In order to survive this lockdown, creating some sort of daily order and structure would be paramount.  Combine that with meaningful projects and goals as described previously, it gave some motivation to hammer out the grunt work. 

So as a typical days begins I'll check the covid cases, make breakfast, then start teaching my online classes.  There's a long break between the morning and afternoon classes so I'll use that to do a myriad of tasks related to my projects.  While this happens, my wife is working online with her digital trading and making calls back and forth to head office.  At some point in the morning will be the daily covid test.  Then, one of us (usually her if we're honest) will cook a nice lunch using the materials on hand.  After this it is more teaching online and then I take a nap.

Waking up again it's time for dinner.   As this lockdown goes on, the food delivery system shows signs of rebounding.  If we're lucky then one of us is able to order something on the apps and we sneak off to pick it up at the gate.  We'll enjoy a nice meal and then settle down in the evening to watch re-runs of Nikita as well as other TV series I put together on my black box.  We schedule one episode of Nikita literally every night.

While watching that, I drink a cinnamon whisky mixed with coke.  Then it's time to take out the trash discretely, break some rules walking around the compound at night, and go to bed. 

As for the weekend, not much changes in the routine.  Instead of teaching classes online, I spend more hours working on my downsizing projects and keep to roughly the same schedule.  

It is vital to keep busy and do *something* during lockdown, otherwise it leads to a worsening downward spiral.  There was abundant evidence of that on my social media feed and I wanted to do everything posssible to keep from going down that road.

To that end if I felt depression coming on I would do any number of things such as update this blog, or even learn new languages online.  Some excellent progress was made in Spanish and also learning Ukranian for the first time.  My interest was piqued during the war which I would also follow daily.  Unfortunately some of the worst developments such as the Russian destruction of Mariupol happened at the beginning of lockdown.  Even so, there was this sense I was right in the thick of things, especially at the beginning when everyone thought that Kyiv would fall.  The city was miraculously spared, and the Russian convoy of tanks suddenly just stopped.  The most likely explanation was that they ran out of fuel.  

All that being said, watching the Ukraine war I tried to keep to a minimum because it wast just adding to more stress that the lockdown already brought on.  2022 was truly shaping up to be one of the worst years in world history and for me personally also.

So I also daydreamed a lot about past cycle tours by reading journals here and also planned some potential tours for the future.  Maybe Ukraine is one of them in the future.

But first things first, we need to get out of this compound.