Sorry for the suspense! DS won the 2020 national teen creative-writing competition, and his essay will be published this month with the other award winning short stories, poems, and essays. My ds has dysgraphia and was still learning how to write The Cat in the Hat at the age of 12. This is why it is a big deal and means so much to him.

5th escape of Covid from Quarantine into the community here today. This time it was an AirNZ flight attendant. 1st escape caused the 3-week Auckland strict lockdown within 5 hours of the positive test, which then started the once a week testing of all quarantine workers. Next 3 covid escapes were caught within the week and were all MIQ workers -- all contact traced and isolated, with covid eliminated from the community again. 2 of these came from surface contamination (trash can lid and elevator button). One of these caused a 'work from home' day in Auckland, and a lockdown of an apartment building for 3 days. This most recent one seems well under control and although the flight attendant visited stores, there has been no community transmission yet. Officials seem to learn from their mistakes here, and are getting better and better. I think having the facilities under military management was a very good idea. The Defense Force is great at operational control. As for escapees of people - we are up to 13 (with one family of 5, so only 8 independent escapees). They call them abscondees here because they keep saying that these facilities are hotels not prisons. The most impressive abscondee was someone who tied sheets together and escaped out a 4th floor window, wandered around Auckland in the middle of the night, and then came back in the morning. I'm glad Australia is moving covid positive people to a different facility. We have done this from the beginning and it seems to have worked. We have had no cases of residential transmission out of 70K returnees. The transmission has been with quarantine workers not residents - 3 nurses, 2 quarantine workers, and a Defense Force worker. Now an AirNZ flight attendent - but they got it from the foreign country stop they think - will know more tomorrow when the genome testing comes back.

He has to do 14 days minimum, and then must be 48 hours with no symptoms and return a negative test in order to leave. So it really depends. Transmission within the facility, however, has been limited to 3 nurses, one Defense Force person, and 2 maintenance people. I don't remember any transmission between residents in the past 6 months. So the latest he could get it would be on the airplane and he is still likely to be out in 14 days. Basically, the less strict facility contains 1-2% of people with unknown covid for the first 3 days until the first test is done and they move people to the stricter facility. Then the covid numbers in the less strict facility would be very very low for days 4-14. The strict facility has 100% covid positive people so is really locked down.

Thanks guys for all your concern. He will be in quarantine for the last 2 weeks of classes, so he will be crazy busy. And thank goodness for modern communications. Although he can only physically see the nurse every day, he will be able to see the rest of us through his phone/computer. Definitely a tradeoff for the 70,000 returnees, but a clear choice for the other 5 million of us. We are currently averaging around 1-2% of returnees testing positive.

I think what is hard about this is the forced component. He will be under both police and military guard, so he can't change his mind. Once he is in, he is in for 14 days. And if he ends up testing positive for Covid and is moved to the stricter facility, he is not allowed outside of his room ever - not for exercise and not for fresh air.

Thanks for that! He and his flat mates are very very careful and have been self isolating in a pod of 5 for the past 3 months.

He has a direct flight across the country and has an N95 mask and goggles, so hoping he doesn't get it!

It has been difficult, and we have to pay $3300 for quarantine on top of the flight costs. But it will be so good to have him back for 8 weeks in the summer in NZ that we decided it was worth it. We are assuming he can handle the mental health issues associated with being basically locked in your hotel room for 2 weeks with only 1-hour-a-day, walk-in-a-circle, outside exercise in a parking lot if you book it. He doesn't seem too worried, but others have said it has been hard.

We are still hoping ds can get back to NZ for the summer before all hell breaks loose in the USA. His flight leaves in a week and we cannot move it forward because he is locked into his quarantine allocation date in the military run facility.

My son does 20 pullups a day and has for a number of years. He loves it!

My ds loves his pullup bar.

You can also buy mushroom spores to grow fresh mushrooms at home. They do well any time of the year.

KY has closed down all schools until January, so my immuno-compromised teacher sister is finally off the hook. She is so relieved. My other sister is in 2 weeks self-isolation with her family before travelling to visit my parents who have seen *no one* since March. My ds enters a NZ military quarantine facility next Sunday for 2 weeks. We can't wait to have him home! Summer BBQs here we come!

I've decided to back away from this thread. I have not read the responses because I fear that I have said the wrong thing. My ideas are nuanced but my responses are short, so I'm sure I am never clear enough. I hope that everyone finds what they are looking for, and I am rooting for positive changes for us all. Ruth in NZ

Thinking more about this... I also think that because he did not achieve what he set out to do (based on his assessment of it, not mine), I viewed it as passive, that he was waiting for the answers to fall in his lap. Very wrong of me to assume effort = outcome.

That is an excellent point. I'm thinking internal = passive, and something I can *see* is active. Very bigoted of me. Glad you pointed it out. I wonder what the author of the quote meant?

