Fighting CoVID at Work

At least playing at fighting CoVID anyway.

First, a Christmas craft, a way to scent drawers or closets. The result looked surprising like abstract images of the virus.

And that led eventually to adapting a game to play at beating up the virus.

For recreationists, this is a game I adapted for Long Term Care Residents. Some key points here are the limited mobility of my residents and reducing the amount of work I need to put into actually running the activity. So as my pictures show, the game is called Balloon Tennis and the residents are in a circle around a balloon tethered to the ceiling. They smash at it and it never travels fast enough to harm anyone and never needs to be picked up by me when it goes over the shoulder of a player. The balloon has a little water in it to give a little more weight.

So first I wrote "CoVID" on the balloon and glued a few 'spike proteins'.

I hung it from the ceiling.

I was struck by the idea of performance art and if we were beating the virus, how would we do it? Well, by using Vaccines, Masks, Hand Washing and Social Distancing of course.

And so my residents beat the heck out of CoVID that day. And since we have been lucky and careful, we don't have actual cases of the disease at our Home to make the game morbid.
 

Another post on the limits of my creativity

Three projects to describe here

In the weeks leading up to Canada Day, I helped the residents of my Long Term Care Home make papier mache, uh, blobs. Most were just wrapping balloons with the paper soaking in flour water but one had some shape with four legs and a head. One failure here is that the residents often have limited mobility and could not do a lot. Mostly, we chatted while my coworker and I did the work. The residents did more of the painting afterward. The papier mache was touched up and finished by my coworker and I. I gotta say, my coworker did more, and better, painting than I. I got the job done while she got the job done well. Perhaps we complement each other.

I joked that I was going to fill the pinatas with the residents' medications but instead we went with more traditional fillings - sugar free chocolate and candy and hair clips. Okay, hair clips might not be traditional but, especially in this time of CoVID, nobody is coming in to cut the residents' hair and the clips are very useful.

Success and failure: Most of the work was done by staff rather than residents. I don't know if lower tables would help so the residents could be 'over' the activity rather than reaching forward to it.ergonomically, their positions in wheelchairs wasn't ideal. Residents were able to paint solid colours but due to palsy or other issues could not paint details well. We staff did a lot of touch up on the papier mache and then a lot of other work on them. I am still working on crafts that residents do the majority of the work. One success was in breaking them open on Canada Day. We hung two from the ceiling and gave the residents foam paddles. A well aimed blow would tear the pinata open but instead, basically a game of tetherball started with the residents batting the increasingly battered bee back and forth to each other. We will use some of the other papier mache creations and find some version of a tetherball that is heavy enough and also gentle enough when impacts occur.

The second activity in the image above was a 'graduation ceremony' for new hires at the LTC Home that missed their actual ceremonies due to CoVID. One coworker went out of her way to say she was sad that she missed her grad. So, Brian to the rescue!

I learned a few things about the young staff that missed their grads, called a few parents up and arranged a ceremony in the Home. A lot went well and a lot did not and this was a unique event; I do not expect a second chance to get it right. So that was my big problem with it; that I wasn't able to sort out all the issues and problems that could happen, that I didn't work it through in my head, or that I didn't have someone edit my ideas to point out possible problems.

Here's what happened.

I prepared the robes and everything else in secret, then sent my coworker away on an errand. In the ten minutes she was away, I cleaned out part of the dining room of all the tables and found enough residents awake to fill it up. I also hung grad decorations on the walls and prepared the computer and so on.  For clothing, I secretly changed from shorts and a Hawaiian shirt to good pants, a shirt and tie. Good stuff! First problem; in moving all those tables on the hottest day of the year to that point, I soaked through my shirt, leaving huge dark stains across my stomach and back.

We had mortarboard hats and 'grad' sashes for a previous activity and I got the grads into PPE robes in place of more traditional ones. I played Pomp and Circumstance and lead the graduates into the dining room. The ceremony went fairly well although my voice was far squeakier than I thought - listening to the recording was embarrassing. And I did not explain fully to the residents what was going on. Otherwise, it went very well. 

Very well on the third floor, that is! Our LTC Home has two floors of residents and we keep them the floors separate - even staff do not mix much. So once the third floor was done, I raced downstairs to do it again on the second. This was faster, clumsier and all round messier. In my defence, my manager who would have taken some of the tasks, was away unexpectedly.

So I say this was well thought out but not as well executed as I would like and I will not have a chance to repeat it.

The final activity I have been working on that has required creativity is shuffleboard. Not the table top version with small discs you slide across a waxed surface but the larger floor one where you push larger discs with a pole. Below are some of the discs I cut from a 1 X 8 and the launcher that will soon go on the end of a pole. The discs are not done and also not all that round but that gives a few residents a job to do this week. We have two fairly able bodied residents who would otherwise have access to out of doors but because of CoVID are trapped inside. They should be able to use sand paper and smooth out these discs. The cutting and shaping on my end took nearly two hours. This is in part due to not having the best or proper tools for the job. I don't want to give so much free labour to my job but in this case, again because of CoVID, I needed something to do aside from feel lonely. This work helped me and will help residents. Time well spent!

Still Alive - that normally doesn't sound so grim!

I go through phases of frequency of blogging and usually when I return, or briefly return, to blogging, I would have a post titled, "Still alive..." In the past, and especially fifteen years ago when I was a young(er) man, that was pretty flippant and easy to write. These days, Yes, I am still alive and that means a little more than it did four months ago.

One reason I have posted less is that my work has, ironically, increased! I am now a full time worker at my Long Term Care Home and will be at least until the Covid crisis is over or under control.

