This is a blog post for our Lifewriting Group. We meet tomorrow morning and were given this topic as a suggestion.

I’m including a few photos from our recent walks. The photo above is a Zamia plant.

There have been quite a few things happening over the past couple of weeks. The situation in Victoria has gone from bad to worse, culminating in a return to Stage Four lockdown in the city of Melbourne. NSW has also seen an increase in community transmission. Although our borders are supposedly closed about 400 people a day come to Western Australia for work or on compassionate grounds. Underlying our good record with no community transmission so far is a good deal of anxiety about whether this will change.

Progress has been made with Matt’s transition to NDIS. After some really poor communication from our Support worker at Integra we had a good conversation on Thursday morning and I’ve signed a Service Agreement with them. I still haven’t heard back from Glenda regarding Matt’s day supports, including support for him to have home visits.

After yesterday I’ve realised a couple of things. We really must return to late afternoon/evening visits. We’ve done this for many years and day visits are disruptive for us and very tiring. The other thing is that weekly visits works better than fortnightly, especially if we want to go away for a week or two. If the visits are more often he adjusts more happily to Facetime catchups. I also find it more emotionally stressful as it seems to raise the stakes for a happy visit, whereas weekly there can be the odd visit where I am less energised when he comes without feeling a bit bad about it. Because Matt will have group activities for which he pays less I’m pretty sure it will work out financially for him.

We are still waiting for the horn on our van to be fixed. It had dawned on us that George Day let us drive away in the van knowing that it wasn’t strictly roadworthy as the fuse for the horn was disabled because of the problem. Fiat Welshpool have on auto electrician who is much in demand and he has only just been firmly assigned to the job today in the hope that he can finish it if he doesn’t have interruptions. Fingers crossed because we want to have a couple of nights away later this week.

We have just started our Mind, Body and Soul program with Connect in Victoria Park. The first Zoom session on Friday went well. I think they are following guidelines on social distancing by only having 35 people attend in person and the rest of us on Zoom. It’s not quite a good for us as actually going there, but at least we don’t have to worry about catching anything.

Stephen is trialling a new singing group which meets on Saturday afternoons. They have a COVID safe plan and his first session on Saturday was in the open air. He wasn’t feeling well on Thursday when Working Voices had their first choir session, but one of the participants was kind enough to set up her phone so that we could join by Facetime. He was in bed, so I joined him and we were teased about using John and Yoko as our model. Shows our age that we knew immediately what she meant.

Stephen and I are working on the videos from our trip. Apparently Matt liked the little clip of drone shots and they have also been watching the couple of other travel videos we have finished. Due to requests from Matt’s house, we took some video yesterday when we celebrated Stephen’s birthday. We are still processing our final Goldfields Trip movie. I do the editing, pass to Stephen, who goes through and makes notes, which I do my best to incorporate before doing a final edit and post to Youtube. It’s not as easy as it looks, of course, and I know understand why Youtubers say they spend hours and hours editing. Still, it’s a creative process and I don’t mind, especially when there are not too many other things to do. I work best in the mornings, but can do a bit of it later in day as well.

My new normal looks much like the old normal I would say, except for the underlying anxiety about the continuing pandemic around the world and the effects of global warming.

Here is our latest video.