Yes, I still exist

Having two children leaves me with very little time for the pondering and writing I need to maintain this blog. Actually, there's a lot of things I've not really had time to do since the son was born. I've hardly had any time to work on the daughter's spaceport beyond simple repairs. Spare time seems to go to cleaning and reorganising rooms and just trying to have enough space in this home for 4 humans.

R is 9 now. As she gets older I'm less comfortable putting details about her life out there. Part of it is that it's not my story to tell. On the other hand it's my life too. So I generally keep details here to a point where she won't hate me for this later. That said, she's a proper human now. She's grown. Her legs are only 10cm or so shorter than mine. And she seems to know more about cellular biology than I ever did (Thanks lockdown). She also can fall alseep on her own now without being tricked, but I do still read to her from a book every other night because we both like it and, TBH, it's the only recreational reading I ever do these days.

The boy, T, is 15 months now. I've skipped a lot of his life on this blog. He's very different from R, even though they look really similar, especially in the first few months. They both got teeth really early (like at 3 months). They both started walking early (he started at 8 months, but slowly built up to it over the course of 2 months when he could walk around the room just fine. she started at 10 months, but just decided I walk now and in the space of 3 days was a pro). I don't think many of the differences between them are boy vs girl. They're just different people with brains and bodies that work differently. Plus he's grown up more than half his life in some form of isolation or lockdown, so he's not had much physical socialisation. No idea if that's had a big impact on him or not, tho.

Some interesting things about T:

• He never got into crawling. He bear walks – back legs slightly bent, knees nowhere near the floor.
• Until quite recently he's had no sense of stairs. To go downstairs he'd just walk straight off the step and just expect someone to catch him. Needless to say, the stairs have been babygated off.
• His favourite book is We're Going on a Bear Hunt. When he was young, he didn't like any other books. The only way to keep his attention in another book was to start a page with We're going on a bear hunt. We're going to catch a big one. followed by the book's actaual text.
• bear was his first word. He has a very easy time with words that begin with B, to the point that he inserts a B to make words he can't otherwise pronouce. He says up as bup.
• He's picked up some baby sign language and will actually make signs. "Hurt", "Done" and "More" are the 3 he uses most. The last of which make sense since he eats amazing amounts of food.
• When he wants me to sit next to him, he pats the surface he's sitting on with his hand. I always dutifully join him there. Whenever I pat the seat next to me to get him to join me, he ignores me and acts as if I did nothing.
• He learned to say no pretty early on. Not in a terrible 2s kind of way, but more in a helpful way to answer questions. Do you need the loo? no.. He may have said yes once or twice, but I can't really tell. He certainly never says yes when we ask if he wants something. He laughs uncomfortably and manaically, which is a good sign. But no words.

I could go, and at some point I'll go into more details about things. When I have the time.

Plague diary: Shopping

I went to the shop today. This was my second attempt. Last time I tried there was a queue the length of the outside of the supermarket. Today I avoided the queue by going at stupid o'clock at night.

I've hardly left the house at all since getting sick, so a trip to the shops was a big deal for me. I've lost lots of leg muscle sitting around all day, and I need to start using it before my health starts suffering from plain old neglect. I wore a hoodie, a hat (I got a terrible haircut just before the lockdown), and a mask with a handful of reusable bags. I'd been told many things about supermarkets in this new world, and I was very curious to see it myself.

It was 20:30 and very few people were in the shop. So the one-way shopping I was warned about wasn't in place. Here were my main take aways

• It was pretty easy to stay 2m+ from everyone else at this hour. Only twice did I have to adjust my path to get around or make room for someone walking nearby.
• No eggs. At all. Why eggs, though?
• No vanilla
• There was flour. Bread flour only, though. Not sure what that means besides everyone must be making cookies or something
• there was plenty of dishwasher stuff except rinse aid. Which is the one thing I'm out of. I can't imagine everyone else is out of it at the same time. But evidence shows otherwise.
• The shop finally stocks the brand of decaf espresso that L likes. And it's on sale!
• I left uncomfortable picking up items to decide if I wanted them. So everything I picked up I bought. It meant for a bit more impulse buying than I normally do
• All the tellers were in the same queue. You'd just queue up and go to the first free teller. Just like passport control. No more getting bitter seeing the queue next to you going faster than yours. I do so hope they keep this.
• Big clear plastic barrier between the tellers and the buyers. Which is good to see they're trying to keep their staff safe. That said, only one of the tellers had a mask. So I guess they felt safe. I do so hope I'm not longer contagious.

