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Nice piece of writing John, though PTSD-like generated some very bad memories of 2020. And there's nothing like the prospect of another Trump administration to make one's days and nights feel long. I'm with you on the exercising, I started with a stationary bike and am now on a rowing erg and the bike just about every day we are home. No beer though. My heart says it feels better without alcohol. I listen carefully these days. Cheers!

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Thanks for your comment, David. The next ten days are going to be rocky indeed. Let's hope that by two weeks from now that threat is receding.

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Nice shed. I appreciate good work when I see it.

We got through the lockdown days much as you, except that my partner still commuted from Sonoma to Oakland every day. One of the projects at the biotech she co-founded involved a potential COVID vaccine and so they were all deemed "essential" workers.

I drove her to and from a couple days a week, to keep her company and to get out of the house. It was surreal to be literally the only car on the road, able to blast along the freeway between Richmond and Oakland in the cold sunshine at 80 mph.

Bingeing "Last of Us" made this liminal un-reality that much more trippy.

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Trippy indeed. Thanks for sharing that. We haven't considered watching "Last of Us." Should we?

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IMO it’s better than it might otherwise be, considering the source material. Gratuitous violence. But the storyline is interesting and has some amazing mini-arcs. Nick Offerman’s performance in S1E3 was heart-rending. The production values are very high. My partner crushes hard on Pedro Pascal. We’ve watched it four times so far

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Chatty and real and honest, just the way I like 'em.

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Oct 26Liked by john sundman

This is a wonderful mini pandemic memoir. Your experience with it was very similar to mine, except for the part where instead of a loving spouse, my not-so-nice boyfriend was living with me. But sometimes it was really fun and it felt like we were living in what I used to call a “ neat secret hideout”.

I also had to build out my home workout capabilities during the pandemic, but they landed in my living room. And I put a pool table in my garage, where I sometimes practiced eight hours a day.

Never got COVID that I know of, knock wood!

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Thank you for this note, Ruth, and thank you for restacking my post. I can just see you playing pool eight hours a day! That's just the vibe I'm trying to capture with my story. How truly scary and bizarre it was during those first few months, and how all that anybody could do — anybody who wasn't on the front lines in the life-or-death battle with Covid-19, that is — was to isolate themselves from all in-person human contact that wasn't absolutely necessary, and try to distract themselves however they could. You played pool. I built Gymnasium Pandemica and finished shingling the shed. Betty, for her part, joined an online community who obsessively watched a feed from an 'eagle cam' above a nest 60' feet up in a tree in Decora, Iowa. She now knows more about the behavior of American Bald Eagles than you might believe possible.

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