Tag: rice krispies

Covid Isolation Day 5: Paging Dr Mario

~ thomastyrrell ~ Leave a comment

I wake up from various anxiety dreams where I’m wandering around school and breathing on people to the familiar four walls of quarantine. The fear of accidentally giving a bunch of people this virus can be quite paralysing and I’m a bit worried how fast I’m going to adapt to going out into the world again, given how hard I’ve found it to move out of a lockdown mindset before.

A Tesco order arrives, meaning I finally get to eat the bowl of rice krispies I’ve been craving since yesterday, and it certainly brings an interesting texture to the feelingless desert that’s my mouth right now.

I manage to hammer out a review of a poetry collection, but it’s the kind of day when I’m struggling to settle into things. Squish finds out that Track and Trace has been in touch with her office and advised them all to self-isolate until the 3rd. She feels rotten about this, especially since Track and Trace have been dragging their feet and she was hoping they wouldn’t have to shut the office. All her colleagues are getting PCR tests, and we’re really hoping they all come out negative. Squish is scared they will think the worse of her for it; I told her that they understand it’s just one of those things that happens in a pandemic, but she was inconsolable for a little while.

Today’s distraction has been Dr Mario, an ancient 16-bit puzzle game. I bought a mini-SNES a while back for a bit of retro gaming, and discovered you can download a program that hacks it and will let you insert the ROM from any old SNES game, downloadable for free on the internet. It’s a simple game about lining up coloured pills to wipe out cartoon vriuses, but the difficulty is flexible and our competition to finish first can be fierce. Plus, playing it with Covid gives the whole thing a pleasant sense of irony!

Battling coronavirus the old-fashioned way

The Game Boy Advance was my favourite console as a kid, and as with the iPod nano, I’m so comfortable with low-tech 16 bit games and pixel art that I rarely see the appeal of polygons and first person shooters. Sometimes I get so involved that I won’t stop even when I’m not enjoying it any more, and I’ve had to take measures to cut down on my gaming hours in lockdown. Dr Mario, however, hits the spot precisely. It’s just lovely to play a two-player game that we’re both reasonable good at and can get a bit competitive about.

I finish my book, rattle out a diary entry and blog in the evening, which gives a sense of acheivement to a diffuse sort of a day. We watch the next episode of the Harley Quinn TV series, which is punky and good fun–a bit bloodsoaked, but it doesn’t feel as unnecessary in the adult cartoon as it does in the Birds of Prey movie.

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Covid Isolation Day 4: Rice Krispie Cravings

~ thomastyrrell ~ Leave a comment

I wake up with an intense craving for rice krispies, which I think comes down to a yearning for foods with very identifiable textures now that my sense of taste has gone to the dogs. I also feel really odd for the first few hours, in a woozy, out-of-my-skull sense. I wonder if this is simply a side effect of being able to breathe properly for the first time in days. Both my nostrils are in reasonable working order, and while I’m still coughing a bit and my energy levels are prone to crash unexpectedly, I would probably have gone into work if I wasn’t still infectious.

I do a few chores and finish watching The Power of the Daleks, remembering how, as a kid, I could devote myself to a solid Saturday morning of watching one Doctor Who episode after another. Now it seems I can barely do ten minutes without checking my phone or seeing what’s happening on another tab.

While Squish is still feeling terrible, I think I’m getting to the stage where I realise my days will need a bit more purpose if they’re not going to turn into lockdown number four, without even the option of a wander in the park.

In the evening we order out for sushi, which has an enjoyable texture, but the fact I can’t taste the salmon continues to depress me. Also, in the most depressingly obvious metaphor imaginable, my watch stops. It will be another six days before normal time resumes.