The word is definitely used in multiple ways. My nephew when on his 'voyage of discovery' after his freshman year of university. He felt completely unmoored and hoped that taking 6 weeks to drive across the USA sleeping in the back of his car and disconnecting would help him 'find' himself. That seems very passive to me compared to what you are doing.

This discussion is making me think that I don't have a purpose, and I am curious why I don't and why it doesn't bother me. I do think that religion and philosophy fill this hole in people's lives. I wonder how easy it is to find purpose without using one of the long-standing bodies of thought that exist throughout the world.

I think finding is passive and creating is active.

It is so hard to do things by writing rather than in person. I thought seeing my thought process might help you see some options. Perhaps not. Let me try another way. I got postpartum depression after the birth of my first child, and it was deep and long lasting. When my boy was 5 months old, I told my dh that I wanted to separate. Nothing was good enough, nothing gave me joy, including the love of my life who I had been with for 13 years since the age of 17. My sweet dh was willing to do anything I asked -- he was desperate to save our marriage. So I asked to move, move to a hippy commune in the outback of NZ. He quit his job, we sold the house and everything we owned, and moved into a one room hut with no running water, no electricity, and a composting toilet in the winter with a baby in the middle of nowhere. I will let you stop and think about that for a moment. But unfortunately even embracing this long-standing dream of mine was not enough, and my depression was now augmented by anxiety. We left 4 months later. We moved in with a friend for a few weeks to regain our bearings, and then traveled the USA to attend my sister's wedding. While we were in America, September 11th happened, and by the time we returned to NZ, there was no housing and no jobs. All the kiwis who were overseas moved back and all the kiwis who were planning to leave, did not. There was nowhere to live and there were no jobs to be had. We had returned to NZ, homeless and jobless, with no family support and with a 1 year old baby. We found a 300 square foot basement apartment, and my dh did odd computer jobs while working from home. He made $8000 that year and we ate into our savings. He did not find a proper job for a full 9 months. My depression did not resolve easily, and I took more than a year to get back my moorings and my life. What I came to understand during this very difficult time was that following your life's dream is not enough to fix a broken mind. My mind was broken. It was my mind that had to change, not my circumstances. So I spent that year digging my way out of this deep depression. It was a rocky road with many false starts, but I did it. It is because of this experience and others I have had that I keep saying what you don't want to hear. I think it is unlikely that you will find something meaningful to fix your struggles. Instead, I think that you need to change the way you think about your life experiences and your future. I do not know if your depression is as deep as mine was, so perhaps you have more options than I did. I certainly hope so. And please know that I do not want to cause you more harm, so if you want me to leave this thread, I will. My intentions are good, but it may be that my experiences are of no use to you.

I had no trigger, but when I went into my most severe OCD episode, my brain definitely flipped. It did not grow gradually that I remember. It was horrific and debilitating. Not knowing what it was, I googled schizophrenia. I thought I was going crazy. I have also experienced postpartum depression at 30, and 5 years of clinical OCD in my early 20s. The 3 month episode, however, was far far far worse.

😞

Well, our focus is on spending our last year with our youngest, building beautiful memories, and preparing him for his future. My job is focused around the desperate attempt to get my students to pass their final exams when they lost about a third of the teaching time this year. We are at the end of the year that started with the covid lockdown in March-May, and it is not pretty. But the kids and I are laughing it off. 'It is just a covid thing.' Yes, it is ugly. Yes, the teachers munted it. Yes, it is just so much work to try to clean it up here at the end. But we are in it together. I spend 20 hours a week calming teen fears and reassuring the parents that what their teens are experiencing is normal. So yes, I am surrounded right now by the effects of the virus. My dh is definitely losing his job at the end of February, and we are expecting that he won't get a new one until 2022 because of the economic conditions. So we will be sending him on the equivalent of the Appalachian Trail here in NZ. This means I cannot stop my tutoring to go to uni next year, but will need to do both concurrently. Well, so be it. It means that dh may have trouble getting a job in 2022 because of a 'gap' in his employment record, well, we will find a way. Worrying won't help. Enjoying my family, good books, good cooking, and now summer is what I am planning. I guess I just see things in a more positive light.

I can totally get why you are putting up boundaries. Sounds like the exact right thing to do. I also think that the covid thing is something that we are all facing. You have lost the best part of your job; my husband is in danger of losing his job every day. He works for immigration, which is funded by visitor visas, and obviously there are no visitors to NZ because the borders are closed. At least 2 times a week since March he has been told that they are cutting his funding and he will be laid off. This is obviously stressful for the whole family, not just him. But it helps me to think it is just a covid thing we have to get through. It will pass. It is temporary. It does not have to be the focus of our life right now. Obvious when covid is over, it sounds like you would spend as much time with students as possible as that is what gives you pleasure. It sounds like your leisure time is where your flexibility lies.

Ah, got it. I agree.