On Pause

I’ve been thinking of late of the Lenin quote: there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.

Exactly two weeks ago, I was puzzling over whether I should cancel client sessions and work from home. Two days later, when I made the choice to do so, at least half the people I emailed seemed to think it was a ridiculously over-cautious choice. Three days after that, Cuomo closed all the gyms in NY State.

All that felt rather fast and dramatic. But the week and change since has felt anything but. While the COVID-19 numbers here in NYC have continued to double every three days, and hospitals are apparently nearing capacity already, the whole thing still seems rather abstract. While I hear ambulance sirens outside my window all day, this is Manhattan; I hear sirens outside my window all day most days, and it’s hard for me to tell if this is more than the usual.

Instead, Jess and I are sort of just floating along in our tiny life boat of an apartment, one day more or less the same as the next.  There’s a certain timelessness to it all; if you told me we’d already been doing this for months, I’d believe you.  In fact, I’ve already lost track enough to have needed to check my calendar for the timeline of events earlier in this post.

And, looking forward, things seem similarly abstract.  With apologies to the President, I’m pretty sure we won’t be back out by Easter.  But, eventually, we’ll be returning to the world.  Right?  But is that in a month?  Two?  Three?  And how many years from now will that seem?

Fortunately, for the moment, we’re still having a pretty excellent time, all things considered.  I’m getting a bunch of work done, cooking up a storm, getting to spend quality time with Jess.  And despite being cooped up together nearly 24/7 in not a whole lot of space (I don’t know the actual square footage of our apartment, but it’s certainly under 600 square feet), I’ve apparently not yet annoyed her enough to smother me to death with a pillow in my sleep.  Here’s hoping that keeps up.

 

March 25, 2020

How to Wash Your Hands

You’ve probably been washing your hands obsessively recently.  But unless you’ve worked in the medical field or a research lab setting, and therefore learned surgical hand-washing technique, odds are good you’ve been missing a ton of (virus-harboring) spots.

This simple, brilliant demo drives that point home.  Watch it, practice washing correctly a few times, then watch it again to make sure the details all sunk in:

 

[And, as a few people have asked of late, some of the other things I’ve been doing to stay (overly) safe:

  • Staying inside completely, aside from a daily walk with Jess during a quiet time of day, along relatively deserted routes, and giving people 20+ feet of leeway along the way.
  • Skipping delivery, and cooking our own food instead.
  • Buying groceries, toiletries, and everything else online only.
  • On the rare occasion I do need to head out for errands / to do laundry in our building  / etc., wearing a disposable latex glove on my right hand. I use that hand to touch anything other people have touched (laundry machine, credit card pin pad, etc.), and use the other to touch anything of my own (the clean laundry, my phone, etc.)
  • Showering as soon as I get back home, along with wiping down my phone, and washing my glasses.
  • Letting all packages, and non-perishable groceries, sit for at least 48 hours in a staging area by our door before bringing them into the rest of our apartment.
  • For perishable groceries, Lysol-wiping packages thoroughly before putting them in the freezer or refrigerator.  
  • For unpackaged produce, putting it in the sink, squirting in some dish soap, and then filling up the sink and agitating in the suds.  Then draining, and refilling and draining twice more with clean water to rinse.
  • Buying a pulse oximeter on Amazon, in case we do get sick.  (On the idea that the only two reasons to head to ER would be a substantially spiked fever [>103°] or a drop in O2Sat (<88%); self-testing would let us know if it was no longer wise to just quarantine, hydrate, and wait it out.)
  • Similarly, practicing listening to each other’s chests when we breathe, to get a baseline for normal lung function to compare against when listening for crackling / bubbling / rumbling during breathing, the symptoms of pneumonia.
  • Stocking some hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, in case trials pan out, but inventory doesn’t keep pace with demand.

I’ll add to the list as more of my OCD virus-phobic practices come come to mind.  Though, if you have similarly nuts ones you’re engaging in, I’d love hear about them.]

March 22, 2020

Busy Quarantine

My father once told me he’d learned over time that to-do lists are kind of like the tides: sometimes it’s high tide, and sometimes it’s low tide, but he’d always been trying to reach no water, and he’d eventually realized that just wasn’t going to happen.

I’ve been thinking about that of late, whenever I see various ‘things to do during self-isolation’ lists getting emailed around, or people complaining on Twitter about being bored out of their minds.  Because, on my end, even having cleared my schedule of every outside-the-apartment appointment and obligation, I’m still making it to the end of each day feeling totally behind on everything I could and should be doing.

That said, I’ve also been extremely productive.  I just have so much more that I want to get done.  And that doesn’t even include the less urgent and obligated stuff, like catching up on the pile of books I’m hoping to read, or the list of movies I’d like to watch, or just taking some time to stare out the window and reflect on the big picture of life.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I still don’t really have a fixed schedule.  I’m hoping to get that figured out shortly, adding a more formal start and end to my workday, making sure I observe an actual weekend.  Anything that adds some regularity and contour to my self-isolated life.  This whole thing could stretch on for quite a while, and as much as I’d like to come out the other end with a list of accomplishments, I’m even more concerned about getting there with my sanity still intact.

March 19, 2020