There are three days left of 2020 and I don’t need to tell anyone that 2020 has been a very weird year. So here is how 2020 happend for me.
Working from Home
I left the Melbourne office of my day job in mid-March and have been working from home since. I’m grateful that my job is secure and I can easily work from home, and I’ve enjoyed the extra sleep and not having to catch the train. Our CEO has told us we can continue to work from home even after things return to normal, (whatever ‘normal’ looks like). When that happens, I will only go into the city once a fortnight or once a week and work from home the rest of the time.
The first two weeks of working from home was confusing. I was obsessed with checking the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 map throughout the day, and I found it hard to get into a rhythm of working. On the plus side, I was delighted to be at home during the day.
Things I didn’t usually get to enjoy because I was in the city were a real novelty. I watched the kangaroos grazing in the yard all morning and really appreciated the number of different birds who visit us. I didn’t have to rush out the door in the morning and for the first time in years I was getting enough sleep.
Autumn Harvest and baking
My lunch breaks were spent picking fruit and going for walks. I gathered up the wild blackberries that grow in the lane, rosehips from the bush near the CFA and a great crop of apples from the trees in our yard. I made rosehip syrup and dozens of jars of apple jelly – apple and rosemary, apple and rosewater, and apple with star anise and cinnamon. I discovered that people with garden surplus leave their excess fruit and veg at the post office for others to take home so I took home rhubarb and crab-apples which quickly became rhubarb crumble and crab-apple jelly.
After turning all available fruit into jelly, I moved on to bread – there is nothing as good as blue cheese with apple and rosemary jelly on fresh bread. Because people went nuts panic buying and hoarding food, there wasn’t any bread in the shops so I had to make my own.
Flour was in very short supply, and yeast was just impossible. I was lucky enough to nab a 16 kilo sack of flour when the local supermarket could only get hold of commercial quantities. I already had a good supply of dry yeast in the pantry, so the bread making began.
I made focaccia, cob loaves, milk loaves, ciabatta and fruit buns. Usually, I make bread every two or three weeks, so all I had to do was increase the output. Unfortunately the sack of flour was fairly low protein – better for cakes and biscuits than for bread. The bread was too finely textured and a bit cakey, but the absurd number of cakes I baked in these first weeks of the pandemic came out beautifully. I still have a few kilos of the flour left.
Autumn knitting
Just before I began working from home, I finished two baby cardigans for colleagues with new babies and they turned out beautifully. (The cardigans that is, although the babies are pretty cute too). I felt as through I was on a roll with my knitting and was sure that working from home would give me so much more time to spend on my favourite hobby.
I was very wrong! When I commuted to Melbourne every day for work, I had two hours knitting time built into my day (one hour each way on the train). I could knit at lunch time too – and most days we had a little informal knitting club in the tea room.
Now I was spending my lunch breaks outside in the Autumn sunshine and just squeezing in a bit of knitting on the weekends and during work webinars when I had to pay attention but didn’t have to take notes. I worked almost exclusively on a winter cape I had started in November 2019, and I also had a moss stitch scrap scarf underway.
Despite the lack of knitting time, I was enjoying my new lifestyle and Autumn 2020 was pretty good fun – apart from the pandemic of course.
Covid-19
As much fun as it was to be working from home, I was obsessed with the COVID-19 pandemic. I checked the Johns Hopkins COVID map throughout the day, and listened to all of the news updates. Knowing people had lost their jobs and seeing the extent of the sickness across the world was shocking.
I enjoyed the isolation of social distancing and lockdown and when I went into town for groceries or the mail, people seemed friendlier and more patient with each other. Then I’d watch the news and see reports of people getting into fights over toilet paper and pasta and not know whether to laugh or cry.
In late May I became really sick. Geoff bundled me into the car and took me to hospital for a COVID test. I must have looked bad because the nurse who took the test swab asked me if I wanted to be admitted as an inpatient. I declined and went home to bed. The next day I received the good news and the bad news. I didn’t have COVID but I did have Influenza B. I spent a week in bed listening to podcasts and worrying about how I’d fare if I got COVID instead.
Autumn 2020 was a strange mixture of novelty, fear and trying to create new habit patterns. Tomorrow I’ll write about the long Winter of 2020. Lockdowns, a second wave of hoarding and a new appreciation for knitted jumpers.
