I remember waking up at about 3, being wide awake, trying to fall back asleep again, but bouncing in and out of a light sleep for a few hours this morning.
It was enough to make me over tired this morning when my aching body decided to get out of bed, but there was a slight bonus in that it was raining outside and I could hear this on the roof, which helped calm me a little bit.
After a quick breakfast, an email chain with my colleagues at The Place Where I Work established it was best some of the teachers and I get together online (Zoom) and have a conversation to see what the next few weeks of online teaching should look like. The meeting was fun, and it was nice to see one another again. We spoke for a long time, mostly about work, but partially about life and how we did miss one another and being at work. It seemed so strange not talking face-to-face like we usually do. But we vowed to reconvene again on Tuesday, the day after the Government tells us if we are sticking at Alert Level 4 for COVID-19 for another few weeks, or we’ll be able to drop down to Alert Level 3 — the “waiting room” as our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern calls it. A little freer but not back to “normal”, whatever that is these days.
After a quick lunch, we found out that two more people died from COVID-19 — one up north in his 80s or 90s, and a woman in her 80s in Christchurch from the cluster at one of the nursing homes here, where all the Christchurch deaths have come from — so that put a dampener on an already soggy day. The good news was there were only 8 new cases today — 2 confirmed, 6 probable — which is showing the lockdown is working. 46 people recovered today, which means 816 recoveries versus 1,409 probable and confirmed cases of COVID-19. I’m not sure if that includes the poor 11 souls who lost their lives so far.
Our Government has started ramping up random testing. Yesterday, it was 300+ tests in a Queenstown supermarket parking lot (at random), which I understand a good chunk of tests have been processed and returned a negative result. Today, Christchurch (where I live) and the Waikato (a region just south of Auckland) also had a bit of random testing going on. Let’s hope this shows that there is no community spread and we can move to “more normal” life again sooner.
After fleshing out some sections on Moodle, which my colleagues and I agreed were the next areas to “go online” for our students not next week but the week after, I felt quite satisfied and managed to get a little downtime playing Final Fantasy XV. Chapter 4 seemed to come and go quite suddenly — I’ve been doing a lot of side quests in Chapter 3 for the last few days, and finally engaged and beat the main storyline dungeon in Chapter 3 — and then I ended up in Chapter 5. I hope I’m able to slow it down again so I can build up levels for my characters to make future battles easier. I’m not as young and every bit as uncoordinated as I used to be.
Tonight, we had pulled pork leftovers from last night. They were really yummy pulled pork burgers, plus salad and a few French fries. They tasted really good.
We watched a very good but very poignant movie tonight on Netflix — BlacKkKlansman — which my husband and I got very upset about at the end when the racism and absolute ignorance of Trump supporters and radical American racists were shown as a sort of coda to the movie. What was before is again.
Really.
Really?
Fuck me, world, I thought we worked towards getting over this shit for like the last half-century or more.
Really disappointing.
More YouTube to settle us down before heading to bed early. It’s been a long few weeks in isolation, that’s for sure. But hopefully this will all be for something.
Stay safe, stay in your bubble, and be kind, everyone.
Beam Me Up, Scotty 