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What’s your routine palate cleanser during the quarantine?
In other words, what do you do between things? I already worked from home before, and used to take medium to long walks between tasks. Now that is discouraged, so I tend to take a shower and change clothes more often. But that’s not very green and my skin started to show signs of wearing. The apartment is relatively large, but not enough for me to feel in another ambient by changing rooms.
So what do you do to help give structure to your routine?
I've been working in a store throughout everything; this virus has changed everything and now I'm basically a glorified salesperson. It's stressful and drives me insane.
But I do have a "palate cleanser", and it even started with the pandemic. Every morning I wake up, I take an extremely long bath. I don't often remember my dreams, so sometimes waking up feels like an extension of yesterday. But with my super long bath, I get a reset on everything. Stress goes away and I can wrangle the insanity.
I don't just sit there, of course; I'm often reading at the same time. I just try to avoid controversy and things that might upset me.
I like that term "palate cleanser", good call. I love your idea of baths, it's a little too hot here for a bath but cold showers have been incredible.
I think my daily or semi daily palate cleaner is biking. I try to get a 10-40 mile ride in at least 5 times a week. When everything first kicked off I wasn't leaving the house much and started getting anxious and moody. Man, just a little time of that bike, even a ride around the neighborhood makes me happy. There are some great trails near us that we've learned about because of the quarantine. Gravel, Muddy bayshore, forest single track. For being in a pretty urban environment I was impressed with all the access we had.
As for shorter, maybe hourly palate cleanser, maybe staring into the fridge haha.
Biking is awesome. Sadly there are no trails nearby and the only nature is the beach — which is boarded up and watched by the police. Going there can literally make me sleep in a cell. I coincidentally fixed my bike today and decided to cycle every day at 4am when there’s no one outside. There’s a real risk of having my bike stolen though.
I'm sorry to hear that! Can you bike along the roadways adjacent to the beach? I'm in California and our HWY 1 has opened back up. It's not ideal but with the reduction in normal traffic it's been pretty pleasant to ride.
I'm with you on worrying about theft but I just bring mine into my apartment every night. It's a little in the way but if you think of it as a functional sculpture, it can add a little to the feeling of home!
I like cleaning my room (e.g. vacuuming, dusting, decluttering). Usually it's not strictly necessary but I find it quite relaxing and therapeutic.
Yeah my room was never so neat :P
Add some funky music to that and you've got a real winner!
Really? AFAIK most places said walking around your neighborhood was ok as long as you stay away from people.
My palate cleanser for a long long time is probably books. Being able to lose myself in the story of some other place helps me reset my mind. I usually do this at the end of the day in bed, reading on my passive-display e-reader so that I don't have an LCD screen obliterating my eyeballs.
That’s not what they’re saying around here. Brazil is the second most affected country, maybe that’s why. People are quite paranoid. It doesn’t help that I’m stuck with my elderly mother who’s super scared herself. In the first days of the pandemic she came close to a nervous breakdown. I do my best to not aggravate her.
Urban centers are probably different, I imagine if everyone in a downtown neighborhood went outside, it'd be really difficult to keep apart. Where I'm at if all my neighbors went outside our houses, we'd all still be 100 feet apart. If I'm walking around and encounter other people, one of us will wave and then cross the street, or just walk in the middle of the street since there's no traffic even on normal days.
That’s wonderful! I wish I had this privilege. I usually love a busy street and living in the city doesn’t bother me at all, but right now it’s really tough to be safe sometimes. And because I’m with my elderly mother I must be extra careful.
I've really enjoyed my time in big cities in the past. I've never lived in one but I've stayed at places for days or a week. Being able to walk a block and grab some groceries, or visit there bank, etc is really nice. And to a certain extent being surrounded by people is very comforting to me. I do also enjoy my quiet neighborhood, but during quarantine it's begun to feel oppressively quiet.
I'm fortunate because I live in a relatively quiet street. There is noise for sure, but it's not the same as an actually busy street. But when I leave the apartment to do anything I must go to a busier street, since they're very close.
I can see how that can become an issue.
When we were in lockdown (we're currently in Phase 2 of reopening, so I'm back at work), we took the dogs on a walk almost every day. That was a really nice way to get some sense of normalcy.
Now, I try to work on some hobby software projects and read comments online. I should probably try to find a better palate cleanser.
Reading. Playing some guitar. Doing a set of some exercise.
I've gotten in a habit of taking my morning shower after scrum and other morning meetings, before I sit down to do the day's real work.
This was probably born out of my tendency to oversleep but I'm happy to pretend it's a Life Hack that lets me clear my head and process what just happened in those meetings before writing some code. It can be both, right?