Coping with Isolation

Math puzzles are good fun
Remember the little person on the last line is wearing red shoes and holding 2 cones

Fortunately human beings are very adaptable. We are all finding ways to cope with this pandemic. Having the luxury of connecting on the internet, unlike during the time of the 1918 flu pandemic, life is a lot better.

We are able to share ideas on how to manage keeping children busy, with things like Tumble Book Library, free with your Calgary library card. This allows kids and parents to listen and read-along to animated story books. Adults can get e-books and audio books. There are crafts and window displays to keep neighbours amused while out walking. There are computer learning opportunities for both adults and kids.

Painting our home is another way to keep busy

A few nice things are happening to make life a little better. With the amount of families out walking there is a need to increase the width of sidewalks. This has prompted the City of Calgary to consider closing off some traffic lanes to vehicles, and opening them up to people walking, or cycling. This helps maintain the very important 6ft. personal space circumference. Alberta is opening some of its child-care centres for health workers, and core services personnel. These will be phased in around hospitals first. We rely on these people to keep us safe and alive. The government of Canada is giving $82 billion dollars to support families and businesses. This is an attempt to keep the economy going, and help prevent massive unemployment.  Hopefully this will help us to recover when life gets back to normal.

I heard a psychologist today giving a tip on surviving  uncertainty in the duration of the virus. She gave the analogy of a starving person not knowing when his next meal would be. This is very difficult. However, if he is starving and knows that a day later he will be getting a slice of bread, it is a different story. We should say to ourselves "I can do this for a month." We can survive this deadline. If life has not changed after this time, we start again using the experience we have gained.

Scary Corona plans

My great plans on visiting all the playgrounds have been dashed now. They have all been closed in an effort to contain the Corona Virus. This is a good plan. The 6ft. distance between individuals, hand washing, isolation if cold or flu symptoms appear, working from home, are also good plans. It has not taken long however for the scary ones to appear.

I have heard of cures posted by nasty people on social media. Drinking bleach, blasting hot air from a blow dryer into your sinuses, gargling warm water with salt or vinegar and eating bananas filled with B6 are a few of them. These are very dangerous. The most dangerous of all was the statement by president Trump that "we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself." He was of course referring to the state of the economy. I would hope he did not realize the danger of this statement. It  prompted the Lieutenant Governor of Texas to say to Tucker Carlson, on Fox News Monday night, that he thought there were "lots of grandparents" who would be "willing to take a chance on {their} survival in exchange for keeping the America that all Americans love for your children and grandchildren." I read this statement by the Lieutenant Governor in heathercoxrichardson@substack.com This is a daily "Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson" which I have been following.

It is at times like this that we find out who the humans are, and who the alien like creatures are. I do have faith in humanity. Sometimes humans are mislead by others who cannot see beyond their own wellbeing. We have to be reminded that the wellbeing of every person means our happiness. The state of the world right now should point out to us in high definition, how much we depend on one another no matter how great we are. Let strong leaders who understand this, emerge.

The good news is that Wuhan China, where the virus started the end of December 2019, declared that restrictions will be lifted April 8th. as they are virus free. That is 3 months and a bit. This gives us hope that there is a time limit.

Keep up the home schooling. Kids love it.

Surviving Isolation

Most of us are doing ok for now. The thought of this virus lasting 3 months minimum, but probably longer frightens me. Do any of us know what it is like to be isolated for an indefinite amount of time?

I keep reminding myself that I should look at the positives. I have a partner and close family all living together who are very healthy. What must it be like for those who live alone? What must it be like for people who have no family or relatives? Even then, we are better off than we were before Facebook, Skype, twitter or Zoom. At least some of us can still work, meet socially on line, or even do some home schooling. There is no reason why we cannot enjoy lunch with a friend online. Everything is the same except different. Really, the only important difference is no physical contact. We can go for family walks. People are amazing. Some neighbourhoods have come up with novel ideas to make walking interesting. They have their kids tape funny pictures to their windows. More structured imaginative ways are also emerging. Competitions for best paintings or the amount of teddybears in windows are becoming popular. The bear hunt is very exciting for the younger ones. For those open playgrounds it is possible to have kids stay very distant from one another. Visiting a variety of them throughout the week is fun.  This may not be possible if infections continue to rise.

