ギター友のzoomの会、御視聴ありがとうございま続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

さあ、しまってこーぜー⚾️う続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

☆7日間ブックカバーチャレンジ☆ 【読書文化の普及に貢献するためのチャレンジ。1日1冊、７日間で7冊を投稿する。本の説明はナシ。表紙画像だけアップする】 小さ続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

昨夜お邪魔いたしました。15分間の続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

５秒か、何やろう、うわっ、3、2、1、ヤバイヤバイ、パシャ✨何とかとったポーズがこれかよ。納得いかないな…もう１度。続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

まだあるんですよ。セルフタイマーで、真面目に撮りますよ。5、4、続きをみる

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5月9日ってだけのタイトルです↑↑↑ぐっもーに続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

鏡を見ながら、自分書いてみました。似て続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

To the women from all over the world I'm privileged to know, and everybody who loves international women.

I have been saving up some articles for the occasion: here are two marvellous bios of trans lesbian elders.

Jan Morris. [Content note: the article is in the Guardian which takes a somewhat transphobic editorial stance, though this article is very positive towards trans women. However it does deadname Morris and includes a picture of her from back when she was presenting as male.]

Sandy Stone, a couple of years old from Vice but it came to my attention recently.

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ETA: You guys are amazing. I was really not expecting to get so many volunteers! I have more than enough people for now. I'm happy to add any additional names to the list for future opportunities. I can't add any more volunteers for this course, otherwise it would end up being all my friends which isn't great for diversity.

My awesome job involves creating free online courses about genomics. The first course I've been fully in charge of is about to go live, and it needs some final quality checks. It's quite exciting IMO: it's about using genomics to identify and avoid antibiotic resistance.

We need people who can put in a couple of hours in the next week, and just play around with the course and see if there are any obvious problems, whether that's technical issues like display problems for your particular hardware and software, or conceptual problems like confusing instructions or something that doesn't make sense. We are definitely not expecting any one individual to go through the whole course in detail, and we're not looking for copy editing or proofreading. I mean, if you have the sort of brain that can't help spotting typos, we don't mind reports of those, but we're mainly looking for something more general than that.

We want people from all backgrounds, so a mix of people who know something about microbiology and genomics, and people who have no idea. I will say that the course is fairly technical, though, so you probably don't want to volunteer if sciencey stuff is hateful or scary to you. We are especially happy to have beta readers who aren't completely fluent in English to be more representative of our target audience.

Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested. The number of available slots is somewhat flexible, probably in the range of 3-5.

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Good things: jack and I went to see the Troy exhibition at the British Museum. With a bit of time and energy left after that, we also visited the Aztec room. And then we went out for pancakes at my favourite spot. And it was generally lovely.

Then we had a go at some tabletop roleplaying, with OSOs and their younger two. jack had put together a cut-down system, roughly D&D based but a lot lot lot less complex and fiddly. And a delightful little one-shot story about saving a baby giant turtle from a suspicious sea captain, set in an archipelago of islands on the back of giant turtles. jack really encouraged us to develop fun characters, and we're all excited to play more in this setting.

I have plans for an exciting date with ghoti_mhic_uait next week, and I think after that no more travel for fun. Honestly I'm not sure about this week either. Maybe it isn't morally or safety-wise sensible to visit a huge tourist spot in the capital. I'm expecting several months of somewhere between boring and terrifying, and I'm not really impatient for that to start.

ghoti_mhic_uait bought me and jack an annual membership of the British Museum for our birthdays. And it was a really good time to visit as members; the Troy exhibition, in its last weekend, was completely sold out for non-members, plus it was lovely to be able to go to the museum semi-spontaneously rather than having to plan for a particular time and buy tickets. I probably wouldn't have made a special trip or paid lots of money to see Troy, but when it was low pressure it was worthwhile.

Basically what they've done is presented objects that represent the myth as told in Classical literature, so lots of vases and friezes and so on, arranged to recount the story of the fall of Troy. And then they have a gallery of Renaissance responses to the Trojan myth, and then a gallery of modern (ish) responses. Nice curation, lots of ideas about how the myth was interpreted through the culture of the time. And a marvellous collection of objects, the BM has really a lot of good blackfigure vases and beautiful neo-Classical objects. There is also quite a lot of commentary about how war is actually bad rather than epic, and thoughtful stuff about attitudes to women, and it's 2020 so we're no longer doing the ridiculous 'no homo' thing about Achilles and Patroclus.

My favourites were this gorgeous little bowl with a really sweet picture of Eris:


And a stunning pre-Raphaelite portrait of Clytemnestra immediately post-murder, which I couldn't photograph due to the lighting, and can't find an image of online.

Then we went to have tea in the special members' room. The main advantage is that it's quieter than the main tea-room, as it isn't in a huge echoing hall. We reckoned we had enough time and energy left to look at one more thing, and Jack was excited to see the famous double-headed turquoise snake from the meso-American gallery. I fell slightly in love with this grumpy woman who shares the room with it:


On the way we wandered past a staircase with some cool mosaics, the Wellcome gallery with has a Moai that they're in the process of returning to the Rapa Nui peoples they stole it from, and the gallery of indigenous North American stuff, much of which is again, stolen. Also the Enlightenment room, which I'm interested to go back to with more time, partly because it contains more stuff that the British Museum actually has a right to than a lot of the galleries!

Dinner was pancakes and mango lambic beer at My Old Dutch in Holborn, which has been a tradition since I visited the BM with my friend MK and his then two-year-old.

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Thanks to ambyr's rec, we watched Dukhtar ['Daughter'], (2014, directed Afia Nathaniel).

ambyr described this very well: it does include misogyny and violence, but ultimately it's a hopeful film. The film feels almost like a stage play; it is almost entirely about the characters, a mother trying to save her young daughter, and the roadster who reluctantly helps them. The camera doesn't dwell either on the beautiful scenery (there are mountains in the background, but no gorgeous cinematic shots) or on the violence; there are quite a few shootings in the film, but it's never gory because it's not about gun porn, it's about trying to escape from that violent world of gang / tribal violence. Quite a bit of it is filmed in shaky-cam style as if it were just incidental video of people's lives.

The characters are all really vivid, and I cared about them a lot, partly because the film is so careful to avoid piling on the drama. The tribal enforcers who go around shooting almost-random people in order to make people fear them are squalid, not glamorous. The elder who is desperate enough to sell his 10-year-old daughter for protection is basically pathetic rather than evil. The main character, Samiya Mumtaz' Allah Rakhi is beautiful and brave, but not really a heroine, she's desperate and runs away with her daughter with almost no plan for how they're going to survive. In other words she's really plausible for a barely literate woman married at 15 and sent to a remote, very patriarchal village in the mountains.

The romance between Allah Rakhi and Sohail is likewise really understated. He's not a white knight saving the princess, and in fact they even joke about how much he doesn't fit that romantic stereotype. He's a troubled person who has survived and escaped from the Taliban training camps, and he doesn't really want to get involved but can't just abandon a desperate mother and daughter to their fate. They have a certain amount of tenderness, but don't instantly fall in love and it's not clear whether their relationship will last, or whether it will end up being romantic or more friend-based. I also really liked that the dashing, handsome man who is avuncular with the kid and flirts with the mother in a rather aggressive way turns out to be a bad guy, not the love interest.

The ending is really odd. The credits just happen in the middle of a desperate car-ride taking the heroine to hospital bleeding from a gunshot wound. I think we're meant to infer that she survives but it's really not clear.

Next up: Nigeria, our first African country. Any recommendations of Nigerian films? Ideally from the 21^st century, and not primarily about violence or depressing real-world history.

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I'm counting 16 March as day 0, being when the government actually started getting serious about reducing the rate of infection spreading.

Will cut all these entries and tag Covid, so feel free to block or ignore or filter if that's best for you.

Day -2 (Saturday): After much dithering decided I did want to enjoy my last planned excursion before cancelling everything. Travelled to London with ghoti_mhic_uait, attended a Pop-up Painting event in a fairly crowded room under a pub, and then went out for dinner in a half-empty, very nice South Bank restaurant. I suspect if that was a mistake I'll never know. Mainly I feel glad that I got three really nice dates with my three partners in the last semi-normal week. One of them involved staying in being coupley, but two of them involved trips to London probably later than was wise.

Anyway the pop-up painting was cool. They set you up with a canvas, brushes, acrylic paints, and an apron, and there's a reference image to copy. In our case it was loosely based on this Banksy, but an interpretation of it, not exactly that picture. The first hour or so, they let the participants just play around with paints, doing whatever we liked to fill in the background. I pretty much just copied the reference image's sunset sky, because I wanted to get comfortable with using the paints, mixing colours and creating textures, more than I wanted to try to exercise creativity. Then there was a break with wine, then in the last 40 minutes the facilitators talked through copying the silhouette of the girl, in a fair amount of detail, like, make a C shape here, this line should be at a 45 degree angle, etc. You were still allowed to paint something else if you wanted to, but again, I found following directions quite helpful. The audience were relatively diverse; mostly young-ish but seemed to be a good cross-section of the London public.

At the moment ghoti_mhic_uait can eat basically only protein and needs a lot of meat anyway, and I'm vegetarian and tend to get most of my calories from carbs. Ghoti miraculously managed to find a place that could feed both of us, this rather lovely Eastern European place. I had creamed mushrooms with some latke-ish things, and a sort of lentil pie with cucumber salad and a lot of capers, and Ghoti had some really impressive-looking pickled herring, and some roast duck with apples and red cabbage. It was very exciting, and goodness knows if we'd ever get a table for a normal weekend. They're also very into their vodka and cocktails, which we didn't sample but I might be interested to try a more alcohol-focused event another time.

London was quiet but not completely a ghost town. Almost everybody who booked showed up for the painting, but it was the last one the organization ran, they're cancelling going forward.

