Social distancing in the sofa. Me in one corner, Adrian at a safe distance.

He misses cuddles and hugs more than anyone. He keeps coming to me because that’s what he does, and I keep having to tell him to back off. Which is no fun for either of us.

Ingrid also woke up with a slightly sore and phlegmy throat. Now the two of us have dinner in the dining/living room, while Eric and Adrian sit in the kitchen, so we don’t all breathe our potential germs at each other all the time.

It feels weird.

The soreness in my throat is so slight that several times during the day I thought I had only imagined it. Hypochondria, due to all the talk about covid-19. But occasionally it comes through more clearly, just enough to confirm that, yes, it’s there for real.

I woke up with a teeny-tiny feeling of soreness in my throat. Just a smidge, no more. Barely there

Whether what I have is a common cold or coronavirus or some other virus, I’m curious how I can have contracted it. I’ve barely been out among people recently, and always at a distance. Perhaps Adrian brought it home from school – I’m sure the kids at school don’t manage to keep a distance between them at all times.

So I isolate myself even further. No more grocery shopping. No more cuddling with the family. I ate my dinner separately, and I hung up a separate hand towel for myself.

The only other symptom apart from the sore throat is that I’ve been feeling slightly chilly all day. (Which could, of course, be due to the 15°C drop in the temperature outside. We even had sleet this morning.) Hence today’s photo, of my fluffiest, woolliest warm skirt.

Things are sprouting, not only in the garden but in the kitchen as well.

How does the potato know that it is spring? They don’t sprout like this during winter. They’re in a paper bag, in a dark cupboard. And still somehow they seem to know.

The old planting boxes are rotten through after ten years of sun and rain. I’m putting in place new ones, with fresh new soil and new strawberry plants.

Some kind of horrible weed had invaded several of the boxes with strawberries. It has thread-thin stalks and roots that break as soon as you try to remove it, so it’s impossible to get rid of. Replacing the soil will give the boxes a fresh start; maybe we’ll get a few years without that thing.

Adrian helped me assemble the boxes. Then Ingrid came out as well and they “helped” each other. There was so much monkeying around that there was almost no progress on the boxes… when they gave up and went in, it was almost a relief, and I could finally get the last boxes done on my own.

Adrian cooks dinner with me once a week, but now he wanted to make a meal all on his own.

Pancakes are a great first dish for him. There’s a single stream of obvious tasks to be done. No multi-tasking, no task-switching, no wondering what to do next. And he’s had enough practice that it’s almost impossible to fail: even if some of the pancakes don’t come out perfectly round, they will all taste good.

I’ve been exercising more or less daily during my lunch break recently. I have found a bit of a routine by now and it’s going pretty well. Some days I go out and cycle, some days I do a bit of weight training in the living room.

(You know what else we have a quarantine shortage of, in addition to toilet paper and web cameras? Kettlebells, and other types of weights. I make do with the small 4 kg weights we had at home and think vague thoughts of making my own weights. I have plenty of rocks in the garden, after all.)

Today the weather was so fabulously nice that I moved my weight training outside to the deck. The bushes are all still bare and don’t screen the garden from passers-by so I felt somewhat self-conscious, but the passers-by were few and didn’t notice me.

The cherry trees outside aren’t blossoming yet, but a branch we have in a vase in the kitchen is.

I wouldn’t normally cut a branch just to bring it inside. It feels disrespectful, wasteful. But a few branches were hanging at face height across the path from the front door to the garage, and getting mildly annoying. So I might as well kill two birds with one stone – get rid of the annoyance and bring in some pretty flowers.

tretton37 usually holds regular code lunches in our offices. Now that we can’t do that, we’ve moved our knowledge sharing events online. Today it was my turn to do a talk – a repeat performance of a talk I’ve done before, but this time streamed on YouTube instead of talking to a live audience sitting in front of me.

It felt weird at first to talk to a camera instead of real people, but I got used to it pretty soon. I found a decent setup with all the screens and windows and peripherals, with my presentation notes close to the camera. And I managed to get my talk done within my allocated time, just barely. I do tend to ramble on sometimes.

I noticed afterwards that I wave my arms a lot. When I speak in front of an audience, it feels natural to move around and gesticulate, and I imagine it looks normal. On screen, it seems more distracting. If I do this again, I’ll have to try and tone down the gesticulating.

Here’s my talk about multi-tenant architecture, in case you’re interested.

It feels like summer outside. I cycled in just a tank top today!