Tag: coronavirus epidemic

8:00 am: Force myself to get up. Last couple days have seen my wake up time slipping later and later and I don’t like it as it eats into my morning.

8:30 am: Start my daily High Intensity Interval Training exercises. Doing four or five sets which should take up about twenty minutes.

9:00 am: My wife is still sleeping so no coffee yet since she’s our official coffee maker. Today I don’t have any official work for my online Masters so I check the forums. No one else has posted anything yet so I don’t have anything to comment on so I start getting some reading done.

10:30 am: My wife finally comes in with coffee.

11:30 am: Got to a good stopping point so switch over to writing. Two to three hours is the maximum productive time for studies until my brain starts glazing over. If I’m working on an actual assignment though I’ll usually keep going till its done. Working on the second scene in chapter seven of my dark fantasy novel. I’m not quite sure where it’s going. The story has kind of veered off from my original plan and I’m not sure what the end, for this book at least will be. There’s a few possibilities and I’ll see what seems to flow naturally from everything that’s come before when it gets to that point.

1:00 pm: Finish my daily goal of two thousand words. Could probably go longer but I’ve found that its better long term if I just stick to my daily goal as I’ll have something to start with tomorrow. Now that I’ve gotten my productive part of the day done, time to relax.

Skip lunch because of intermitting fasting. Time to do daily bounties in Diablo 3 and daily scan of home system in eve online.

4:00 pm: Pause current game of the moment, Dragon Age: Inquisition and whatever movie or youtube video is playing on my laptop, to take out tonight’s meat from the freezer. We’re having chicken tonight. I also tell my wife to put the rice on since that’s her contribution to dinner and it will take her a while to get around to it.

5:00 pm: Start cooking dinner. My wife can’t cook except for the occasional meal so I usually cook every day. Some day’s I’ll do something more involved like making pizza from scratch, including the dough. Today I’ll just be doing chicken and broccoli for one dish and egg and mushroom. My wife still hasn’t put on the rice so ask her nicely to do it again.

6:00 pm: Waiting on rice now which finally finishes. We sit down together to eat. My wife is bored from sitting around watching Chinese TV series all day. I tell her to get a hobby.

6:30 pm: Tonight is a trash night so I suit up with a mask and take out the trash. Don’t run into anyone else in elevator and I make sure to stay a few meters from everyone else. Garbarge collectors still have to work since they are doing an essential job. When I come back in, my wife helps me take off my outer clothes and stores them in the designed area. She also watches to make sure I wash my hands.

7:00 pm: Start playing Dragon Age and check to see if anyone from my gaming community is online on discord.

9:00 pm: Finish playing Dragon age for the night and switch over to Eve online for an hour.

10:00 pm: Wrap up gaming and head off to take a shower and spend the rest of the evening with my wife.

11:30 pm: Wife finally stops talking and we get to sleep. While falling asleep, I plan out the story for tomorrow’s writing.

To be honest, my day is pretty full. Not sure how I manage to normally fit in a nine to five job. I can happily stay home every day as long as I have projects to work on. Not getting a salary is the annoying part. If I can ever transition to writing fulltime, this is basically how I’ll live. I feel sorry for the people who feel they have to go out every day. They are not having fun at the moment. As my wife said, nerds in China are having a good time right now. Apparently there’s been a surge in zombie computer and video games popularity. Go figure right?

We’ve been visiting my wife’s sister and brother-in-law in Beijing for the last four days. We had originally planned to go back to Shanghai on the 27^th but we decided to move our return up for a few reasons. We’d heard through the family grapevine (cousin’s uncle’s brother twice removed etc…) that there has been some consideration to locking down Shanghai in the same way Wuhan and its neighboring cities have been locked down and the thought of spending a few weeks in Beijing playing Mahjong all day long every day is more time than my wife and I want to spend in Beijing. There’s also the element of being on home ground when confronting a virus. If one has to deal with a flu epidemic, it’s much better to do it from the comforts of home and the neighborhood you know.

For all those reasons, we switched our train tickets. Thanks to the wonders of social harmony, the railway company is not making anyone pay for refunds and offering free date alterations on prepaid tickets so we switched over to January 26th. My wife wondered if we should get the earliest train possible but I told her that there was no way she was going to get up at five in the morning so no point. Also as a foreigner in China, I cannot use my passport to board trains in the same way that Chinese can use their national ID cards so I have to get an actual printout of the ticket. Since the ticket office doesn’t open before eight o’clock in the morning, there’s no way I can get a 7 a.m. train so we changed to the 12 pm train.

This morning, we woke up earlier than we had been this holiday. I checked my masters’ website for new contributions from my fellow students on the forums, made a few comments and then we finished packing up. While we were waiting, my wife’s sister informed her that they had heard that the building managers were going around checking the temperature of everyone in the buildings that form the residential compound where we were staying. Since we don’t officially live there and were staying at her sister’s extra apartment, this could have created some awkwardness. Fortunately, the building managers never appeared and our in-laws drove us to Beijing train station.  Everyone at the station was wearing masks and the boards showing train capacity informed us that many of the trains had hundreds of empty seats, a first during the Spring Festival I’m sure.

Despite everything we’ve heard about lockdowns and checking people’s temperatures, there was no health inspection on our way out of Beijing. I told my wife that it was possible they were only checking the people coming into the city, figuring that anyone leaving would be the destination city’s problem. As I type this, we are in the train heading to Shanghai so I will see what kind of set up they have for those entering the city.

 Well we’ve now arrived home and it’s a bit anticlimactic to say that we entered Shanghai without any hassle whatsoever. Despite the gossip on social media, I didn’t see anything remotely resembling health checkups. Also contrary to social media, the supermarkets are as stocked as they always are with food, although our local supermarket has removed its fresh vegetables section, which is a bit annoying as they don’t sell packaged vegetables so we’ll have to go shopping tomorrow. All public venues such as museums, cinemas and such are closed and we’ll probably be staying in for the most part which will give plenty of time to keep up my studying, writing and gaming. I may even work in some exercising. The city has announced that all middle schools, primary schools and kindergartens are not allowed to reopen until the 17^th of February so I have an extra two weeks of holiday, though probably unpaid.

I would like to assure everyone that my wife and I are healthy and glad to be home and I will post updates to life in a flue epidemic as they come. For some reason, I have an urge to write a storyline about a plague in the novel I’m working on at the moment. Don’t know where these ideas come from.