Today I was supposed to be on a day off at work, but I had to do a few bits and pieces and this evening managed to book a very important meeting and so have been prepping for that meeting that will be at 10am tomorrow morning.
I had coffee and cornflakes for breakfast again and I faffed around a bit on the internet doing a few bits for work, watched some Frasier with Alan and listened to the Archers on the BBC Sounds app whilst and then got into my run kit to persuade myself to go running. It was much rainier today so actually it was much cooler to go running. I am still tracking ok for my 1000 mile yearly target, but the walk on Monday meant I had a bit of catching up to do so I needed to run 8km. I then got distracted watching PMQs and I had to get back before 2pm to give me time for a shower and food before going to meet my friend Tana for a socially distanced walk. I managed to do a more or less out and back route through Lumby and kept a decent pace and picked up 3 Strava trophies and average pace of 8.16 per mile.
I had a shower and then had a granny smith, a yoghurt and some goats cheese and chutney on crispbreads for lunch.
I was meeting Tana and her very cute 2.5 month old baby girl for the first time at Walton Colliery Park for a walk which was lovely and we saw some goslings and swans. We walked for an hour and got a bit lost, but found our way back to the carpark. It was so nice to catch up and I really feel for anyone who has had a baby around this time, hopefully we'll be in a better situation soon and at least she got to meet her grandparents just before lockdown.
Driving was weird as I was on the motorway and it was as busy as usual and more busy than I would have expected at 3pm and I drove back around the start of "rush hour" too.
I watched the daily briefing which was fragmented and confusing and I'm still baffled why the MPs have voted to not use online voting. I drank a bottle of kombucha and remembered I should buy more.
Alan went out for a run and I listened to some more Archers and cooked Hello Fresh for tea Hake with tomato, caper and olive sauce and tagliattelli. I had to make my decision on work so I've opted for 80% for July to review as needed as this week we have had far more new roles come in.
I'd been debating whether to do Zumba at 7pm or attend an online talk by Tania Hershman and I decided on the talk. She talked about her work which includes what she calls "hybrid" work and I loved this concept. I had hoped to do a bit more writing today, but I felt quite cross and out of sorts and I'm not sure why (other than all the obvious horrific things going on)
I then subscribed to Hay Player as I wanted to watch a few things including a few James O'brien talks.
The news that Alok Sharma has contracted Coronavirus and is having to self isolate I found interesting and I wonder if that will make MPs rethink this cancelling of online voting as by voting for it in this way is like saying they want to conduct a survey of physically disabled people, but going to the top a 25 storey building with no lifts to do it. I don't get the logic of voting against not only the interests of your constituents, but in this situation putting yourself at risk.
Today was a pretty exhausting day, another day of work starting with a 9am kick off meeting. Again I had a couple of black coffees and some cornflakes for breakfast and during the 9am meeting I learned that having worked at 80% hours for the past 2 months we are going to have this reviewed and I could potentially go back to 100% or stay at 80%. I have found having more free time has been good over the past 2 months, it's allowed me to do more focussed work for Guides and runclub as well as tidy the house, train and do blogging and the creative writing last week. In the last couple of days at work though it's been signficantly more busy so I'm thinking that I could easily fill 5 days of work, there's is plenty to do. I'm not sure what I'll decide or exactly when I need to have decided by, but the whole lockdown situation has made me value having more time at home and less time commuting.
After the 9am meeting, we then had a temp update meeting and I helped one of my team in preparing a proposal for a client which I found out later this afternoon was accepted which is a big relief.
I knew I had a busy evening this evening so I went out to post a letter to a friend and go for my run at lunchtime. I had shared a tweet over the weekend from Postsecret about someone's biggest fear being able to not be with their pet if they had to be put to sleep because of the Covid situation, it is a huge fear for me and I hadn't realised that one of my very few twitter followers who I'm friends with in real life had been through this. I felt bad, although I don't think she thought I'd done it intentionally so I sent her a card with some seeds to plant to remember her kitty and also a dribble that I'd written about cats. I hope she likes it and it doesn't upset her more. I also remembered that I'd planned on sending a tangle to one of my colleagues who mentioned she'd been really picking at her hands with all the anxiety.
