Of Earthquakes, Virus and a Big Fat Tick

When feeling tired after a walk – something we haven´t done at all lately due to a 14 day home isolation – it usually means rest. However, right now I am high on adrenaline because during my rest a persistent itching on my calf kept me awake. Finally, an ever more nagging thought in the back of my mind made me check if by some chance I picked up a tick on our beautiful woodland walk, the first outing in almost two weeks (if I disregard the trips to the pharmacy and the shops). While being certain that there was no way I picked up a tick this early in the year, I opened my eyes and folded up the lower end of my pants where the itch originated and there it was. The biggest tick I have ever seen – it probably mistook me for a calf. And that is it the tick mistook my calf for a calf – and that is what happens when tick overthink things. Anyway, I grabbed the big fat tick and tried to squeeze it but it kept squirming and crawling between my fingers. I tried drowning it, but it kept going towards me on the surface of our washbasin. Then I just let it wash down the drain and thankfully it did not come back up.

It seems that is the story of these past few weeks, beautiful things mixed together inextricably with ugly and annoying things. Like the pleasant feeling of being together with the family, having fun, playing games, doing puzzles, watching movies, cooking together, while listening to the radio and looking outside keeps reminding us it is not our holiday but in fact a world wide pandemic due to a new virus. Even this sentence reads as a nightmarish part of a script out of an apocalyptic movie we used to watch and marvel at the endless imagination of the Hollywood writers. Not so imaginary now, when daily news brings us numbers in the thousand dead in one day in Italy and US rise in the number of infected. Not so entertaining as the time I watched the Outbreak and thought thank god this could never happen in real life. Even World War Z doesn´t seem so far fetched anymore. Seems that Hollywood will have to try harder just to outdo the things that are really happening.

But still we manage to find pleasant and positive things to do in our daily life. Among those positives I even count the chance to act as a home teacher to my kids. Although I do admit I was more enthusiastic the first week, because during the second week I started to miss my work a bit and tried to write an expert article for publication (something that I can usually manage to write in two days) but wasn´t able to finish it a whole week. Well, full disclosure, maybe playing Witcher III might have had something to do with that and not just the constant questions and problems associated with the home schooling. We were actually really successful with the work we did, keeping really high discipline and we even managed to write a co-authored song (meaning we all contributed to the rhymes) that got published on the web site of the school. 😀 Plus, I had loads of fun making more and more elaborate art from micro pictures:

You can see more of them here at the bottom where I will keep adding new ones: https://hertourage.com/postbridge/micro-world/

Therefore, the key to staying upbeat in this situation was finding nice, useful and fun things to do at home, trying to remain aware of the reality outside while not allowing that reality to pull us down mentally. That was really hard to do last Saturday when we got shaken out of our bed by an earthquake. While I was laying in my bed, still a bit woozy from being awoken forcefully (yep, I really like my sleep), the bed wash shaking, my first reaction was to ask my wife to stop shaking the bed, when the reality finally hit. My first reaction was: “Kids!”

Luckily for us the earthquake amounted to nothing but a bit of shaking. However, the people in Zagreb, which is not 100 miles from us, were not as lucky. That whole day ended up being full of information about coronavirus victims and the devastation of the earthquake. There was one interview with a Slovene that lives in Zagreb and he tried to describe the situation when people were evacuated from their homes while still being under the isolation protocols due to the virus. He tried hard to find words to describe the absurdity or maybe the oddity of the situation but persistently failed to succeed. We all felt like he did at that moment. It seemed like the end of days is really coming.

To sign-off on a positive note – being 14 days in isolation means that it has been 14 days since we last had direct contact with other people and as of yet have not developed any signs of infection. Which is always good news based on the information that 14 days is the usual maximum incubation period for the virus. Therefore, anybody who reads this blog, hope you enjoy the choice of pictures, which do not in any way show the grim reality of the world in which they were made.