Day -1 (Sunday): The synagogue ran Sunday school as normal, on the grounds that schools are still open. But two of the teachers (who are related to each other) didn't show, so I had to take two classes. And in fact, of my expected 10 children across two classes, only three showed up, and we had only 14 of our roster of 50 overall. So most likely we're not going to bother running the last two classes before Pesach, but it's not definitely cancelled yet. In the afternoon OSOs and their children came over for roleplaying, which again had been planned for a while and didn't seem dangerous enough to cancel.

Day zero (Monday): We had known since Friday that we'd been given a week to close the whole campus where I work (bar "essential" staff, mostly those working directly on Covid responses in the lab), and send everybody to work from home for an indefinite period, probably minimum several months. My team had a meeting about how we would handle the transition, and agreed that there was really no reason for most of us to return to the site after yesterday. My lovely line manager has been handling all the disaster response for the last several weeks, basically cancelling everything we do because nearly everything we do is... run international conferences. She was somewhat hysterical by yesterday, but just about holding things together. She very kindly offered to give me a lift home so I could take my computer equipment. We're allowed to take our ergonomic chairs and even our desks, or there's budget to set up home offices, though I was fine with just my laptop and a decent sized screen. Shit is serious.

We detoured via a lost property office to retrieve my wallet which had fallen out of my bag on the coach to work; the coach company tracked me down via a dental appointment card which led to the local council who called me before I cancelled the cards and before I got trapped on the other side of a quarantine barrier from my account access tokens. On the journey she put the radio on and we heard the government announcement.

I am technically in the high risk category as I have chronic asthma. I don't think my asthma is particularly "severe" but it probably would be if I got pneumonia. I haven't really fully processed thinking of myself as one of the "vulnerable" people rather than one of the healthy people who need to act to protect others. Since I'm working from home anyway, I don't have a whole lot of reason to need to go out for the next several weeks. But realistically it's gonna be months, isn't it? I had a bit of a feeling of being sent home to die when we were packing up the office. I have about the degree of death-fear that I get when my period is late; it's not that likely that I actually have Covid-19, it's not that likely that if I do get it I will get complications, and even if I do get complications I might still survive it. I'm a little scared of social collapse, but only a little, I can't really picture, like, mass starvation or something.

Day 1 (Tuesday): I worked from home. I talked to jack a lot (he's very tolerant of my extrovert need to talk things through when it's emotionally scary). We took a car trip to his (deserted) office to pick up computer equipment for him to also work from home for the duration, and didn't interact with any other humans.

I am still undecided about whether I really will isolate myself completely, though the guidelines include me in the category of people who should. I will quit teaching Sunday school and attending services, which is likely to be academic anyway as I'm fairly certain the synagogue will close within the next few days. For now I intend to keep seeing my OSOs; they are ten minutes walk away and our lives are so intermingled that we probably all have the same infection status.

Personal status: feels like the beginning of a mild cold.
Social circle tally: one case, two acquaintances with suspicious symptoms. Nobody I've been in physical contact with within a month though.

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Day 3 (Wednesday): successful social distancing, yay. I worked from home, I came into contact with no humans except jack.

Work tried to establish ways to keep in touch, socially as well as for specific work concerns. We have just moved to a new system, Cisco Webex, for conference calls, and it's really not holding up to the volume of everybody suddenly moving to WFH. So we had a slightly hilarious team coffee chat, when half the participants had no audio and we ended up playing charades.

Mood-wise, I felt slightly manic all day. Every time I had to communicate with someone at work I used way too many words, and I got plenty done but everything felt like it was in a massive rush and slightly out of control.

I also successfully persuaded my mother, and my Stoke community, not to hold big Passover seders with crowds of vulnerable people travelling from all over to gather in a small room and share meals. It is going to be really awful to miss a big seder with my family of origin for the first time in my 41 years of life. But better than infecting my over-70 parents or my paralysed brother. And the Stoke community are breaking a streak of even more decades, and they grumped that I (along with the Chief Rabbi of their movement, the United Synagogue) am overreacting, but they're not risking the health of their various elderly and frail members, so that's good.

Today I mostly worked from home, but I had to go out for, of all things, dental surgery. I'd assumed it just wouldn't happen in the middle of a pandemic, but a tooth extraction is sufficiently urgent that it went ahead. The poor receptionist was absolutely frantically sanitizing every surface continuously.

I had never had a tooth taken out before today. Really rubbish first, I must say! The dentist was super lovely, kind without being patronizing, but I found myself very close to panic. The actual operation lasted only a couple of minutes and the local anaesthetic was the (not very bad) worst part of it, but anyway. I decided to walk home in order to calm myself down, though jack did offer me a lift. Then I met up with ghoti_mhic_uait and we went for another walk together, which did a lot for my general mood and happiness.

Town was quieter than usual, but not completely dead; there were enough walkers, cyclists and joggers out and about that it wasn't entirely easy to maintain the prescribed 2 metre separation from everybody. Also businesses, including pubs and other social gathering spots, are still open (because the government are trying to make individual businesses rather than insurers or the state assume the risk of telling individuals not to go to bars, but not telling bars to actually close), and were quiet but had some customers.

Personal status: If I had the beginning of a mild cold before, I now feel I have the end of a mild cold. Sore throat which I can't tell if it's an infection or a reaction to having my mouth poked about.
Social circle tally: One case, four with suspicious symptoms. All online acquaintances so far.

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Nobody had any recs for Nigeria, so we poked around a bunch of internet best of lists and came up with Lionheart, (2018, dir Genevieve Nnaji), which turned out to be a great choice.

Lionheart is about a young business woman, Adaeze, who has to overcome sexism and save her father's struggling transport business. The director, Nnaji, also plays the title role and does a brilliant job. What I particularly loved about this film was that it undermined my genre expectations of feel-good feminist films. Adaeze doesn't have to outsmart and triumph over the sexist men, she has to learn to collaborate with people different from herself. And the company doesn't win by beating its rivals but by conducting a merger that at the start seemed unthinkable, requiring cooperation between her Igbo, Christian family and some Hausa (I think?) Muslims.

In particular, the eccentric uncle who is inexplicably appointed as acting MD when everybody knows it should have been Adaeze turns out to have some key strengths. He is in fact only annoying, and not a jerk. His people skills and intuition perfectly complement Adaeze's business acumen. (And how nice to have a female lead be the excessively competent and rational one!)

Adaeze does experience some sexism, particularly creepy men who expect sexual favours in return for investment in the business. But most of the antagonists are just nasty in a gender neutral way, like they want to sell the business to a conniving rival for quick money.

Anyway that was a really sweet date-night movie and I do feel our film project is back on track

Any recs for Bangladeshi films? We are most excited about 21^st century films not primarily about violence or depressing real-world history.

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Well, as they say, that escalated quickly.

Day 5 (Friday): Stayed home all day with jack. We ordered takeaway for our date night while we still can. The delivery guy wore a proper facemask.

Day 6 (Saturday): Woke up feeling kind of grim. Decided, on consultation with my partners, that I was fairly sure it was just a cold, so we agreed I would go ahead with my planned evening with cjwatson and the children.

In the morning I virtually 'attended' a livestreamed service, which is a really really new thing for my community who normally ban telecoms and electronics on the Sabbath. It was weird, but I felt good for praying with the community even if I wasn't actually interacting with them directly. In the afternoon I did a virtual play readthrough over Zoom, organized by the lovely wildeabandon. It was really really fun, and I got to see the faces of friends I haven't seen for ages, as well as a couple of internet acquaintances I had no mental image of previously. The play was Loves labours lost and I played a couple of small but fun roles, Lady Katharine, a slightly bitchy court woman, and Sir Nathaniel, a pompous curate.

And then I walked to my partners' house, and it was sunny and seemed basically normal. Plus I was feeling completely better by mid afternoon. I took a winding route to stay most of 2m away from any other pedestrians. We played Labyrinth and watched TV and I stayed the night.

In the morning (Sunday) there was more TV and another game, Robot turtles, a sort of cut-down, child-friendly version of Robo Rally, which the children have got much better at since we last played. And we walked part way together to metamour's house where there was mother's day planned, which I didn't join in with, I went home to jack. We went out to the local shop, I walked with him to enjoy the spring weather and he did the actual shopping, as I'm in theory more vulnerable than him.

Sunday evening I did my chevruta (traditional paired Jewish text study), which has always been online because my partner is in New York, and we had a long and pleasant video call with some old friends of jack's I don't see often enough.

Today, day 8, well, jack and I stayed home, mostly working. And anxiously watching the news of how most of the country treated the weekend as a bonus bank holiday and flocked to tourist spots and crowded into parks and gardens. It was kind of obvious the restrictions would have to get stricter, if that was how people were interpreting more gentle restrictions.

Then they cancelled the daily "briefing" (I haven't really been listening to them as it's mostly just our incompetent prime minister waffling with no substance) for a COBRA meeting. I carried out my intended plan of collecting Judith from OSOs' for a Hebrew lesson, and am I ever glad I did. Because as of an hour ago, and starting from tonight, we're no longer allowed out at all except for "essential" purposes. And we're explicitly no longer allowed to meet friends and family. So I don't know how long it will be before I get to hug my partners again.

In a way, lockdown isn't very different from how we were already behaving, with one vulnerable person in each of our three houses (me and metamour have asthma, girlfriend is pregnant). We were already going out only once a day for exercise, we were already only visiting shops to buy, like, food. But what it has taken away from us is that we can no longer bounce between the three houses, treating the polycule as a closed pod. I think our behaviour for the past week has been safe. If I walk a kilometre to my partners' house, that's no different from walking a kilometre in a random direction to get exercise. But the problem is everybody thinks they're an exception, (and multi-household poly relationships are never thought of in official rulings), so now it's forbidden.

The announcement says three weeks, but I think what's actually going to happen is that people will again not take the restrictions seriously and it will have to be extended.

Personal status: I thought I was doing ok, and the tighter restrictions are almost certainly necessary and not really a surprise. But it hurts.
Social circle tally: three cases, including one person I see face to face (though not for at least a month). 8 mostly online acquaintances with suspicious symptoms.

