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Day 29 – Ides of April

Tracy was at work on the ward again today, and I had a non-working day at home with the children. After a decadent breakfast of pastries and doughnuts we spent most of the day in the garden. Although we hardly worked.

Garden

Lucy and I assembled a planter outside the front door. We found all the bits, took it out the front and built it with cable ties. It was a bit old and the quality of the cable ties was rubbish, three of the eight broke. So Lucy had a break while I found some more. We had two cable ties for each of the wicker panels, and assembled it into a square. There was a black fabric liner, which we stabilised with some spare house bricks in the bottom corners.

The planter is quite large. We had three trips with the wheel barrow to fill it. The first time we shoveled some of the lumps of clay from a raised bed that had too much in it. That should give a relatively waterproof layer at the bottom to help retain moisture. The second time we got some of the topsoil I’d dumped in the raised beds the other day and added that in as a layer. We then topped it off with compost from the last bag and watered it a lot.

We were expecting there to be two planters, and we had a look around the hut, the shelves outside the back door, the coal shed and around the patio. But we didn’t manage to find it.

While we were doing all that Alexander was cutting the grass again on a shorter setting than the other day. He also whittled and sanded a bit of ash that he cut a couple of days ago. He’s planning to make a wooden light sabre handle with it.

‘Epoxy’ Bread

I watched a TED talk the other day about making bread and experimenting with different flours. One of the things was about bringing together two different mixtures to make a stronger better tasting bread in the same way that epoxy glue mixes two compounds.

Alexander has been experimenting with bread too. He’s got a sourdough starter that we’ve not quite managed to make work. So today we mixed some spelt and self-raising flour with water and set it aside to start the process. We also took a bit off the sourdough starter and fed it with spelt flour and water.

Tomorrow we’ll add some more spelt flour to the starter to make a soft dough that we can leave to ferment for a couple of hours. Once it doubles in size we’ll mix it up with the rest of the dough into a proper bread mix and knead it. With a bit more proving it should give us an interesting bread.

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Day 28 – Back to Work Tuesday

The four day weekend is over, although the kids are still off school. Tracy was back on the ward, and I rolled out of bed and logged into my work laptop to catch up on what happened over the weekend before Lucy woke up.

Last night Lucy had decided to sleep under her bed, which I only realised this morning when she told me. She wanted a change and built herself a nest in the area under the bed. If you look closely you can see her bedtime reading, Bedtime Stories for Rebel Girls. She’s gone to sleep in there again this evening.

Working

My work was in three distinct phases. From 0700 until just after ten, and then from 11 until after half two, and then three until just before five. Lucy had a martial arts grading by zoom and a birthday party. In between those I read a lot of emails, and spent some time on the phone and video. Over the weekend I found an attachment to hold a mobile phone on a camera tripod. I fitted that to my mini gorilla tripod and am now using that for video conferencing.

Birthday party

Lucy’s friend Amalie, who lives round the corner, turned 8 today. Because of the lockdown she couldn’t have a proper party, so her mum organised one on houseparty. Lucy wrote the card out, and wrapped the present (Lego dots – a flexible wrist band with Lego studs on it that you can decorate with Lego pieces). Then we decided to go and deliver it in person just before the party.

We met another of Lucy’s friends on the way out. Lola and her mum had the same idea as us, and their car was parked in front of our house. So we waved and said hello for a minute. Then Lucy and I went round to Amalie’s house and left the present and card by the door. We waited at the end of the drive and had a chat with Amalie and her mum for a few minutes before going back home.

Once I’d got Lucy logged into the houseparty app on Tracy’s phone I hid in my bedroom so that I could carry on working. From the excited shouting coming from downstairs I’m pretty certain Lucy enjoyed the party. I only had to intervene once!

Shopping

It’s Lucy’s birthday in a few weeks, and I needed to go to the Argos at the back of Sainsbury’s in Redhill to collect the present I’d ordered. We also needed a few things, including cheese, diet cola, pasta, flour, cotton buds and any cheap Easter Eggs that might be left over. Immediately after dinner I took Alexander with me to help carry it all.

We did OK on the Easter egg front, scoring four medium and one large egg for £5. I also found the pasta aisle had been restocked, although only with penne and fusilli. There still wasn’t any flour, but I found the paprika that we hadn’t been able to get last time, and everything else that was on our list, plus half price grass seed for outside my hut. We also got a video that Tracy said she wanted to watch and some sweets as small treats.

With the shopping done we collected Lucy’s present. It was rather larger than I’d expected!

Exercise

Having spent most of the day behind my work laptop I needed some exercise. So I took the kids on four laps of the green in front of the house, and we had some fun with a ‘magic’ stick. Alexander pretended to be Boblin the Goblin and did a character voice and walk. Lucy turned herself into Vikki the Fighter from Carmena. I was Dad the Bad, and we each took a turn wielding the stick to chase the other two round the green. There was an extended roleplay story going on as we raced round at a fast walk.

