Coping with COVID-19

Don’t let the title mislead you, I don’t have the virus. I’m meaning more how I’m coping with the world being predominantly closed. I’ve said it previously that I haven’t noticed too many drastic alternations to my previous lifestyle. I was practicing social distancing before it became required. I thought that I’d share some of the things that I’ve experienced during the global pandemic that helped boost my social interactions.

Group Chats: The first thing that happened was that I got added to more group chats. I have been in one dedicated one for many, many years dating back to the time of the Blackberry. This chat remained fairly constant as we got into the shutdown. I was added to a couple more and initially they were fast and furious. There was a twelve minute span at one point were I’d accumulated over one hundred messages. Quite remarkable. After the first week or two these started to diminish considerably as people fell into their new normal routine.

Video Calls: The next thing that happened right after the group chats blew up was scheduled video calls to hang out. I’ve FaceTimed with family in the past and I’ve had the odd Skype call but this was a different animal altogether. It started to become a regular thing in the early days of isolation to have 3-4 calls a week with friends I hadn’t seen in years. We’d have some drinks and some laughs and share stories. It was fun. Like the group chats, these became less frequent. Several people would have to drop out for various reasons; family, scheduling conflicts, lack of interest; and then it became a small group of three or four people and then stopped, not completely but more rare.

Online Gaming: This seems to replace the video call piece. It involves less people but there is something to do, rather than have to actually talk to each other. Which, admittedly, in a large group can be chaotic and not informative, especially with booze in the mix. I’ve had the good fortune to have a group of four of us try and solve a movie mystery game called Contradictions. It was somewhat poorly designed and our scheduled sessions would devolve into us talking about other things. We made it over halfway through and have decided to let it remain that way. It was challenging to do logisitically. Our tech savvy friend “drove” and we watched through his Twitch channel while on a video call. We enjoyed the time spent chatting and laughing at the game more than the gameplay.

Battleship: This past week I created an Excel file that would allow me to play Battleship against the Beer Guy’s young son over the internet. He is a novice and hardly understands the concept but was enjoying the game so I came up with the idea that we could play over FaceTime. He quickly learned how to decipher the grid and attack my ships. It helped him that I was showing him my screen, pretty advanced military intelligence. Also, the first game I had no option to fire back at him. It was a massacre! I told him that it took a full day for the ships to regenerate which was a clever ploy to limit it to one game a day. We played again and I was able to shoot back. He won though. At some point it would be good to get to the point where he can’t see my screen but that is yet to be determined.

Those are just a couple of the things that have kept me connected to the world outside my house. I’ve also been looking out the windows and seeing what little activity goes on in my neighbourhood. I know who is ignoring isolation protocols for sure. Otherwise I’ve found some other things to keep me busy. I’m posting episodes of Tales from The Tugboat, I’m reading my own novel from the Witcher series of books, and I’m continuing to cook up a storm. This past week I was mostly repeating recipes or eating leftovers so it wasn’t as exciting. Hopefully you are keeping busy and enjoying this once in a lifetime opportunity to live this way.