Try to find friends to facetime/skype/zoom/google hangout with then! That will help… You can always talk to us here, too, to help with depression and loneliness.
Oh no… I’m sorry. Poor kitty!
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Better now that I’ve been set up to work from home. We were the last department to be sent home (besides the folks in mission control who made it possible). Felt like our department was the band playing live music while the titanic sunk. Had some serious imposter syndrome. What I initially felt was a lot of hysteria has now gotten to me and is making me paranoid. Reading a book on agnotology helped me keep my thinking cap on though because the narrative in the media changes daily.
Glad to be home with family after a parental leave with my month old, born into a pandemic and my eldest daughter, who was born into Trump is now a bit of a nail biter. This makes all the germaphobes cringe and all we can do is educate her and wash her hands as often as possible.
Really am hopeful that this tragedy will spawn a shift in the consciousness of people and will help implement progressive actions to move into the 21st century as a glass half full kind of person… but I’m still pretty cynical.
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Okay-ish here. I’m furloughed while my company is shutdown, but we’re still conferencing and I’m moderately optimistic my job will come back. Mrs. F is WFH until her lab opens up again, and we’re fortunate to be able to float on her salary for a few months. After that, we’ll see.
Lots of anxiety though, I’m immunocompromised so I’m hardly leaving the house. We still have to eat, so I take my chances at the grocery store every few days.
I’m doing a lot of baking with the spud. It helps take the edge off. Yesterday was French Apple Tart:
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Everything says I should be freaking the fuck out, but I’m not. I’m mostly in a headspace of “Well, this is weird, huh?” but then I tend to do better in a crisis. I’m a rock, albeit a very flippant one.
Life’s too short not to eat the damn cake so eat it, diets are for next year, talk or text your friends and family, do whatever it takes, and keep washing your hands!
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Mostly okay for now
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Had been doing mostly okay. In fact, my biggest complaint much of the time, apart from the usual, was feeling kinda guilty that our forced seclusion spot is such an awesome place to be forcibly secluded. I mean, it’s time to give the chickens their afternoon snack and gather the rest of the eggs, and I may do some trail running later if I can get sufficiently motivated. So lately I feel very, very spoiled relative to everyone else stuck wherever. To say nothing of who they may be stuck with, another area where I am very fortunate.
But a couple hours ago our housemate announced that he was feeling funny and feverish. Which my fancy digital (but non-medical) ranging thermometer, as well as my old-school hand, confirmed. He works in a drug store and has the hygiene of a twelve year old, so that’s not even a little concerning.
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@anon61221983 - thank you for caring.
@DukeTrout - you made me cry.
I’m in Ohio, on week 3 of quarantining. I’m doing good as hell right now, because I made Busia’s chocolate cake* with vanilla buttercream icing, with only enough icing to fill and do a crumb coat. It’s ugly and lopsided and delicious, and that was breakfast. The husband is our outside person, and he has gone out about once a week for supply runs. I make him disinfect & change clothes before he approaches me.
Late spring is scheduled for road trips for filming, and that’s on hold. So if I think about it, I get depressed. A significant part of the world is dying. That makes me depressed. We’re living in interesting times, and that makes me anxious, and cautiously optimistic. The government is a dumpster fire, but gave me my newest hero, Dr. Amy Acton. We will have meatloaf and mashed potatoes for dinner, and have chocolate cake for dessert, and that makes me happy.
/* Busia made a great chocolate cake from a “secret recipe” that I finally got from her before she died. It’s still a “secret recipe” but if you have a can of Hershey’s cocoa, you can be in on the secret. 
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I’m sorry for your loss.
And also, wow, I can’t imagine.
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I’m sorry for that. That scene makes me cry, too, which is why I cut it off where I did.
(& also for @orenwolf)
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Surviving. Those if you on private message channel know what is up with me and for now I wanna keep that info there. Today I am giving a re listening to this.
Some dated racial humor but a fun hippie infused radio adventure.
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I cannot even imagine. Loss and fear are each bad enough on their own.
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We are up in Seattle.
I’m glad my partner can work from home, he’s been doing so for four weeks. His day job is in tech and the university class he’s teaching next is going online. His counselor is doing remote sessions. He’s extra stressed but holding up, not as stressed as he was a couple years ago before he started therapy.
I’m always home anyway. I’ve normally got alot of anxiety/social anxiety which hasn’t increased too much. And I’ve had health problems for almost two years now.
The good part is that we were well stocked on sanitizer and following good hygiene already because I’ve been immunocompromised this past year. Even better is that my treatment should be wearing off completely this month. I might not be compromised at all by now. I just took my last dose of profilactic antibiotics today.
Although my testing might get put off for a while at this point. The hope is that my immune system behaves now and won’t attack my kidneys again.
I’ll need to do radioactive iodine treatment at some point but that can be put off indefinitely. I should be fine on my current meds for now.
So I’m puttering around, doing art, doing weird house decoration and maintenance, and keeping up my very low volume Etsy shop, in case anyone needs some chainmail. I do custom work as long as it’s not steel. My hands are too weak for heavy duty pieces.
We’ve gone from one weekly online game with out of town friends, to our local biweekly game also going online. We’ve also done random pick up games with various other friends, local and distant. We have a Fiasco game scheduled tonight. We did an online party for equinox. We did a virtual goth night, our local club has been streaming on Twitch, and we got on Hangouts with a couple of friends and talked while we listened together. And we just did a local poly Hangouts yesterday.
We did have people over for my Birthday back on the 10th, that was the last time we socialized in person except one friend who has been by to use our scanner.
