Enjoying glorious self-isolation
It’s Friday, and the school term is finished. That means that today is the last day for a fortnight that I have to make my kids do schoolwork while I try to work.
I am way too tired to write anything tonight. We’ve had a good day, although Tracy was very late home from work.
Only took one picture. Lucy made a hospital for her toys. She was very proud of it, and so she should be.
I started work when I got out of bed, and caught up on a lot of emails from my day off yesterday before Lucy appeared. Tracy went off to work at the hospital, so it was just me, Alexander and Lucy in the house for most of the day.
Alexander spent his day mostly doing his art homework on the computer. He’s been learning to use gimp and painting a face. He picked a black and white photo of Joe Exotic, of Tiger King fame, and painted half the face in colour, and the other half as a tiger. It’s pretty impressive, although painstakingly slow compared to how long it would have taken with pens or a brush.
Lucy has had a productive day. She read an entire Captain Underpants novel, and then did the Logic and Data workbook for a computing lesson. We spent some time talking about that too. There were two bouts of dancing, including dancing with Ote where she was singing along in the background of an SLT video call I was on.
Between a couple of calls I spent half an hour with Lucy talking about what she thought might happen with the science experiment we started yesterday. We then drained the cups and weighed and measured each of the fruit pastilles. Lucy touched each of them and was delighted by how they’d changed texture and gone slushy. She also managed to write a long paragraph in her book about it afterwards.
Lunch today was bratwurst and bread. Alexander made his into currywurst with copious ketchup and curry powder. I just ate mine.
For dinner I did something I’ve never done before. I spatchcocked a chicken. It was both simpler and harder than I thought. I found some instructions with a quick internet search. That was the easy bit. The harder bit was cutting out the spine with a pair of kitchen scissors. It took a bit more effort than I expected, but once I’d got the first cut in it became a lot more straightforward because I could see where I needed to cut.
After dinner Alexander and I went for a walk, this time we decided to go a little further and planned our route to walk down to Wiggie Lane, then come back up the A23 towards home. When we left the house, about half seven, we spotted a police helicopter hovering in the direction we were walking about a mile or so away. As we got to the Merstham rec the helicopter banked and flew off towards Redhill aerodrome.
By the time we got to the bottom of Nutfield Road we saw an ambulance and a police car. As we carried on, there were more police, clearly conducting a search. We carried on through the Watercolour towards the railway. As we got to the Tesco people started appearing for the 8pm big clap. We paused briefly to join in. As we continued we saw some of the police cars moving on. It turned out they’d caught someone who had attempted a mugging in the area.
We did the route we’d planned, and we saw Molly and her family when we went down Frenches Road and said hello from across the road. We covered 4.6 miles in 1 hour 25 minutes. The walk on its own was 9,500 steps. So today is the most exercise I’ve had since I was unwell.
Lucy launched herself onto me while I was still in bed this morning. Pinch, punch, first of the month. No returns! Alexander was next on the list, and we all piled into his room and got him while he was still groggy with sleep. He was not amused. He started this weird tradition in our house and Lucy is now determined to best him every month, I think this was the first time she’d done it.
For the first time since Lucy’s cough started we’ve had a change of routine. Tracy was back at work on the ward today. So she left just after eight for the hospital. Before she went we rehearsed the preparations she’d made for minimising the chance of bringing any infection home. She’s identified work shoes that stay there. There’s a change of clothes every day just for coming home, and a washable bag to put her uniform in. When her shift ended she got changed and washed her hands. On getting back to the house she used an antibacterial wipe to clean the steering wheel, gearstick and door handles in the car. Then she came in, had a shower and put the uniform and change of clothes on a very hot wash.Meanwhile we had a pretty relaxed day at home. I’ve maintained Wednesday as my non-working day. I didn’t really do any of the things I’d hoped to. I did have a go, but my computer wasn’t behaving. In the end I had to reboot it, which is pretty unusual for a Linux machine.
We ate too much today. Breakfast was normal, bit lunch was home made sausage rolls. They were really nice, and it was hard to resist the temptation to eat more of them. Then in the afternoon I did some science with Lucy, and we needed four jelly sweets. The best we had was a large packet of fruit pastilles, so we ate a lot of the spare ones…
Earlier in the month I’d promised to buy everyone takeaway on payday. Tracy forgot this yesterday and made us a lovely dinner. So I did it today instead. I checked before lunch what the kids wanted and then asked Tracy by text. She had a mixed kebab from the local kebab house. The rest of us has pizza from the pizza project. So we supported a couple of local businesses.
Lucy and I did a fair few things today. We started with some reading, both of us read, and then Lucy picked one of the activities off her list from school. She acted out a scene from the book for me. After that it was time for writing, and she wrote a book review for The Bolts. It was accompanied by a drawing of the cover in her book. That took us up to break time. After break we did some maths, involving finding some coins and doing sums with them. At 1130 Lucy did dancing with Ote via the YouTube live stream. Today it was a Greatest Showman dance, which she just loved. So much so that she watched it a second time when it stopped.We double handed lunch with topic, by watching Horrible Histories Rotten Romans. We also had a bit of a chat about the Romans too. After that we did some checking on the seeds we planted at the weekend, the pansies had sprouted, but the rest of them hadn’t. I don’t expect that we’ll see many shoots for another few days, but I wanted to check that they hadn’t dried out. Then it was time for science.
In the pack from school was a set of science experiments from the Glasgow Science Festival. So we picked one to do, which was measuring what happens when you put gummy bears in liquid. We didn’t have gummy bears so we substituted with fruit pastilles. The first step was to measure them and weigh them. Mostly they were 10mm high and 20mm in diameter and weighed 4g. Then we put 50ml of water in three cups. In one we added 4g salt and 4g baking soda in another. The fourth cup got 50ml of white wine vinegar.Tomorrow we need to drain the cups and measure and weigh the fruit pastilles. Before that we need to have a think about what we think might happen, and why. Then we need to compare that with what we measure.