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Covid-adjacent but mostly about adapting to circumstances rather than the illness directly.

If you're suddenly homeschooling your children, or if you're suddenly having to teach online when you're used to face-to-face, there are several things I might be able to help with. I have a lot of experience and knowledge of education, all age groups from about aged 7 to university-level. My current job is primarily about online learning so I know quite a lot about both the pedagogy and the technology. I can offer advice on how to teach a range of topics, what online resources are available, or conversely how to adapt the expertise you already have to a virtual context.

I'm no expert on homeschooling, so I'm probably not the best person to help you plan your curriculum, decide your educational philosophy etc. I'm thinking more on the individual topic or activity level. My professional training is in life sciences, and I have a fairly solid grasp of maths, biology and chemistry. Plus quite a lot of experience of tutoring in random other subjects like literature and religion and social sciences. I'm less useful at sport and creative arts, but I can still probably help to find resources and give advice on a general level.

Another thing I can offer, and would actually be quite happy to do, is I can give some direct external input into your teaching. Sometimes children don't take learning entirely seriously, or get over-invested emotionally, if teacher is also their parent, and a new person can be useful. So I can give a virtual lesson if we can arrange a time and topic, or I can set a novel task for a pupil, or I can look at and give helpful, constructive comments on something your children have created, even grade or mark things if you're into that. Feel free to PM me if you're not comfortable discussing details in public.

Aside from that, I wanted to plug covidcoffeecorner, which is a lovely little community where people post a different topic every day and a few dozen people chat about it. So if you miss mostly topic-centred communities from LJ (or even older systems) it might be worth having a look. There's also fictional_fans which has picked up a lot of activity lately, if you are interested in fandom-related (in the broadest sense) topic-focused discussions.

I assume few people are actually short of reading material, but I wanted to recommend a couple of collections.

honigfrosch is gathering poetry in various languages.

The Decameron project has a bunch of quite well-known speculative fiction authors writing stories in response to the pandemic. (Not all of them are directly about disease; it's modelled on the original where fictional people who were sheltering from plague wrote a bunch of stories.) It's hosted on Patreon but available without payment.

angelofthenorth made a second language café post last month, and it didn't get nearly as much attention as the first, so I reckon now would be a good time to revive it, if you feel like practising foreign languages with friendly people.

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Adapting to the new normal.

Day 9 (Tuesday): Worked from home. Did my daily exercise by walking past the house where OSOs are quarantined so we could wave to each other from a distance. We actually ended up having a conversation, them on their doorstep, me several metres away. Which is perhaps stretching the no gathering thing a little but I think the risk is low and the psychological benefit is enormous. I have vastly more cope knowing I can still see and talk to my partners.

Day 10: (Wednesday): Worked from home. Failed to secure online delivery for now. Called my parents who reported that they were doing fine and that my doctor cousin had completely randomly, for no reason at all, told them they need to isolate from my brother within the household. I said that sounded over the top. But then I spoke to my brother and it turned out parents left out an extremely salient fact, namely that they had been in recent contact with someone symptomatic. Called my parents again, and talked them through sensible in-house isolation precautions. Part of the reason my brother is quarantining with them is because they have a big house with multiple kitchens and bathrooms, so hopefully this is doable. But I've been kind of tearing my hear out over all this.

Day 11: (Thursday): Another exercise walk and distanced chat with OSOs. Again, felt much better for that. I noticed that the local corner shop is observing proper social distancing, with only a few people allowed in the shop at a time, and everybody else queuing outside actually at 2m separation.

Took part in a rehearsal for running Saturday's service purely over Zoom. (Unlike last week, nobody is going to the synagogue building at all, so we will need to coordinate between people in different locations.) There are lots of probably more exciting options for livestreamed shabbat services, but if you would like to virtually join ours on Saturday (and hear / see me fake-read the Torah), PM me for the Zoom link. I'm not putting it on the public internet because scumbags have been hacking Zoom-based services in order to harass Jews :-(

Day 12 (today): Pleasantly boring day. jack did some shopping in a locally owned shop, which was quieter than Tesco.

Personal status: In spite of being worried about my family of origin, I am getting used to this situation and basically feel ok. Also I still / again have mild cold symptoms. Tracking makes me paranoid, but also makes me realize just how unreasonably susceptible I am to mild respiratory stuff. I've pretty much constantly had a mild cough, with occasional chest soreness or shortness of breath ever since I started paying attention. I'm pretty sure it's chronic asthma with rhinitis and unreasonable sensitivity to normal endemic viruses, rather than acute Covid, but 'pretty sure' isn't ideal with the stakes this high.

Social circle tally: five cases. Twelve people with suspicious symptoms. Now including some people I see in person, but none recently.

Does anyone have any recommendations for decent online bridge setups? Free as in beer would be good, free as in speech is always a bonus. We can probably download software if needed, but ideally we want to work across multiple different tech eg phones, tablets, laptops with various OSes, so probably web-based is easiest. Also it needs to be at least vaguely usable by people who are not completely computer savvy, though not completely clueless either.

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Small milestones.

A couple of significant milestones just now: it's been a full week since I went within 2m of anyone other than jack. He's not been as fully isolated as I have, since he has no underlying conditions and has been doing our household shopping. Of course making an effort to avoid getting too close to people, but still.

And I've passed the magic 14 days since I last took public transport and intentionally went to venue with a crowd of people. I don't yet feel confident I definitely haven't caught the virus, particularly since I've spent most of the intervening time with very mild almost-certainly-a-cold-but-who-knows symptoms. But the feeling of impending doom is somewhat lessened, knowing that I've been in a two person almost closed pod for most of the significant infectious period.

Anyway, Day 12, Friday, was almost a normal day. I often work from home Fridays in normal life anyway, and I was very absorbed in putting the finishing touches to my online course. And then after 5 I had date night with jack, like we always do, and we cooked together and played a successful episode of Gloomhaven.

Day 13, Saturday, I did online synagogue service again. This time I had a small role in the service, reading something from Leviticus in place of a full Torah reading. And this time it was entirely on Zoom, with nobody physically in the synagogue. It went pretty well and it was nice to see people's faces all over the screen. And another lovely readthrough with wildeabandon and co, the radio play of Gaiman's Stardust, where I had the delightful role of the chief evil witch Morwanneg, and was congratulated on my evilness. And a Zoom party in the evening hosted by ptc24. Finally a phonecall with cjwatson before we both retired. So yeah, basically a very full day of virtual socializing!

Day 14, Sunday, wasn't much quieter. I virtually attended OSOs' church service, since they'd showed up to mine and it seems nice to support each other. It's much more isolated than ours: they literally just have a camera feed of their priest in an empty church, with no interaction with the rest of the congregation. I could hear the Communion wafer snap, which is a weird experience; I've been told it's basically like matzah but I didn't know that it sounds like matzah.

We just about had time for lunch between church and setting up for an online game of bridge, with my brother and parents in one location, and me and Jack in one location, and OSOs and metamour in a third location. Thank you to silveradept for recommending us a nice simple card playing site, Trickster Cards. It's not completely perfect but it's a lot less fiddly than some of the more serious sites we found. We had hoped to use Jitsi for video chat but couldn't get it to work on everybody's assorted devices, so we fell back to Zoom and just put up with redialling every 40 minutes. And I had to leave the gaming table fairly promptly for my online chevruta.

Today, day 15 since the somewhat arbitrary date I started counting, I attended communal weekday prayers, which I basically haven't done since I lived in Sweden in the mid 2000s. Broadcast Zoom service from the movement rabbinic seminary, which was delightful. Not only could I see people's faces on screen, I could see the smattering of fellow Reform Jews who, like me, lay tefillin every day. It's always been a bit lonely knowing that the very great majority of people who lay tefillin don't approve of women, and anyway with normal life commuting I can't usually get to communal prayers on weekdays.

I did some work, though mostly got very distracted by the dashboard of my new course, showing lots of people signing up from just about every corner of the globe. Look, it's an actual real thing out in the world, with 1500 people actually learning from materials I put together! And this evening I have my online Hebrew class as usual, and jack is doing some online roleplaying.

No new symptoms showing up among my immediate social circle in the last few days. However I'm starting to hear of deaths of people I'm connected to at second degree. Two people from partners' church. One of our movement rabbis. The father and grandfather of one of the cleaners at work. I am sad about these people I don't know (I think I might have met R' Kraft once or twice, may his memory be a blessing), but also afraid. Afraid that somehow, I'll run out of sadness and not be able to respond appropriately when someone I know is bereaved. Or that I won't, and I'll just drown in endless grief. Like a lot of these things there's no point buying trouble by worrying about it.

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I am getting so angry about trying to deal with a viral pandemic by stopping people from enjoying themselves.

I understand that people are scared and trying to claw back some control. I understand that some people are excluded from even infection-safe forms of fun, because of existing disabilities or because they have extra work at the moment rather than extra free time or because of poverty. But enjoying yourself isn't an infection risk and it isn't morally bad.

If I choose to take my exercise by heading to an attractive area with nature and nice views, I'm not doing anyone any harm. There's no benefit to punishing myself by walking alongside a busy road through a suburban wasteland. If a family have fun together, have a kickabout or play fetch with their pets, that's at least as good and probably better than joylessly frogmarching the children and dog round the block.

And even in normal times, I hate the assumption that exercise has to be grim and miserable to count as exercise. It's still exercise if you move your body in ways that bring you joy, if you play, if you take your exercise somewhere that uplifts you. I got annoyed with someone (who I basically quite like) on Twitter mocking people who never normally take exercise chafing at only being allowed to go out for exercise once a day. But plenty of people are deprived of movement by the pandemic even if they don't normally put on special clothes and gear and 'go for' a walk or run. Lots of us exercise by walking or cycling to do our errands or to see friends, or we exercise by dancing or climbing or whatever, and those things are still bloody exercise.

If I go to the shop or make an online order for provisions, in order to be able to, you know, eat for the next however many weeks, I'm not doing any harm by buying treats as well as the most virtuously dull possible staples. Nobody's risk of illness is increased if I also buy something that curtain-twitching busybodies consider "exotic", or alcohol, or, shock horror, something containing ~sugar~.