My run was fast today, I managed to get a PB on a segment near me and was onlyl 8 seconds off being the fastest woman to have run it, I did just over 5K in just around 26 minutes. I grabbed an orangle lolly out of the freezer and a pint of orange squash with ice and a bit of salt thrown in to cool down. I was then straight back onto another teams call to launch an BD session for the afternoon and then a meeting about the housing sector and another about government and then a wrap up call - it was exhausting! I managed to pick up 2 leads for colleagues in the North West that will hopefully turn into jobs and so it wasn't completely meeting focussed thankfully. I realised that after signing in for the call straight after my run that an hour passed before I realised I'd not eaten so I quickly prepped a carrot and cucumber into sticks as well as cheese (coverdale and goats) chutney and a couple of slices of serrano ham.
I then had 15 mins away from the laptop before running my virtual #runandtalk meeting for the run club, we had 6 people sign in and a nice chat about how we were finding things. I was hungry so I'd grabbed a granny smith apple and cut it into chunks and a babybel light. I then had a call with my friends Hayley and Sam for a catch up for about an hour and a half. and Alan very kindly made Beef Ragu for tea from Hello Fresh. We talked about how we are all still very nervous of being out and about, even if we are allowed more freedom at the moment. Hayley also told us about a commission she's working on. I tidied the kitchen, grabbed another glass of white wine and a gu pudding and had a sneaky couple of slices of serrano ham.
I read a lot more about the unrest going on in America today, I blacked out my facebook and Instagram for #blackouttuesday and I'm still trying to read and learn more about how I can support black people better. I feel ignorant, I feel ashamed, I feel guilty and I'm confused as to what I can do, so I'm going to do my best to learn more and try and support more.
First day back at work after a week off today. I woke up before my alarm and felt groggy as it took me a while to fall asleep and it was pretty late by the time we'd got to bed. I had 2 coffees and a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast. I got the milk in from outside, we get 1 pint of whole milk, 2 pints of semi skimmed and one of orange juice and tend to get through it very easily. I start the day with a MS Teams call so I dialled in at 9am and caught up with the team. Usually after a week off there is an avalanche of emails and work to get through, but it was half term which usually means it is quieter for me. I don't usually take half term off, but given we can't go anywhere it was a sensible time to take off and the weather was great.
The first part of the day was spent catching up on emails and returning calls and then I'd booked a virtual meeting with a new contact and one of my colleagues in the afternoon which went well. I then as usual fell into a more productive mindset and got far more done in the last couple of hours and in total it was a pretty productive day.
I read Why We Sleep - by Matthew Walker, well when I said read, I listened to it on the commute to work, well most of it... and one of the takeaways I found was that there are two types of people morning and night people as developed in times when we lived in tribes and had to sleep 8 hours (the ideal amount) and the morning people would go to bed earlier by 4 hours and get up 4 hours earlier. If you are an "evening" person (definitely me) you are likely to naturally choose a later bedtime so a 9 - 5 world unfairly disadvantages you if you have to get up before you 8 hours of sleep is completed. Before we were in lockdown I was averaging around 6-7 hours of sleep a night, I'm now closer to between 8 - 9 and generally feeling good for it. The important thing the book points out if you are an evening person and you get up early is that you if you have 6 out of 8 hours you don't just lose 25% of sleep, you actually lose 85% of the REM sleep as much of this happens in the last 2 hours of your 8 hour cycle. I'm worried about what will happen when we go back to having to commute how I'll cope on 6 - 7 hours again.
We also had a discussion about when we might be going back into the office, originally it was set to be September, but it could be July and that makes me nervous. It seemed to make Alan angry as his company are still completely working from home all around the world and he is saying that if I have to go into the office too soon he'll sleep in a separate bed. Our CEO has said that we won't need to go back in until we feel safe, and no one will be forced, so I don't think that I'll be forced to make a decision about this hopefully.