The walk back was kind of hard, as I'm not used to the exercise. The mask actually made it notably harder to breathe, and I was kind of dizzy when I took it off.

I keep my outside clothes quite separate from anything I wear in the house but I suspect it'll be impractical to wash them after every time I leave the house. I wonder if, over time, we'll start having disinfectant closets for outsidewear, so it can be made safe from viruses. Something like UV-C lights or some kind of spray. It would make me more comfortable about contamination.

Plague diary: Day 38 - back working

Day 3 of me back at work. The C-19 has subsided enough that I've been able to work, but I've been so knackered by the end of the day, that it's taken me a while to blog about it.

Day 1 of work went ok, beyond the drop in energy at the end of the day. And of course, I managed to sleep funny on the inflatable mattress. Getting out of bed was such pain I just had to sit on the floor for a minute or two. I got through the morning, but I had to give up in the afternoon. OTOH, my lungs were actually able to fill to the bottom, so, if it's not one thing, it's another.

Back in time a bit... Two weeks ago, the wee boy woke up in the night, and crawled off the bed. The baby monitor we were using (which we used when R was a baby) gave up giving us audio, so we didn't notice him deciding to roam around. After roaming off the bed entirely, and the crying that ensued afterward, L and I took action. 1) Barriers so he could not get out of his cot, and 2) a new, working baby monitor.

The barriers are working, but the baby monitor is crap. the camera gets up to 50^C just being plugged in, not even on. So we have to return it.

Back to the present. I've been calling every day since Sunday, being on hold, waiting for someone to answer, and finally giving up. Yesterday, instead of working with back pain, I lay down on the sofa, feet in the air, and pipe under the painful part of my back, on hold for an hour and 42 minutes. When they finally answered, I discovered I was asleep and had to drag myself into sentience. Despite the wait, they were very fast and efficient resolving my request to return it. In fact, they just picked it up and took it away 2 minutes ago, as I was writing this.

Given the inflatable had betrayed me, last night I slept in my own bed. It was lovely. I didn't sleep very well, but I awoke with no back pain, so that's really nice. Day 3 of work had almost practical levels of energy, so I could do things. Let's hope this continues

Plague diary: day 31 (really, 31?)

Now that the pneumonia is gone, one day seems to be much like another. I did push it a bit too hard on Tuesday, and needed a long rest. The rest of this week has been more or less the same. I'm ok as long as I'm not doing something. But once I do I just get winded and lose all my energy. I can hang up laundry just fine. Then 3 minutes later I realise, no, it wasn't fine. I can't figure out my limits because the goal posts keep changing all the time for no obvious reason.

A couple of the doctors I've spoke to have said that they're finding The Virus can linger as long as 6 weeks. I'm only just past week 4, so I'm not surprised it's still having an impact. I am worrying that this is what life is like now. Perhaps the lung damage is permanent and I'll just have no energy to speak of from here on out. I mean, with chicken pox, I've gotten scarred for life in a number of places on my skin, so it'd not be shocking that covid-19 might do some irreparable harm. No one knows. It's all new to everyone. Like those Samsung phones with exploding batteries. They were just phones. They're expected to just either work, or to break. Nobody expected them to blow up. Perhaps The Virus just smashes things up before it leaves like a renter who lost their deposit.

In other news, the son is getting consonants. M and D and H, mostly. He says Da like his sister did, but not as often, and with more variety of other things. I suppose by the time we next leave the house he'll be walking and speaking at least a few small words. He's eating too. Anything we put in front of him. Blueberries, cucumbers, avocado, tomatoes, squash, asparagus, mushrooms, lemons, brussels sprouts. Anything. This is so very different from what we got used to with his sister, who in retrospect, was a picky eater. I always thought she was just the sort to just eat a bit, and was ok with only eating a bit. Now I know, she was really thinking Ok, I'll eat this one thing, but the rest, I'll just move around and hope they never try it again. I like milk. Can I just stick to milk?.

Of course I'm not doing the food prep. I'm sure I would have passed on The Virus by now if they didn't have it already, but I'm still a little wary, since no one really knows how this things can spread. I'll feed him, but with chopsticks so I stay far away from touching the food or touching him myself. It's odd, and awkward and unpleasant. He has changed quite a bit in the last month, and it bugs me to be missing it from so up close.

