Quarantine diaries: day 10

 Realised how dependent my body is becoming on this routine I have set up. Dinner was over an hour late - I say "late", but the paperwork at the start did say that all meals would be delivered to our rooms within a 2 hour window each time, it's just that they have been so punctual that I had gotten used to eating at 1815 on the dot. My stomach was growling, I was getting hangry, snapping at people over the chat and generally feeling displeased and even more frustrated because there was nothing I could do about it. I had a few leftover jelly beans and plenty of tea, but they weren't ever going to hit the spot. And I started looking around on deliveroo, just to see what my options were, but none of them were going to get here imminently, and then I could foresee the daft nuisance of any deliveroo I ordered coming exactly at the same time as the provided hotel food and me feeling like a piggish twit having to eat it all at once. So I sat and stewed and then nachos and chilli arrived, with a can of what I am deciding to interpret as "apology pepsi" (because it is the first fizzy pop I have had since coming in here). Which I proceeded to skull and immediately regretted it. All those bubbles. All that sugar. But alls well that ends well and all ends well if I don't get a hanger-inspired takeaway. 

Today is day 10. Second swab day! Which means I get to see some actual humans for the first time in a long time. The mental health calls everyday are helping to remind me about how to talk to strangers, which is an important skill I was at risk of losing, and I did once see a man walk briefly through an office in one of the tower blocks opposite me (I don't usually because of a combination of lack of direct sunlight and quite darkly tinted windows all around me, but this once I managed it because it was just getting dark and he had his light on and I didn't yet). I think I am facing a lot of back offices, because I've only seen someone inside any of them that one time, and then there was the time a man came out to have smoke on the creepily empty balconies off another block. 

Hopefully this swab is also negative, I don't get any calls until day 13, and then I get the all-clear and go-ahead to arrange to be picked up by actual family. I don't know if I'm allowed to hug them still. I mean we will be living together and I have been given an all clear after two tests, and there aren't any community cases in Sydney, so it's not like they will have it (and they're OLD, so unlikely to be asymptomatic carriers, one hopes). But the rules are so against any kind of common sense that I don't want to make any assumptions. Elbow bumps for the fam it is.