There are some beautiful parks in Alberta

This park had a solar energy spot to charge phones

Bike riding and scootering could be a change from walking.

I myself belong to Toastmasters. We have started having club meetings on Zoom. This is different but still enjoyable. We get to meet and appreciate one another in new ways. I find myself Skyping or e-mailing old friends to find out how they are coping. The daily updates which we must watch, to find out the speedy changes that are happening, can be frightening. We are lucky to have computers to help us have discussions with friends and be informed.

Do not forget the elderly. I saw some great ideas on TV. One can record songs and messages on old simple devises. Decks of cards for solitaire and other card and board games can also be included. Get the grandkids to do drawings. Remember to clean all with anti bacterial wipes and put into a zip lock bag. This could be a great treat to the old folk.

Does anyone have other interesting ideas? Simple ideas are best especially in this era of overload.
Keep safe.

Pandemic Musings

I am used to having personal and family “downs” as in “ups and downs” in everyday life. Who has not felt the horrible frustration of the stove not working on Christmas Eve? The car mysteriously refusing to work when running late for an important meeting is another one.  How about the furnace breaking down on the coldest day of the winter? “Why is life so unfair to me” I say to myself, when experiencing these mini tsunamis. “Look at all these people walking around with not a care in the world”. I then give myself a shake. Realizing I have the knowledge and means to fix the issues, I just get to it.

This corona virus is something different. The whole world is unfortunate. There is no one wandering around without a care. Also, we do not have the knowledge and means to fix this yet. “Yet” is the important word to dwell on. Eventually we will have a vaccine to stop it. In the meantime, we are told how to keep ourselves as safe as possible. Government health leaders say we should avoid crowds. We need to remember this new phrase “social isolation”. We should cough into our sleeve, or a tissue that we throw away. Frequent hand washing for as long as it takes to say happy birthday twice is also required. Protocol is changing hourly,  so we have to stay tuned to government health web sites for updates.

I have noticed people getting angry at the way governments are handling the crisis. I overheard a gentleman telling someone, "A friend of mine in Italy was given a 500 dollar ticket for being out on his scooter after curfew, looking for groceries". This gentleman was very angry at the perceived injustice. This may or may not be true, but the problem with it is not the veracity of the story, but the emphasis on the wrong issue. The really important issue is there has been 1800 deaths in Italy as of Monday March 16th. There were actually 368 deaths in just 24 hours. These numbers are per Global News reporting by James MacKenzie. The horror of this does justify some extreme measures.

The world has certainly shifted. Uncertainty does not feel comfortable. Wouldn't it be nice to have a time limit on this virus? In the meantime have patience, stay safe and help flatten the curve.

Celebrations

Around 1975 our first car a big old Chevy Biscayne

My husband and I are 46 years married today March 9th! This is an achievement to be proud of. Among all the congratulations I got a couple of condolences. This funny little sarcasm is because life is not one long “happy ever after” tale. How would we know we are happy, if we never know sadness. Just look at any persons social media page. Life is not the wonderful trips and achievements that are posted. It is a combination of these, and everyday life, mixed with, hopefully, not too much tragedy. Never envy those posts. They are just part of the tale.

I am enjoying the long relationship I have with my husband. We, luckily, have not had too much sadness or tragedy in our lives. Our close family is also healthy and happy. Not being wealthy or weighted down with a lot of material things, gives us freedom.

We try hard to never compromise our values. I do not mean the pious ones, but the human ones. They are what guides us to have respect, acceptance, consideration, appreciation, openness and empathy towards other human beings. They also put a responsibility on us to make the most of the next 20 or 30 years. I am feeling the chasm between past and future. It is time to jump over and take on new challenges. What these may be is what we are both exploring now. Bye, bye youth hello new beginning.



