This Is My First Pandemic

Hello. Welcome back to Daily ish episode two sixty one, Pandemic Special Edition. I don't know. As I said in the previous episode, there's no, plans to do this on the regular, but it's just a venue or avenue for, some thoughts to get out of my brain. So thank you for listening.

Tweet at me at I Chris if you have questions about anything I say, but know that it's very much just off the cuff, off the top of my head, and into your eardrums, and maybe your brain if it makes it that far. So today is actually two weeks since we arrived back in Canada, and so we're officially out of the mandatory well, what wasn't officially mandatory when we landed, but now is very much mandatory and fine slash jail time if you don't obey, the basically a quarantine of your family or your your household or whatever that arrived back in Canada. So we're done that now. But just as we're finishing that, of course, if you're in the news or paying attention to the news at all, at least up here in Canada, everybody's basically isolating anyways. And so, restaurants are shut down, not like, gathering over groups of 10, I think it is right now, is prohibited.

Not supposed to even get together in your homes with friends and all that kind of stuff, which I totally agree with. Just sort of clear, I'm not bemoaning that in terms of it's not being necessary. I think it's very necessary, especially if you see what's going on down in The States and the sort of mixture of wolf of ignorance to complete, precautions. It's kinda like the reactions or the results of that in the various areas and the amount of the outbreak happening, etcetera. So this is not another pandemic podcast though, nor is it a weather podcast, though I wish spring would just get here.

It was beautiful yesterday here where we were got to go for a long walk, avoided people obviously, but fresh air, sunshine, breaking up some ice and stuff on the street here to help the snow melt and flow away into the sewers, but supposed to get snow again tomorrow. So hopefully hopefully spring is coming. As I'm sure you've seen and, if you're on social media anywhere, whatever your platform of choice is, there's lots of folks sort of trying to in the mixture of of all the in the midst of all the noise and freak out and fear, there's a lot of also folks reminding us of the fact that things like this is our for most of us, hopefully, this is our first pandemic. This is something that is not normal. This isn't something we have all gone through, and you're a weirdo if you don't understand or get it or are dealing with it in a different way than everybody around you.

And I I do find some of that kind of reassuring because it's good to remind ourselves that we are not equipped for this because it's not normal. And, hopefully, it's not the new normal, I guess, but it's okay to be stressed. It's okay to be afraid. It's okay to be worried. It's okay to be anxious about bringing food into your home and things like that.

And so for me now as we exit our, like, mandatory self isolation part, it's actually in some ways more fearful now for me because if we as we're gonna go grocery shopping and pick up some some groceries in a safe way, my wife is, but now we're in this phase where we're having to bring stuff into our house. We can potentially leave, you know, go to a takeout restaurant or whatever, pick up things, interact a little bit more with people around us in a very limited, obviously, way. But, and so for me, as the resident hypochondriac worrier, Before it was like, could just say, no, can't go. No, we can't go. No, we can't go.

And I didn't have to worry about that. It was just all contained in our house. And once we knew that none of us had it, which we kind of, you know, figured probably by day 10, odds are that we're pretty good, but we still, you know, played it safe until fourteen days and and still will obviously. You know, we kinda knew, okay, there's nothing in the house right now, and now it's just a matter of what we're able to keep out of our house and or our bodies. Obviously, it's more important than our house.

But very thankful for technology that allows for things, and these are all things that were around before obviously, but we didn't really make use of it in huge form beforehand. But like right now as I record this, the my kids are playing Minecraft with their cousins who are spread out across Canada, chatting with each other through a Discord server we set up, voice chatting and stuff. My wife is on a Zoom call, I think, with some friends doing a coffee chat that way, and and I'm obviously able to continue working. And so it's, it's this weird blessing, and it's fun sort of having the kids around. We're getting to interact a lot more for better or worse, and and dealing with it in our own way obviously.