At 12pm I had my online pilates class and it was really warm! We had a bit focus on core, I'm terrible at core exercises. Alan then made some new dumplings for the stew and so I had stew and dumplings for lunch on a very warm day. I also booked onto a reading and Q&A session with Jo Brand via Arvon on Friday evening at 7.15pm so something cool to look forward to.
I finished work around 6.45 as I was finishing of writing an advert (not my favourite tasks as there are so many drop down boxes to choose!) and I had over 60 applications to my last advert.
Alan made smoothies with a pineapple, banana and mango that I'd had delivered from Delifresh about a week and a half ago that were going a bit soft. We took the smoothies and went on a 4.5k walk around the fields and I found a really cool green stone and the light was beautiful and it was really warm.
I then made a Hello Fresh dinner of roasted pork with lentils and creme fraiche and Alan served up some rum and raisin ice cream, with cream for dessert and I had a glass of white wine that's been open for a couple of weeks that was actually still really good.
We watched friends and Qubit meowed loudly until Maya came home at about 11pm.
Another late rising today, but I did manage to read 1 short story before I got out of bed which was an achievement. I took Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks with me to Costa Rica in December 2018 and read and loved most of it, but inspired by the Flash Fiction earlier this week I've been inspired to read it again.
We had a ridiculously childlike breakfast of potato waffles and sausages and some Reggae Reggae Sauce and I had a couple of coffees to wake me up properly. I watched another Hay Festival online talk from A C Grayling about democracy which wasn't hugely positive about the democratic future for us post Covid, but did make some helpful suggestions about how it could be changed to be basically more democratic. The one quote I especially enjoyed was "There is no such thing as a majority, only a temporary coalition of minorities across different elements of society" (i'm likely misquoting, but this was the gist)
I refilled the coffee machine with the emergency coffee that I got from Amazon whilst we waited for our deliver to arrive from Modern Standard last week (of course they came on the same day10 and Qubit wanted to smell it - he wasn't keen.
I watched a talk from Hay Festival last year by Michael Rosen, I loved his poems as a kid and I love some of his newer work. It was lovely to see how much the kids in the audience loved his work as well. Really inspiring. I've just googled him to find out how old he was out of curiousity and he is 74, I also spotted that he was really poorly with suspected Covid-19 and I hope that he's doing ok.
Alan prepared the ingredients for a stew and put it in the slow cooker, and I tidied some of the potatoes up out of the kitchen that had started to sprout and planted them in planters in the garden after I had cleared off the weeds.
For lunch I made us another salad and the avocado was just about perfectly ripe thankfully! We ate outside on our very lovely garden chair with a blanket over the top to cover from the ridiculous sunshine.
I watched the Daily Briefing and it was heartening to see that many homeless people have been helped during this crisis, around 15000 people, but I'm sad that there were that many people who were homeless and needed support. I'm incredibly confused and concerned that they have all of a sudden decided that even though the death rate is the same as when we went into lockdown, they have deemed it ok for those who have been shielding to go outside again. The photos of crowded parks and beaches also massively worry me, I am incredibly fortunate to be able to work from home and not have to go into busier situations in the coming weeks unless I choose to, so I'm going to choose to remain not too different from my current situation to hopefully mitigate the easing of lockdown which (in my opinion) is just too early to be safe.
I decided to go for my run and needed to find the last photo for my photo challenge for the theme "chasing rainbows" and I ran into the village and said hello to some of our friends including our 6 year old dance teacher from yesterday.
I found a couple of rainbows in the village and then ran up to Lumby and found a couple more. I ran back through Lumby and debated whether to go left and a longer route or right for a shorter one. I was pleased that I went for the longer route back and enjoyed some beautiful evening light. I had a nice chat with our neighbours at number 2 on the way back in.
Alan's stew was nearly ready so I had a shower and then ate some tasty dumplings and enjoyed the last of the meat (stewing steak)) from our very delicious order from The Ethical Butcher. He put on Space Force, but I've been a bit distracted so I'm not sure what I make of it.
Lauren had finished work at 8 so we had a wrap up video chat on our creative week and we have a few really good ideas for collaboration of work for flash fiction. She also shared a great drabble with me in relation to our idea for our collaboration. I've started mine... let's see how it all turns out.
