Huh, yeah, so my life and pretty much everyone else's has now gone off the rails!
February ended up being just as busy as I had expected and that continued on into the first two weeks of March. We had our faculty candidate visits, our board meeting, and our grad student recruiting and then the university closed on March 13 when the first cases of the novel coronavirus were confirmed in Austin. Most of us have been working from home since, although I've popped up to campus a couple of time to grab things. I was lucky that I was pretty much ready to go with a set up for working from home - probably a sad statement on my life choices - since I have had to occasionally do some work while home on staycations.
Not surprisingly, with all of the free food around during all of our events, I have not been able to sustain any weight loss over the past two months. And I don't expect to really lose any while working from home. I'm actually mostly okay with that, as long as I don't have a huge gain. I'm not getting as much walking and stair climbing in right now, mostly because the weather hasn't been very cooperative (not really a complaint - we've gotten some much-needed rain). I also haven't been checking my blood pressure as frequently as I should, but when I have checked, the numbers were pretty good.
But the good things - I've been keeping up with the Shakespeare 2020 project! I can stay up later reading since I don't have to get up as early to get ready for work and drive in. And I've gotten quite a bit more stitching done, not surprisingly. More on that over on Lara's Loose Threads soon!
I keep thinking that I should write some about what it's like to be living through this time, but the main thing I keep thinking is just how WEIRD it all feels. I was shopping in the grocery store on March 10 when things were really starting to get... "interesting" and they were already starting to sell out of some things and limit purchases on items and while I was standing in line to check out, I was reading the news on my phone. And for one brief moment I had a wave come over me where I honestly felt like I was in the first 20 minutes of a post-apocalyptic movie (or the first episode of a post-apocalyptic TV show) as things are *just* starting to tip. I did a little shopping last week and it was just surreal going through a store with a bunch of empty shelves and few people, some already wearing masks. I'm probably going to head to the grocery store later this week and this time I'll be wearing some sort of face covering too.
At this point, I think we're expecting at least 3-4 more weeks of working from home. I'm not really stir crazy yet since I've been working and chatting with people over Slack, Zoom, etc. but I think even I will have a breaking point eventually. I may be a homebody introvert, but even introverts need some in-person interaction with friends and family! With some good alone time to recover after. :)