Life in self-isolation: What you can expect
Common coronavirus wisdom seems to be that if you’re not sick, what’s the point of self-isolation. But if not for lockdown when else would you try to teach your pets to speak, asks Sarah Blake.
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Life in lockdown, Day 9.
It happened today.
My husband and I had a competition to see who could get the cat to say the most “words”.
“Kitten! Kitten!”, my husband called at the cat.
“Pippy! Pippy! Talk to mummy!”, I exhorted.
The cat sat in the middle of the room and just stared down at the floor. We tried again, but she refused to look at either of us or to say a word in cat-speak. She wandered off as we called after her.
“Do you think we’re starting to get a bit weird?” I asked my husband. He was still looking to see where the cat had gone and looked frustrated that she had refused to “talk” to him.
“Huh?”
I asked him again if he thought we were starting to act a bit weird. Because we’d been locked down together for nine long days and nine long nights, us and the two teenagers.
“Oh,” my husband said, “no, I don’t think so. I’m just going to go and find the kitten. Kitten! Kitten!”
Our 18-year-old son has started playing Minecraft again, a decade after he first got into it.
“You’re playing Minecraft? Isn’t that for little kids?” I asked him.
“Mom, come on,” was his only explanation (yes, they call me Mom now).
My husband bought me a Japanese suki and barbecue cooking contraption two Christmases ago. It has been re-gifted regularly and has never left the box because I quite frankly didn’t know what to do with it. Now he’s taken it out of the box and there are bits of it all over the place. He gave up and went back to the tele.
Speaking of which, the streaming services have been kind enough to bring forward some movies that were still on at the cinema – seeing as how we can’t go to the cinema anymore. I found one I thought I’d like to watch – it was $A35 to rent it. I went back to watching the 24-hour coronavirus stations.
There is a definite tendency in lockdown to feel that you are sick, or at least, that you should be sick, or what’s the point of all this? We have two thermometers and my husband never gets tired of making his joke that he’s not going to tell anyone which is one he’s put in his mouth and which one has gone under his sweaty armpit. We all take our temperatures all day. We are also looking at investing in a wider range of self-testing devices for everything from blood-pressure to pulse-oxygen monitors. It gives us something to do.
Especially when the damn cat won’t talk to us.
Originally published as Life in self-isolation: What you can expect