Same. Germany is sooo slow and my state is slowest of all. there is not enough vaccine at all and now there is a fight about deliveries and contracts and building up new factories. I am also starting to think we’ll be in the same state in 12 months.
But now that numbers are slowly falling the idiotic state education minister wants to reopen schools next monday to cover up her own failures…numbers are still high statewide (79 per 100k per week). Opening too early is exactly what brought us here.
Btw we now have to wear n95 masks everywhere. cloth masks are no longer good enough.
Here, everyone is still paranoid about lack of testing on Japanese population and side effects. The urgency for immediate and dramatic rollout is not present, and manufacturing is non-existent. Saw some images of vaccines being tested on the elderly, each patient being observed for an hour after injection… that’s where we are now. Testing. The hold up doesn’t even seem to be about logistics at this point.
Here we had something of a success story at least. People in care homes and elderly living facilities did mostly get the vaccine and it seems like the vaccine prevented a larger outbreak in one of those last week and saved lives because all the old people had very mild symptoms, just one person had to go to the hospital. And they managed to just have fewer infections overall than in previous similar situations.
They also made it very public that those in the home who opted out of the vaccine and were now reconsidering… had missed the chance.
I think the world could do better. Those vaccines may have been developed faster than any before but there was so much money and support thrown at this Problem as well. I for one am going to take the first chance I get. Merkel said something about everyone in Germany having had a chance by September… that was a week ago before the latest issues with deliveries came up. So I take that with a grain of salt. And even if my country manages the feat… the whole world needs to get there for a return to whatever is normal next.
I’m aching all over, after dragging a 65kg treadmill up to my 4th-floor (5th floor in $US) attic flat yesterday. I thought it would come in pieces… T_T
I can’t recommend it. But I’m looking forward to being able to walk as I work. It’s so much harder to exercise without my hour’s walk to work.
Next week I get some leave, so I’m really looking forward to that. Maybe finally get some writing done…
I may have misinterpreted the news. March 2022 is when they think they’ll achieve widespread vaccination, whatever that means, while there does seem to be some effort going into less complete coverage significantly before that date.
Outdoor socialising just means park playdates for our kids, and even then only local parks that aren’t too busy. Otherwise our (my) social lives revolved entirely around houses, community centres, bouldering gym… there are no outdoor substitutes. I’m also not entirely convinced the outdoor/indoor split is sufficient - social distancing in terms of maintaining a physical distance has never caught on here, and is impossible on public transport anyway.
The video sounds really stressful. Not being able to focus on anything is stressful and I know it makes me feel quite useless when I have a phase where I cannot seem to get anything done.
I have no experience with ADHD but I have a hard time concentrating when a myriad of small tasks overwhelm me. So what (often) works for me in that situation–doesn’t necessarily work for anyone else–I make lists. Once upon a time I read a book called Getting Things Done. I don’t think I finished reading it and I don’t think it’s the solution to all problems with organization but a few things stuck with me through the years and when things get too much, I put them into lists and then I can relax a little because everything is on the list instead of crowding my brain. I find this especially helpful when a huge number of chores have accumulated or something particularly unpleasant like “doing my taxes” looms. And when a single bullet point seems unachievable? Cut it into pieces: divide and conquer. It’s not “do my taxes” but “fill basic information into tax forms”.
Most of the time I can get by without doing lists. But when things get bad… sometimes it helps.
A trick of lists that works for me is to make the items small but “actionable”. If I can’t do a thing because I’m waiting for something else to happen, it doesn’t go on the list. If it can be broken down into subtasks, that’s how it goes on. If there’s a dependency, it becomes hierarchical; the basic idea is that I should be able to pick an item from the list at random and start working on it.
This is partly because I enjoy the process of breaking a thing into subtasks, partly because a long list of small things is less intimidating for me than an entry that just reads “clear up the computer room”.
Which is a variant of SMART – I’m not at all a believer but the basic idea of “a thing that has an unambiguous state of ‘done’” is a decent one.
I’m not ashamed to put trivial things on my to-do list (e.g. whenever I spend some money it goes on there as a to-do to be put into the accounts system). Lots of DONE things feel good.
My partner has ADHD (she’s 45 and only just realised). She gets 10/10 on all the checklists, and I’m learning a lot about it.
She has an absolute phobia of paperwork, to the point that she’s be on the verge of tears if I suggest just doing some in the next five minutes. It took her two days to build up to the idea of doing her taxes.
She cannot time-manage at all, but can do one big thing a day and lose the entire 5 hours leading up to that thing. She can’t imagine that a journey will ever take longer than its absolute minimum time (time itself doesn’t really work around her) and when she gets in she’ll take one boot off and then be doing something distractedly with the other boot still on 10 minutes later. Lots and lots of executive dysfunction. On the other hand, she’s an amazing Shakespearean actress raising a fairly autistic 18 year-old daughter on her own, so it clearly doesn’t stop her achieving big stuff. But she’s only just working out all the walls she runs into on a daily basis.
I don’t have the answers for making concentration happen! Of course, everyone’s also dealing with pandemic anxiety / stress / depression, which makes concentration difficult. We’re just not able to tackle as many things per day as usual, because part of our brain is busy dealing with that 24/7.
Lists do help, if only because you don’t have to remember the items on them. Setting an alarm for a time when you will start a task also helps, and setting a reward for afterwards. That way you know you’re only going to spend 30/60 minutes on the task and it’s not going to be a big scary thing that stretches out for the rest of the day.
I don’t know much about the ADHD challenges, but dopamine deficiency means you’re chasing fun. Things that are Not Fun are almost impossible to start, until the Panic Monster comes in at the last possible minute and you have to do it. So reducing the Not Fun burden by limiting the time you’ll spend on it, and planning something good after it, can help with getting it started.
(When my partner saw the cartoon with the Panic Monster and the Instant Gratification Monkey she immediately declared to be how she’d worked for her entire life)
I’ve just seen a tweet about buying Girl Scout cookies online from a troop based entirely in NYC Homeless Shelters.
I don’t think they’ll ship to Cardiff, so I’d like to buy some for someone in the US. If you would like them, or can give me an address of someone else who would enjoy them please DM me the details. First come first served.
You can also buy cookies from a troop as a donation. Always good to check for more information on the donation if you can as it might not match your expectations or be something you’d support. Sometimes the donated boxes stay with the troop to be used as snacks or summer camp meal dessert or the like. Sometimes the donated boxes go to US military stationed overseas; local police, fire department, or other emergency personnel; or during this current pandemic local hospital workers. It looks like that particular troop says their donated boxes go to NY City food banks, which if you are looking to support a troop specifically for homeless girls and young women, that might make it doubly appealing.
Very much procrastinating. I’ve been staring at a stack of paperwork (besides making sure the kids are alive, fed, not bugging each other).
Paperwork-kiddo history from birth issues to parental stresses.
It really takes a toll, because thinking about all the ways my kids are different then neuro-typical kids is something I try not to think too hard about.
Tried to gear myself up like “get this section done, then have a nice breakfast, I mean lunch”
That just seems to end up with my lunch being my first meal and late.
Tomorrow is an unrelated zoom meeting of more of the same.