I've spent a huge amount more time with R than I did while we both had school and work. I'm still sleeping in her room, but I don't really count that as quality time together. I've stopped reading her bedtime stories. I've run out of books from our queue and have struggled to find age appropriate stuff. I read Neverwhere on a few good breathing days in there, but that and the short story sequel are done. I need to get back in to the habit of reading before it's broken entirely.

Also, R is now pretty big. She's still smaller than us, but she's not a little girl. She's a small person, but a proper person. Still very headstrong. We are still facing many challenges. I'm trying to get a bit of learning in there, but all she wants to do is use the iPad or sometimes play with toys (which I'm happy to join on, when I have the energy for it, but her room is so cramped with the extra bed, we can't both use the spaceport at the same time). I've been trying to teach her useful stuff based on things that come up in conversation. Monday I explained how FM and AM radio (frequency vs amplitude modulation) works. Today I explained triangulation (how do we know where a lion is when it roars). On a practical level, to get her away from the iPad, I hid it today, and taught her card games. Poker and solitaire. She seems to like them both and the latter I'm finding less boring. This seemed to get her happily away from technology for the whole day.

Plague Diary: day 23 - I leave the house

For the first time in over 3 weeks, I left the house. It was interesting to finally see what the local area was like in lockdown. But more interesting was going to the local Covid-19 hub for additional testing to find out why I so breathless today.

Today was weird. I had lung capacity, at least as I measured with the flow meter. But just having a conversation was leaving my breathless. By mid afternoon I called the GP. they made the appointment at the Covid-19 hub at a nearby hospital to check out my bloody oxygen levels – that's apparently the important number, more important than how much air you're getting in. Since I couldn't walk or drive, they sent an ambulance to pick me up and take me there. With the understanding that if anything was awry, they'd take me on to hospital.

So I charge my phone and collect all my meds to take with me, get my shoes on and wait. All the while my brain is telling me that if things do go wrong this will be the last time I see my family, since no one can come with me or see me in hospital. I try to not think of it, but do make sure I say goodbye before I go.

When the ambulance comes, they want to take my readings in the house before they take me away. Bloody pressing, temperature, that sort of thing. Then they give me a mask and off I go.

It's like a weekend out there. Lots of things are closed, but there are plenty of people out and about. The biggest sign that things are different were the well-spaced queues outside the post office and grocery stores. I saw a dozen or so people wearing face masks, but most people were not. Signs outside the park warning people to keep distant. And many "We're closed" signs on shops.

Once at the Hub I was asked to wait outside for the doctor to collect me. I waited at first in the ambulance, but it was a nice day, so I waited outside the front door with the paramedic from the ambulance a coupe of meters away. The wait was pretty short.

The doctor was wearing a mask and plastic sheet of his clothes, just like the ambulance people. Plus he had goggles over his glasses. He took my vitals and blood oxygen levels, and everything looked good. My chest also sounded clear. He thinks it's the lung lining being irritated from all the horrors it's seeing (not his words) and that it'll be like this possible for a few more weeks. This virus is slow to get over. and even afterward, my lungs will still be tight for a while. So unless my energy levels drop drastically, it looks like I'll be ok to ride this out.

I guess it's closer to the 45 days some of the early reports from Asia were saying instead of the 7 days we're being told in the UK. Which makes me (sigh) potentially at the halfway point.

Plague Diary: Day 21 - why can't this end?

This virus seems to be completely unable to make up its mind whether its coming or going. Every day starts with a normal temperature going into a fever. The "getting better" feeling I had at the end of last week has switched back to the same heavy-lunged drowseyness I was feeling in the first few days. The GP's given me antibiotics in case what I'm feeling is bacterial pneumonia. We should see shortly if this makes a difference or not.

L is spending all her energy keeping the house together – which I greatly appreciate given I have to nap for an hour if I try to hang up laundry. I think she's going a bit mad with all the work, plus looking after a crawling baby. And R is going a bit mad with all the freedom from schooling.

I found R had replaced her chore calendar with chores or her own making, like "Binge watch something" or "stay home" rather than the previous "take out compost" or "tidy room". I give her points for creativity. But zero for making family life easier.

Plague Diary: Day 14

I've been feeling better over the past few days. I woke this morning with only a 37.2^C temperature. So I decided to try working from home today. I was fine until around 1230, when my lungs let me know it was a mistake.

