Sunny chills

The Covid Pause gets frosty...

Tomoki and I are continuing with our morning walk before work/study as it is the time with fewest people around. The weather gods continue to mock us and the daily temperature continues to hit a new maximum for the year as each day of this wretched week passes. The sky is blue, the sun shining. One or two aircraft contrails can be seen but there are hardly any flights these days. Never quite seen anything like it. It was however frosty when we set out this morning - in more ways than one.

There has been a change in the mood since the Prime Minister's announcement of Monday night. The cheerful 'Hellos' of the weekend have become frosty grimaces or a thousand-yard stare as people walking past each other just want to be on their way. There is an almost guilty atmosphere as if we are doing something wrong simply by walking the dog. I absolutely hate it. We are only permitted one sojourn outside for daily exercise and it has become a somewhat fraught experience. The delight of an empty trail ahead is soon turned to a sinking feeling when someone steps onto it and starts heading towards you.

However, we are trying to make the best of the situation. I set Tomoki a challenge today. He was tasked with taking photos of interesting looking plants and collecting some samples. He will then need to try and identify the plants using whatever resources available. (Mainly this will be the internet). Then he has been asked to research some interesting facts and to document his discoveries by means of a blog article. He can also draw the leaves and buds we collected. In this way, I explained to him we can cover his ICT, science, English, art and exercise all in one challenge. He seems quite enthusiastic about it. がんばれ！(do your best).

[Here is his report]

We had a video call with Adam, Akiko, and Leo yesterday evening. Adam will be working from home from today thank goodness. They have everything they need. It seems that shops continue to improve though with strict distancing measures now enforced. We have managed to avoid going so far thanks to home deliveries. Another one arrived yesterday thanks to Nozomi's efforts but it looks to be the last for many weeks so we will probably have to start going out for a few things within a week. I am eyeing up my dwindling wine stock with some concern as I am drinking way more than normal. Oh well, once it's gone it's gone. 

I continue my morning exercises although I am allowing myself to get up a little later. I started at 6:30 today (rather than the usual 5:45). My regime involves about 15mins of bodyweight exercises, and then 56min on the exercise bike in front of a Netflix show. Today was Better Call Saul.

Ok, back to work. Enough brain dumping for now.