Covid-19 Lockdown, day 11
I don’t know how I’m going to come up with new blog titles about the same thing. I’m calling this “day 11” of a “lockdown” although it’s not a lockdown here, yet—it’s socially distancing, staying home except for essentials and semi-essentials (we’re planning to pick up pizza tonight). It’s day 11 because it’s the 11th day of us not allowing our kids to see friends up close, though it’s only been four or five days since the BC government has discouraged meeting up with anybody outside your immediate family, at any distance, at all.
Up until then, the kids were playing tennis although we’d cautioned about maintaining distance, and washing hands, of course. The next day they went back and it was closed and a neighbour yelled at them for trying to go in, or smoething. They said it was hard to make out what the guy was yelling, but they didn’t see the signs the city had put up until they walked around to a different exit.
Our kids are lucky that they have eachother and they’re getting along better than they typically do, for whatever reason. I think because our kids have generally always recognized when it’s time to put petty annoyances aside, in general. Not that they don’t lose their stuff with eachother or with us or that we don’t lose it with them. But they’ve been making good use of the trampolines and wooden swords they haven’t picked up in a dog’s sage, for example. They’re also going through old books and we’ve got the dogs as well. So while we miss our friends, we’ve got plenty of companionship, and in that we’re very lucky.
Work continues. I’ve volunteered to help with enabling Covid-19 research but haven’t been called on yet. The most I’ve done is running some Folding@Home pods on my broken-laptop Kubernetes cluster. These are not powerful machines, but they’ve contributed a handful of work units. This is using personal resources: there are individuals at work providing spare cycles on super-computing resources, so they started a bit after me and have scaled up to 1000 cores. I’m at eight, and I need to read up on the configuration more to see if those nodes are actually using the cores I’ve made available. (This is easy to check but I forget in the evening and once I’m done work I’m physically distancing myself from the computer.)
Yesterday W and I went out for a run. That was good. I haven’t been out at all today but exercise is important. I do my “Office 50” workout every couple of days and if I don’t sweat at least once a day from some kind of exertion I will be disappointed with myself. I also don’t let myself wear my favourite clothes if I haven’t worked out. This is petty, narcissistic and weird but it works for me as a motivator.
I keep looking at my guitar or thinking of the book I haven’t finished and thinking, “I should definitely be getting to that” but really, my commitments haven’t changed at all: I still have my work (I am lucky!) and the family and all those responsibilities, so I’ve not freed up any time anywhere.
Next week W goes back to work at the hospital. We are not looking forward to that. She’ll be taking on risk, and a lot of nurses are basically staying in hotels until this is over. We aren’t looking at that at this stage and can’t afford it, but we are thinking about how we’re going to minimize risk to our family.
I don’t have a wide network on social media, we’re talking a cool dozen or so, but one of them has symptoms and is getting tested. So at the farthest reaches of my social system, this thing is starting to happen.
Other things, by the by
- I’ve updated the layout and stylesheets so that this is hopefully readable and navigable on mobile devices.
- I’m listening to a lot of music but aware too much streaming might be putting pressure on networks that are more in need with more people working from home—but then streaming music is much lighter on bandwidth than Netflix, so… hmm. But thinking of hooking up my record player and playing my mother’s old records.
- I need to make time for riding my bike every day.
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