Pandemic 2

Thought I would expand on the whole coping with the pandemic thing.  Plus, I'm pondering doing a move back here and dropping Facebook.  FB has given me contact with many long lost friends but they have been sh*tty lately about facilitating propaganda, and I just don't feel like I'm keeping a record of my life there.

We really we could be back in the US to help and support and hell, just see family.  But family members who are in the States can't do much to support each other these days anyway, so the times are what they are.

Our work situations settled really quickly -- Marjorie was already working from home for much of the time when the call to settle in place came down, and my company, while they had been resistant to the idea of people working from home during the previous year I've worked there, were able to adapt quickly to everyone WFH.  Since we do a massively multiplayer online game, business has been booming since the lockdown, and having everyone work from home hasn't been much of an impact at all.  I do miss working in our nice office, but working at home has its perks too.

Marjorie has taken over the upstairs bedroom that we converted into an office, and is on video conference calls much of the day, doing admin work for the NHS.  I'm downstairs at the dining room table, where I have my work MacBook (gah) and monitor set up, and spend a lot of time conference calling as well.  This lets me man the back door so Hamish can come and go as he pleases, between his morning and evening walks.  He doesn't quite get everything that's going on, but he's mostly happy to have us home.  He doesn't quite understand why we aren't going to the pub anymore though.

Thursday evenings at 8 pm is the Clap For Carers time, when everyone goes out and applauds for a few moments, then basically catches up with each other (from an appropriate distance).  Hamish thinks it's Clap For Hamish.  We let him come out with us without a lead, perhaps foolhardily, but the clapping probably scares off the cats, and he always just ends up sitting on the end of the driveway and sniffing the air.

Weekends we've been trying to do a bigger family outing.  We've gone through town a couple of times, once on bike and once with the dog on foot, but mostly stay confined to our village.

I have a new hobby!  I had dabbled in it before, but probably thanks to the lockdown, now it's serious.  I've started using my exercise outings to visit area cemeteries (we have a dozen or so easily reachable) to take pictures, which I then upload to findagrave.com and transcribe, for the benefit of genealogists and historians around the world.  I've done 217 graves as of now, and it feels like I'm just getting started.  It's a perfect mixture of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation for me -- the churchyards and cemeteries are historically interesting, but I think consistently beautiful as well.  The graves are of course poignant reminders of mortality, but I'm also learning so many random things about British history, and from the ground up.  There are historical records for some of these sites already, but they are grossly incomplete and spotty, and almost no pictures.  So it feels like any effort that's made helps.  So much of this history is just fading before our eyes, and I mean that literally -- many graves feel like they are on the brink of readability, and to record them now is to rescue them from obscurity!