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Since coming off the Prednisone, I’d fallen back into depression, and spent 8 consecutive days in bed. I’m two weeks into a prescription for generic Zoloft, and waiting for something to happen. Hoping for better days soon.
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I keep bouncing around from okayish to not okay.
My brother with one working lung left yesterday for an RCMP assignment on a remote reserve where there are confirmed cases and I feel like he gone to war. He was in town for a week and I didn’t visit him because I have had a cough for a month (haven’t broken 100F, but haven’t left home in that time either). I wonder if I will ever see him again.
One of my budgies has decided he’d rather be bald and looks like a plucked chicken. He’s the most cuddly of my birds, but he’s also the oldest. He keeps eating, drinking, and pooping (not pooping is very bad, I’ve had a bird die from being backed before, it isn’t pretty), but he doesn’t move that well. I made him a special bed in the cage because he kept falling off the perch at night and he freaks out if he is away from the other birds. He purrs when I scritch his head. I know I am going to lose him soon, but dammnit I’m going to take it bad when I do.
I’ve been yelling at the TV, radio, and internet that this shit was going to happen for months and now that it is happening I can only feel numb. I can hardly get angry for the stupid thing people do and feel overwhelmed by the somewhat preventable misery that is going on in the world.
I’m okay because I’m used to being housebound, single, and childless. Being on disability I don’t have to worry about a job and I have some money coming in and I have been saving for a scooter so I have some set aside. I’m happy that my mom is retired and that we have moved from the middle of nowhere to somewhere there are amenities. I have a large freezer full of soup and baked goods. Baking calms me, so I expect by the end of this I will be huge. Thanks to therapy I have tools to recognize and deal with my anxiety and depression - they are getting a lot of use.
I’m happy to pm anyone who just wants to chat.
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Seems like they could send someone LESS vulnerable and give him an assignment with less risk to his health?
I hope you do!
You are probably all of us right now…
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My mom is 75 and since my Dad passed 2 years ago, she is now very much alone and incredibly vulnerable. I am incredibly worried for her.
My oldest sister is a Nurse manager, so she has to show up every day to a hospital. I am incredibly worried for her.
My middle sister’s husband just was laid off from the small web dev shop he was the office manager for. He is now collecting and their insurance has minimum coverage and high deductibles. I am incredibly worried for her.
My immediate family is fine. My extended fam not so much.
UPDATE: And I am not ok at all either. Because while I can handle all the other bullshit in my life when I come to a place like the BBS where my expectation is its a semi-safe space for some banter, conversation, and healthy debate…I find myself jumped on for a comment about how much fast food some parent is feeding their kid and get told how I hate fat people even though I never mentioned anyone’s god damn size, body type, or appearance…in that case it’s a 6 year old; her body type is off limits. And add to the fact… AM A FUCKING FAT PERSON.
This place is great when you are in whatever damn clique there is…and this place has it just like every where else. But when you are an outsider or not part of whatever the circle is you will find yourself jumped on like no one’s business. And that shit…IT FUCKING HURTS.
SO…yeah, fuck all of this shit. Because while I can handle all the other bullshit, I get pretty damn bent when people jump on my shit for something I did not actually say. When people make assumptions about me and my intentions without just fucking asking me directly. But yeah…I expect the response to just be another attack or a “well you were asking for it” response. Cool. I am not ok. Fuck all of this/.
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Scared but ok for now. No ins this year and history of cancer/autoimmune disorder, but good health overall in the past few years. Just… washing hands and figuring I have the privilege to do a lot of social distancing so beyond that effort, if I get it I get it. If I go I go. And whoever I know, if they die, they all know I cared so at least I have that peace stowed away for myself on the other side of this experience. No reason to abandon hope until it can’t be sustained anymore. In the meantime I’m just trying to stay positive and upbeat about it. What good does it do to whine when we’re all afraid and we all know it anyway? From time to time I cry. Seems normal.
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On the surface I’m doing ok. Kiddo and I are staying close to home. We’ll ride our bikes around the neighborhood or along one of the greenways, which are busy but everyone maintaining adequate distance. We are already homeschooling, so the closure of the schools through the end of the year is no big deal, except her co-op won’t reconvene. We’re fine on food and disinfectant. Husband continues to work his renovation project and is at Home Depot etc. pretty much daily, but I have the coming-home-mitigation plan in place, and he mostly complies.
Inside I’m screaming. I started a graduate program in January, just one online class to see if I can hack it, and I’m paralyzed by anxiety and hopelessness. I have a simple assignment due that the prof has already given me an extension on, a bigger one due in a week, and a client project to start, and I can’t move on any of them. It feels so pointless and futile now. The idea behind going back to school at my ripe old age was to try to undo the damage of being a stay-at-home mom for more years than I should have and to build some credentials to freelance. I saw that a glimmer of a possibility for being able to get the hell out of this country if Gilead happens, but I think that ship has sailed, I’m stuck here, and I failed my daughter being able to protect her.
Because we homeschool, I have contact - over distance only now - with too many willfully stupid, stereotypical homeschool moms (evolution?!!? clutches pearls! vaccinations?!!!? sneers and dabs on an essential oil blend! so I know exactly where my flu exposure at the beginning of the month came from). This morning it was a group text inviting everyone to a lake house - zero chance of Coronavirus because no neighbors for miles! NO NO NO, that’s not how it works. And the fact that it’s 80 deg F here today is NOT going to “kill the virus really fast” now.
TL:DR fine on the surface, collapsing inside.
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