contrarianarchon

Brain swab 3/3 complete for this quarantine period. If this comes back negative, which it ought to, then I will be free in just 24 short hours, and home maybe 24 more after that. So close to the end of my year-and-a-day away from home! (and yes, it'll be exactly a year and a day. Arrived in norway middle of new years eve, will be get back home evening of new years day :P)

... I should find blogging content other than sporadic complaints about being stuck in a small box

Exams are terrible and international travel is terrible as well and both of those things are happening to me in approxtimately under-control ways in the near future!

Also: I kinda want to archive-binge the Alexandrian (https://thealexandrian.net/), but thier archive is laid out so annoyingly! It'd be such a pain to read through everything in chronological order (Or any other order for that matter), since you have to go to the archive, pick a month, then page through the months archives to then select an article. Such a pain! If anyone has a work-around for this, I'd be interested to hear it, but I don't expect people to.

I have obtained 16x 400g tins of tomatos, and 4kg of dry pasta, which is like a week or two of eating nothing else; also some tins of fruit and garlic which I can flavour pasta with if I run out of tomatos. I expect this to last maybe a month of normal eating since these are very staple ingredients for my cooking.

(This (along with the normal "don't starve for the next day" purchases) has proven to be more than I can carry home from my nearest (and fortunately, cheapest) supermarket without trouble - it was both painful and resulted in dropped tins - with better equipment than my normal shopping bags and the box the tomatoes were shipped in this could be avoided - maybe my large ikea bags would do? The only other item-moving containers I have are my suitcases, which I guess are also a possibility if I don't mind looking like a weirdo. thus are the perils of living on foot).

Also in coronavirus local news: my classmate with doctors in her family says that she doesn't think it's an issue here yet, honestly I don't believe her; the hospital is apparently also losing capacity from an entire department getting quarantined and there are ~30 confirmed cases in surrounding cities.

I worry that self-isolation to my apartment would be largely ineffective since I have to share food-prep area with seven people, several of whom I can't reliably even talk to, let alone co-ordinate on "we're not leaving the apartment to not catch the virus" (One of whom has spent large sections of the last week bedridden with non-coronavirus flu - which she has had blood-tests for, and which I wasn't told about until she was already on her feet again). Self-isolation to just my room is, I think, a non-starter (it would be theoretically possible; I have a bathroom and water-source, but even I would go stir-crazy, and living off tins of fruit stacked in my closet and muesli bars would be miserable)

Travel has so far been quite mundane. I've met some cool people and the weather is nice and cool here but overall life proceeds apace. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, or if I'm just a deeply boring person, or if enough of my social and mental life is tied up in the internet and computers that changing my physical location doesn't really shock me out of complacency. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. No drastic change seems to have occurred. I'm not sure what to think about that.

Holy shit I'm in Dubai!!! More to follow when travel is over and I can do downtime

My poor cat; he seems to worry that people have died every time they leave to travel somewhere for longer than a few days (and then he expresses genuine shock when they turn up non-dead, as well as happiness), and I'm going to be gone for a whole year. It's a mild concern to put on the big pile but I wish I could explain to him that I have more sensible plans than that.