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Day 14 – 31 March 2020

Officially our self-isolation is over, although we’re under the same general restrictions as everyone else. Tracy celebrated this not quite freedom with a trip to Tesco. So we had a celebration lunch of brown food!

Work

With Tracy having Tuesday off I spent most of the day working. I started a bit later than yesterday, logged in about 0715 and read the sitrep with my breakfast. A day of meetings followed, most video but a few straight phone calls. Outlook only worked when I use it live, which eats bandwidth like a teenager. So mostly I was in the web browser version, which lacks functionality but at least it works reliably. Things are starting to make more sense, as a team we’re almost adapted to working from home. Our role is taking shape, and in the absence of direction we’re radiating intent and doing things that help. Or at least I hope so.In between meetings I managed to go to the pharmacy to collect my prescription and then take it to another pharmacy that had the inhaler in stock. This was mostly down to Tracy, she used her knowledge of community pharmacies and rang round while I worked. Thanks to the miracle of work smartphones I also managed to keep working while I queued (distantly). So I’m good for another four months with my inhaler.

School at home

Alexander spent most of his day on art homework. He got to grips with gimp, and also a stylus for the touch screen on his laptop. So mostly what he did was teach himself to paint on a computer. He also built a Lego version of the BFG from Doom and posted it on r/doom and got over 2000 upvotes, which he was pretty chuffed about.Lucy got a large box of crafting supplies from the Tesco trip. This fed into her art lesson where she made ‘Spoonie’ to go with the Forkie she made at school after seeing Toy Story 4. Other lessons included reading, a maths worksheet and learning about the body with Tracy.

Food

Thanks to Tracy’s monthly shop we have plenty of everything. We should only need bread, milk, eggs, cheese and fruit over the next few weeks. This is pretty much our normal state. The only thing we don’t have is strong white flour. I usually make bread, usually for pizza dough, every other week or so. This is one of our more common Saturday evening treats. So I guess I need to find a method that uses plain flour, which we do have.Today’s food was a buffet of ‘brown food’ for lunch and Tracy’s home made shepherds pie for dinner. ‘Brown Food’ is a term we’ve picked up as a family for the sort of frozen oven food that you get for parties. It’s nearly all shades of brown. Our smorgasbord included chicken wontons, breaded mozzarella bites, jalapeno poppers, chicken fillets, prawn toast, spring rolls and tortilla chips. It was very nice.

Exercise

Lucy managed to join in an online martial arts class. We hooked her laptop up to the TV and got zoom working to join the class. I was working in the background while she did her exercise. It was pretty interesting, the instructor muted all the lines and she was able to see who was doing what. It was just like the sessions I’ve watched in the dojo where the kids were called out either to praise or speed up in s friendly way. They all got involved positively.Later on, after dinner, Alexander and I went for a walk round Merstham. We took a circular route through the back streets avoiding other people. We went over the railway bridge, saw the pizza project was still doing takeaway, and came back down under the railway and through the rec to keep us moving the whole time. We had a pretty good chat while we walked. Mostly about how to make daleks scarier and more intelligent as an adversary for Doctor Who. For the first time in a while I’ve comfortably got in over 10,000 steps.I’ve got the Tiger King in the background while I’m writing this. It’s a pretty messed up story, if it was presented as fiction it would be seen as too far fetched.

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Day 13 – Monday 30th March 2020

I try not to see 13 as an unlucky number. Today made that a bit hard. Our internet connection ground almost to a halt, we’ve been working from home with multiple connections for over a week, but today I could practically see the mail server loading the emails one character at a time. I dialled into the video conferences because I couldn’t get a fast enough connection for video.

That however wasn’t the unlucky part of my day. Oh no. That was merely the preparation to ensure that I was in the right frame if mind for the unlucky part.

Out for a Walk

We were all feeling fine today, and although I started counting on the first day that we didn’t send Lucy to school, day 1 was actually the day before. So Tracy, our resident medical professional, thought it would be okay for us to walk to the local shop for some exercise, and to replenish the milk that we’ve almost run out of again. (We got eight litres delivered on Friday morning, as of Monday evening it’s all gone).

The weather has been pretty awful today, so we all put on our waterproofs and got ready for the walk to the co-op, which is about a mile as a round trip. Lucy decided that her ‘baby’ needed to come too, and she put her in the pram.

It was dry, if cold and overcast, when we left. There was hardly another person out along our route. It was a nice change of scenery, and when we got to the row of shops there was no queue. So I went into the pharmacy to collect my repeat prescription. Alexander went into the co-op first to buy a snack while Tracy waited outside with Lucy.

Inside the pharmacy they’d done an interesting job to protect people. The floor had some two metre lines marked in brown parcel on the floor. The cashier position also had a clear perspex screen and the card reader was on the front of the counter. I was second in the queue.

When my turn came I gave the pharmacy assistant the usual spiel. I’m here for my repeat prescription, told her my name and she went off to look for it.

A moment later she came back to ask what it was that I’d ordered. I needed a Symbicort turbohaler, it’s a repeat prescription, ordered on 17th March. She spent a moment looking at the computer.

‘We can’t get the inhaler for you. There’s a manufacturing problem and there are none in stock.’

It took me a moment to take this in. I was given a choice of either looking for another pharmacy or going to see my GP for an alternative.

When we got home Tracy called a couple of other pharmacies, and neither of them had it in stock, nor did they know when it would be back in stock. So tomorrow I need to talk to my GP again.