Tracking my Time in Quarantine by Weeks not Days

We are doing what? Going in quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic? That was March 13, 2020.

As a person who considers themselves a “homebody” – a person who likes staying home - this was not a issue, but instead welcoming news. The idea of being quarantined for a week or two was not a problem. I immediately decided to take care of the essential stuff:

• Stack up on food – make a supermarket run.

• Sign up for Disney+ – the kids have been asking, so spending the $7 a month is not a problem. Along with every other streaming service we have (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple TV) and cable television and YouTube, we will all be entertained.

• Make sure I have no lingering or outstanding disagreement with my wife.

• Have VPN access for work.

I am set to go. I can survive this journey for two weeks. Two days in and I remember I left something off my list, I need to make sure I have:

• Dumbbells for exercising. I might as well workout at home since I cannot go anywhere.

All right, I am ready for quarantine. Day 4 of quarantine-What? We are out of food already. In a house with three teenagers, my wife and I, we realized how quickly we plow through food. I will add to my list:

• Go to the supermarket. Outcome: we could not get everything we needed from the supermarket – they were running low on certain food items.

We made it through week 1. Time to reflect - lessons learned from week 1:

• I spend too much time on Zoom calls – this only got worse over the coming weeks.

• I had a hard time adjusting to work the first two days of the week – but by the end of the week, I was now a pro at working from home.

• 3 trips to the supermarket in 1 week, revealing how much teenagers eat – this only got worse for the upcoming weeks.

• The lines between work and personal life were so blurred that I spent more hours working than with family – this did not improve greatly over the coming weeks.

• I started to lose track of the day and date; however, I know we completed week 1.

Week 1 ended and so did week 2 and week 3. While I liked the idea of being home, I lost track of the days. I started to count my time in quarantine in terms of the week. So, week 1, week 2 …… week 6. This morning I got up, and all I said to my wife was it is week 10. It was a continuous Groundhog Day loop.

In pre-COVID days we counted days to get to the weekend. Now, here I am counting weeks to when we get out of quarantine with no idea of how many weeks that will be. So, counting weeks has become my new way of telling what month and day it is – It is week 10 and counting.

How are you managing quarantine? Reach out to me at wthompson@live7p.com. Next entry will discuss some of your tips, as well as a few of my own at surviving (and thriving) in quarantine and beyond.