Morning Pages, March 18th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D.C. metro region has been in a state of partial lockdown. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Last night I was pretty worried about what to do in the situation where both my parents died. They picked up my little brother from college and he's in "quarantine" at home for two weeks, but I don't know how much is enough. If anything happens to them, I'll be caught flat-footed and vulnerable to predatory actors who might want a chunk of the estate. I don't think being paranoid will help things. I think I should probably put together some sort of a checklist of items of things to do in that situation. I'll add it to my todo list.

I'm sick with something viral. A dry cough with no fever. It's been like this for about a week or two. I've been sick for weeks on end at times with just a cold, so this isn't surprising, but the inability to get coronavirus tests is a bit scary. I actually wish I had nausea or something because those are explicitly not symptoms of coronavirus.

My productivity has been shit over the past few days. I checked my GitHub and apparently I had zero commits over the past four days alone. I promised people I would have an MVP by the end of the week, and I'm not sure how reasonable that might be. I don't have a deployment path set up after a week of running through tutorials. Turns out good tutorials on how to set up production sites on AWS without the usage of AWS RDS is extremely hard, and I wasted a lot of time by doing so. Pretty disappointing.

Good things. I'm really happy I got my bike back from the old office bike cage. They cut both my locks, and I'm not sure where my bike-mounted flashlight, grocery panniers, and kickstand are (or at least it wasn't on the bike), but my bike is still there in one piece. I love this bike, I had it when I was a kid, and I have around 1,500 miles on it. Just got the gear mechanism replaced a few years ago too. I decided to keep it in my apartment in order to avoid the raw sewage that bubbles up in the apartment complex bike room. It's nice just looking at it and having it in my life. I thought it had been scrapped.