Day Eight
After being under the weather the last few days - no coronavirus symptoms involved, I'm happy to say - I perked up enough yesterday to go for a brief jog in the morning, only to receive a message from Bexi, as I settled smugly down on the sofa to catch up on the news, announcing that she had just completed a 21km run! So much for covering myself in sporting glory. I've also been thinking that we could use the quarantine time to do a little light gardening, only to find that Wolfgang, in the absence of actual paid work, has drawn up ambitious plans (complete with sketches) of a total garden overhaul with flower-lined stone paths, sheds, lounge areas, a berry garden and a veg garden and has found suppliers who can deliver all the stuff we'll need. He's evidently confident that his income will soon return to pre-quarantine levels, so that's fine, but it did make me feel like a complete couch potato, so it was quite a relief to fill out a questionnaire on the government's rseponse to coronavirus and discover that lethargy and difficulty concentrating are perfectly normal reactions to the situation and that I'm far from the only person in the world right now who can't muster up the enthusiasm to do much more than sleep and watch the news.
In the evening, we had a semi-successful attempt at getting my side of the family all together by Skype. My mother couldn't sort out the technology, not even with Wolfgang giving her instructions down the phone, so she had to do a video call on What's App and we propped the phone in front of the computer screen so she could more or less see everyone, albeit only as very very tiny people. My brain almost immediately started to think of the phone as actually containing my mother, or even being her, which was a very weird experience. It was convinced she was inside the phone, even though all I could see of it was the back. It took a while for her to figure out how to reverse the screen so she wasn't looking at an image of herself and for the first few minutes the muddle of voices was repeated punctuated by cries of "All I can see is my face! How horrible!"
Everyone wants to do it again, so it must have been at least partially successful, but it isn't very satisfying having ten people skying at once, and actual conversations are impossible. We should probably explore other options, but I can't really be bothered right now. And I guess that's okay.
In the evening, we had a semi-successful attempt at getting my side of the family all together by Skype. My mother couldn't sort out the technology, not even with Wolfgang giving her instructions down the phone, so she had to do a video call on What's App and we propped the phone in front of the computer screen so she could more or less see everyone, albeit only as very very tiny people. My brain almost immediately started to think of the phone as actually containing my mother, or even being her, which was a very weird experience. It was convinced she was inside the phone, even though all I could see of it was the back. It took a while for her to figure out how to reverse the screen so she wasn't looking at an image of herself and for the first few minutes the muddle of voices was repeated punctuated by cries of "All I can see is my face! How horrible!"
Everyone wants to do it again, so it must have been at least partially successful, but it isn't very satisfying having ten people skying at once, and actual conversations are impossible. We should probably explore other options, but I can't really be bothered right now. And I guess that's okay.