Family life continues as the COVID-19 crisis starts to wash over Australia.
March 2020 has been a remarkable experience for everyone in Australia. Our country's experiences are of course somewhat similar to what is happening in other parts of the world, although in different timeframes (months or weeks earlier in some countries; still to come in others) and with very different degrees of impact.
Life at the beginning of March
During the first week of March there were Rotary Club meetings happening at the Concord Golf Club as normal. I attended farewell meals for a few people that were changing jobs and I was working out of our company's offices in Macquarie Park and the city, as well as the Sydney Airport offices next to the international terminal. And I was being contacted literally on a daily basis by recruiters about cyber security jobs.
Our older son Owen was enthusing about starting the second month of his engineering internship with Siemens in Macquarie Park. Our younger son Liam was doing the final rehearsals as the lead in a one-act play with the Guild Theatre which was going to run as a roadshow at some retirement villages and nursing homes. He had also settled into study routines for his year 12. Maree was of course keeping the house running while working on an amazing stream of knitting projects.
Three weeks later
Sydney in late March seems to be a completely different world from how things were at the start of the month ...
Liam and the cast of his play had one performance at the theatre, but all of the roadshow performances have been suspended for the time being as aged care facilities have headed into lockdown. Liam has also been doing online school from home for the last week.
My work has switched location and I'm now also working in the study at home. One of my close colleagues finished work on Friday and of course there was no farewell for him - there is also a lot of job uncertainty in our field all of a sudden. The company is reasonably stable with a lot of our income being from long-term contracts, however the sudden drop of project work means that all staff have been asked to take 10 days of leave during the next quarter to help avoid lay-offs. Last week I was contacted by a couple of recruiters who were indicating that they have several very skilled cyber security people that are looking for jobs.
Owen has been mostly working from home as well, although this changed suddenly at 4:30pm on Thursday when he was advised that the whole internship programme at Siemens had been suspended. On Friday he had to return his laptop and building pass, on and negotiate with university for late enrollment into the current semester (which has just finished week 3). During the weekend he's been ordering lab kits, dealing with timetable problems, and scrambling to catch up on coursework.
We have all got to see the drastic impact on tourism, hospitality and retail businesses in the city around us as the month has unfolded, flowing into more industries extremely quickly. Many people have lost their jobs and small business owners are now under enormous financial and emotional strain. My brother has a physiotherapy practice that has a mortgage on their hospital rooms and employs several staff; there are so many more who are facing similar crises. And of course the direct front-line health impact is continuing to grow each day, with increasing numbers of the population coming down with the COVID-19 illness and of course more deaths.
The seasons continue
Since moving into our current house in July we've established a small vegetable patch in the garden, with strawberries, tomatoes and a range of herbs. It's clear that we'll have a lot more time around the house during the coming months and so we decided it was a good time to build out the garden with a range of seasonal vegetables.
Our seedlings all arrived on Friday and so we spent much of Saturday preparing the beds and planting out the seedlings. Here are a couple of photos from the end of the day.
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