COVID Year

 Since 2018 when I started this blog, I have been consistently posting in it with one exception: I skipped the COVID year. I had a post right before the quarantine hit, and I have talked a little about the juggling we did around it, but for the most part this was a black hole for the blog. It was a black hole for my life too. Now that its been a few years I can finally write about it. 

When we first heard the news of COVID in 2019, of this superdisease in China, it all seemed very ominous but distant. Then in March 2021 the entire world was forced into quarantine, and it became real. Especially for us as I am pretty sure (we never got tested it was difficult then) that exactly the first week when everyone started hiding we came down with COVID. I remember feeling very sick, and one night in particular my lungs hurt really bad like a stabbing pain and I thought I was going to die. But within a month we recovered, and since the whole world was hiding it wasn't something I had to reveal to everyone. 

A month before the quarantine was the great 2021 winter storm and during that we were stuck at home for a week sometimes without power or water. Luckily I kept water then for the fish tank, and it was that spare water that floated us by when the world was frozen over. I remember doing things like trying to heat up food with a blow torch, and compared to that the COVID quarantine was easy. At first at least. 

In those early days it was just striking how disrupted everything was: fighting for toilet paper, figuring out how to to pick up orders everywhere, how hard it was to continue Finn's therapy. For a moment it felt novel, I remember going down to a HEB in Austin I had never been to in order to find supplies and seeing a crazy long line. But soon the novelty wore off and I started to go crazy. 

As a social person the quarantine was bad for my mental state. I didn't know how to balance work and life when they all mixed together, and being around each other 24/7 hurt me and Lindsey's relationship. I wanted to prove I was working, prove I could still be useful but the world was at a standstill. In retrospect I probably should have enjoyed it more, as many others did, but instead it set me back big-time. 

It wasn't all bad. My friends decided to play D&D with each other via Zoom, and frankly that was the most I had interacted with them since the early days of me being in Austin. With them on the other side of town it was very convenient for me, and when that went away I was sad. Plus during COVID was when I got extra time with my Oculus Rift and when I did pack down a lot of good Finn memories, but overall I look back and 2020 was a dark year in my life. 

Some of the routine from that period stuck: I still shop more at Target and pick up groceries there. But eventually the masks came off and the Plexiglas came down, and the moment the Ukraine war started it felt like COVID was over or at least people tolerating putting life on hold for it was over.