If I stop for a minute during my necessary excursions to admire the cherry blossom, I'm not doing any harm. I'm not increasing infection risk, I'm not suddenly invalidating the necessity of my trip. If I take a snack or a drink with me to enjoy outdoors instead of shut up in my home, so what?

And even worse than people trying to police each other for having fun during a pandemic, is the actual literal police harassing or even arresting people for perfectly innocent, low risk activities that happen to be considered too enjoyable. legionseagle, a real life lawyer, says Everything currently coming back from the policing front has got me more scared than the virus itself, and I was pretty fucking terrified about the virus.. I'm scared that people are going to be intimidated and criminalized, and we all know who is preferentially targeted by the police, but I'm also scared that the police are a huge vector of infection. Which is worse: me taking a walk in a pleasant park while staying 2m away from everybody else, or the police, who regularly interact with all kinds of different people in the course of their jobs, getting into my social distancing space in order to reprimand me for being somewhere pretty rather than somewhere boring?

Anyway, just let people harmlessly enjoy themselves, FFS.

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As of some time last night, I have novel respiratory symptoms. I'm basically fine but it feels safest to act as if I am infected.

My lungs hurt, and it's not the tightness I associate with mild asthma symptoms, or the tired muscle ache / burn I associate with a bad cough (whether asthma or viral). Not badly, but pretty much continuously. I'm coughing a bit but not severely, and I don't feel feverish. I have a slight headache and sore throat, but that could be just about anything including stress. I am somewhat distracted but I've been able to get on with useful work today.

I'm probably being over-cautious, but I feel like the balance of probabilities points towards suspected case. So this morning jack and I activated our self-isolation plan. We've divided up the house so that I "live" upstairs and he stays downstairs apart from using the bathroom. We have separate towels and we're cleaning metal bathroom surfaces constantly. jack has taken on food prep for both of us and he's leaving me plates of food and cups of tea and retreating to the bottom of the stairs.

And we're preparing to avoid leaving the house at all until it's more likely that we're not infectious than that we still are. We have plenty of supplies, and we managed to get an online supermarket delivery order in by virtue of going on the website just after midnight last night, which was fortuitous timing. It's going to suck, more so if my symptoms progress beyond the almost ignorable level, but since we can do this I think it's the right thing.

The most likely (and in some ways comforting) narrative I can come up with is that I picked this up when I had to attend a dental appointment two weeks ago. I had very mild symptoms (including a tell-tale sore throat) within a few days of that surgery, which in retrospect I can imagine might have been the first phase. And now, 12 days after the first symptoms, I have potential lower respiratory tract symptoms, so hopefully this is the second phase. That's comforting because it suggests my source of infection is a necessary medical appointment rather than either something frivolous I did, or just being unlucky even though I've stayed at home except for exercise for ten days now, and jack has been doing minimal necessary shopping with careful social distancing. And if I picked it up at the dentist it's unlikely I infected the dentist or any of his staff or patients. Also, if my guess is right I'm probably approaching the end of the infectious phase.

We are really not sure how long we should maintain full isolation at home. UK guidelines say 7 days from start of symptoms (me, today), or 14 days from contact with a symptomatic person (Jack). But I suspect this is not entirely adequate especially as it's much less restrictive than the WHO advice. If my symptoms don't get any worse than this and jack doesn't get sick at all, which is definitely the brnach of the timeline I'm hoping for, I won't know whether I've actually had Covid. Currently we're thinking that if nothing changes we'll start interacting with eachother again after 7 days, but not go outside until we're more confident the incubation period has passed; I think the safest is 14 days from the end of symptoms but we might not be able to sustain that.

Send hugs and support to jack, please? He's doing amazingly in a somewhat scary situation.

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I'm doing basically fine but continuing to be careful.

I still have the same single worrying symptom I had on Thursday, sore lungs. I don't otherwise feel ill, feverish, tired or anything else, so I'm really second guessing myself over whether isolation was the right choice.

The last few days have been mostly pleasant though stressful for jack who's handling everything on his own and worrying about me getting seriously ill or possibly infecting him.

Friday was 19 days since the government started taking action. I worked in my new upstairs den (previously jack's den.) We had a weird date where jack brought me up a tray with the Shabbat ritual things, I made kiddush sitting at the top of the stairs and he sat at the bottom, and we ate dinner in parallel but at a distance. And then we played Potion explosion over Steam, which worked pretty well.

The weekend was ridiculously lovely, and we were both good and only sunbathed and exercised in our own garden. Saturday, day 20, I went to virtual shul, which on only the second iteration starts to feel almost normal. Bigger than usual congregation, including some of the people who are usually strict about not using electronic technology on Shabbat. And in the afternoon I attended the second half of wildeabandon's Stardust readthrough which was generally satisfying and companionable. And I had a long phonecall with ghoti_mhic_uait.

Sunday, day 21, had slightly fewer online social commitments. We had a lot of time in the sunshine in the garden, remaining carefully distanced. cjwatson came by to wave to me from the street while I looked out of an upstairs window like some ridiculous fairy tale princess. We video chatted to jack's university friends; it's been a long time since the original trio got together since one of them lives in Croatia and has two small children. And I did my online chevruta just like the previous week, slightly sheepishly admitting I was Skyping from bed because I was isolating for basically no reason. And I had a long conversation with cjwatson in the evening.

Since today is day 22, and two weeks of lockdown, it's now been a whole two weeks since I last interacted directly with anyone other than jack. jack has also not left the house or allowed delivery people to come close to him since I got the weird symptoms on Thursday, so five days so far.

I now know eight people who have pretty clearly been through a bout of coronavirus, and 21 who like me are being careful because they have suspicious symptoms.

Thanks to everyone who made nice comments on my last post, I really appreciate all of you.

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So, to break up the all pandemic all the time posts: I spent most of March getting my first big project at work over the line. I and my team have just released a FutureLearn MOOC. Behold: Antimicrobial Resistance in Bacterial Pathogens.

It's not completely unrelated to the pandemic, because it's about using genomics methods to detect and avoid antibiotic resistance, and track outbreaks of infectious diseases, albeit bacterial rather than viral. It turned out the timing was quite fortuitous, because the whole world is under lockdown and lots of people have time for taking online courses and interest in epidemics and outbreaks.

So slightly under halfway through the course, we have 5000 sign-ups, from basically every country in the world except places like North Korea and Turkmenistan that don't let people access the internet. And we got a personal message of congratulations from the head of section for making such an awesome course.

On the other hand the timing was slightly disastrous because two weeks before launch the lead educator had to drop out of working on the course and go off to run the national Covid-19 sequencing effort. The rest of the team pulled together in very trying circumstances, more than just the general lockdown and emergency, they're all more or less directly involved in clinical-related work on the pandemic. But the last few weeks have been intense, to say the least.

You're welcome to have a go if you like. It's completely free as in beer - we're funded by the Wellcome Trust so we pay for everybody to have premium access to the course. It's quite technical though; our target audience was basically people who are already working in the field of antibiotic resistance but want to learn about modern cutting edge techniques. If you have college-level science and a general interest it should be fine, and we do have a bunch of keen secondary school students who are desperate for something to learn while public exams are cancelled.

If you are excited about it but it's a bit too technical, there is a companion course called Disease outbreaks and antimicrobial resistance. Which I didn't really work on directly, it all happened before I joined the institution, but it's still part of the portfolio of courses I manage.

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So like most other Jews I took part in virtual seders this year. It was very emotional and mostly good.

In less than a month, it's been amazing how Jewish communities have adapted to being mostly virtual. My home synagogue went from frowning on use of electronics at all on Shabbat and festivals, to unanimous agreement that we're keeping up the livestreaming once we're allowed back in our physical building, and the most vocal objectors to tech have started leading virtual services. Basically, the first time we did it, with great trepidation, we saw the faces of former members who have moved away, even to other continents, and of disabled and chronically ill members who are only variably able to attend shul in person. And suddenly, we all viscerally understood that using telecomms for religious purposes and to be together as a community is honoring the sabbath, not breaking it.

The other factor is that Zoom is good enough. It's not perfect, but the sound and picture quality, and the interoperability across devices, and the usability for people who aren't really tech savvy, are all good enough that you can just get on and have your virtual gathering. Yes, I know there are privacy and security concerns, but honestly I'm a bit impatient with hearing about those problems from people who live most of their online life in the Google empire. (People who are very strictly Free software only I have more sympathy for, but even then, if you're not providing tech support for people using elderly i-devices who can barely use a web browser, or at least working on products that are actually usable by people who haven't been programming since they could read, then my patience is still limited.)

In less than a month, we've gone from, stick a web cam in front of a service and hope, to people actually creating liturgy for distributed video call services. Even including fake Zoom-bombing by 'Pharaoh' refusing to let the people go, or 'Elijah'. What is still missing is the ritual around the Torah scrolls, and anything more than very limited music; my community pride themselves on their beautiful spontaneous harmonies and that's not really happening. But still, it's been amazing, people are praying together from their homes.

So, I agreed with my family that we would do a Zoom-based seder this year (I'm not quite sure about the coinage 'Zeder'). And planning the liturgy was a bit chaotic, but it's kind of always chaotic. We also all realized that actually, a virtual seder has a rather higher limit on how many people can join together, so instead of having two separate occasions for my family of origin and my family of choice, we all piled in to a huge seder, nine households, and my dad's sister and his oldest friend from uni who sometimes used to join us when we were kids. There was this moment when I was trying to introduce everybody who might not know each other, and I wanted to make it clear that my partners are my partners without getting derailed into a complicated poly coming out thing, and I said something kind of clumsy about usually being a family but less so at the moment under quarantine, and my lovely gf said, no, we're just as much family now, only in different physical places. There's a lot of sadness about not being able to gather in person for the one day in the year when we always manage a family reunion no matter what, but that moment went a long way to make up for it.

