#LivingInLockdown
Day 15 – Monday 30th March
It’s the start of a new week and enough of the heavy thinking I feel. Time to lighten the mood. For some reason I leapt out of bed this morning raring to go. This is most unusual. I never do this, even without the lockdown, because I’m not a morning person. It’s even more surprising because it is snowing this morning. The weather has gone crazy. Any sensible person would be snuggled up in bed, but my mind is racing and making plans. I’ve decided this will be a week of the old versus the new.
Old because I made a list of things to do at the start of this quarantine that I’ve so far managed to ignore. This is largely because it’s the sort of jobs that I’ve happily been ignoring forever, like ironing, because I find them dull, though some are normal work activities. Well, no more! This week I start to cross them off the list as done.
New because there are a whole load of activities that have opened up to us all during this quarantine. One of its big benefits is that everyone is rushing to get their services online and offer free incentives to help people whilst stuck indoors and I assume encourage new customers into the fold. The National Theatre is showcasing a play every Thursday; The Globe is showing a Shakespeare play each day; over 500 museums have provided virtual online tours; a number of musicals and circus acts have also been made available; there are free online courses from Cousera and Udemy; some of my favourite wine shops in Madrid are doing online wine tastings and they’ll deliver the wines to your home; many of our local comedians are also doing online shows; the top cocktail bars in Spain are doing a series on how to make their cocktails; quiz nights, drink night socials, coffee mornings, business networking have all gone onto various video conference facilities; then there is the plethora of online health activities including exercise routines, yoga practice, meditation, hypnotherapy, diets that boost your immune system, and cookery classes of all international culinary types.
If there was ever something you’ve always wanted to try, now is the time to do it, because you can probably try it for free online whereas before you would have had to pay. It would be madness not to take advantage of this, so this week’s goal is to give something new a try each day. I’ll let you know how it goes.
However before you can try all these new activities you need to have the software or app that they run on. I am a typical middle age social media user. I’m on Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype. At the beginning of this year I finally caved and signed up for Amazon Prime, but I’m still holding out against NetFlix. I don’t want to watch that much TV. Since this start of this quarantine I’ve opened a Zoom account to host video conferences, started FaceTiming my family, downloaded instagram to see the wine tastings, signed up to YouTube for the plays and musicals (i did use it before but didn’t have an account), and bought the AirWeb app to allow me to access the internet on my TV (as if the phone, iPad and computer were not enough options!)
Just learning what I am doing with all these different apps is enough new stuff for now I feel. But watch this space as I review the various freebies on offer.
As for the old and that big To Do list, I finally knuckled down and start writing my wine blog again. For those of you who don’t know it is called The HonestWineDrinker.com and is available as a website and a Facebook Page. I’ve been running it for a couple of years now largely as a way for me to remember what I’ve drunk (getting harder to remember as I get older). Normally I do a post a day from Monday to Friday with weekends off, but I have posted anything for 3 weeks. This is in part because I usually write my posts on my phone whilst having a coffee in a cafe somewhere on one of my long walks. Obviously there have been no walks and no lingering over coffee in a nice cafe. Trying to write the blog at home on my computer seems more like work than fun. Nonetheless today I wrote and scheduled all this weeks posts and I’m feeling pretty chuffed with myself. I can now sit back until next weekend and enjoy a job well done.