Image Description: Adare Manor, seen from the back garden. I took this photo when we had afternoon tea there in August of 2019. It was probably the most impressive of the castles we saw in Ireland, though not our personal top favorite castle. Still, I thought maybe all of us would like to see a castle today. Would you like to see more castles? Let me know in the comments!

Hello! I hope this finds you well.

I myself have been sick for the past couple of weeks. I don’t know with what. It started with a very mildly sore throat and a tiny dry cough. For a few days I had some trouble breathing, but that, thankfully, seems to have passed now. Now my coughs are a bit more frequent and productive, which is annoying, but something I can deal with. I never had a fever as far as I know. I did at points have body aches and chills and a bit of nausea. Could this be COVID-19? Maybe. But I will likely never know. It’s mild, thankfully, and the criteria for testing here is very hard to meet without actually being in need of the hospital. I certainly hope that doesn’t become necessary for me, and I am optimistic about my continued relatively mild annoyance as I cough for a bit longer here.

Because of this, Moss and I went into full isolation on … the 11th? I think? A bit ahead of most of the people in our area, but not by too much. Moss appears to be fine, and we’ve isolated me in a separate room in the hopes that whatever I have won’t pass to him.

That said, I was consumed by pandemic news for other reasons before this personal bout with illness. I’d lose whole days to watching as the shutdowns and the outbreaks spread globally and wondering exactly how to reconcile that with my personal and professional welfare, and now… well, I guess everyone’s on the same page. It’s exhausting, and worrying, and financially and physically and emotionally difficult.

And while I have many friends and colleagues who have rushed to make online classes and concerts and virtual meetups on Zoom and Discord and Slack and so forth, I have mostly not had the energy for that. “Here are things to do instead of being bored!” they all say. To which I have mostly responded by falling asleep, because the energy it took to read their posts tired me out. Again. It’s been all I could do some days just to focus on breathing, and on other days to scrape by on editing and uploading episodes of This Is Why We’re Like This mostly on time.

But now that I am starting to feel a bit better, it’s time to try to figure out what this new normal of being at home ALL THE TIME can and should look like for me. Because of course I will still be staying home for the foreseeable future, even once I feel all the way better, because there’s a really good chance that whatever I have right now is not the main thing everyone’s worried about. Since I don’t know, I have to assume I may still be susceptible to catching and/or spreading it. And goodness knows I definitely don’t want to do either if at all possible.

Movement, for instance. I am the kind of person who loves to go on walks, but that’s not at all practical in a larger metropolitan area at present. Current jealousy level of everyone I know who has a large backyard or lives in the country: HIGH. And don’t even get me started on people who have their own pools! But! My yoga instructor has started livestreaming classes, and so yesterday and today I did a bit of extremely modified gentle yoga—the blessing of livestream classes is that I can do them with mic and video muted so that no one has to be distracted whenever I must stop to cough or take several moments to catch my breath. That seems like a good start, anyway.

Still, this new landscape of social isolation is going to take some more adjusting. We’re all in this together, though. How are you coping? Are you well? Do you need help of any kind? What has brightened your day of late? This is an open comment thread, and I invite you to share whatever you feel like sharing.