I struggled a bit with finding an online Hagaddah. I mean, there are a zillion options, but I found few that met my requirements of being relatively easy to use while you also have your fellow guests in their little video grid in another window, containing all the traditional text in a clear layout that distinguishes it from commentary, and not being intolerably sexist. But we made up seder plates as best as we could, with ingenious substitutions in some houses and the family's heirloom china in others. And mostly we could judge whose turn it was to speak, though it's cognitively extremely taxing compared to being at the same table, and we managed to read the essential words and have some discussions, and Judith (who has been learning Hebrew for about one term) sang the four questions. And we sort of managed to hide and hunt for the afikomen. I hadn't been sure about maintaining the Zoom connection while we were eating, but actually about half the houses dropped out and the rest of us remained and managed to chat and catch up and argue politics and even complete the remainder of a mostly finished Times jumbo crossword over Zoom. Very few aspects of a proper seder meal were lacking!

The thing about a virtual seder is, we finished the main ritual at 10, and clearing up for 2 is much quicker than clearing up for 20, and we didn't have to travel home via spending an hour standing in the doorway talking about how we really must get going, so actually we managed quite an early night. And then the morning service, which I basically never make it to, was online rather than in town, so I showed up. Then second night, my Stoke community completely spontaneously organized a virtual community seder, with no input at all from me. Someone else put together a virtual Hagaddah by combining pages from various sources and making a kind of slide-slow, and got everybody to take part in the reading, and did fun stuff for kids (another pupil from the same Hebrew class where I'm teaching my partners' kid did the four questions) the community just showed up and got on with it. A few stayed away because it's an Orthodox community and some followed the Ashkenazi rabbinate's ruling that Zoom seders are forbidden, but it was lovely to see at least some of my people.

And my sister posted me her amazing Pesach cakes, and she and some other people rallied round to make sure I had matzah, and somehow, it's the most terrible Pesach but it's also a really wonderful Pesach. I am loving reading of everybody else's improvised seders, or their first times leading instead of deferring to their elders, or people who took advantage of the virtual seder to be able to be with both sets of inlaws or even relatives who normally can't stand eachother, or the people who are normally too secular but decided that this year they wanted to mark the occasion. And lots lots lots of people have pointed out that it couldn't be more in the spirit of Pesach that we're all improvising what sanctity we can while we huddle from danger. I was particularly moved by jjhunter's haiku and all the responses:

may it pass over
our elders our sick our home
everyone held safe

Also R' Debbie Young-Somers beautiful meditation on Dayenu:

Perhaps over zoom we will find companionship, or perhaps in the unusual quietness we will create space for the ‘still small voice’. It will be a Passover like no other, but this too shall Pass, and we will have done enough.

Chag sameach to all who celebrate, and extra love to all my Christian friends whose Easter is going to be even weirder than my Pesach has been.

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Still basically fine, but this one is a bit whiny.

I'm losing track of everything I'm trying to count. This is:

Day 27 since I started counting from vaguely serious government measures.

Day 19 since lockdown and since I last interacted with anyone other than jack.

Day 9 since I had maybe suspicious symptoms and since jack and I last left the house.

Day 3 since jack and I ended internal isolation from each other.

Day 2 of the Omer. In the first century a plague was lifted on 33^rd day; I somehow doubt we are going to be allowed out for picnics a month from now, but it's nice to imagine.

Even though everybody has been incredibly lovely, I'm kind of struggling a bit.

The first couple of days when I thought I might have symptoms, I had basically continuous lung soreness, but no other real symptoms, I wasn't tired or achy or feverish or coughing much more than normal. And since then the lung soreness hasn't completely gone away but it's become intermittent. So I'm not at all certain whether I was ever actually sick, and I'm also not at all certain whether, if I was infected, I'm now better. I feel that morally, we really need to isolate for at least a couple of weeks. Past Thursday (2 full weeks of isolation) I really don't know; I'm not exactly better but maybe I was never infected / infectious in the first place.

I'm a very sedentary person normally, but the complete absence of any physical activity was starting to get to me. During internal isolation I mostly stayed upstairs and jack downstairs, and for 9 days I have lost out on my permitted walks. So I have been getting a bunch of minor problems like back-ache, poor sleep, feeling lethargic; I think these are symptoms of under-exercising and not of the hypothetical virus which I probably don't have. I've tried to get a bit more serious about doing what exercise I can in the back garden, which yes, I know we are very privileged to have. So yesterday I started a C25K equivalent thing, replacing the running intervals with climbing on a stepper machine. That seems to be good, it provides resistance without putting strain on my lungs like climbing hills or stairs sometimes can. And I'm alternating that with some really basic strength exercises (at the moment not even weighted).

So as I reported, the start of Passover on Wednesday-Thursday was lovely. But yesterday, Friday (26 days at home) I found really hard. I'm missing the part of the festivals that happens after the intense liturgical stuff, when I get to spend relaxed time with my people. The middle of Passover, when at least some of my scattered family are still gathered and the seder is done and we can just hang out together. And this year that time happens to exactly span the Easter bank holiday weekend. Normally what happens is that I really revel in Friday and Saturday to focus entirely on jack; work is closed and doesn't need either of us, and our Christian partners are busy with the solemn bit of the Triduum, and most of our friends are either likewise Christian, or they're also on holiday. I am definitely enjoying jack's company but it doesn't feel like a treat this year when it's been just us two for nearly 3 weeks. And in a normal year we then get Sunday and Monday to hang out with OSOs and the children, as guests at their dinner and Easter egg hunt and other relaxed celebrations.

I know a lot of people have cancelled much more exciting bank holiday plans, for lots of people it's the only time they get away for a family holiday, or they were going to travel somewhere exciting, and a good number of my friends are missing Eastercon, and Christians are dealing with a very thin version of what should be a major festival. So I feel very ungrateful for being sad that I miss the umbra of the festival, just an afternoon of family time in one of our homes. But I do miss that, it turns out.

jack admitted, after more than 12 years together, that he doesn't actually like matzo brei. At which point I cried all over him, which probably retroactively justified his never previously mentioning that he doesn't like my Pesach treat. But it's not really the omelette, it's all the treats I'm missing this year. I don't even get my slightly subversive reduced price chocolate eggs this year since the police have apparently decided that buying Easter eggs is a crime. And the timing of isolation means we're a bit low on fresh vegetables, and I'm definitely not going to go hungry but I am going to have a sad Pesach once we run out of my sister's cakes.

jack fixed the practical issue by finding orgs and friends who are willing to deliver fresh vegetables to us. Co-op now do small, limited deliveries, and I followed up rmc28's suggestion of making an order from Kale and Damson who have temporarily switched from supplying the restaurant trade to delivering fresh produce to individual homes, and wonderful ceb really kindly agreed to bring us some mushrooms and other veg to tide us over the bank holiday weekend until the rest shows up. Oh, and J found some Pesach-suitable chocolate in our last big shopping order; I'm not desperately attached to my ordinary milk chocolate being egg-shaped and chocolate is good for feeling weepy and despairing.

Today I am less sad, partly because I'm remembering, and able, to bulk out what I eat during the week when snacks are scarce, and adequate blood sugar does wonders for my mood. But I'm still kinda sad. Lonely, mostly. And not currently coping too well with the uncertainty of when I can consider myself safe to return to the slightly less oppressive regime of being allowed out once a day. Or if I'll even get that at all because we might get a tighter lock-down by the time I'm confident I'm not infectious.

Also nearly a thousand reported deaths yesterday. I think we're not counting deaths thoroughly or consistently, but in as far as that means anything, I have some hope that it's a peak reflecting three weekends ago when everyone was having one last hurrah because the government implemented and communicated lockdown in a really ineffectual way, like announcing on Friday afternoon that the bars would be closed after Friday evening trade, and telling people to go to parks but not gather there. And personally, I have in fact been distancing from others for most of three weeks. Most of a month really; I was only interacting with OSOs for more than a week before even that was forbidden. So either whatever's wrong with me this week is in fact a mild case of Covid, or else I'm in a situation where there's a reasonable chance I will remain uninfected.

I'm very well aware that things could be a lot worse. I'm stuck in a pleasant house with a person I like a lot. And we have a nice garden where I can enjoy the sunshine. We are both being paid our full salary, because we are in fact both able to achieve meaningful work from home. And I have lots of friends who are willing to put in the time and effort to make contact through various telecommunication means. So I feel really self-indulgent even recording that I have a sad this weekend, but hey, I've been whining on this journal for 17 years now.

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We are stalled on Bangladeshi films for our world film project, because whenever we try to search we find films actually from Bangladesh completely swamped by Indian films in the Bengali language. So we fell back to watching Porco Rosso, which jack is fond of and I hadn't seen.

It was a very sweet date night movie, and I don't have a whole lot to say about it. I loved the landscapes, and I really enjoyed the characterization, particularly of Porco Rosso and Fio. The film is interestingly aware that hinting at romance between a middle-aged man and a 17yo girl is creepy, but it's also not not a romance.

The plot doesn't make a great deal of sense; like, the purported flashback to explain why Porco Rosso is under a curse to turn into a pig doesn't really explain what his experience as a fighter pilot has to do with the curse. There is a dramatic showdown between PR and his arch-rival, except that it ends with a weird anti-climax where they both run out of ammo and end up standing the sea punching each other. And there are evil fascists being evil in the background, but it's not a war movie about defeating the Fascists, nor a fatalistic film about how Italy is about to succumb to evil. And even the central romance doesn't really go anywhere; the ending is deliberately ambiguous about whether PR actually gets together with the beautiful woman who is in love with him.

That sounds a bit negative, which it isn't meant to be. It's enjoyable, it has a lot of cute and funny moments, the animation is really lovely. I was very happy to just go with the flow and accept that it didn't follow what I expected from the structure.

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From just about everybody.

1. Are you an Essential Worker?

Nope. I have been comfortably working from home for a month, making online education. It's useful, thousands of people have been learning about bacterial genomics from my stuff, but it's not essential. In many ways my job hasn't changed very much since lockdown since we did a lot of collaborating with scientists all over the world by conference call, in order to make material that goes on the internet anyway.

