Lockdown Level 4 begins at midnight tonight. I left the house once today to enjoy a full body massage from the wonderful Rebecca… the last human touch aside from Antony for sometime! There was thorough hand washing (check out the instructions!) prior to beginning and nose and face covered when I was face up … then lots of disinfecting surfaces I’d touched before the next client was in.
I came home, sat on my chair, looked out at my garden on this beautiful sunny day and felt extremely privileged. Not only was the massage a total treat for my stiff and tight muscles so I was feeling good… but I don’t have to worry about my income or entertaining children or finding food. I can rest, work, cook and enjoy life in the new normal.
I am acutely aware though that this is a really stressful time for families, for people in sectors like banking, health, government services and for business owners. I can’t imagine what it must be like for single-parent families, for those who live alone and those going through other stresses of job losses, ill-health, droughts etc. at the same time. Not to mention the homeless and those in overcrowded, unhealthy homes barely making ends meet. It doesn’t bear thinking about how the next month for some people will play out.
I am going to try and blog daily… sometimes it might be what I got up to – a kind of diary for myself in this strange time… who knows what else it will end up being. We will see! Summary of today’s happenings:
- Woke at 5.30am (body clock doesn’t know it’s lock-down yet), slept again though until 7.30, fed the chooks
- 8.45 Massage
- 10 am Reflections on how blessed I am – gratitude.
- 10.30am Work meeting via phone
- 11.15 kitchen pottering – making a salad, setting more beans to sprout while listening to podcast [On Being with Krista Tippett: Jonathan Rowson- Integrating Our Souls, Systems, and Society.]
- 1pm Zoom webinar
- 2pm Phone call with Sarah
- 3pm Listened to PM’s address on RNZ live
- Collected the eggs from our chooks, gave them fresh water, looked at facebook and Coronovirus stats & started this blog post
Before you go thinking these chooks are sweet – they aren’t! They are good layers (we get three eggs almost every day) but one of them attacked me – bit my hand twice today when I was giving them fresh water (my sore hand grrr)… and they aren’t very clever. First instead of going up on their roost at night (which all our other chooks have done automatically), they were sleeping (and pooping!) in the laying box. To stop that we put up bricks in the doorway at night so they couldn’t get in. They then went on TOP of the laying box, which meant smelly poop up there… so we placed a couple of wire things over that to make access difficult. The next day the chooks had pushed aside the wire frames which we’d tied in place with wire (!) and still sat there… sigh! Job for lockdown – come up with another method that gets them up on the roost. Suggestions welcome!
Right – time to make dinner now. I’m going to listen to the ‘WAIATA – anthems’ album while in the kitchen. If you’re not familiar with it, a bunch of NZ artists have each recorded one of their popular songs in te reo Māori… my favourites are the Six60 and Shapeshifter songs. Other plans for the evening include an hour or two of TimeBank work, creating a bit of a schedule for myself and reading my book. Love to all x