her and she doesn’t have the spoons to deal with her stuff and my stuff right now.

Let’s get the good news out of the way first: March 17th I went into self-isolation at the recommendation of the Canadian Government, which was advising everyone who had the capacity to stay home to do exactly that. The government created a program called “CERB” (COVID Emergency Relief Benefit), which granted anyone unable to return to work a reasonable weekly salary ($500/week). This worked out to be almost, to the dollar, the same amount I was making at my paying job (board game specialist at a game store), so the net impact on my wallet was actually quite a significant gain: I wasn’t spending nearly as much on games and impulse purchases, but was still making the same amount.

In the first three weeks I finished a novel and began writing my next one.

Late May, my boss from the game store contacts me about returning to work. I’m not excited to go: the 60 days I had spent in isolation were among the best days of my life. I was writing up a storm, I was relaxed, eating much better, baking, spending time with my partner… but he was insistent, and so June 3rd I returned to work at the game store. Nobody else at the store wore a mask (it wasn’t mandated until almost a month later), but they had curbside pickup practices in place.

I wore a mask and a faceshield. Almost nobody else was wearing even a mask, including customers who kept trying to sneak into the obviously closed store and were always surprised that we weren’t allowing the public inside.

The next result was a plummeting of my writing productivity, a sharp incline in my stress, and the realization that nobody else was nearly as worried about this pandemic as I was.

Now, I will say my bosses have done a really solid job taking better-than-average steps to protect their employees: we have plexiglass completely around the cashier areas (no protection for me since I am in my aisle most of the time helping customers), they disinfect common surfaces very frequently (except not in the board game aisle where the games would be damaged by disinfecting them), they limit the number of customers in the store to 6 people per aisle (although frequently customers will go from other aisles into the board game aisle “just to look”, so I often have 10-15 people in the aisle, including kids)… you get the idea. And I want to stress this isn’t my boss’s fault. They’re doing a good job, and a helluva lot more than many places.

My lunch procedure is: go to the staff room, wash hands, remove mask, wash hands, put food in microwave, wash hands, fill water bottle and coffee, remove food from microwave, wash hands, eat and consume the 2L of liquid I will get to drink for the entire work-day, go to the bathroom, wash hands, put mask back on, wash hands. I probably disinfect my hands… 10 times an hour? More some hours, less others. I get twitchy any time a customer asks me to hand them a book or product that I know they’re going to paw through and then want me to put away again. I have about 3-4 rat-lickers (people who refuse to wear masks) in a week, and the boss won’t deny them service but he does let me avoid them when they come into the store… except they still touch and breath on everything and I still have to do my job with other customers and I know I’m being unreasonable but fuck I can’t take this.

deep breath

So yeah. Not great. But it’s worse than that because those 60+ days of isolation were amazing. I missed my friends, but I got to live the life I’ve always wanted to live. Went for runs in the morning, wrote all day, took breaks to paint or assemble LEGO, played video games at night, slept like a baby. My partner has had a much harder time of things, and so I couldn’t really lean into how much I enjoyed it, but gods, it was so good. And knowing that has made all of this harder.

There were downsides to isolation (grocery shopping was a special kind of hell… I’ve managed to get it down to 1 trip a month, with almost half of my monthly income spent on food on those trips, but again, what else aside from editing costs was I going to spend that money on anyway?). But if tomorrow COVID magically went away and I could do anything I wanted, I would’ve been doing exactly the same things I was doing during that isolation with the addition of maybe one weekly board game night.

And that’s hard. And having to drag my ass to work and deal with saying “I’m sorry, but if you wouldn’t mind just pulling your mask over your nose we’d really appreciate it” five times a day and panicking every time I touch anything because that’s going to be the thing that makes you sick… did I mention there are like, a dozen cases in my entire half-million-people city? All in nursing homes. I completely lack the ability to have proper scope and scale to this, and I can’t stop. I wear my mask on my bike ride into work. What are the odds that I’m going to get sick while biking outside just because I pass somebody!? I’m a scientist, I know the odds are basically zero… and yet. Mask on when I leave home, it does not come off until lunch (we covered the lunch procedure already), and then it doesn’t come off until I am home, and have washed my hands (open door, remove phone and earbud onto disinfecting station, wash hands, remove mask, wash masks, wash hands, disinfect phone and earbud).

And I still haven’t finished that novel I started back in April. Between April and June I finished 40k words, more or less. Between June and July I did less than a thousand. Between July and now I’ve gotten the total up to 55k… but it’s like pulling teeth.

Anyway. /rant. Not good, and I know it’s all in my own head and that doesn’t help.

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I am assuming airborne infection is all I need to worry about. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, but disinfecting everything is beyond us.

(That said, I do try to limit contact with public surfaces, and use knuckles and elbows where I can.)

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Keep at it :slight_smile: Most of programming is a lot of practice and having seen a problem before. Knowing how to debug is such a valuable skill. I learned it late and it could have saved me so much time and stress.

I wish commuting was a thing of the past forever. Or at least completely optional. I can see the difference in my partner every day. It’s what scares me most about going back to work eventually… having to waste an hour or more a day.

Congrats! Really, finishing a complete novel is no small feat. Yes, yes it will probably need another draft and editing and what not… but still, writing 50k words or more in that time, I am in awe :slight_smile: My time off from programming was supposed to give me time to write but sadly my creativity has dried up completely and I cannot seem to find any time at all… it’s like you said “pulling teeth”

I am afraid of flying and no statistics in the world can calm me down when there is turbulence. Not every problem can be solved by just thinking it through.

Yesterday, I was running errands downtown–just visiting three different shops but when I came home my hands were all dried up because I tried my best to be careful. I am assuming like Ben that airborne is the much bigger problem but still…

I wish my mask-refusing family member could read English so I could show them your account of what they are doing to every employee in every store they try to go to.

edit:
@tomm_archer re: yoga (much further up the thread)
I started practicing in 2009 for both physical and mental health reasons. I haven’t practiced continuously but right now it’s been instrumental in both those ways again. I am at the moment doing a “30 day” program from Adriene’s channel (look her up she’s awesome and her programs are beginner friendly). I am terrible at meditation but yoga somehow works for me.

So much this. My partner also reports having conversations about this at work. The week seems to stretch our forever. But come the next week, it’s like the previous one never was. The days blur into each other without punctuation of the things that normally make up our memories–events, traveling, meeting people. I write a daily diary and when I miss a few days, it’s really hard to figure out what happened.


I wish I could send virtual hugs across the void to all of you. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: But don’t worry. If we ever meet, I am not a RL hugger. Just virtual hugs to everyone and thank you for putting into words how you are doing.

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