Day 3 of the Positive Life

It turns out life locked inside one room can still be pretty busy (although a bit frustrating if you had plans outside). After this isolation weekend I didn't complete the supposedly Day 2 of the series, talking about what post-positive life would mean. I guess I would just do a quick check-in here for now as a dairy.

Day 2

For some reason I got up early every day recently — I am talking about 6 - 8 o'clock, which is a good thing 🙂 .

I no longer had fever for more than 24 hours, which is good, but I still had a sore throat and coughs. I even had a weird hot nose at night.

I went to the grocery store double masked in the morning and grabbed milk and fruits in less than 5 minutes. I didn't interact with anyone during the process. Maybe I should have felt guilty for this - I should really stay at home, but no one really would bring milk to my door, which is a problem. People in Shanghai maybe won't get milk delivery either?

Then I did some more more reading, cleaned part of my room (which I haven't done for months), listened to random music, scrolling through Twitter (finding Top tweet give you random recommendation in the past day rather than my following tweets past 1 day, and thus it had an ending, so I gave up), wrote the Day 1 of this thing.

For the meal, I cooked spaghettis and (my first time) Gai Lan a.k.a. Chinese broccoli (with beef slice as oil). Not too bad.

I also (finally) cooked sago that I bought maybe a year ago. It turned out just so-so. Maybe I was not adding the right condiments - maybe a bit more sugar?

In the evening I realized I won't be able to complete my daily walking goal without annoying my neighbor downstairs in the next few days. I looked up a bit, and I really shouldn't go to anywhere not-my-space, because isolation as it means, is to stop the spread of COVID-19 (see my government tongue?) by not passing my virus in public to anyone. Maybe this is what happens when I don't own a house which has a balcony. I don't regret at all tbh.

This is still the case for Day 3. I really missed 2 weeks ago when I completed the weekly walking recommendation in 1 day 🙂 .

Day 3

I don't think my symptom actually improved today. My nose no longer feels weird, but I still have a sore throat and coughs. My sputum no longer looked yellow though.

I still remember on Day 1 when I found that I had a yellow sputum, my parent saying "that is bacteria" and me thinking "COVID is not bacteria and this is really a Chinese-only interpretation"... until I did my test.

I slept a bit more today, maybe 14 hours in total. I spent the rest of the time going through my short reading list in Chrome (finding this OpenType feature demo very helpful). It turns out to take a few hours. Not too bad, but I thought I was going to arrange my room, write and catch up some "paid work" — maybe leave that "miserable" work thing to an actual workday then?

I don't know. I really thought this would be a weekend when I can finally got things done, and then it of course ended up in the old way. Change is hard.

looks like this weekend is finally the time to start my side project with the almost obsolete domain name

— Phy (@phy25) May 14, 2022

Good thing though, I am still oncall and I haven't got a single page after I was sick. I just checked and my pager still works.

I planned to get some drive-through food and COVID test kits today, but I slept, so I gave up. Maybe tomorrow I will do one more test and head out then. I know this sounds irresponsible to some folks, but as a reminder, it looks like drive-through is the best way to protect others from me when I am outside (of course with masks).

I am expecting to receive some discounted HelloFresh tomorrow. I placed the order well before I was sick and I was just trying to start a new life :/ . Turns out this will be my "resource pack" during these days (as known in China as the government-sourced grocery pack during at-home quarantine/lockdown when you are simply not allowed to go outside of the building at all).

No, no Prime Now - I don't think they will come upstairs to send it to my door. I actually just cancelled my Prime membership recently. I figured I don't really buy a lot there. (Disclaimer: I am still an Amazon employee as of today.)

So instead, I had some egg noodles tonight. A bit tired to cook anything more complex. I figured this would be when in most cases I headed out for pick-up meals. That was not a positive lifestyle at all.

Good night.