An Unremarkable Day in Virusy Times

Today I had no scheduled work meetings, aside from the 15-minute meetings that take place anyway. As my mother witnessed, I literally did a 'happy dance' when I looked at my calendar yesterday evening and saw that.

(After missing an important meeting two years ago, I asked one of the managers for advice. He said that he checks his calendar last thing in the evening, to see which meetings are scheduled the next day. His advice has been so helpful that I've kept following it.)

But many surprise tasks and questions came up. So even without the meetings, I was quite absorbed and absent-minded, and had to take pains to make sure that I kept up with developments in my team and others.

For lunch I put on a pot of potatoes to boil, and later stirred together yoghurt with chopped onion, salt, and cracked black peppercorns — although the melted butter that I had with part of the potatoes was even nicer.

Then Ge. came home and went grocery-shopping with his red mask, obeying the anti-coronavirus measures that have been ordered by Berlin's city government since yesterday.

Now we have a greater variety of food to eat again; I've been culpably reluctant to drag myself around to the grocery store, and had begun to 'scrape the bottom of the barrel' when deciding what to make.

Ge. also fried an omelette for us, and he and Mama and I took turns boiling water to make a kind of grain coffee throughout the day.

Also, I broke off work earlier, at 6:15 p.m. — the day began before 9 a.m., so it was fair. Then I exercised and read in a paper book until the Berlin city evening news began, when I dashed back to the living room and listened to the TV news. At the same time I finished up the last daily tasks for work.

After hours, I've been listening to an audiobook and doing language exercises on Duolingo after neglecting it for months. Right now I'm focused on Swedish and Turkish.

Under-Sense and Over-Sensibility

It's late at night and I'll hopefully go to sleep soon.

The week has been like a merry-go-round of continuing activity. Aside from a heavier schedule of work, I overdid the exercise and underdid the eating so that the analogy is even more apt in that I've been spit, also physically, exhausted and half-nauseated into the weekend.

Today a few colleagues and I also concluded what were hopefully the last phases of a debate about principles and company-wide interests at work. My conscience hadn't left me alone until I rushed into a fray that I'd rather have avoided.

And mentally I am still spinning in circles like a caffeinated squirrel. It is also a bit depressing to realize — in the middle of writing answers to questions at work — that I've written error-filled and irrelevant stuff; maybe I really do need to build in more pauses.

But that's the glum view of things.

Then in the evening I read up on the U.S. President's views on the possibilities of the internal use of disinfectants in fighting viruses, which were not reassuring. Even if he later claimed — a claim that appeared in no wise supported by the video footage that I watched with my own lying eyes and lying ears — that it was 'sarcasm.'

Then I found that Twitter threw me into another 'anxiety spiral'. So although I am curious how other Republicans are reacting to his pearls of wisdom, it didn't appear wise to check it.

I've been catching up on YouTube subscription videos that had gathered unwatched for the past three months, on classic literature and home cooking and baking. Besides I have written two emails this evening, neither of which were in English so there was more head-scratching than usual.

The wind is wuthering, I think — the Brontës might disagree that this wind sound is what they heard — and rattling the windowpanes every now and then. It's a restless sound and a restless feeling, after the sun-soaked idyll of the past days. But let's hope that it's a wind like the one in the Dick van Dyke and Julie Andrews film version of Mary Poppins, and if we must interpret it subjectively and unscientifically as a sign, it may be a sign that a change is coming, but a good one.

A colleague is reading Sense and Sensibility, and perhaps it is time to immerse myself in something soothing and subtly critical like that too. The Marianne Dashwood within me is likely too strong and I must swing over nearer the spirit of Elinor.