I

Opinions on Everything.

I am changing up my blog a little now. Notice I am going from tales to opinions. Opinions are also tales, but not stories. They are my take on whats going on in the world with my limited background knowledge. I try to be flexible and not have preconceived ideas about everything. Looking at facebook I am aware that what I see is confirmation that my concerns about the world are correct. The person next door will get different information which confirms that their concerns are correct. We need to worry if all we get is confirmation that we are very aware, very correct all knowing humans. Similarly, if we always surround ourselves with friends and acquaintances who think just like us, we are liable to become narrow minded and smug about all our opinions.

The only way to overcome this bias is to read and research from a lot of different sources. Do not be afraid to read a right wing article if you are left wing, and of course visa versa.  No person is totally one way or the other, unless they have been brainwashed. There is also obvious criteria to help us form all our opinions. No beliefs should urge us to harm or intimidate another person. They should not force us to become a xenophobic person. We should recognize that we all want the same things. We want a healthy, happy, fulfilled life for our whole family. We want sufficient education to have a job and home with resources to eat nutritionally and vacation occasionally. To put it better we can look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. (It is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs. There are 5 stages:

1st Physiological needs:  air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction
2nd Safety needs:  personal security, employment, resources, health, property
3rd Love and belonging:  friendship, intimacy, family, sense of connection
4th Esteem:  respect, self-esteem, status, recognition, strength, freedom
5th Self-actualization:  desire to become the most that one can be

Maslow continued to refine his theory over several decades. (Maslow, 1943, 1962, 1987)

ref:
McLeod, S.A. (2018, May 21). Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Simply psychology:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html)

Just because we all need the same things does not mean that we go about achieving them the same way. Some of us differ a little on how to achieve these and some of us differ a lot.

Learning to blog

This blog, with 8 posts I have done within a month. It was a project for Pathways at Toastmasters. My main reason for taking it on, is that I needed a reason to write. I also needed a timeline. Writing on demand, at least twice a week, was not something I was sure I could do. I feel very competent and proud that I did do this, at least, and loved it.

With zero knowledge of blogging I was able to navigate the murky waters of blogging land, with its strange lingo like hosting, URL's, design, layout, theme and reading list.

The reading list, I recently discovered, is the blogs I like to read, belonging to others. It puts them under this heading, to be easily accessible. I find these blogs by clicking on my likes, eg. reading, in my profile, and this brings up tons of blogs belonging to people who like to read.

I seem to learn new things each day, quite often by accident. For eg. iPads are not very good for editing posts. I can see my full post in Preview mode but when I go to Draft mode, to edit, my post will not page up. Desk tops, or I believe, lap tops are better for editing.

I also found that using Safari as my web browser was not good for some things. I had to do some research to discover that Google Chrome was far superior. I was not able to reply to comments through Safari only through Google Chrome. I do not know, however, if this applies to all blogging hosts.

Having bungled my way through this I found out some things. Blogs are used by writers mostly to promote their books, whether e-books or paper books. They give some excerpts, and write some short essays, about their writing angst. They also give advise on writing which I find is very interesting. Also, hosting sites are usually geared towards 'birds of a feather'. Ones interests guides one to a certain host. There are free hosts, (good for new bloggers), and also ones that charge fees. The difference is, that the ones that charge, have a lot of fancy bells and whistles.

I read something interesting about these two varieties. In keeping with modern thinking, people generally, are getting fed up with fancy sites. They want just plain quality, not fanciness. It reminds me of when people used to type their resumes on colourful paper, with all kinds of unique fancy lettering. That phase, thank goodness, has passed. Maybe this plainness is just hopeful thinking for a new blogger.

The experience has been wonderful. I loved it so much that I am determined to keep going. Being retired now I need a passion for my second life. I call it this because our life span is much longer than it used to be. With my many years of experience I could do some opinion pieces, or talk about family, or write some very short stories. The options are limitless. I also find the idea exciting.