I know I am one of the relatively fortunate few who is able to work remotely with no major interruptions in terms of keeping projects on track. In addition, my children are old enough that they can handle the on-line learning fairly well (if a bit reluctantly in one case), so I don't feel terribly obligated to get involved and try to home school them.
As it happens demand in the transportation sector is way down (except for shipping!), and there are beginning to be layoffs at the TTC and TransLink (in Vancouver), but as of yet not at my firm. Knock wood. I mean I don't want to be furloughed, and what I am working on will help with the economic recovery down the road, but I should be able to weather a 2-3 month furlough without too much pain. Again, I hope it doesn't come to that.
I'm not really a positive person (and certainly not an optimist), though I have made some attempts to filter out my most negative thoughts from the blog. That said, things could be much worse. It's looking like Ontario as a whole and even Toronto have done very well in flattening the curve (not as well as B.C. but still pretty good). Now there is a major and terrible exception which is the condition of the long-term care homes, and I really hope they can get a handle on that situation, but for the average person life is not so bad, assuming of course that you are still employed... I was just reading that they think close to 25% of New York City residents have been exposed to the virus. As far as I know, the people I know living in Brooklyn and Queens have not contracted it, which is certainly of great concern to me.
At any rate, this is a somewhat rambling prologue to explain why I haven't been taking up brand new hobbies or learning Sanskrit. However, I still have been quite productive. Two weekends ago, I buckled down and got through my US taxes, then I mailed them on the 13th (a couple of days before the official deadline). In addition to just wanting them done, I was owed a bit of money and thought I should try to get that sooner rather than later... Then this past weekend I did the Canadian taxes. I'm definitely getting more efficient at getting them done, but they are still a drag, not least because you have to file separately, so it is twice as much paperwork (and my taxes are complicated to the point I have no choice but to file paper copies).
I then rushed home (I had been biking downtown for exercise and took advantage of my empty office to spread out and fill in the tax forms...) and took the last call from Outside the March's Mundane Mysteries. I was only giving it half of my attention, and I had pretty clearly missed out on a bunch of clues (while it wasn't quite as involved as an escape room, there were some hints I was supposed to get). As an aside to the aside, I don't really like escape rooms or this type of mental puzzle, and I might not have signed up in the first place if I had know about the format, but I was mostly trying to support a group of actors, and I succeeded in doing that, at least.
However, I didn't have much time to worry about missing out on the "answer" to my mystery, as I needed to check up on my Zoom session. I was rehearsing a group of 8 actors in some of my short plays (most but not all have been presented at SFYS over the past two years, though one of them was written last Friday, so definitely hot off the presses!) So all that past week I was experimenting with how to make Zoom do recordings and what happens to the saved files and so forth. Between taxes and preparing for the reading (and my actual work), I have been busy indeed!
Things went pretty well, and I think this week I can relax a bit. I only have two relatively minor tasks. First to find out how to set up a Youtube channel where I can livestream the Zoom recording (as I can't risk the performance being Zoom-bombed) and second how to set up a Patreon page to see if anyone wants to pay the actors a bit more than the stipend I am offering them. That's probably one or two evenings worth of work, so the worst is over. I'll definitely publish the details of the actual reading (which will be Sat. May 2 at 6:30) once I have the Youtube slot lined up. More details soon.
I mean I have plenty of other things I can do after this, including clean the basement, sew up more masks and perhaps even sign up to do bike deliveries for seniors (though this is apparently being organized through Facebook, and I am just not willing to get a Facebook account, even for such a good cause). What I haven't really done is taken much time off to really relax, but I don't really do that well when I slow down, especially in a situation like this where there is so much that I am trying to (mentally) avoid. At any rate, that's how I've been filling my time. Well, and growing a beard though that is more a question of not bothering to shave, and I think it's coming off this weekend. I'll post some before and after photos, unless they are truly wretched.
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