We woke up a bit later again today, we really must try and get back to normal tomorrow evening as we are back at work on Monday.
Alan got up and made french toast with berry compote and coffee and we watched Friends on TV - it's up to the point where Phoebe meetings Mike which are some of my favourite episodes. I read about the Michael Gove Tweet and cynically seems like an attempted distraction more than anything else.
We kept the cats locked in as we were worried about Qubit, but his paw did seem much better and so I sneaked out Maya earlier on and then in the afternoon we let them both out.
Alan then got into his running kit and after I'd hung out the washing I got into mine and we went out for a gentle jog up to the nature reserve at Ledsham. I managed to get some photos on the way for a photo challenge with both my friends and also with the running club. We sat in the reserve in the warm sunshine and saw one person in the distance, we're very fortunate to be living where we do. We chatted about a few things, notably racism and misogyny and why my beliefs are so different to my parents. I concluded that school was a major common factor as well as Blue Peter and good kids tv.
We covered about 7 K in just over an hour and I got a photo of my reflection in a random discarded new roll of tin foil as one of the categories was "Your Reflection". My knee is feeling better and so hopefully I can do a bit more running again tomorrow to keep on track with my distance targets.
I made a salad for lunch and disappointingly the avocado was way past it's best and I had to cut out all the black squidy bits. I also was craving a baked potato and had a topping of butter and marmite - delicious and a lockdown tip I'd heard from the High Low.
I watched the Daily Briefing which was interesting as they focussed on re-opening sports including football and horse racing from next week rather than the fact the R number is still high and the death rate is what it was as we decided to lock down. They also had Professor Van-Tam on who was very clear about how it wasn't the time to "rip the pants out" of the government guidance or indeed the fact that “In my opinion the rules are clear and they have always been clear,” he said. “In my opinion they are for the benefit of all. In my opinion they apply to all.” As I have the freedom of choice to be able to continue to work from home and the impact on my day to day life hasn't been as severe as others I feel that my approach will be to remain in "lockdown" in terms of what we've been doing for the past 10 weeks with a small exception that we might have a few outdoor garden conversations. Not barbecues or anything where we'd have to access or have our house accessed ideally. I am aware not everyone can work from home, so if those who can do continue to be socially distant, maybe we can mitigate what is likely to be a second peak.
We then had a 5pm appointment with a friend's 6 year old daughter who has opened an online dance school on zoom and she performed a number of songs that me and Alan had to dance to with some of her friends and family also signed up. If we liked it and go to the next one it's £1 per class that will go to charity.
Alan and I then both had baths and I watched another Hay Festival talk - David Mitchell being interviewed by John Mitchinson and a bit later on Paul Krugman talking about the economics post Covid-19 Lauren and I had also swapped our Dribbles earlier and talked about a few other ideas for writing.
I got an email from Easyjet to say that it was 30% off flights to Barcelona, I went with Alan back in 2016 and saw someone on Facebook's memories there pop up and it made me really think it would be nice to get back there. I looked into costs for flights in March and for £83 for the 2 of us seemed like a decent calculated risk. Hopefully we'll have a bit more normality by that point.
I watched the Nasa SpaceX launch with Alan outside in the garden and we tried to see it, but didn't have any luck and then forgot to look at it outside for the ISS later. It was really interesting watching how smooth everything went and how the Falcon? landed back on the boat.
Alan made a pasta bake for tea with Hello Fresh and I had a couple of Jim Beams and Ginger Beers and we put Friends on TV again.
We woke up late again this morning, mostly because we were so warm even with the fan on full blast, but mostly because I made the mistake of engaging with my Mum's friend on one of her posts on Facebook. My error here is that she's retired, a staunch brexiteer and hits the return button so often that there are more comments pinging all over the place. I wish there was a feature on Facebook to block certain people's comments appearing from a certain time in the evening... it has my heart palpitating and my mind racing!
We got up and I had some cornflakes and coffee for breakfast after I'd dealt with a couple of work matters.
