I had a better nights sleep last night, so woke feeling much more positive. Thankfully. I cannot cope with the lows for very long.

The very exciting thing of the day though was to wake with words in my head! I haven’t had this for a long time (which is why I haven’t finished writing about South Africa and Armenia yet!). When I am stressed and anxious, I don’t want to think let alone write.

I didn’t realise I was back in the place to blog until after I had a message from my neighbour to say that her husband was going to the store and did I want anything. It was so incredibly kind of her to think of me. It got me to thinking about how lovely Mum’s neighbours are being helping her out when she isn’t able to leave home. It made me smile.

After that little cheery thought, I went on to Facebook for a nosy. That’s when I saw that my cousin-in-law and his chums are doing super well with their 3D printing and crowdfunding efforts. They are printing face shields for NHS workers as there is a massive shortage. (If you wish to donate, please do HERE).

I sat pondering everything for a minute and that is when the words came forward. I wrote this little status update, and thought the words would be gone.

I keep being reminded of the goodness in people at the moment, and I’m loving it. Whether it’s the 3D printers like by cousin-in-law who are crowd funding and printing face shields for the NHS, or my Mum’s neighbours who are checking in with her regularly when my sister and I can’t. Even my neighbour just text to say her husband was going to the store and could they pick something up for me. In times where we are flooded with negativity, these acts of kindness are beacons in the perpetual dark. Thank you to anyone who is paying it forward in any way. Let’s keep being kind and lighting the way through this.

06.04.2020

The words weren’t gone. This was just the beginning. I made myself a treat breakfast – a Jimmy Deans Breakfast Sandwich (like Maccas breakfast mcmuffins only way better) and set up my laptop. Words came pouring out. I never have a plan for what I’m goign to write. I just sit at the keyboards and type.

I wrote an intro to the Corona Chronicles because that’s just what happened. I then wrote day one, and published both. I started off day two and then switched to catching up because it was still only 10am and not enough had happened for me to carry on writing.

It felt soooooo gooooood! I am not a writer by trade. I am not an English literature graduate. I don’t even have an A-level in English. I had to look up what an adjective is the other day. My spelling is bad and my grammar isn’t perfect. But I write. I write how I talk. By writing and the words flying out of my fingers without much though, I felt like I was finally getting my voice back. It made me so happy. It made me a little emotional. It made me want to write more. So I did.

When I had finished all my English words, I called Mum so that we could take the first lesson of the Spanish course she bought for us. This was actually what broke through my panic attack last night. Mum was making plans for the next day to give me a bit of structure (that always works for me) and it all sounded fine. Then she said we would do the course together and that excited me enough that it stopped everything in it’s tracks.

When I was at high school, we learned French in year one. As an FYI, I loved it and I was good at it. In year two, we had to pick a second language. We could take Spanish, German or Latin. I really wanted Spanish but my father wanted me to take German. For one reason or another, I ended up taking German. I hated it.

Fast forward “a couple” of years and I get my chance again. I’ve been talking about doing Spanish for an age (like, probably since high school). Mum is bored after 4 weeks of self-isolation. She already aced her first course (98% – and only because she pressed a button that’s wrong on her first assessment because online courses are new to her!) but that was in something useful. This time she wanted a challenge. Unlike me she took Spanish at high school but like me and German, she was terrible at it. Mum isn’t good at being bad at things. It’s not in her nature. She decided that now time to fix that.

That is how we found ourselves taking an online Spanish course in the middle of a lockdown. We both sign into our courses on our laptop, then on our phones we video conference so we can practice or ask questions, or generally be confused together.

The course we are taking is a 3 minute course. Sadly, you’re not fluent in only three minutes but the lessons are only 3 minutes long. This is about as much as my brain can handle right now so it worked really well. We did two lessons and we learned a bunch new words. I’m not sure that it is going to teach us now to write and read Spanish separately, so instead we are learning that bit on our own by writing down everything.

(Given you have read this so far, I’m voting that you are holding out as much hope as I am that I am going to be able to spell in a second language either!!)

After all my blogging and learning, it was finally time for lunch and some tv time. I decided to watch Jane the Virgin on Netflix. I’ve seen the first four seasons before but I decided that with nothing else to really do and the final season just released, then I should start at the beginning again and watch them all through! It has the added advantage of being duel language and so I can say it’s revision!

I am so good at finding reasons to watch tv!

After a few episodes, my back ache started to kick in so I decided to fix this by getting into a hot bubble bath for a couple of hours. Such an action packed day. I spent that couple of hours also watching more tv on my iPad. Don’t you just love technology!

Dinner was a bit random. I had been laying in the bath planning on having either prawn stir fry or pasta with prawns. Prawns were featuring very heavily on my choice list, probably because I am low in vitamin B12 again. Then, I opened the fridge and there were sausages. Pork sausages. I had forgotten I had bought those!

I had leftover mash, gravy and veggies from dinner a couple of nights before so it really was the perfect choice! By perfect I mean “easy”. I like easy. But cooking sausages isn’t a quick thing. I spent the time productibely though by calling Mum and going through our vocabularly…..

Not many words for two lessons but it obviously works as I am typing this the next morning and I’ve just remembered all of that without looking! It took me a while to work out how to find the accents though because I don’t have to use those so often. There must be an easier way to get the letters without having to go into Word and copying them across?

So that was my day. How was yours?

Much love, and stay safe xx