Saturday 20 March 2021

Lockdown 2020 - a year on....

 It's a year on Tuesday (23rd March), since Britain first went into full Lockdown in the fight against COVID-19.   The television is full of it this morning, which got me thinking... What have I done differently, since we went into Lockdown?  There are a lot of things that I did before, that many people have adopted during this time (cooking from scratch, baking, knitting, etc), but here are a few things that I do now, that I didn't habitually do before Lockdown:-

  1. Regularly walking to L!dl.  Our local branch is 1.5 miles away and it's become our primary grocery shop.  We walk there about once a week to buy toiletries, dairy products and fresh veg. (Prior to Lockdown, we bought our fresh veg and eggs from a farm shop 5 miles away and split our supermarket shopping between MrT's and L!dl, driving to both.  The first casualty of Lockdown was the farm shop - they are in the  middle of a National Trust property and were forced to close when the "big house" closed.  They haven't reopened.)
  2. Buy the Sunday paper from the local branch of the C0-0p.  Again, this is a walk, whereas previously we'd drive to MrT's.
  3. Going for a walk "after work" every evening.  We've both been working from home since Lockdown started.  This is the only way to get that mental space between work-life and home-life, which we'd normally get from a commute.  Another plus side is that, unlike many people, I haven't put on weight. 
  4. As you may have gathered, I'm not doing a lot of driving now.  The money that I've saved by not buying a tank of diesel every week is going into the "Car Account" instead, to be spent on services, insurance, road tax and the inevitable replacement car.
  5. Use my "morning commute" time to exercise.  Rather than get up later, now that I'm working from home - which might upset DH's daily routine - I use that time to exercise.  I've done the Couch-to-5K and now run 3 times a week.  On the other 2 mornings, I do some yoga stretches and I've started doing a bit of weight training.
  6. Learned French via Duolingo. (It's free.)  Today is day 296 of my current streak of lessons.  I'm spending less than 10 minutes a day and have learned considerably more words than I did in four years of French at high school.  I'm not sure I can string a sentence together and I doubt I'd understand if my French colleagues started talking in their native tongue, but I know far more than I did. 

What about you?  What are you doing differently since you went into Lockdown?

- Pip

2 comments:

Jackie said...

I am not shopping as much, not visiting people like I used to (though part of that is needing surgery, which I have finally had, and being busy trying to get as many projects done as possible.

God bless.

Monday's Child said...

I'm taking my Spanish lessons seriously. I've got Mondly for a few minutes every morning (368 day streak right now) and Rosetta Stone at least 4 days a week.
I'm exercising during my after work "commute" hour, three times a week.
I'm getting more rest by sleeping later in the morning.
I'm doing more to keep the house in the condition I want it to be. (DH is a house spouse, so technically he's supposed to be handling all of the house and cooking while I handle the money-making. But his priorities and tolerance for mess are very different from mine. And now that I'm in this environment all day, every day, I not only have more time to handle things but I have much more *need* to.)
I'm spending more time with DH. A lot of it is watching stupid crap on TV, but we do stop and discuss many times during any show. So it's still very much together time.
We've been playing with cocktails. While drinking and spending might not be the healthiest things ever, it's been a lot of fun to experiment with various mixers and flavors and such.
In the beginning we played more board games. We haven't done much of that lately. But we have spent a lot of time getting the garden going. We're growing strawberries, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, swiss chard, etc. And we're setting up to get our tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers going.

I noticed that a year ago I was shocked by how much extra time I had, without my 2 hours a day of commute, and my 1 hour a day of a lunch hour just killing time sitting in my car. But I've learned that just as my possessions will grow until they fill my space, and my expenses will grow until they consume my paycheck, it seems like my tasks will grow until they consume my time. There's probably a lesson to be learned in there about decluttering and budgeting. :)