I got drawn back into the ongoing Facebook debate, I'd posted a video last night prompted by the (to me) inexplicable loyalty to some of the government actions during the discussion. I remain convinced that you can still be loyal to a Government or political party or a country and yet disagree with a policy or action of an MP or special advisor. Critique and opinion forms better ideas and policy, and in this situation as my Mum asks me "How would you do better?" I think my awareness that I know very little about virology would mean that I would collate as many scientists as possible to help me. I'd look at the world and steal all the ideas that had worked well and I'd make sure messaging was clear - "Stay Alert" is not a clear message when it comes to a microscopic and invisble virus, if it was a war maybe, but it's not. The wartime rhetoric that has been invoke is problematic for many reasons, not least that as a globe we are stronger to collaborate globally to contain the virus and develop a vaccine. Anyway, this was the video - Jordan Klepper vs. Trump Supporters This particular person was clearly provoked by this (although I provided no commentary on it, just the link and some thinking emojis) and she went into an overloaded rant and a few comments later was talking about Brexit and calling it the "Chinese" virus. I shared a quote that I'd found on a Psychology Today article
"Our survival will not be enhanced by racism or denial of racism. On an individual level, our immune systems are enhanced by compassion and community, and damaged by contempt." and also the link from the WHO as to why it's not helpful to name diseases based on country of origin.
After we'd wasted far too much time on this I'd changed into my run kit to test my knee out on a gentle run with Alan. Qubit brought in a baby bird that he'd caught and killed which still makes me sad even though he does it far more frequently than any other cat I've lived with.
We ran a different route today through the fields and over the railway and I was trying to find some street art for my photo challenge. It was really warm and so there was lots of walking, I tried to top the run up to over an hour for a full 8 Vitality Points, but it only gave me 5. Fortunately my step count took me up to over 12500 so I did end up with the full points. My knee is still sore, but it seemed ok to do just over 7K so hopefully it's just a niggle that will go away easily.
We'd not had lunch and had not much time before our 6pm online DJ session so we had the remainder of a treacle tart and cream for lunch before showering, changing and getting a few more songs ready for our DJ set. Alan had done some visuals and we'd created a playlist themed around the political events of the week - not too serious, just themed around Dominic Cumming's jaunt to the north and inspired by some dancing rumours.
In the midst of getting ready Qubit came running into the house with a baby rabbit. We thought it was dead, but Alan prised it out of his mouth and he hopped off. We had no spare boxes to hand and the rabbit managed to get upstairs and we had to empty the washing basket and catch it. I took him out to the paddock in front of the house and slowly tipped him out and he hopped off into the field. He was really cute and it still upsets me that Qubit is such a big hunter, at least he was ok.
We Djed for 2 hours, I made a few mistakes, the feed went a bit sketchy and I'm not sure I'm getting any better, but Alan enjoyed playing with his app that he's just finished coding.
Alan then made chicken stir fry for tea and we watched Have I got News for You and more Friends. We noticed Qubit was limping a bit, although would let us look at his paw and ther wasn't an obvious injury so we are keeping an eye on him and hope that he'll be ok tomorrow. He was also happy to eat his dinner and some treats, so hopefully will be fine.
And so to bed, late again...I need to get better at going at a proper time.
Once again the cat alarm woke us up earlier than I was hoping, I was so tired that I fed the cats, but managed to throw dry cat food everywhere.
I snoozed a bit longer and then got up around 9.30am and tidied and cleaned the kitchen from dinner yesterday evening and had some cornflakes and an Americano for breakfast made from our lovely coffee machine (our over indulgence to commiserate our abrupt end to our honeymoon and make lockdown more bearable when our cheaper machine broke down - I do recommend highly!) I also recommend the lovely Modern Standard coffee that we use and is far to easy to plough through a bag of!
I noticed my right knee was really quite sore this morning, I'd not done anything yesterday to be concerned about my knee, although I'd had some perifirmis issues. When I rubbed around the knee cap it was really crunchy compared to the left knee.
