The entire world is at home at the moment. Travelers have been forced to cancel trips. Countries have canceled tourist visas. Everything in the world has been upended as a result of a biological pathogen far beyond our (or anyone else’s) control. If you’re not already a corona zombie, there’s no need for further explanation. So now that everyone is living in a world of social distancing and home quarantine, handling the isolation has become a difficult change. My suggestions may not help you, but I thought I would take this opportunity to let everyone know how we are dealing with the change.
Working
Michelle and I both have occupations suited for remote work. Michelle is a data scientist for a large software conglomerate and I’m a corporate transactional lawyer. Since my practice is mainly working with documents and email, I work from wherever I’m at, including while we are away from home. Michelle and I are home a lot when we aren’t galavanting abroad, but this new level of work from home isn’t easy for us. When Michelle received notice that she would be working from home indefinitely, I immediately went on Amazon and purchased another monitor and keyboard so she would have better working conditions to maximize productivity.
Michelle has been occupying the first floor as her home office and I’ve been using my home office on the second floor. This gives us enough separation for conference calls and other working distractions.
As for me, this is entirely new territory. I represent businesses, and the government has ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses. This is really for businesses that come in contact with other people, like retail storefront. A lot of my clients are e-commerce based or essential services. Clients that are essential services are wondering what they are all supposed to do regarding business. How do they work in peoples’ homes and offices? What protections should they put in place? What company policies should be issued? Anyone who tells you they have experience dealing with this is not telling you the truth. The truth is we don’t know, but we use our best judgment in order to protect our clients and anyone they come in contact with. That is likely the necessary use of N95 masks and disposable latex gloves.
Fitness
We’re pretty avid about our fitness and typically attend group training sessions at Body Machine Fitness 4-5 times a week. Our state has ordered all gyms closed so we have had to scramble to ensure that our fitness levels will be maintained during this quarantine, not only for vanity, but heart, lung, and immune system health is crucial right now.
I started by evaluating what we have at home, which is much more than I thought. We had a range of fitness bands, bikes, and an Elite Suito smart cycling trainer. Our house is also right on a running trail, which is great for outdoor exercise while still maintaining social distancing. I wanted weights without having a large weight rack with a bunch of dumbbells. After all, that would be totally antithetical to our minimalist home decor. I hit up the Google for a solution and stumbled upon a set of Bowflex adjustable dumbbells. They weren’t cheap, but who knows how long we’ll be quarantined. Health and fitness in the new normal deserve the financial attention. After all, we’re not buying outside entertainment, travel, or things like clothes at the moment.
Michelle also likes to do yoga, which has YouTube video instruction. This quarantine hasn’t changed that at all for her; she is enjoying getting to practice more often though.
We have been trying to plan an hour once or twice a day for fitness. Planning this time has been more productive towards execution, since we’re used to having our fitness classes planned out in time blocks days in advance. It’s important we actually take the time to do these activities since we’re sitting much more and haven’t really been leaving the house.
I’ve gone on a couple outdoor runs with Michelle joining in and I plan to continue this almost daily, both to get out of the house safely, and to break up my day with fitness productivity rather than sitting around even more.
Netflix and Chill
I won’t get into the “chill” part, but hope that other couples are also taking the time to connect more.
As for the Netflix part, this really encompasses a more broad television and movies than the Netflix offerings. For instance, HBO’s Westworld Season 3 premiered last week so Michelle and I decided that we would go back and watch Seasons 1 and 2 before we move on to Season 3. We’ve been working on that and are now halfway through Season 2.
We have also been watching Dirty Money on Netflix, which seems pretty appropriate considering the epic global market decline currently taking place right now. It’s almost as if the Earth is handing down its punishment for capitalism.
This quarantine has also given us the opportunity to utilize our home theatre a little more. We put a lot of time and money into that room, but either don’t get a chance to use it as much as we had originally intended or just disregard it to watch TV in other rooms. When we heard that studios would be releasing their films direct to streaming services in these quarantine times, we thought that was a great idea. Our theatre has a 7.2.4 Dolby Atmos MartinLogan audio setup (maybe audiophiles read our travel blog?) so it’s more than comparable to any neighborhood movie theatre for the experience. Michelle wanted to watch Invisible Man so we turned on the theatre projector and ventured over to Amazon Prime to find that Invisible Man was only $19.99. That’s not bad considering it would cost us at least $30 to see it in a theatre. While checking out the IMDB score and rating, we saw that it was decreasing since the release so we opted to skip it in favor of Adam Sandler’s Uncut Gems, which we heard was good—which was a lie. It was not good. In fact, Uncut Gems was awful. 135 minutes of yelling and screaming in New York accents with a score mixed way too loud over the spoken audio channel. Michelle complained during the movie on a few different occasions that it was hurting her ears.
Cleaning
One of the most important things I think we can do during a pandemic is clean. Even if we’re social distancing or staying at home, we constantly have packages coming in. Who knows what kind of pathogens lie on the packaging? Once the packages come in, the contents may get placed on a table or countertop and we want to make sure we get those clean. Luckily, Michelle is great at cleaning, even though she doesn’t love it. It’s not something I’m typically fond of doing either, but in these times of home quarantine, it’s the least I can do to help out. Besides, it’s good to break up the day rather than doing the same thing all day long.
The highlight of our cleaning was the guest bathroom. We have a 50 year old white cast iron tub in there, which we have never been able to really get as clean as we would like. As it sits in the guest bathroom, it doesn’t get much use so we’ve usually just kind of forgotten about it. I searched on the internet for a solution to cleaning this tub and found that a mixture of white vinegar and baking soda was up to task.
First, drench a sponge in white vinegar and wipe down the tub. Let it sit for 5 minutes. Then sprinkle baking soda on the vinegar sponge. The combination will start to foam. Use the sponge to wipe the dirty spots away and lightly scrub the areas that require a little extra attention.
Today, I remembered that I should probably run the fans in the HVAC systems to get the air circulating to filter out some of the unwanted microbes. March is usually a pretty fair temperature between hot and cold so the systems don’t usually turn on.
Media Editing
It’s been less than 2 weeks since we’ve returned from Oman so I’m spending a bunch of random time between working, working out, and watching TV with Michelle to get some of the media content edited for Instagram posting. I’ve been so excited about these photos and videos since leaving Oman, but coming back to Z-Day hasn’t been giving me the desire to do much beyond necessary. Keep watching our Instagram feed over the next few weeks to see content of us having fun in the desert, wadis, up on mountains, and a bunch of other really cool things we did while visiting Oman.