Once Lucy had done four laps I took Alexander on a longer walk over the railway and back down through the rec to home. We got in about three miles. That gave Lucy enough time to be in bed so that we could stash her present in the garage.

Technology

The last thing I did, before writing this and going to bed, was to try to fix a couple of issues Alexander has been having with his laptop. His school uses Microsoft office 365 for the schoolwork, and go4schools to allocate homework. Alexander hasn’t been able to print to our printer and couldn’t open PDF files or PowerPoints from the browser. Each time he tries to open one (from a link in Firefox) it causes a cascade of new tabs. You need to kill Firefox to make it stop.

I installed a PDF reader to solve that issue and it was straightforward. I tried the same with a PowerPoint viewer but that didn’t work. It garbled the presentation. But I did discover that saving the file locally and then uploading to open in the PowerPoint web all worked fine.

Alexander’s printing issue from Office 365 is a feature, not a bug. The web versions are not as good at layout as the native apps. So they produce a pdf instead. You are then supposed to print the PDF from your preferred PDF viewer app.

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Day 27 – Easter Monday

The second day of the weekend for us. Quite a.lot colder than yesterday too. We spent a large chunk of the day in the garden, digging and cutting. We even ate lunch al fresco. Between getting up and making breakfast I had one last look over the model I built on Friday, and uploaded it for a blog post. If you are wondering how long the lockdown will last then my Covid-19 model might help.

Buttering the Toaster

Over breakfast I managed to butter the toaster. I only really like buttered toast when it’s done immediately and all of the butter melts into the toast. I never have butter (or margarine) on anything that won’t melt it, I can’t tolerate the texture/feel of it.

So I had put some margarine on the knife ready to start spreading it as soon as I’d got the toast out of the toaster. When it popped up the toast stuck in the lip of the toaster and I needed to wiggle the lever while trying to get the toast out. This needed two hands, and I had the loaded knife in my right hand. So I used that. As I wiggled a dollop of margarine came off the knife and fell into the toaster. It started smoking.

Somehow it had missed the toast, and fallen down to the bottom of the toaster. As it turned out the toast wasn’t quite ready anyway, toasters only seem to do stale bread or burnt. I removed the toast from the toaster and took the crumb tray out. The margarine hung over the gap, taunting me. A large pile of crumbs covered the worktop under the toaster. It took some thumping and banging the toaster in the worktop to dislodge the margarine, and a double handful of crumbs.

Gardening

Tracy and I finished off clearing the brambles and other weeds from outside the hut. While she got stuck into the digging I moved the spare topsoil to the raised beds at the back of the garden. When I’d got it looking a bit more level I then started moving the roots, leaves and branches we’d dug up to the back of the garden. Normally I’d have a fire to burn them when they’ve dried out a bit. However we’ve not burned any garden rubbish since the autumn. Initially this was because it was too wet, but we’ve not done it recently because everyone is at home and we don’t want to smoke people out.

Alexander started to mow the grass, but it failed almost immediately. A couple of wooden skewers managed to get trapped in the blades and stopped it turning. There was smoke coming out of the motor when, after unplugging it, I helped unstick the blades. It wouldn’t restart. Fortunately though we still have the old lawnmower, and he was able to mow the grass with that.

When we finished the digging out of roots we stopped for a bit of lunch on the patio. We had biscuits and cheese, olives, hummus and crisps. While we ate the robins, blackbirds and wagtails took turns finding the insects and worms on the patch we’d dug up. They also sang quite a bit too. It was a nice moment in the sunshine.

After lunch Tracy took the children, on foot, to the Co-op to do some shopping. While they were away I carried on with putting fabric over the area we’re going to pave and then moving the paving slabs that were in front of the hut. These had all been grown over because there wasn’t fabric under them when they were put there a decade ago. This is the next area to be cleared, some of the soul from here will go into raised beds. Then the spare concrete slabs at the back of the garden will go on top of fabric to make a level path under the washing line.

Neighbours

Just before Tracy for back I moved to the front garden to carry on some of the work we’d started there. As I was tidying up a bit and starting to dig out a stump, I realised that Vinny from No18 was rotivating a bit of the nature area on the green. Vinny is a cub scout leader in the same group that I help with, he’s on Monday cubs and I do Thursday. So I went over for a chat, from over the road to maintain our distance.

Vinny was prepping a bed for some wildflowers, and I offered the box of wildflower seeds that I had spare. While we were chatting a woman came by with her teenage daughter and said hello, again at a safe distance. They lived on Taynton Drive and were out for their daily exercise. We had a friendly chat about how things had changed before they carried on.