I have not caught Covid and my employer has done a great job of being proactive in making safety precautions so that we have put policies in place before the government required them. For example, my workplace required me to work only at it or to stop working at it. Admirably, it also gave me more hours so that choosing it exclusively was not a financial hardship. A week or two later, the provincial government required LTCH workers to work at only one location. 

Ah. let's have a work picture:

I presume it was clear, but my residents don't naturally have blurry faces. I have just put a little effort into anonymity for them.

Anyway, most days, I have something drawn on my mask. The goggles were a spur of the moment thing because we had cut down Styrofoam cups for planters for our basil and dill.

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Some creativity links:

I have some soapstone and am going to learn a little about how to carve it. Mrs Clone's Sculpture Class.

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Library of Congress has a Hip-Hop sampling tool.

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The British Museum has millions of images available for public use.

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Touring the Van Gogh museum.

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Some people like weird text editors. This one is write only.

LTCH Fast Animals

I am trying to find animals that I can make quickly so that I can make enough for residents to sand and paint.

'Quickly' means 'roughly' so there aren't many details. That's fine; that's what paint is for.

Still, I have not found any animal that I can carve quickly. Cut quickly was a saw, yes. But once the knife is used, the takes a long time.

Here are the animals before painting or sanding:

The giraffe necks took a lot of work, as did the legs. The bodies are very boxy.  They were cut from a 2" x 4" with the two pieces, neck and neck overlapping. I cut earlier pictures and will add them soon.

The fish is simple and mostly fun. The main challenge is quickly getting the fins and tail thin enough. A blocky tail just looks wrong.

The deer were fun and mostly done by keyhole saw and then coping saw.  There is a bit of story to their creation. I used this template.  I don't have an electric saw or room to place one if I did so I used a hand coping saw. I also don't have a vise. I used a clamp but since is pinched the wood at only a small spot, my sawing put too much pressure on the neck and snapped the first deer's neck. At work, I used a vise and since it grips the wood across a wide area, and the positioning was so much better, I was able to cut these deer very fast. Maybe twenty minutes for two. They don't have pleasing contours but still the basic shape is very obvious. And fast! 

The necks of the two giraffes went from recognizable to pleasing with a good sanding.

I work at two LTCHs (Long Term Care Home) and in one is a coworker who is both an excellent painter and painting teacher. One technique I learned from her, perhaps obvious to others, is to paint the lightest colour needed first and dry it. She uses a hair dryer but we waited overnight. So we somewhat sloppily painted one or two colours - fur brown and beige antlers for the deer - and the next day added other elements. For the giraffes, the plan was to paint them a light tan one day and the darker spots the next.

These aren't art grade carvings so it was silly for me to imagine the residents of the LTCHs would attempt art grade painting. They did attempt, and manage, fun grade painting. We all had a lot of fun

I will definitely make more deer, perhaps enough to try to sell the completed works, next year. Both LTCHs I work at have bazaars and the sale of products made by residents - as tree ornaments  perhaps - would go well.

And as my saw work improves, maybe I will try giraffes again. The iconic long neck is easy to identify so the finished work is not as confusing as dogs or cats might be - I probably wouldn't be able to carve -quickly or not - enough detail to allow people to recognize the difference. 

LTCH Crafts: looks fishy to me!

I am currently an activity aide at a Long Term Care Home (the 'LTCH' in the labels or tags for this post). I want to do creative work with my residents but many suffer forms of dementia and other challenges. I do not want to put sharp or heavy tools in their hands; not merely because they might use them on each other but, well, I have a big scar on the back of my own hand and my residents often have shakes or palsies of their own.

Another consideration here is my own limited ability - remember that scar on my hand? I can cut wood but not always in a straight line. 

So I thought for a long time on how wood working projects we could do. At my mother's home, I saw a big carved fish - very simply done, mostly a slab of 10" by 2" that, well, looks better than the ones below but clearly similar.

I was able to find some soft wood, cut out some big chunks and do most of the rest with a knife.

There was a discussion online about asking people to draw a bike from memory. Many people had trouble with the shapes and how they connected. Because I love cycling, I got all but the fine details right - and as not before about my ability, those fine details would be sloppy anyway. In this case, I think I conflated many different fish and how their lower fins fit and worked.

This one from   Government Fisheries, has four forward fins, almost like four arms on terrestrial verts.

Some of my fish has two forward and two hind fins while others, to look less like legs, had two forward and one hind fin.

I am not too concerned as I wanted these shapes to be quickly made. This wasn't supposed to be my project but one for the residents that I assisted with.

Here is how the project progressed:

I work in a locked home area with the most confused residents. Most were happy to chat while I, a volunteer and one resident did the sanding. The sanding took an hour or a little more and we were all amazed at how soft the fish felt after the sanding. We could have left the project there and simply used the fish for tactile purposes!

Instead we painted a few of them. I am not much of a painter but a coworker is both a skilled painter and an excellent instructor in the painting process. Where I  painted the yellow fish carefully doing both colours at one sitting, she would have done the whole fish one colour, let it dry and then done the second, darker colour. Sounds simple but I didn't think to do it the first time.

These fish were simple and fun but took more time on my part in the basic shaping than I wanted. I need to get faster, get more of a production line approach going, or I will be wasting my time in prep.
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Future plans:

Sept: Little Bird:

 

Oct: Jack-o-lantern:

 

Nov: Eagle Feather:

 

Dec: Or ask residents - offer a choice of what they want to make.

Owl:

Jan: Dinosaur

 

trivia game for residents of a LTCH

This post is not for general consumption and I am 'hiding' it back here. If you found it, fine.