James O'Brien

My sadness around the closure of local businesses continues, though I’m mindful there have been some bright spots in the way some of them have responded.

Normally, I might eat breakfast at the Triple Shot cafe every few weeks. Since I’m been working from home, I’ve been grabbing a coffee there every day, and have since increased my consumption to two take-away coffees. In response to the shut-down, I’m pleased to see they’re now using a pre-order app so I can order ahead, and then walk 100m to get there to pick it up. Sadly, they’ve stopped using keep-cups.

Working from home is going okay. There was only one day this week when I felt a little overwhelmed by the inability to separate work and home. I’ve started doing some phone calls from the balcony, which must be annoying to the neighbours. However, I’m really enjoying it, since it gets me “out of the house”, if only by a few metres.

In response to the isolation, I’m pleased one of my neighbours has set up a Facebook group. Though the conversations has been mostly confined to posting photographs of the cat which is “collectively” owned, it’s a nice way of learning a little more about my neighbours. Beyond the people on either side of my apartment, I’m on hello terms with a few others, and this is a nice way of getting to know them a little better.

Starting on Tuesday, I’ll be doing Swedish class via Zoom. My teacher is a woman in her 70s, and she’s not all that technically-savvy, so I’ve been helping her with things, and it seems to be going well. She rang me with a problem today and I was able to help her. Most of the technical help has been in English, as her English is better than my Swedish. Though today, I was able to help her mostly in Swedish with some English when it got too hard. And for her, there were bits in English when she asked if we could revert to Swedish. Multi-lingual tech support!