And and there's been plenty of discussion I've had with, on other podcasts. We have, the 25¢, the Apple Arcade podcast that I do with Nick here at goodstuff.goodstuff.fm/25c if you wanna subscribe to that. We've chatted about some of the games and stuff that we're playing and sort of using as distractions with our families. And then there's also a a show that we're doing here with Good Stuff hosts called Crosstalk. That's, it's not available yet publicly.

It's just for Patreon members. So if you're supporter of my Patreon, patreon.com/ichris, or the good stuff Patreon, patreon.com/goodstuff, either one will get you episodes of that, and we'll probably gonna release that publicly here shortly as well as a new show just kind of ironing out the details as to whether it's worth doing and why we might do that and for who and when and all that kind of stuff because it's not something we're committing to doing the long term necessarily, but kind of is just a way to gather, and play and talk and share and commiserate and lift each other up and and kinda laugh together. So one thing I'll put out there for you, if you haven't if you're not familiar with is, jackbox.tv. Jackbox Games is the company, and they make a series of games, sort of like game pack collections, and you may have seen them in various forms. Some of them are called like Quiplash, Drawful, and they're basically like party games that you can play on the Internet, with your friends or family.

And so you can set up like a a Zoom call or Google Hangout or Skype call or whatever. One person sort of hosts it and shares their screen with, everybody else on the call with your family, let's say, and then you can play a game using your phones to sort of log into a server, and your phone is basically a controller for the game. So Drawful, for example, is like you get a prompt, you have to draw everybody has to draw the picture with really crude tools, and everybody kind of votes on the best drawing or Quiplash is, you know, as it sounds like a game where you have to enter some funny responses to things, took a prompt, and people vote on what they think is the best response, and hilarity inevitably ensues as long as everybody has fun with that, I guess. But, yeah, if you check out Jackbox, jackboxgames.com, and they've got a whole bunch of game packs. We like the, there's the the first or second draw game pack, I think, that includes Drawful and, Quiplash, but there's also I've heard I'm looking at possibly picking up game pack four, which has a bunch of games in it, and and just trying out.

And they're like they're 20 to $30, and, you can try them out and play different ones. It's on every platform basically. So even, within your home, it doesn't have to be remote as well, like on an Xbox or PlayStation or Nintendo Switch or even on your Apple, like your app Apple TV, your iPad device, computer, Windows computer, etcetera. They're all available on there as well. It allows you to play it with friends remotely over like a Skype call, like I said, as a fun way to just get together and chat and play games like you used to without having to, you know, swap coronavirus germs, I guess.

Alright. Well, I'm gonna wrap this up for now. Hope you're doing well. If you, need to or want to, you can tweet at me at I Chris on Twitter. [email protected] is my email address if you feel like, just needing to vent about some stuff going on related to this or whatever in your world.

Or join us in the Discord, Good Stuff Discord, by signing up for Patreon. Patreon.com/goodstuff or patreon.com/ichris, and we'll get you connected in there. There's a great sort of health talk discussion going on for folks all over the world, I guess North America especially, just sharing stories about what's going on in in their world as it relates to this without some of the hype and noise, I guess, of, and fear of social media that generally happens. So I've kind of enjoyed that. So if you don't have a community already, feel free to join us there.

But of course, obviously, if you do, that's great. And, just as another note, we, as a family, we tried to do screen time free Sunday yesterday. And, as much for the kids or as much for the adults as it was for the kids, just to take a break from everything. And I I know that I found the day much less stressful, much less sort of reigniting every little anxiety or fear of that you're gonna hear about anyways eventually, in terms of what's going on in the world. And skipping a day or two is probably not going to force you to miss something very important because chances are someone will let you know if if you shouldn't leave your house at this point even more or if you should be washing your hands twice as much or whatever it is.

It has a finds a way of getting into our inboxes or stream or wherever. So hope you're doing well. Hope you stay healthy, wash your hands, get some moisturizer for your hands because I'm sure they're turning to, scaly, dry, cracked Canadian winter hands at this point if you're not using some moisturizer. And, we'll talk to you again next time. Thanks.

Bye.