Last night I was chatting to a friend, and he asked me what my plans were for the weekend. I had a quick and confident answer: “Tomorrow is my day. I’m going to spend it writing, updating my blog, working on my professional site.“. Easy peasy. Except that it is now 10pm, and I have only managed to sit in front of the computer now.
So, what happened to my Saturday? And it’s not just today. Everyday seems to just disappear. And not just for me. You’d think that in lockdown, days would drag on because we’re bored. But they don’t, and we aren’t. (As an aside and on a similar note, my sister reminded me recently that whenever I am in hospital I am always amazed at how quickly the days fly by, given that I cannot get out of bed or do anything at all, really. (This does not mean that I enjoy my stay there, just to be clear.) So lockdown and hospital stays have that in common 🙂 )
But let’s analyze the day, hour by hour.
Friday 9pm
To understand where my Saturday went, I have to start on Friday night. I now have a ritual with a friend who sits in Zurich: at 9pm on a Friday night, we each pour ourselves a G&T (or two), get on the phone and chat. We start at 9pm, and talk until exhaustion. Last night/this morning, that was at 2am. (!!) No complaints, though. I enjoy those conversations immensely.
Rating: 5/5 stars
Saturday 9am
But a 2am bedtime means a (reluctant) 9am wake-up. Consider those two G&Ts, and you can actually make that 9:30 with a slight headache. (For the record: my Gin is finished!! And no alcohol sales during lockdown!)
Rating: 3/5 stars. I should have woken up at 10!
10am
Because 5hrs on the phone is apparently not enough, I then sent a couple of follow up WhatsApps to Zurich and then spent another hour on the phone with a friend in the UK. The one thing that the lockdown has done is it has increased phone calls with my global friends. We are not any further apart than we were before the lockdown, but it does it feel like it. Plus, as has been pointed out, this is the first time that the entire world is facing the same threat, so we all have a common topic of conversation no matter where we are in the world. And that means a lot of time spent on the phone.
Rating: 5/5 stars
12-2pm
By the time the phone calls were over and I was done with the shower, it was noon. I only then made it downstairs, where I made a much needed plunger of coffee and caught up with my kids (who themselves were having a very chilled day). Micole made lunch (aka reheated pizza from Friday-night-UberEats treat) and we decided that we needed to get out of the house – mostly to just start the car and re-charge the battery, which is regularly announcing that it is at “low level”.
Rating: 5/5 stars
2:30-5pm
We left the house at 2:30. Neither of the kids goes anywhere during the week, and I am not exactly eager to defeat the purpose of our in-house strict lockdown by immersing ourselves with mall-crowds or any such nonsense, so we did what we usually do when we get cabin fever: we went to the local nursery. Now, this nursery (Safari, in Pretoria) is quite spectacular. It is massive, for starters. And aside from some very good quality plants it also has: waterfalls, swans, monkeys macaws, petting zoo, ducks, restaurants (closed) and bridges. We were there till closing time (4pm) and we didn’t buy a single plant! (We’ll do that next week).
(We made a quick pitstop by a pet shop to buy Lisa some new toys. They are still not allowed to be sold in physical retail, but we heard of a shop that is bending those rules so we took a chance. Lisa was very happy!)
Rating: 5/5 stars (for sure!)
5pm
I have no idea how the lockdown loophole works on this one, given that no-one is allowed to sell any hot food unless it is delivered to a work or home address, but there are some coffee houses attached to petrol stations that have started to sell what used to be my daily-fix. And today was the first day since lockdown began that I got one! In for a penny, in for a pound: we drove to another petrol station that sells Krispy Kreams, and our “Aargh!” day of nutrition was complete.
Rating: 5/5 stars (heaven!)
5-7pm
I finally managed to catch some time for myself. I escape to my bed, and read my new book which I can tell is (literally) going to be life changing for me: Atomic Habits. I’ll probably finish it tomorrow, and hopefully will be able to write more on it then. In the meantime I pre-heated the oven and asked Micole to pop in an “Easy-Cook” pot-roast from Woolies, which stayed in the oven for 2 hours. She also made Airfryer roast potatoes.
Rating: 5/5 stars
7:30-9:30pm
We ate dinner – it was delicious! Well done, Woolies! And we started to watch Alice in Wonderland (the one with real actors, not the classic animated one) but I wasn’t really enjoying it so we switched over to Mary Poppins 2 which I had not watched and which is absolutely charming. We didn’t make it though the whole movie because I really wanted to get upstairs to my computer, so I chased the kids off to bed at 9pm, and cleaned up/locked up downstairs.
Rating: 4.5/5 stars (great movie but I wish the kitchen would clean itself)
9:30-now
Got ready for bed, settled in under three blankets (I am never cold in my bed!) and wrote this post.
Rating: 5/5 stars (living my best life!)
So…that’s where my Saturday went. Did it turn out as planned? Nope. Would I change a thing? Also a nope. You can see the day got a solid 5 stars 🙂
I hope your day was just as fun and relaxed.
xx,
