Notes from the 422nd week of isolation (or something like that):
- I’ve been able to get out for two or three walks each day most of the time. Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate, but I do what I can. Sunday morning was a first for me, though. I went out for about a 40-minute walk, and it wasn’t until I was basically back to the apartment building that I saw another pedestrian. I had seen a few vehicles, but I had always passed at least a few people on my walk.
- Watching a fair number of videos on Twitch. Some of the games they play I don’t totally understand, but it’s still pretty easy sometimes to see something didn’t work. One game called Valorant, for instance, has all the different characters with a different secondary power. I was watching one game where a player sent something like a Roomba ahead of the group as a scout, just as one of the other players on their team put up a wall. The ‘Roomba’ hit the wall and came right back to the group. Whoops.
- It seems like every day, almost every professional sports league around the world is putting forward a new plan for how they can get their seasons either restarted (NBA and NHL), started (MLB) or starting on schedule (NFL). Then the next day, something happens with the state of COVID-19, and they have to put up a new plan. One thing they may to plan for happened at a horse race in Australia. After the race, one of the jockeys headbutted one of the other jockeys. He was suspended for a) assaulting the other jockey and b) violating the social distancing rules that had been put in place. It sounded as though the second violation was more serious than the first.
- Locally, plans seem to be slowly being put into place to get things up and rolling again, but obviously in a different form than we saw a few months ago. It appears everyone involved (bar a few morons) knows we have to move slowly and make sure all the safety plans are in place before we can make any real changes to the current situation. That’s a good thing to hear from most of those concerned.
- I have noticed one thing over the past few weeks. Normally, my conversations with friends and family on the phone are just a few minutes. Now, most of my calls are about 15 minutes and some have been more than half an hour. It’s not necessarily that we have more to say, but the phone call is the closest we can come right now to personal contact, so you have to take advantage of it.