Tag: COVID-19

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personal

Isolation Days 7-8: Keeping busy

Nobody believes it, or Mr. Gray

Been waking up late – after 9AM most mornings – but also going to bed late. Mainly working on projects that I’ve been meaning to do but haven’t been able to because of time and the kid.

That’s what I tell people, at least.

Closer to the truth is what I told you about years ago: Everybody knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it.

I do what most people do when Death makes himself known – keep myself busy and try to ignore him as best I can.

Household stuff

      • Did my taxes – right before it was announced that we had until July 15th. Just as well.
      • Filled out the census.
      • Patched, sanded, and repainted a hole in my bathroom.
      • Assembled some new dining room chairs and tossed the old one – the one, above, on the left is the old one, the one on the right is new. Need to fix the bottom of the new ones.
      • Assembled a new entryway seat and tossed the old one.
      • Collected all my knives I had hidden around the apartment (more on that in another entry).
      • Practiced doing what I do with said knives.
      • Cleaned my oven and then baked a ton of low-carb cookies for myself (more on that tomorrow)
      • Dusted. Oh, the dusting…

I think the reason it took so long to toss out the chairs and benches was because I remember Alison and I putting them together, together. Now I did it alone. It made it harder than it should have, for a multitude of reasons.

But one thing that she firmly believed in was that things had to be useful.

If they weren’t, she insisted that they be tossed. If not for her, I’m certain that I would be (a worse) hoarder. So, I did take solace in that.

Still, it was…difficult.

Technology stuff

      • Converted my wired network from a hodgepodge of Cat4, Cat5, and Cat5e cable to pure Cat5e. No, I didn’t have any Cat6 and I find it too rigid to work with.
        • Used to know how to terminate ethernet cable from memory but I knew I’d forget, so that printout you see above I made 20 years ago at my old job at CNET. Kept it all this time.
      • Upgraded my mixed powerline network from 100mb to gigabit (!).
      • Laid a mesh network over my current 801.11ac network, backhauling upstream data through the aforementioned Cat5e network.
        • As a sidenote, my internal speeds went from a laughable 10-17MB/s to consistently above 100MB/s. I’ve never seen that ever before, ever.

Went to sleep on night 8 with a massive headache and an aching jaw. I felt like exactly what I was afraid of might happen, was happening – I was getting sick by myself.

I’ll tell you about more about that tomorrow.

For now, I will say that I had to go out because: (1) I needed to see a doctor and (2) I was out of peanut butter.

Hard to say which one was the priority.

Ended up buying five pounds of peanut butter, which should last me the week. The quarter and rum are there for size comparison.

Had both the peanut butter and the rum for dinner tonight.

I wrote this watching the CBS weekend news. In the segment on Italy, the magnitude of what this virus does didn’t really hit me until he said the following at minute 1:17:

The cases that don’t make it end up here, with the morgues overflowing…Every person died alone. Without family or friends.

It’s that gaping yaw of existential loneliness that I told you about earlier. Everybody knows they’re going to die, yeah?

I wonder if I’ll die alone.

Man, I miss having a family. My own, that is.

The boy sent me that image over Skype. If you’re with family, you’re lucky. Because I have to love someone through a television screen.

Not gonna lie, I’m jealous. I used to have my own family, you see. For all of five days.

And now, during this historically crazy moment in time, I find myself completely alone with just Harold, five pounds of peanut butter, and 3/4 of a liter of rum.

Well, it’s not altogether  bad, I suppose.

Location: an empty UWS apartment building but with killer network speeds
Mood: inebriated
Music: you’ve been on my mind, honey (Spotify)
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personal

Isolation Days 1-4: At least Sharon’s living it up

Heading to Chinaworld

Him: What did you get in Chinaworld?

Having been through 9/11, a couple of blackouts, a hurricane here and there, and just random emergencies, gotta say that this pandemic is something entirely new for me.

Spent most of the past weekend with the redheaded babysitter and the boy. She’s an actress so she literally lost all her gigs at once and I just found out today that the boy’s classes are cancelled until the end of April.

With her help, I was able to head back down to Chinatown in order to pick up some more supplies and support the Chinese community at the same time.

So, I hopped a nearly empty train – dressed as I’ve always wanted to dress in the city as a (not-so) closeted germaphobe – and picked up some stuff. One thing I made sure to get was some frozen dumplings from this hole-in-the-wall that I love.

Unfortunately, it was only after I returned home that I found out that the boy’s classes were cancelled. I immediately regretted my decision to only buy a single bag of frozen dumplings and only one bag of groceries.

Sitter: (laughing) I told him you went to Chinatown.
Him: Honestly, I think I prefer the name, Chinaworld.

Everything’s been a whirlwind of activity, mainly because everything’s taking longer and longer to do.

This is my local no frills grocery store, which had a line, the length of which I’ve never seen before.

TBH, there’s never a line of any sort here.

And I had to call both the NYC Dept of Finances and NYC Dept of Buildings for work; that took the entire morning – because you have to go through the 311 number for the city and the hold times were cray – and I eventually gave up.

With the kiddo being as young as he is, evenings are difficult because there’s nothing that we can both watch together.

Him: Why don’t we watch the news?
Me: The world’s a disaster and we’re surrounded by cretins; there, I just saved us 30 minutes.
Him: Cretins!
Me: No, don’t…nevermind…

On that note, I accidentally got an order confirmation for a woman named Sharon in Iowa who seems be living it up by prepping for isolation very differently from me and – gotta say – I’m slightly jelly.

Well, if nuthin else, Sharon’s living it up…

Location: surrounded by cretins and an awesome little boy
Mood: beat
Music: For a second, I thought you loved me
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