2. How many drinks have you had since the quarantine has started?

Hi, I've just finished celebrating Pesach. The two of us got through about 2 bottles of wine in the course of two seders and two kiddushes. And in the couple of weeks before that, something around one bottle between the two of us, again mostly for religious reasons rather than mental health reasons.

3. If you have kids... Are they driving you nuts?

I don't have kids, but there are children who are normally part of my life and now I'm quarantined in a different house from them. They are being amazing and bringing positivity to my life through the limited interaction we're allowed, playing music with me over video link, waving and sending hugs when I'm calling their adults or walking past their house for exercise. I am probably less sane than usual but it's from too little contact with not-my-own children, not too much.

4. What new hobby have you taken up during this

Online play readthroughs, organized by the marvellous wildeabandon. I've tried to start an ultra, ultra low-key exercise routine at home, which isn't a completely new hobby, but is something I hadn't done for some years.

5. How many grocery runs have you done?

None at all since I had maybe suspicious symptoms. We've got by on the generosity of friends bringing us occasional top-ups of extra-perishable stuff like milk and mushrooms, a big online order that fortuitously arrived just before we started full isolation, and a couple of local organizations that were able to make limited deliveries of produce. Before that, we weren't really counting. We had a decent amount of supplies in at the start of lockdown, and jack was visiting the local corner shop a couple of times a week to top up on fresh produce (with careful distancing), but we haven't needed to make a 'run' to a big supermarket since lockdown officially started.

6. What are you spending your stimulus check on?

I'm not getting any extra money, which is reasonable because I don't need any extra money. I am still working full time and still earning my full salary, as is jack. I'm not really even spending much extra on working from home rather than in an office; it's warm enough not to need the heating on during the day, and we already had plenty of broadband. We're spending very slightly more on food because we're getting everything delivered rather than picking up our own shopping, but it's fairly trivial on the scale of things.

Also, can I just say it's a weird framing to talk about a 'stimulus', ie money provided to encourage people to spend and keep the economy buoyant. The state is paying money to people to make it possible for them to stay home without starving, and really the aim is, or should be, to keep the economy as stagnant as possible, not to encourage economic activity which would involve people interacting and spreading the infection.

7. Do you have any special occasions that you will miss during this quarantine?

My plague of disappointment started with a work trip to Paraguay to help with some in-person training. Then I missed spending Passover with my family like I normally do. Other than that, I saw this coming far enough in advance that I didn't make a whole lot of plans for this spring or summer


8. Are you keeping your housework done?

About the same amount as normal. To an extent we tend to tidy for visitors and we're not having any visitors. But we're mostly succeeding with keeping on top of general maintenance. On the other hand I did zero Passover cleaning because I was isolating from jack at the time so not going into the kitchen, and I was uncertain enough about supplies that I wasn't willing to eliminate leavened products.

9a. What movie have you watched during this quarantine?

Lionheart
Porco Rosso

9b. What are you reading right now?

Err... Twitter, mostly. And some Gemara, the mystical bit of Chagigah, which is a project I've been meaning to get to for ages, and which I will hopefully be talking about soon.

9c. What video game are you playing?

At the weekend managed to progress our three-way game of Stellaris with cjwatson in a different house, so that was cool. Still a lot of Monster Legends on my phone. A little bit of the second chapter of 12 Labours of Hercules, but only about as often as I was playing it anyway, which isn't very often.

10. What are you streaming with?

Netflix, and even that occasionally. Spotify and YouTube for music. I haven't managed to watch any of the free broadcast theatre and opera performances yet.

11. 9 months from now is there any chance of you having a baby?

Very unlikely but not completely impossible. I'm quarantined away from the partner I'm most likely to have potentially-reproductive sex with (but I guess rarely indulging isn't never). I am 41 and was recently diagnosed with PCOS so I'm quite possibly not as fertile as I spent most of my adult life assuming. I have a coil, which should be pretty reliable at preventing pregnancy, but it has reached the end of its predicted 10-year lifetime, and getting it replaced was one of the things I failed to get sorted out while non-emergency medical stuff was still happening.

My partner is going to have a baby much sooner than 9 months away though! She made it before the virus even existed, and I have absolutely no idea how long it will be before I'm allowed to meet the little one, but I'm still quite excited.

12. What's your go-to quarantine meal?

About the same as not in quarantine: we call it goulash, but it isn't really anything to do with goulash. It's a sort of veggie chilli, basically onions, garlic, spice, tomato sauce, some combination of Quorn mince and beans, and veg if we have lots of veg available but otherwise it's nice on its own.

13. Is this whole situation making you paranoid?

So siderea the actual psych says it only counts as paranoia if you're irrationally afraid that beings with agency ... are behaving malevolently towards you personally. So, no, I do not think the virus is out to get me nor deliberately created by evil people.

However, I've already spent much of the last five years worrying that the government and much of the populace want me dead, and it's the worst version of that increasingly nasty government which is in charge of deciding whether buying ventilators and medical equipment is a good use of money that could otherwise be used for bridges to nowhere. When I hear people ranting about foreigners or Europeans or 'citizens of nowhere' it feels personal. I think it isn't, mostly. I'm a shirley exception for lots of people, or at least, I see posts on social media about how it's morally good to exterminate Jews from people who are broadly civil to me as an individual.

I'm scared of vigilantes who are using the pandemic as an excuse for violence against people they don't like being out in public, and to an extent I'm scared of overreach by the official police. And I'm somewhat scared of looting, of people getting desperate enough that they start breaking into houses like mine where there is enough toilet paper and storable foods. And a little bit scared of wannabe fascists trying to deliberately infect liberals and Jews. But not very scared, not to the point that it's actually interfering with my day-to-day life. Anxious, I guess, rather than paranoid.

14. Has your internet gone out on you during this time?

Nah. Internet is fine and I'm deeply grateful for that.

15. What month do you predict this all ends?

I don't think it's going to end, really, not all of it at once. It's going to be a very gradual climb back towards sufficient population immunity that we can live our lives without infection avoidance being the major determining factor in all decisions.

Predicting the end of the plague would require me to predict all of: how fast scientists will come up with a vaccine and reliable tests; how the disease itself will move through the population; and what our terrible politicians will decide, and I don't really have any information on any of those.

I'm guessing some relaxation of lockdown round about July or August, but we will still be very much in a pandemic situation. Sticking my finger in the air I think we'll likely have the capacity for mass vaccination and testing by early 2021, let's say January. But whether we will actually in practice have an effective programme of prevention and detection depends on decisions by a leadership who are erratic and evil, plus we are heading for a cliff-edge end to our Brexit transition at the end of 2020, so I think people will still be getting infected and dying well into 2021 or even 2022.

16. First thing you're gonna do when you get off quarantine?

Go to my OSOs' house and hug my partners and their children. And meet the baby, because I'm pretty certain that getting off quarantine is happening after baby is external.

17. Where do you wish you were right now?

I'm pretty happy with my location, my nice pleasant house with all my friends inside my computer, surrounded by a beautiful spring. The problem is not where I am, it's that I have been forced to stay here for a month and expect to continue here for months to come. I wish I could go to other places, especially places where my friends are.

I slightly wish to be in a country with a competent government, if I have to pick somewhere I'd probably go for New Zealand, but I don't actually wish I were in NZ, since I don't know anybody there and I can't imagine the circumstances that would lead to being there.

18. What free-from-quarantine activity are you missing the most?

Visiting people in person, primarily.

19. Have you run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer?

No. We usually buy a big family pack of TP once every few weeks and we happened to do so just before lockdown. Also I don't believe in hand sanitizer in a domestic setting.

20. Do you have enough food to last a month?

Yeah, probably. If we really couldn't get any fresh supplies for a whole month we would struggle, and we haven't counted it out in terms of calories and micronutrients per person per day, but we have decent amounts of long-lasting carbs and tinned vegetables.

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Less frequent posts since time hardly exists any more.

5 weeks of pandemic life (yesterday).
4 weeks of lockdown and since I last interacted with anyone except jack.
19 days since I thought I maybe had symptoms.
13 days since I ended internal isolation with jack. He hasn't had any symptoms at all.
5 days since I last had symptoms I was significantly worried about.
3 days since I returned to occasionally leaving the house for exercise.
Also, day 12 of the Omer.

So, healthwise: I had about 5 days, 2nd April to 7th April, when my lungs hurt. Just continuously, not affected by taking deep breaths or posture or anything much else. I didn't have any other symptoms whatsoever. After that I had like a week of thinking I was better, except that the soreness returned intermittently. So I really wasn't sure when I could start counting to the end of isolation; the UK guidelines say 7 days from symptoms appearing, but everywhere else counts from the end of symptoms, and the symptoms were so minor and tailed off so gradually that I don't know where I'd place the 'end'.

On 16th April I had a weird episode of dizziness, much worse than I'd ever experienced before. I pretty much had to lie down for a couple of hours. I had no other symptoms, no tiredness, no fever, just plain vertigo. I looked it up on the internet as you do, and articles from before Covid-19 suggested that sometimes people get post-viral labyrinthitis, whereas more up-to-date information suggested dizziness might be a Covid-19 symptom. I don't know. If my lung soreness was in fact Covid-19 then I got the dizziness two weeks after symptoms appeared, which seems implausibly long.

We decided we could start going out from Sunday 19th. We're still staying away from shops and avoiding other people. It's a bit arbitrary but it is over two weeks since I first worried, and 5 days since I had even the vaguest trace of symptoms (except the dizziness which might or might not be relevant).

So, the rest of the bank holiday weekend when I was sad that I didn't get to do Easter family time with OSOs. I did in fact enjoy some restful time with jack. We played Gloomhaven and unwound a bit from work and Pesach. And we managed to get in some remote Stellaris with cjwatson; it pretty much Just Worked even though we last played most of a year ago and had a really old version of the game. We used Discord for voice chat and it was pleasant and companionable.

