Ordinarily, I don't put a lot of my personal life into the blog here. That's what twitter and facebook and my Dreamwidth journal are for. But on the off chance that I have readers of this blog who don't follow me elsewhere, here's a quick update. I'm entering my third week of working from home as a epidemic-slowing measure. I don't know if the language is common elsewhere, but here in California it's being referred to as "shelter in place"--a term more often used for things like chemical releases, wildfire air quality emergencies, and the like. Not quite as absolute a concept as quarantine. (And, of course, much different from the standard protocol for earthquakes, which is "duck and cover, then exit the building".)
I've been tracking my activities, daily temperature, and potential contacts in my Dreamwidth journal. At this point, any potential exposure from pre-shelter days can be ruled out but I have made a couple of grocery excursions since then. At this point, I'm pretty well set to completely isolate (other than a daily bike ride for exercise) for the duration, even if the duration lasts over another month. I don't think anyone can predict how this is going to play out at that timescale. There are many possibilities and most of them involve catastrophizing. At this time, I do know people who are infected, though all of them are online friends rather than face-to-face. At this time, I don't yet have any direct social links to anyone who has died (that I know of), but statistics says that will happen. In my immediate circle, I worry most for my 90-year-old father and my brother-with-the-heart-condition who live together an hour's drive away. (Close enough that if they needed me to run errands for them, I could.) And periodically, people remind me that, at age 61, I fall in a statistically more-at-risk group, despite being generally in robust health with no significant other risk factors.
So much of my day-to-day social life is online that there are long stretches when it scarcely feels different. Writing a blog like this is like living in a room with one-way glass. For the most part, I never know whether my writing is touching people, or serving to entertain or educate. I know I put out this plea on a regular basis, but when face-to-face contacts are even further reduced, it means a lot to me when people let me know that the work I put out has created a relationship between us. That there's a face on the other side of that glass, even if I can't see it.
Comments