I was excited this morning as I'd signed up for a 2 hour Flash Fiction course that my friend Lauren had told me about with Arvon. At the start of the the year I'd thought about doing a residential there as they have a site in Hebden Bridge, but obviously Corona got in the way of these plans, so it was a great way to still do something in keeping with my 20 things 20 times in 2020 which included 20 hours learning something new and 20 creative writting sessions or blog entries.
The course started at 11am via Zoom and was hosted and facilitated by Dr Tania Hershman I had a quick chat with Lauren first about the writing challenges we'd been doing together this week. We signed on and after Tania was introduced she said that she was going to "work us hard" and she really did!
We had a first exercise of word cricket where she gave us a starting phrase and we had to build a short story by just writing continously for 15 minutes and at certain points she threw in some extra words to include. We then read a short story together called "The Yacht Man" and moved onto our next exercise which was taking 6 random excerpts from books grabbed off the shelf including a coffee machine manual and weaving as many as possible into a story - this was a really good fun one and I managed to write on that featured many current events. We again read together a few more pieces of flash fiction and in very different and interesting styles and our next excerise was to take very serious trigger words and write as many descriptive words that related to that word. Tania then announced that these were "banned" words and we had to write for 7 minutes about that word - it was both harder and easier than you would think. Our final exercise was on Drabbles and Dribbles and this one I found much harder as I didn't have an obvious inspiration starting point.
2 hours totally flew by and I would highly recommend this as great value for money (£35) and great content, but most importantly a great faciliator who was encouraging, energetic and fun!
I made some lunch for me and Alan - creamy garlic mushroom pasta and then Lauren and I read what we'd written back to each other which was fascinating as even with a very similar start and end to one of the pieces we were very different in content. We decided to try and find a flash fiction competition to enter and talked about a few films and books that we recommended including Arrival which Alan and I decided to watch this evening.
I got bogged down watching the Daily Briefing again today and I'm yet to be convinced that we are ready to ease the lockdown based on the number of infections and where the R number is at. What concerned me more was how Whitty and Vallance weren't allowed to respond to some of the journalist questions as Johnson stepped in. I totally understand that they don't want to be "dragged into politics" but it was palpable to see what their opinions have beens towards some of the comments by politians that they visibly disagree with. I was especially impressed with Sam Coates at Sky News for asking them if they had been gagged and forbidden to answer questions and how they felt about it.
Alan went out for a run and I decided not to today as my knee was sore, but when he'd got back I decided to go for a walk as it was such lovely weather and I strolled through the nearby fields and took the time to take some pictures and videos including one for my daily photo challenge with my friends Hayley and Sam which was "All the Small Things" today. I walked for 45 minutes and about 3K.
I listened to the High Low Podcast as I was walking and then when I'd got home as I made tea. Another Hello Fresh recipe of Cod with a cheesy crumb and mashed potato with spring greens - delicious! We then had treacle tart and clotted cream for dessert and watched Arrival. Arrival really reminded me of Interstellar and it had a really interesting plot and it is definitely one of those that I really want to rewatch and am slightly sad I didn't see in a cinema as I bet it's great on the big screen.
Since then I've been messing around on my phone and trying to film Qubit having a conversation about Dominic Cummings, but he's been noisy and then camera shy. Some of the comments about this from members of my family have made me so angry that my heart has been racing. I'm most worried that it's all part of his plan and a deliberate plot to distract us from our awful death rate. I also feel frustrated that I can't do more to tangibly help.
I managed to totally forget the 8pm clap, I hadn't planned on clapping as I feel uncomfortable being press ganged by the neighbourhood whatsapp group (allthough I could be completely misinterpreting things) and the fact that I'm not sure we all have the same interpretation of social distancing, so this evening I made another donation to Selby District Foodbank. I liked the initial idea of the clap, but no one near me is a carer and so it felt a bit like keeping up appearances for the neighbours so instead I've tried to do more tangible things each week like donations or helping to make hampers of hand santisers, hand cream and treats for the local GP surgery.
I never thought keeping an isolation lockdown blog would actually give me so much to write about each day as nothing really happens and the concept of time has changed - this from the High Low today made me smile in describing how time works now.
Night night!
