Update: COVID-19 2020 edition!

I realized that I haven't posted here for a few weeks, and unless you've been self-isolating pretty hard the past few months it's probably not hard to figure out why. With all the global turmoil surrounding COVID-19* I've been a little busy lately and haven't gotten around to posting.

First of all, I'm fine. There are over a hundred cases of COVID-19 here in Victoria, and the government is cracking down hard on international travel and meetings of people, but no one I know has caught it yet. Most of the astronomy department at Swinburne (including me) has been voluntarily working from home this past week, indefinitely, and all our meetings and colloquia have gone remote.

Personally, I am loving working from home so far. I never really realized how stressful it was, upon waking up each morning, to have a ticking time constraint before I needed to be at the train station until I suddenly…don't. It's absolutely fantastic, and I've been reveling in this socially-acceptable reason to be the hermit it was apparently always my calling to be. Productivity has suffered a bit, this past week, as I settle into the idea of working from home, but I'm getting better at it. And not losing ~2 hours commuting each day definitely gives me more time to be productive.

It's also made me feel a lot more creative, as I'm no longer so drained at the end of each day from being out and about, so I might have some more stuff to post about soon. For instance, I've discovered that I can paint in the background while watching someone's talk from home—and I often end up paying better attention when I've got something to keep my hands occupied…

Anyway, that's what's been happening here. I'm sure this is just the start of some serious world-wide changes this year, but I'm in a pretty privileged position where my PhD is unlikely to be affected, so for now I'm just going with the flow and seeing what happens. A hui hou! 

*Can I just say what a boring name this is? It sounds like something astronomers would come up with. Given that it apparently came from a bat, can we call it “Bat Flu” or something? I'm just imagining telling my grandchildren one day about how I lived through the “Great COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020!”