Hi friends! How are you all doing with this whole quarantine/social-distancing situation?

Like most people, I'm having good days and crappy days.

On the good days, I can get up, feel productive working from home, squeeze in a workout and generally not be too bothered by the whole situation, which I realize is an incredible privilege.


On the good days, I can enjoy the flowers too!

On the crappy days, I can't sleep, I struggle to focus at work and I lack the motivation to do any sort of workout.

After a rough couple of early week of quarantine, I feel like I'd been having more good days than bad ones.

But the weather we've been having this past week and a half in DC has been killing me. It's been cold and rainy and incredibly windy, which has made it unpleasant to be outside. And when the only thing that breaks up a day is the ability to get outside for a walk or run, I really start to feel like a prisoner in my house when the weather is bad.

I've found that working out is pretty key to my mental well-being these days, even more so than in normal times. So when the weather is too gross, I've been doing some virtual strength training workouts with my mom. She found this app called HasFit that has a good variety of workouts that don't require more than some dumbbells. We pick a time of day, and we both fire up the same workout video at the same time. Then we talk about the best/worst parts of it when we're finished.

Having the extra accountability has been helpful, especially for the crappier days. I always feel better after I get some movement, no matter how much I'm dreading it before I start. So I've appreciated the extra little push a lot lately.

I also started working on a house project in our master bathroom. The floor in the bathroom was hand-painted with a stencil pattern by one of the previous owners, and the paint was old and had started to chip in places. At some point, we planned on dealing with it, but given all my new-found quarantine time, I've gotten started on it sooner than initially planned.


Hand painted bathroom floor. You can see where it's really started to chip up in the right corner of the shower.

Let me tell you, removing all that paint from the floor is a giant pain in the butt, but boy does it make me feel like I've done something productive, even if I only spend 30 minutes working on it here and there. I'll share some pictures when it's actually done. Right now, things look like a disaster, but it's at least something I can tackle little by little on these dreary and gross days.

But when I'm not feeling productive, I've spent plenty of time curled up on the sofa watching TV and reading. I've gotten over the hump of not being able to read that hit hard at the beginning of quarantine and I've read a ton lately. I'll have a pretty huge April book round up. I've also found myself watching the new Bachelor show, which initially I had sworn off because it looked ridiculous. It's as bad as you'd imagine, but it's perfect mindless entertainment.

So that's what I've been up to -- along with a healthy mix of virtual happy hours and Zoom game nights.

I'm really looking forward to when we can return to some semblance of normal life, so I'm over here cheering on all those medical researchers trying to find us a vaccine.