Exercise

I’ve got quite a bit of exercise in the garden yesterday and today. So I didn’t go for a walk after dinner. I can really feel my shoulders and arms from swinging the pickaxe!

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Day 26 – Easter Sunday

I was woken this morning with a about of “Hoppy Easter!” before Lucy threw a Cadbury creme egg Easter egg at me. So I did what any sled respecting Dad would do in that situation. I got out of bed, made some coffee and ate the chocolate egg for breakfast.The kids each got a present for Easter and one chocolate egg. Alex has a baby Yoda plush somewhere in transit to the UK. Lucy had an LOL Easter Surprise. They also got some money from their Nanna and Grandad, and Lucy used hers, along with the pocket money she’d saved to buy the Lego Mia House. I’d anticipated this and already ordered it from Amazon, so it was on top of the shelf until she’d negotiated the purchase from me.

So the morning was pretty relaxed, mostly featuring chocolate, hot cross buns and Lucy building her Lego. I went upstairs and sat with Alexander for a bit as he built things in Minecraft. I experimented with a painting app on my tablet and a stylus. It was pretty good.

Gardening

After lunch, which was the rest of the jambalaya for three of us, I went out into the garden to cut things down. My first thought was to try and clear some of the back of the garden before it turned into a jungle. So I rolled the extension cable as far up the garden as I could and set the old lawnmower on the longest setting. At the time I thought that Tracy was going to come out with the kids, but that didn’t happen.

It was pretty hot, 22°C according to the forecast, so I didn’t knock myself out at it. I mowed a path up to the compost heap at the very back of the garden. The compost heap itself is covered in nettles and brambles. I’d quite like to get into it and move some of the compost in the raised beds. However when I got that far the cable didn’t quite reach and the lawnmower choked on the long grass/bramble/nettle mix.

So I switched to weeding the raised beds. There were a couple of green shoots I’d missed in the first one. I took them out and then spent about an hour clearing the second one completely apart from the ten strawberry plants that were growing in it. There were quite a few weeds around the bricks on the raised beds, so I fetched some shears from the shed and cleared round the outside of three of the beds. I also started on the brambles that had infested the main strawberry bed.After a break Tracy wanted me to finish off putting fabric on the area outside the shed. So I left the back of the garden and took up the pickaxe to dig the ground and clear the roots. I ended up lifting some of the path too, as many of the roots went under it. Tomorrow I’m hoping that I’ll get to finish this off.

Evening Walk

Alexander and I went for a short walk so that he could get some exercise. On the return leg we spotted some things outside a house in Radstock Way with a sign saying “Please Take Me”. There was a battered trangia camping stove. So I picked it up to bring home. It’s clearly spent some time on a shelf somewhere, and it will need a serious clean. If it works then it will come in handy for the scout camps when we are allowed to do that sort of thing again.

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Three weeks was never going to be enough

As a country we’ve been in lockdown for almost three weeks. The government said they’d review it after three weeks, which is on Easter Monday.

Why Three Weeks?

Why did the government pick three weeks as the review period?

Well, when you look at how people seem to progress through being infected the vast majority, well over 90%, are no longer infectious after that time. Pretty much everyone that was infected before the lockdown started will have either recovered or died after three weeks.

So three weeks in what you think you should be seeing, if the lockdown has worked, are the people that lived with those that were infected before the lockdown developing symptoms. They’ll also be passing it onto the people they come into contact with, but far fewer than before.

What you see isn’t what you get

However there’s a time lag in there, and we’ve only tested people admitted to hospital. So there are a load of people infected before lockdown that only get tested 7-10 days after they develop symptoms at the point they get admitted to hospital. Symptoms start about 5-7 days after they were infected. So overall the people being tested in hospital were infected 12-17 days earlier.

From the published stats, there seems to be up to a three to four day lag in processing tests, especially over a weekend. So today’s reported new cases were probably infected between 2-3 weeks earlier. Before the lockdown in most cases. That’s why it still looks like cases are going up. What we’re reporting today is the pre-lockdown infection rate.

This is apparent in the official estimate of the rate of infection. Before the lockdown the estimate was that every infected person passed it on to 3.3 other people. That took us from a 3-4 new cases per day in late February to over 2,000 per day on 26 March. Those also have the 2-3 week delay mentioned above.

The estimate on 31 March, less than a week after the lockdown started, was that it had slowed to between 0.6-0.9 infections. Certainly when you look at the daily increase in confirmed cases the rate of increase starts to slow in mid-March.

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Day 25 – 11th April 2020

I think it might be Saturday today. Tracy is at work and the rest of us are having a very lazy day. My excuse is a very sore left foot from having stood on a nail yesterday. I managed to clean it, treat it with tea tree oil and put a new dressing on it. I did take photos, but I doubt anyone wants to see a puncture wound in the sole of my foot, apart from Tracy who likes that sort of thing (why else would you go into nursing?)

