the only i photo took this week was of an empty cruise ship docked in the harbour near where we live.
this week has been difficult to write about purely because i'm embarrassed to reveal the startling regularity of the daily structure that i've sunk into. this paragraph alone has been the source of a significant amount of anguish for longer than 20 minutes. and even now i'm tinkering with it and rewriting it.
there are reasons for this. this week i was supposed to be attending the IETF107 in vancouver, which was unfortunately, but understandably, cancelled. however, the meeting continued in virtual format, and so did my active participation. i still struggle with the nerves of presenting, even when i'm just to required to sit at a desk and talk. i've been sat in shorts all week, and i made myself put some jeans on for the occasion. this almost certainly had a negative impact on my mental state, i'm sure of it.
aside from that, i've refactored out the core functionality of my weekday routine, which almost every day follows with minor adjustments. the daily routine this week looked something like this:
- wake up around 8am
- look at my laptop for a minute and watch the emails and IMs roll in
- go have a shower
- eat breakfast; pick one of the following: peanut butter on toast, bran flakes, porridge with blueberries & peanut butter.
- start working
- eat lunch at 1pm in the garden
- stop working some point after 6pm
- provide assistance with routine tasks during the process of cooking dinner
- eat dinner
- join some of the IETF sessions remotely
- play on the playstation
- sleep
there are variables that can be tweaked etc, but this routine is not only a well-oiled machine but an irresistible force of nature. you would be a fool (or an immovable object) if you thought that you could tamper with it.
anyway, what i'm trying to say is that, when i get into the diary, i'm going to cut this routine from the description of each day. this is my attempt at being merciful. and also to prevent you from closing the tab and declaring me a lost cause.
you'll be glad to hear that i'm still managing to keep the weekend as a separate independent entity, safely hidden from the activities of the working week. i hope that the week is more fulfilling, otherwise this process of documentation is going to become fairly torturous for me (and you). i also hope that i will stop putting myself under so much pressure to utilise the fleeting moments that are dealt to us by the global pandemic.
march 22
woke up to the dread of having to write two significant pieces of text in a single day. the academic review that i (thought i) had forgotten about, and the first iteration of my diary into a format that could be presented on the ~internet~.
first things first, we ate the remainder of the pancakes that were cooked the day before. then i sat down to finish off this review. it was a subject that i was knowledgable on, but that assumed the large part of the day. by the time that we had been to the supermarket (which was v. well-stocked considering the stories we've heard from england) it was already the late afternoon.
which meant it was time to finally and sit down and commit to writing the first portion of this diary. it was okay, i had weeks of material to set the scene with. there was also the novelty of being able to commit words to paper on a subject that i hadn't yet thought about in those terms. (these are both resources that i no longer have access to).
still feeling like something critical was missing, i'm embarrassed to say that we bathed in the comforting embrace of the leeds vs derby play-off semi-final from last season. i've provided a link to the highlights for my own future benefit.
march 23
back to the working week, i didn't sleep very well the night before and i truly felt it. there was a fly dead in the spare room where we are currently working together on the same desk.
it was finally time to acknowledge that the week was here to present (on thursday). so I plucked up the courage to open Google Slides and started committing keystrokes to virtual paper.
the uk was pushed into the customary "1 exercise per day" lockdown, that portugal had entered into almost a week earlier.
march 24
i spent the day soliciting and applying feedback to the slides that i had written the day earlier. i also practised the presentation in conditions that would replicate the future event. which meant locking myself in a room and talking at a computer screen for an amount of time that was as negligibly close (for any reasonable choice of input parameter) as possible to 10 minutes.
it seemed like a nice day outside. we have a lot of bees in the garden and it's a very welcome reprieve to go and watch what they get up to at lunchtime.
march 25
portugal decided to bring a little more clarity to the self-isolation procedure. from what i could gather, we're allowed to self-isolate in our own home if we own a thermometer and we have separate rooms to house individuals that are stricken by the illness. we fail these (imo arbitrary) criteria at the first hurdle, the thermometer check. and i'm still yet to get around to buying one.
the day passed by without incident beyond me doing a few more practice runs of sitting in a dark room and talking to myself. it was jeremy corbyn's last prime minster's questions as labour leader. it was hard not to reminisce about the spring/summer of 2017, when it seemed like anything was possible.
march 26
i finally got the presentation off my list of tasks to do.
we ordered a pizza for dinner. our local place moved away from delivering from their website, and now are solely available on exploitative delivery platforms :(
march 27
slept terribly, dry eyes seemed to be a concern again. which is a minor worry, as i'm running out of eye drops. managed to sew up the loose ends at work after only finishing the night before at around 10pm.
in the uk, the prime minister, health secretary and chief medical office (probably) became sick with the virus. i'm not sure what's going on here? but clearly, the key figures in government are also struggling to come to terms with the lack of rigour that is described in the guidelines. for instance, presumably on what is considered safe physical distancing.
in the evening, we spoke to friends on houseparty. an app that i had no idea existed before 8pm on friday, and by sunday i was already sick of hearing about it. we spent the whole time looking at frozen images of people's faces, and trying to manually error-correct broken audio.
march 28
i slept better but woke up early. i was left with nothing to do and my partner still enjoying the blanket of sleep that i had managed to dispose of so rapidly. i decided to go for a run around midday; i never fare too well when i decide to go first thing. so i sat down to play an hour of death stranding. i managed to make progress in the game (a hard-fought battle with mads mikkelsen), but it required a significant amount of effort.
still with time to kill, i decided to have a bowl of bran flakes and sit down to prepare my character's backstory to a sci-fi horror rpg that we would be playing that night. this took longer than i had anticipated, so the time of my run was upon me.
i thought the bran flakes would be a stroke of genius but, in fact, they just gave me a stitch early on and i initially forgot to set my strava recording. so a bad start, and then within around 2k of my turnaround point, i came across two police officers who told me to return home. i was annoyed at having my personal liberty infringed upon, but it was also a merciful end to an arduous activity so i didn't mind too much ("oh shoot! really?! okay well i guess i'll head home then. :(").
i got back and we had nothing to eat beyond home-grown lemons so we decided to make the long trip to the supermarket (for my second(!) piece of exercise), elongating a 200m distance into a 2.7km walk.
in the evening we travelled to a ghost ship at the outer reaches of the solar system, and ran for our lives.