Two and a half days back at work, then I had to take an afternoon off to be dizzy, but I was fine by Friday. The lovely Reform Movement started up broadcasting again after a break for the festival, and I attended a couple of seminars (but haven't yet got back into the habit of attending communal morning prayer).

This recent weekend I had deliberately not made too many social plans. I had a nice date with jack on Friday evening. OSOs virtually joined me for the Saturday morning service, and I listened in to their church service on Sunday. The latter feels much less like being together because it's just a broadcast, whereas our service has a Zoom congregation and is a bit more interactive, but I still wanted to support my partners. We also managed a couple of nearly spontaneous games of online bridge using the Trickster Cards site, a matter of just sending a text saying, do you feel like playing and pretty much starting a game with minimal faff. The first was with my mother and brother who are quarantined together, and the second was with OSOs. And I've had a couple of phonecall dates with each of my non-domestic partners.

Going out for the first time after self-isolation was weird. We decided that we could justify going for a short drive to reach a place more pleasant and less crowded than Cambridge city. We went to Waterbeach in order to look at the river, but decided against walking along it because the path is too narrow. It was the most amazingly gorgeous day, just perfect spring weather. And during the three weeks I stayed at home the world has become gloriously green. There were a few people about enjoying the weather but it was far from crowded. We walked in a little nature reserve and it was really lovely.

But I found it emotionally hard. I was anxious about getting too close to people, I was anxious about getting in trouble for having fun and not moving fast enough. And I was really struggling with feeling sad about this perfect spring that we're mostly going to miss, and not knowing how many more seasons will just flow past while we're all stuck indoors, and the people who won't make it through quarantine to enjoy the outdoors again.

Today was a bit better, I returned to my pre-symptoms habit of walking across very quiet north Cambridge suburbs to OSOs' house. And we chatted with them on their doorstep and me more than 2m away in the street, and that made me feel better. I was a lot less angsty about going out of the house the second time than the first.

Last few days I've had fairly obvious hayfever but otherwise feel fine. There are 7 people known to me personally who have had pretty clear cases of Covid-19, and 26 including me who have had suspicious symptoms.

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Normal life up to February or March 2020 was clearly the Before Times. (I like that better than calling it BC for 'before corona', because the latter seems slightly offensive to Christians, and Before Times is ironic but immediately transparent.)

ironed_orchid pointed out that the period we're in now is clearly the Time of Isolation.

So what are we going to call the post-Covid future? Maybe we'll never really be post-Covid, any more than we are post-flu or post-TB, but I am daring to hope for a time when it's not the dominant feature of everybody's lives. Anyone heard a term as memorable and fitting as Before Times and Time of Isolation?

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Seen several variations of this floating around. This particular version I got from ghoti_mhic_uait who pointed out that whether and how some of them are gendered can be really regional.

It/its - Basically nobody ever uses 'it' spontaneously unless they are trying to insult people for being GNC or perceived as trans. Most people perceive me as a not particularly feminine woman, so 'it' pretty much doesn't happen. I don't have any wish to be insulted by people who hate non-binary folk, but in the abstract I somewhat prefer 'it' to 'they'.

She/her - Most usual pronouns for me, and what I'll pick if people ask for pronouns and I don't want to be that annoying cis person who says 'I don't mind'. But actually I kind of don't mind.

He/him - I about equally don't mind 'he' as 'she', but in practice nobody ever reads me as male. I'll correct it if we're in an online discussion where people assume that articulate and sensible = male, but otherwise, emotionally it would be fine, realistically not very likely.

They/them - I feel guilty for saying this but I somewhat dislike being referred to as 'they'. I think it's the same objection I used to have when 'Ms' became common. It ought to mean that my gender (marital status) is irrelevant to what people are saying about me, which is correct, but actually it seems to mark me as one of those people for whom non-binary gender (or non-determinate marital status) is really important. So I don't like 'they' because I feel like I'm being gendered as a gender rebel, which I'm really not, I have no spare energy for activism around not fitting into the female box. I am entirely happy to refer to other people as they and hopefully wouldn't make too many assumptions about anybody else's gender politics, but I dislike it for myself.

Neo-pronouns - If it were a politically uncomplicated choice, and didn't have the same problem as 'they' that neo-pronouns mark you as a gender rebel, this would probably be my preference. I particularly relate to zie / hir ; some people object to this set because it sounds like German 'sie' meaning 'she' and therefore isn't truly gender neutral. But actually that matches pretty well how I feel about myself. I'm sort of female-ish, if people think of me as somewhere on the female side of neutral, that's about right. Also, as you can see from my icon, my preferred pronoun in Swedish is definitely 'hen'; yes, it does sound like the feminine gendered English word 'hen', which is a problem for many bilingual people, but for me personally it works really well.

Mr. - Can't really imagine this happening to me. Sometimes I choose it in a fit of pique if I'm choosing from a fixed list with only inappropriate title options. But just like I'm never going to be called 'he' spontaneously, nobody ever calls me Mr.

Mx - Don't love Mx but I'm ok with it. If social norms shift to the point that Mx is the default that people start out with rather than assuming Mr or Ms, that would be ok with me. But I don't love it anywhere near enough to insist on it if people are using a different title. (I don't like to spell it with a dot as it was in the list I copied from, 'Mx.' just looks wrong to me because it isn't an abbreviation for anything.)

Miss - My preferred title if Dr. isn't available. I dislike when people who don't know my name just call me 'Miss', but in a formal context where we're using titles, I will opt for 'Miss Surname'.

Ms - I guess, if I can't have Dr or Miss, then Ms is probably better that the other options. I am less prickly about being identified as a feminist than I was years ago, but it kind of doesn't really feel like me and I'd rather have Mx.

Mrs. - Don't like this because there is no sensible combination of 'Mrs.' with a surname. I don't have the same surname as my husband, so calling me 'Mrs. Hisname' is incorrect, but calling me 'Mrs. Myname' doesn't work either because it's not a married name, it's the same surname I was assigned at birth. A few distant relatives on both sides do default to 'Mrs. Hisname', and I don't really take offence at it, it's just a slightly incorrect formalism, not an insult. It just feels completely irrelevant to how I think of myself.

Dr. - This is my correct and earned title, which is incidentally gender neutral. I don't like being pretentious enough to insist on it always, but if I have to give a formal title to a random customer service bod, then Dr. is more correct than any of the other options. I'm happy to be addressed as 'Dr. Surname' if we are being formal. I'm not a fan of being addressed as just 'Dr.' or 'Doc', but I suppose it's better than plain 'Miss'.

Sir - I can't imagine a situation where someone would call me Sir outside a kink scene. And even then I'm almost exclusively submissive so it's not very likely. If I hypothetically did get read as male, and hypothetically it was the kind of context where 'Sir' is polite, I would be ok with it, but I'm not willing to go to the effort to be read as male, so it's not going to happen.

Ma'am - The cross-section of class and region I'm most familiar with doesn't use this. I have occasionally been called 'Madam' and I'm ok with that if it's a mark of genuine respect from someone who doesn't have a clue what my name or title are, not if it's sarcastic.

Dude - Relatively gender neutral in my dialect, but mostly used as an expression of surprise. So I wouldn't expect to be called 'dude' for real, but if it happened it would be ok.

Bro/bruh - I don't think anyone has ever called me either of these. If I heard it from someone from a similar sort of race and class background to me, I would assume they were taking the mick, either mocking me, or mocking what they perceive as a working class or ethnic minority dialect. If I were called 'bro' by someone who regularly calls people 'bro' that would be ok but again, unlikely because it's too male-gendered.

Sis - Fine from my actual siblings, and one particular friend with whom I have a negotiated fraternal relationship. Fine from people who are expressing feminist solidarity; I think I broadly prefer 'sister' over 'sis' but either is fine.

I'm also totally fine with Muslim women calling me 'sister' if they come from a culture where that's the general term of respect for anyone perceived as a woman. And if they normally only call fellow-Muslims 'sister' then it's a compliment to include a Jewish woman in the sisterhood. I don't expect it from Christians because I'm not a nun and not likely to be mistaken for one.

I wouldn't like to be called 'sis' by a stranger trying to get my attention though, it's one of the words that assumes intimacy.

Sib - Nobody really calls me 'sib' (or 'fam' for that matter). I like them, but they don't really belong in my culture and dialect.

Woman - I'm totally fine with being described as a woman. I strongly dislike being addressed as 'woman'; I can't think of a context where that would be anything other than deliberately rude.

Man - I don't think people call me 'man' directly. People use 'man' as an expression of emphasis, like, man, you're fast!. But I don't perceive that as being addressed as 'man'.

I have a few friends who will refer to me as a man if I happen to be wearing more masc attire than I usually do, and I am somewhat uncomfortable with that, because I'm not more male in trousers than a skirt, though I appreciate the underlying thought process which is to acknowledge gender-fluidity.

Boy - Implausible.

Girl - In a feminist-disapproved way, I do to some extent think of myself as a 'girl'. I am ok with other people calling me 'girl' in a context where it's obviously positive, like you go, girl!, but I wouldn't respond to someone calling me 'hey girl!' in the street. I might slightly ironically say 'because I'm a girl' when discussing some gender unfairness. I don't like people referring to me as a girl, because that can be patronizing. I particularly don't like 'girl' as a modifier; I'm not a 'girl scientist' or a 'girl manager' or a 'girl blogger', I'm a woman or female scientist.

King - I don't move in the kind of circles where this would ever be a term of address.

Queen - I think you have to be a certain kind of gay man or African American to call someone 'Queen' so this doesn't seem to fit me.

Prince - Implausible.

Princess - I kind of dislike this even as a term of endearment. It feels like a name for either a young child, or someone you don't really respect as a person but think of as basically an ornament or toy.

Captain - Completely irrelevant. The only time I'm ever even slightly likely to be addressed as 'Captain' is if someone is gently ribbing me for being bossy, which I suppose is ok if we have the kind of relationship where that sort of teasing is accepted.

