Day 13: Masks, doom, stage-combat.

While la p'tite did her online distance learning in the morning, I spent the morning sewing surgical facemasks, which was fun and felt very wartime - sort of like knitting socks for Our Boys At The Front, except they were actually for my parents (my mother was wanting something more stylish than the grotty sawdust-covered all-purpose masks that have been hanging on a nail next to my dad's table saw for the last twenty years, can't think why). I did feel very proud of my pre-COVID reduce-reuse-recyle mentality, as I was successfully able to scrounge up enough garbage twisty-ties to successfully make nose-pinchy inserts for all the masks. I made a mask out of octupus and squid-print material lined with grey - for the business cephalopod look - since la p'tite wanted one as well, so we are all set, at least fashion-wise, for the apocalypse. Oh, the irony that I taught a class in monster mask-making just last summer, with no inkling that I would be mass-producing surgical masks less than a year later... Trophy BF has requested a Batman N95, which is above my paygrade but which I am sure will be one of the first things to start getting produced once the factories in Wuhan are up and running again; I secretly hope that the experience of having lived under actual clear blue skies for the last couple of months while everything's been shut down will result in some converts to the environmentalist cause in the mainland Chinese powers-that-be. Dare to hope... 

In the afternoon we went out for a run/rollerskate; passing through the Westbrae we passed two grocery stores both with lines out the door and multiple smaller food shops which were allowing only one customer in at a time. The shops are, thankfully, starting to limit people as to how much of any one item they can buy in order to prevent hoarding, but it does mean that we will need to go out to buy food more often and spend longer doing it than before, which is somewhere on the frownyface/smileyface pain scale between tedious and possibly dangerous. Video chat with auntie D. over dinner - she is on the lam in Utah camped out in a vacation rental in a closed-down ski resort, and likely to remain there for the duration, working online by day and teaching her co-fugitives 'how to find the beat in a piece of music' (yes, for real) by night - and then we watched Song of the Sea, which I think is up there in my top ten favourite movies ever. I love, love, love the artwork in it, plus I just read that the whole thing was drawn by hand. Wow. I wish Tomm Moore would make more films already. 

I am trying not to worry about money. Quite apart from only being able to work halftime while the schools are closed down, furloughs and layoffs and reduced hours are happening, even in the doctor world. As locums physicians both trophy BF and I are, we are finding out, very, very vulnerable - as the outpatient clinics reduce their services and go down to unreimbursed phone visits, the locums are the first to get the chop, and credentialling as a hospitalist/ER triage provider will (a) take time (b) not be guaranteed either and (c) put us more in harm's way with regards to getting sick ourselves (I am grateful la p'tite and I are both in a low risk group, and was very reassured by Atul Gawande's level-headed recent article in the New Yorker, but I could still bring it home to other, more vulnerable family members). 

I fell asleep and dreamt that I got into a stage-fight with some woman in a cafeteria while waiting for our plane to leave for South Africa for the medieval bookmaking art class I'd registered for, and our fake fight was so convincing that someone called the cops on us and we ended up missing the flight. I have no idea what it means.