Wednesday means date night, we cooked chicken parm with homemade marinara sauce. I’ve said it before, if there’s one skill I’m going to come out of here much improved will be cooking!
Continue readingLosing track of what day it is. For a good period of the day thought it was Monday. We got two new chairs for the apartment today. I have a proper office chair but the only other chairs we had were some wooden chairs that came with my dining table when I first moved to NY. Unfortunately, they were coming apart and not comfy for long periods. It’s good to have some better chairs now – particularly for Danielle’s back!
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A busy day of meetings so not much time to get outside. It was also pouring with rain all day. Talking to the team there’s a clear theme to how people are keeping busy and the different stages we’re all going through. Building/buying more furniture (chairs, desks – we have two chairs on the way as well) and playing games on video conference (Jackbox, House Party, Cards against Humanity, Settlers of Catan).
Continue readingNew York “paused” at 8pm tonight. All non-essential businesses (somehow wine and spirit shops included in this category) must close or have employees work remote. Before then we took a walk down to Soho to drop off the Spectrum router. For the most everyone seemed to be social distancing and a lot of areas were very quiet. Although as we walked back through Madison Square Park the park was quite full, especially the dog park. It feels more and more that the only way to control social distancing is to enforce it.
Continue readingNeither Danielle nor I had the best night sleep as a couple of mosquitoes decided to join us. Mid-March feels early for them and I read it can be attributed to global warming, which reminds me how I have been thinking this coronavirus is at least helpful for the planet if not the people.
Continue readingDefinite TGIF feeling today. Despite the weekend not bringing anything particular, still going to be home for most of it, it feels good. Treated ourselves to a bagel breakfast today, after a brisk walk around the block. Had a 30 minute break from calls this afternoon which we took advantage of for another walk. It’s been so nice outside, really feels like Spring. Shame it’s not lasting or that we can really enjoy it – socialising in a park, dinner outside? Out of the question.
Each day I’m going to be posting an update from past 24 hours of my experiences living in New York City during the coronavirus lockdown. So far I’ve been working remote since Thursday 12th of March with NYC seemingly progressively shutting down.
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Continue readingA week today was the first time I started working from home. In that time streets have definitely got emptier but not necessarily day over day, I think Monday was still the quietest. Started the day with a 9am call and yesterday was crazy at work as everyone seemed to start reacting to Coronavirus, so didn’t wake up early enough for a walk.
Continue readingTook a longer walk this morning in really nice warm weather. Made one stop at UPS to drop off a parcel, one woman in there ahead of us talking with the man behind the counter. The man and woman were discussing one of the variations of the only real conversation point right now. Everyone’s got one thing on their mind, but conversation can split in a few different strands from the central topic. This particular topic captured a couple – how quiet it is generally, and what do you do in the evening? After a while you start to go to bed early..
The walk was actually quite eventful, more so than expected. As we passed Trader Joe’s supermarket, there was a line wrapped half way around the block and then right down to the bottom of the avenue. It’s hard to judge how many people were in the line given people applying social distancing but I’ve never seen anything like that, much least at 9am on a Wednesday. I don’t really understand it, the initial panic buying proved needless and we went food shopping on Saturday without an issue. There had been suggestions from city mayor of a more rigorous lockdown but that was quickly dismissed by NY governor.
Work has been incredibly busy today. With my tech client, demand has clearly been there for laptops as people adjust to new working environments and styles. For the first time since starting to work remote we started doing video conferencing instead of audio only. This was helpful in adding a new dimension to the day.
Social highlight of the day? The walk in the morning and then a short walk in the evening to buy some beer and watch Survivor then Shark Tank. Wednesday evening is normally our ‘date night’ – we try and keep it free every week to hang and do something together. Since it is Wednesday we ordered food in, first time for not cooking this week. It’s a small thing but it’s about trying to keep routine as usual as possible – making Wednesday feel different from other days.
Danielle’s work was quiet today, which meant we had the TV on and a couple of laptops. Seemed to stretch the already dodgy internet beyond where it was happy. To solve for this I ordered a new router from Best Buy vs the crappy Spectrum provided. This in turn was the perfect lunchtime walk, a nice 20 minute stroll to Union Square.
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