Quarantine Update

March 31, 2020

Well, just like many others across the country and the world, I’m now practicing social distancing and staying home just about all the time. While I’m fortunate in that I have a job that allows me to work from home, I can’t help but to think of all those who aren’t as fortunate and have either lost their job or have to go to work and potentially put their health and life on the line. Doctors, nurses, first responders and others are braving this and they deserve nothing but praise and respect for working through these tough times.

I’ve been spending my time trying to stay busy and not get too stir-crazy. I, like many others haven’t experienced anything like this before in my life. I’m not used to staying home all the time, not being able to really do anything outside of the home, not being able to go anywhere. It feels really weird to me.

Here’s what I’ve been up to in an attempt to stay occupied.

Running

Since my gym closed, I’ve been limited as to what I can do for fitness. I could do bodyweight exercises, but haven’t been in the mood. Running has been my go-to exercise. So much so that my monthly mileage for March was over 60 miles. I haven’t run this much since I was training for the 2015 Philadelphia Marathon. I may regret it later, but between all this running and reading The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal, I’m actually considering signing up for the 2020 Philadelphia Marathon. I haven’t made the decision yet, but I’m giving it serious thought.

Puzzles

A puzzle of New York City my wife and I completed

My wife and I have spent some evenings working on puzzles. This is the first one we did, a 750 piece panoramic shot of New York City (The sky was annoying!). We have since started a 2,000 piece puzzle of a scene from the Dolomites in Northern Italy.

Side Projects and Blog Improvements

I’ve been spending some of my time improving my blog. I completely re-did my Reading List and my Current pages. I decided to make the books stand out a little more by adding the covers. I used CSS grid to make arrange them, and for the first time, used the HTML <picture> tag to try to make it a little quicker to load on mobile. It seems to be working.

I’ve also spent some of the time working on my recipes site side project. I’ve been teaching myself how to setup Unit Testing since it’s something I’ve never done. It’s been a little frustrating at times, but I’m getting there. I’ve been using React Apollo to handle the GraphQL queries, and I’ve been re-writing the components to use Hooks. It might delay its release, but after making the changes, I can see why people prefer hooks…the code looks so much cleaner.

Reading

So far since this has started, I’ve been reading quite a bit. I ended up finishing 3 books so far, and last night I started on my 4th. I’ve already increased my book count for 2020.

I hope you’re all staying safe out there. Stay home and practice social distancing. Stay healthy, and we’ll all get through this.

How are you all keeping yourself busy?