Lady - As a term of address where this is culturally normal, fine. I don't feel personally excluded or hurt if someone addresses a speech to 'Ladies and Gentlemen'. If a complete stranger is trying to get my attention, I probably prefer 'lady' over 'girl', though neither is great. I don't mind when parents tell their children, say thankyou to the nice lady or similar. I would not expect anyone who knows my name to call me 'lady' instead. If someone is describing me rather than addressing me, I think 'woman' is a better word than 'lady', and 'person' is a better word still.

Feminine compliments - I don't entirely agree with the various examples from different versions of the meme of what constitutes a feminine, masculine or gender-neutral compliment. I broadly dislike 'feminine' compliments from people who don't know me well, because they are almost all about appearance, and because they are often belittling. If I'm in a close relationship with someone and feel comfortable with them complimenting my appearance, I prefer the gender-neutral 'gorgeous' over the more feminine-ish 'beautiful' as terms of address, but if it's a description rather than a name then it depends on the person giving the compliment.

Masculine compliments - I would love to be described as 'handsome', but it's never going to happen, because I'm really not. Also I don't like being addressed as 'handsome' in place of a name or title. What other masculine compliments even exist? I can't think of any of the top of my head.

Neutral compliments - In place of a name, supposedly neutral compliments are often feminized. Like, if a stranger calls me 'cute' or 'hot' or 'sexy' because they don't know my name, they're quite likely to be asserting gendered power over me and I don't like that. If someone wants to describe me in a sentence using complimentary language, I usually prefer neutral over explicitly feminine.

Honey, sweetie etc - If it's normal in someone's dialect to call random strangers by terms of endearment, that's fine. I think doing so can be gendered slightly female, but it doesn't bother me if someone calls me 'darling' or 'sweetheart' because they perceive me as female. I dislike endearments once I'm having an ongoing interaction with someone, in that case I want them to ask my name (or title, in a more professional context) and use it.

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Not a gratitude practice; I'm really bad at that. Just, in spite of all the awfulness on a global scale, on a personal level my cup runneth over right now.

My extremely wonderful job was made permanent. I had been assured this would happen, but I'm really pleased to have it confirmed.

We finally managed to catch (at least the first act of) one of the many performances currently being made available online in response to the pandemic: the National Theatre's utterly amazing Twelfth Night from 2017. Lots of people have recommended it, so thank you for inspiring me to actually watch. It's on YouTube until 7 pm tomorrow (Thursday), and it's so, so, so good. So many amazing actors, and the set is great, and the direction is great, and I'm in awe, basically. Hope to watch Act II this evening.

We also really loved Knives Out. From publicity it didn't seem like my kind of thing at all, don't care about semi-parodic murder mysteries about awful people, but I saw enough reviews to convince me to give it a try and it's amazing. The comedy is actually funny, and very much punching up.

I have been having some wonderful distanced conversations with people I care about. Phone date with ghoti_mhic_uait. Phone call with hatam_soferet. Video chat with rysmiel, which we hadn't managed to coordinate for ages because of time zones and demanding jobs. Video chat with doseybat, who has been one of my favourite people to talk to for nearly a quarter century, and every extension of that enormous conversation makes my life better. I sympathize with all the people who dislike spending all their leisure time as well as in many cases their work time in calls, but for me, a one-to-one conversation with a friend goes a long way to balance the awfulness of lockdown.

Talking of which, ambyr, who also feels positive towards phonecalls, really kindly agreed to phone me to teach me Mystic Vale. It's a really pretty deck building game I'd heard good things about, but I couldn't make any sense of the interface on Yucata. And now ambyr has explained it to me and I'm really enjoying it. Plus I got to talk to someone I like and had only previously interacted with on DW.

And I have a regular call set up with angelofthenorth, who lives the other side of the country so we always have too much geography even in normal times. She had the brilliant idea of reading through a book about the Old Testament aimed at Christian ministers in training, SCM Studyguide: The Old Testament, by John Holdsworth, which I'm finding really fascinating. Mostly the conversation with angelofthenorth, who brings the perspective of an experienced Christian preacher and mentor of ordinands, whereas I'm a random Jewish person who obviously has a very different approach to the Bible. The book itself is written in a somewhat annoying style, but the content is good.

angelofthenorth, along with my sister, got me back into playing Scrabble using the rather dreadful official app from Electronic Arts. I'm really enjoying being able to ping anagrams back and forth as a minor distraction during the day.

Another friend who is completely wonderful is ewt, who transcribed for me the tune of the Psalm we use for special occasion grace after meals. This is particularly awesome because it's really hard to find any record of the Anglo-Jewish tunes I'm used to. Everything is transmitted within communities and not documented anywhere, and the internet is full of American and Israeli and Chassidic tunes, and I can't teach my own tunes because I'm not musical enough.

The final thing making me happy right now is the disco tardigrade. I have always loved tardigrades, and fluorescence microscopy, and this is just such a lovely image. It's my new 'squee' icon (cos nobody really understood the 'methane on Mars' one), and also my new Zoom background. Turns out, Zoom backgrounds are set per device not per account, so when I tried to put it on my personal account, it ended up showing up on work Zoom calls too. Luckily it's not embarrassing and my equally geeky colleagues love it too. (But in case anyone could stand to learn from my experience, don't put a work-unsuitable background on your Zoom if you use the same physical machine for work and personal calls.)

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I was really sad to learn of the death of Mel Baggs. I have been following Mel's writing for many years and learned a great deal about disability and activist communities.

In particular, Mel disabused me of the view of autism that says, autism is all very well if you're also highly intelligent, but it's a terrible tragedy to be autistic as well as intellectually disabled, or autistic and non-speaking, or "low-functioning". And in general lots of concrete ways of being a respectful fellow citizen towards the the kinds of disabled people who don't get much activism airtime.

It seems that Mel didn't die "of" Coronavirus in the strict sense of the word, but of complications of a number of other illnesses and conditions. Mel had posted a fair bit recently about not getting access to needed personal care as an indirect result of the pandemic and the dangerously inadequate official response to it. I don't know whether inadequate care was a contributory factor in Mel's death but it did cause a lot of suffering, and I have seen way too many reports of people not getting the care they need, and I'm not even that plugged in to the disability community.

Anyway. Mel was someone I admired greatly, and a huge influence on me, and the world is poorer.

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Keeping on keeping on.

7 weeks and change of pandemic life. That's a lot of weeks.
43 days lockdown, and no significant interactions except with my husband. Though 26 days since I gave up internal isolation and I have been interacting normally with him within the house for those 3 1/2 weeks.
18 days since I decided that any novel symptoms I had were mostly gone. I've had very occasional returns of the lung soreness, but very briefly and mildly to the point I'm not sure I'm not just deluding myself. During these 18 days I've been going out occasionally for exercise and fresh air, and jack has visited actual shops a couple of times to pick up things we needed faster than internet delivery could manage.
And day 27 of the Omer. I'm still not expecting plague lifting by day 33, though I know some countries are starting to relax some restrictions.

New lockdown activities: sfred and djm4's extremely moving partnership ceremony over Zoom on 25 April. It was exceptionally well coordinated, with a congregation of around 200 people. And even though the couple had initially told us the socializing part would be postponed until after the Reconnection, actually after the ceremony we just unmuted everybody and there was this amazing buzz of congratulations and people being pleased to see each other and little kids shrieking, just like at a real wedding.

Collaborative crossword solving with seekingferret. That was really fun, despite silght technical issues with Discord. I am not at all experienced with American-style crosswords (and sometimes was thrown by specifically American clues), but I contributed only a little less than my fair share.

Teaching three different Hebrew school classes over Zoom. The new ones, for my actual local cheder where I am formally employed as a teacher, are going less well than the established one with two boys from Stoke plus my partners' daughter. Some of the children are struggling because they've suddenly switched from "screens are evil and rot your brains" to "your entire education is now on screens (so good luck working out how to operate a smart phone!)". Others are just too young for online teaching to work well; my youngest class is Yr 4 which means some of them are not quite 9 and still need direct personal interaction from a trusted adult to hold their attention. I feel even more sorry than previously for people who are trying to teach infant school or even kindergarten online. And the most tech savvy kid is also the worst behaved; right now the set-up is such that I don't have moderator privs and it took her about 10 minutes to work out that she could grab the screen from me, and scribble rude drawings over my worksheets, and there's not a whole lot I can do about it technically.

Talking of people for whom tech is a barrier, I've also been involved in the community welfare programme, trying to help someone who really has no idea how to access the internet short of buying a computer and full broadband subscription. Not someone particularly ancient either, and never thought they would be the kind of person who receives welfare. But at least open to the idea that pandemic life will be better with an internet connection.

Zoom crafting, hosted by pseudomonas. He has a very good theory that it's nice to gently hang out with people, but while doing something rather than having the whole social event focused on chat. Definitely less exhausting than purely conversational Zoom parties, but still feeds my extrovert energies. I have added a few rows to my rather long-abandoned Möbius scarf project.

IRC. Slack is ok, Discord is ok, even Twitter is bearable if you curate your feed carefully. But it turns out that working with a flow of text based conversation in a window is just really soothing to my emotional state. I don't have to reply to or even read everything, but just knowing my people are there, and if I do want to join in the conversation, I can do so on a full-sized keyboard, is just brilliant.

Our veg box person, Cambridge Fruit Co. has now teamed up with a cake shop (and a butcher's, if you like that kind of thing), so we now get a random selection of cake with our random selection of fruit and veg. This week: avocados, a swede and a mango. Also new to our online shopping rotation: v expensive bread flour from former hipster café Stir. It's leading to perceptibly better breadmaker bread, and cheap bread flour isn't very available anyway, so for the moment it's worth the extra money.

Today I feel kind of physically miserable. I think it's mostly menstruation-related and not outside the range of normal for me. But emotionally mostly ok, I'm doing better at finding a balance between getting enough connection, and getting drained by too many video calls, or worse, arguing with people who are Wrong on the Internet because I'm starved of social connection.

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