I've pretty much reverted a week from just a few hours of work. Not sure how or why, but I certainly won't be fooled like that again.I don't know what about work hit me so hard – perhaps it's my authoritative voice? Perhaps it was listening and paying attention and making notes? I don't know, but it's not something my body can cope with.

I am not impressed with this virus

In other news, we've been doing more video calls lately. R, like most children always acts up on the calls. So we tried something different – turning off our side of the video. It worked as expected, at first. She didn't act up or make faces at all. Until after a while she burst into tears about not being able to see herself. That was a surprising side effect. but I will continue trying to just not show our side of the video and see if there's a way to make calls to family more enjoyable that way.

Plague Diary: day 8

Day 8 and the whole country is on lockdown. On the other hand we finally got our food order delivered. So we are no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what we can eat. That said, there was no pasta, so I don't know how R is going to cope.

We had two grocery orders. One, from Tesco that we booked ten days ago. The other from the local veg shop that we called in yesterday. Given the reliability of the latter, I wish we could get everything from them. But it's good to know we won't run out of fresh food.

Today R had her first Zoom conference call with the other kids in her class. Good thing I use this at work all the time. It was easy to install and show her how to use it. Then I just let her be for 90 minutes. It seemed quite chaotic and I did not have the energy to even watch.

On that note, I'm still tired very easily. Talking a lot, especially on the phone, really does me in. I had a couple of long calls today after which I just had to nap. I say I'm easily exhausted, but not at night when I try to sleep. Then I'm just laying in bed for ages. (Last night wasn't helped by R setting an alarm for 7am, which only I heard. So I had to hunt down where her iPad was so I could kill it.

Talked to the GP yesterday about my symptoms and Covid-19. She said it does sounds like I've got it – which does bring some peace of mind. She also says that since it's been a week I should start to feel better soon. Most people are over it after a week, she says, except some take a turn for the worse around day 8 or 9. Which implies that if things are still ok Thursday, I should be past the worst of it. Apparently the lung/cough issues should linger for ages – but that doesn't really give me an idea of when I'm no longer contagious. Nor does it give me a sense of when I'd be ready to work again, but I should be able to work that out for myself.

Plague diary

Day 6 of what appears to be covid-19. It's hard to tell since most of the symptoms are so generic and there is nearly zero testing in the UK. All I know for sure is that I've got a fever, some mild chest and throat symptoms and am exhausted all the time. The girl has a higher fever and is bouncing off the walls trying to find something to do. L and the baby are both fever and symptom free.

I was coping with working form home for 2 weeks before coming down with anything. I decided to self-isolate when someone on the floor above me at work tested positive. Most of my coworkers decided the same thing. I have to say that our conference calls became much more chatty once they became nearly the sole human interaction we could experience.

I'm still not sure how I caught this. Could be anywhere. Looking back at the 5-14 days before I felt anything, I'd not gone out much, but since I've been on pills that make me immunocompromised, it appears it doesn't take much. And when it hit, it came on pretty fast. I started feeling a sore throat at around 5-6am. By 11am I was completely wiped out and dropped off the conference call, saying I'd be out for a while. Hung up and and went to sleep.

The next day R came down with a fever, so I've been sleeping on an inflatable mattress in her room. Which is much better than the tiny sofa in the office I had been using. Since then, everything has shut, including schools. We're slowing running out of food, so I hope out grocery delivery does not get cancelled (like our last one was). Beyond that we're catching up on a lot of old Deep Space Nine

(With R's newfound interest in all things Trek, we've already watched all of Next Generation, plus 2 of the movies and a little Picard)

Unfortunately I don't have an extra energy to do useful things like clean the place, or file away the mess of papers which have accrued. The one night I stayed up late dealing with bills completely wiped me out, and I won't be doing that again.

To keep R in the right mood, on Friday I read her The Masque of the Red Death as a bedtime story. She absolutely loved the description of the Black Room – It sounds so beautiful. And she said that maybe this could happen to the Tories, which means she understood what the story was about.

Annoyingly the pleasure of when I get better will be diminished by the fact I've no idea if I've actually got covid-19 or am just sick. So when we all feel fine again we'll still be stuck here uselessly quarantined until 2021, at this rate. I've already written my MP get universal testing, I suggest you write yours too.