Austin's COVID Quarantine Routine 2020

Here's another routine article for you, now that it's a new and extremely memorable year for all of us.

Austin's COVID Quarantine Routine

My day starts somewhere between 1:00 a.m. and maybe 5:00 a.m. if I'm really lucky. I wake up to my son crying in his crib and my wife saying "Your shift." I groggily get out of bed, go to the bathroom, then take the screamingly hungry child to the kitchen to fill up a bottle of formula. I feed him in the rocking chair in the living room, watching an episode of Phineas & Ferb or playing a couple of rounds of Hearthstone. When he was a fresh newborn, he would just want to be held all the time, so I would stay up for three hours a night, playing Hearthstone or Divinity: Original Sin 2 or some other game I could play one-handed; but now, he's just as keen as I am to go to sleep again right after he's done eating! So I'm usually only up for an hour, sometimes as little as 40 minutes from start to finish feeding and changing his diaper.

When I wake up to him crying again when it's my shift, it's usually around 6:00 or 7:00. I've long since turned off my phone alarm, since I'm guaranteed to get up no matter what nowadays. I feed the kid again, usually while my other two kids are complaining about being hungry themselves, even though they're pretty much capable of getting a bowl of cereal on their own now. I keep all three kids entertained and fed as best as I can until about 8:30, when my workday technically should begin. I put my son in his Snoo crib, leaving my wife at his mercy, shower, and then I go on my precious morning walk.

Work

I decided early on in this quarantine, when my workplace began requiring us to work from home, that I'd try and keep a degree of normalcy and familiarity to my daily routine, for my own sanity's sake. So I decided to start taking 20-minute walks in the morning and afternoon to replace my normal 20-minute commutes. I set a timer on my phone for 10 minutes and start listening to the Glass Cannon Podcast or Marco Poloing my best friend Dustin about D&D. I wander as far as I can, then when the timer goes off, I retrace my steps back home. My mind woken up, I'm ready for working at home. As ready as I can be, anyway.

Unfortunately, the only place that my work station fits in my house is on my kitchen table, in the middle of the house and everyone else's activity. Thank goodness for headphones, but I still had to modify my work pace significantly... Just being in everyone's view makes it hard for my wife not to ask for help holding the baby or the kids not to bother me. But they do their best to leave me alone if my headphones are on.

At 10:30, we do our online Stand Up meeting on Microsoft Teams, but everything else I do on a regular basis is much less organized than it was last year. I work on tickets throughout the day, but take constant breaks and drag out my hours longer than usual out of their usual frame. Sometimes I conference with my mentors online and pair program over screen share, but most of the time the work itself isn't too different.

At lunchtime, I eat pretty much what I ate at work before: some kind of leftover warmed up in the microwave. After I'm done, I sit down with my daughter to read her a Harry Potter book. Right now we're on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which really should be called and the Triwizard Tournament, and it's been a lot of fun to reread the series with her and see her experience the awesome story for the first time. I also really enjoy doing the voices. My wife says my Hagrid is spot-on. I enjoy giving Karkaroff a strong Russian accent, and Professor Sprout and Mister Filch both have Southern accents (though Filch's is more like a greasy cowboy). We read a chapter a day, but some days my daughter can't wait and we end up reading two. I never like reading more than that though. It's fun to keep the routine and I'm going to be sad when it's finished.

The 2:00–3:00 sleepy slog is worse than ever now that I have less sleep at night, but at least here at home I can find a place to take a cat nap and not feel bad about it. In between working, I like to work on any of my D&D documents on my Google Drive, most recently a 5e adventure based on Zelda: Ocarina of Time. My recent discoveries and subscriptions to Inkarnate, FlowScape, and Dungeondraft have helped along my D&D endeavors immensely.

Done

I finish up around 4:30 like usual, and my afternoon walk is usually accompanied by my kids, wife, or both. The weather has been getting really nice lately, which makes these walks a real delight to go on, especially when we're stuck at home so often. I try to make dinner around 5:00, and then atound 6:00 or so, we've been having movie nights three times a week as a family. This has been a fun tradition to keep all of us sane together, and a great way to both reminisce and show my kids the types of movies I watched when I was their age. So far, we've watched George of the Jungle, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Homeward Bound, The Parent Trap, Flubber, Lilo & Stitch, and some other 90s classics, as well as a few movies I had never seen before like The BFG.

These movies are often accompanied by a bowl of my wife's popcorn, or dinner itself in a "picnic" form. I also usually enjoy a dessert, but the kids have to spend a Ballard Buck to have one, and by this point they've usually spent them all on extra screen time.

After the kids are in bed, I usually have time to play a little bit of computer, though most of the time I have to be holding my sleeping baby, so I'm still limited to one-handed games or grown-up movies like Pirates of the Caribbean or, this past weekend, TRON. On Thursday nights, I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons with my wife, brother, and sister-in-law, with Dustin as the DM. It's been a lot of fun to be a player instead of a DM for a little bit, which has helped with DM burnout a bit. Friday nights are sometimes bro nights where I play Terraria or Heroes of the Storm with my brothers and cousin, but those have been dying out lately, and my wife and I want to start having Friday nights be James Bond Goldeneye 64 nights. Saturday nights are my favorite: the Dungeons & Dragons adventure Dragon of Icespire Peak with a full group of five players on Roll20! I'd never ran a prepared D&D module before, and I've had a blast with this one. When it's over, we may move up to a more ambitious adventure: Baldur's Gate: Descent to Avernus, and I can't wait. I didn't use to like playing online with Roll20, but doing it out of necessity during this pandemic has let it grow on me, and I can't deny it's easier to get a group together in one place digitally to play.

Bedtime is pretty variable these days, but I usually get to bed around 10:30 or so just out of pure exhaustion. The days and weeks seem to fly by during this quarantine, which I guess is a blessing. We've had a lot of time to sit home and cook new things, bake (my wife is creating a sourdough starter as I type), and see what new projects the kids can come up with in their boredom. If only our landlord would let us get a trampoline or a puppy, they'd be set for this summer, but I guess we'll see how much longer things go. I think the thing I miss most is working on my YouTube channel (and the extra fun money income it brings in). It's just impossible to find the specific time and energy needed to make videos, or even stream, except for simple things I can do in my spare time like lip sync animations.

That's about it for this year! Honestly, I'm not scared at all of the pandemic, and being an introvert, I really haven't missed too much other than going to restaurants and movie theaters. I'm confident it'll end eventually and life will get back to normal. For now, I can think of no better recourse than to work on projects, find enjoyment in old interests, and develop new skills. I hope you stay healthy, and I'm excited to read this one day when COVID-19 is just a weird memory.