Lego houses

Lucy continues to evolve her Lego house and spent some time explaining her new acquisition of the word ‘renovation’. There are a couple of new rooms, and some of the other rooms have changed significantly. She has been building almost all day, with only a brief break to jump on the trampoline and to make her own lunch.

Modelling

I did some modelling of my own, there’ll be a separate blog post about that, but not today because I want to reflect before I share.

I took all the open source data that I could find about what’s happening in the UK and built my own pandemic model. There were some surprising insights, but the big caveat is that the data is only partial.

Food

For dinner I made jambalaya with king prawns and chorizo. It was the first time I’d made jambalaya and also the first time I’d cooked prawns. It wasn’t as hard as I’d expected it to be, although it wouldn’t qualify as a twenty minute meal!

I made quite a large pot, with enough for today and tomorrow. Largely because Tracy was very late home from work (just after half eight) and she didn’t eat any jambalaya. I found a recipe on BBC good food for chicken and chorizo and adapted it a bit. I used risotto rice (two different kinds, because an open packet with 200g in it was a different kind from the fresh packet, not for of any poncy hipster reason). I had a large red pepper and a large yellow pepper, a red onion and a whole chorizo sausage as well as a bag of king prawns.

I fried the onion and peppers with some garlic and Cajun spices. When they were softened I added the rice (400g in total) and some chicken stock (700ml, but not all at once). I cut up the chorizo and lightly fried it in a separate pan while I added a can of chopped tomatoes and about a third of a jar of hot salsa to the rice.

Once the chorizo was fried a bit I tilted the frying pan so that I could scoop out the chorizo while leaving the fat in the frying pan. The chorizo for stirred into the rice, peppers and tomatoes along with the remainder of the chicken stock. I turned the heat down on the jambalaya mixture and covered it.

The frying pan that had the chorizo get in it got a bit of olive oil added. I then turned up the heat (8 on my cooker). I drained the prawns in the sink and let them drip for a moment while preparing a couple of cloves of garlic. Then I threw it all in the frying pan and stirred the prawns until I was happy they’d cooked. I was looking for them to change colour, and they did, but it was sort of masked by the orange from the chorizo!

When the prawns we cooked I poured the content of the frying pan into the jambalaya pot, but I didn’t stir it in. I left it for about fifteen minutes on a low heat so that the rice would cook properly.

It tasted really good, and the only trick I think I missed was having some freshly baked bread to accompany it.

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Day 24 – 10th April 2020

Seeing as it is Good Friday we all had the day off. Breakfast was hot cross buns, toasted. We had a relaxed start to the day before going out to do some gardening.

Gardening

Today we all went out the front. Tracy and I dug weeds out of the borders round the drive. Alexander painted the fence that we replaced earlier in the year, after the storms knocked it flat. Lucy did some painting and she also did some weeding.

I took the pick axe to the part of the border nearest the front. We cut down some thorn bushes last Autumn. There were still a few sets if roots still in the ground as well as some ivy, brambles and a large grass that gets everywhere. It was pretty hard going, and I cleared a couple if metres of the border.

Tracy was doing something similar at the other end, and we pulled a lot of roots and woody parts out of the ground.

Afternoon Walk

After lunch Lucy lost the love for gardening, so I took her for a walk. We had to collect some leaflets about Covid-19 volunteering for our street. We also needed to stop by the Co-op for dishwasher tablets, bread, milk and a few other things for dinner.

Our destination was down Nutfield Road, just over a mile from the house. So Lucy and I set off at a fairly leisurely pace and we played twenty questions until we got as far as the Merstham rec. Then we switched to the alphabet game, with the theme of Spring. This took us all the way onto Nutfield Road. Lucy was a bit despondent about then, it was a hot day (22°C according to the weather underground app).

We couldn’t find the envelope with the leaflets in, so I phoned Tracy for more detailed instructions. However she didn’t answer and I tried Alexander. In relaying the message I didn’t get that the house we were after was located behind another one. So we didn’t find it. Lucy was a bit upset as we walked back to the Co-op, but I managed to reassure her that it was okay.

Shopping

There was a pretty big queue for the Co-op, eight people in front of us when we arrived. It moved quickly though. We were only about five minutes outside. One thing I did notice was that the automatic doors were on exit only. So it was only possible to enter if someone left. I thought that was a pretty neat solution. Inside only the self-service tills were working, so staff contact was minimised.

Some of the shelves were better stocked than the last time I was in, although still no pasta, dried rice, or flour. The sweet aisle was pretty thin, and half the beer fridge was empty, notably no cider. We got most of what we wanted, including the dishwasher tablets (24 for £3), bread (lots of choice), milk (ditto), chorizo, crisps, and the very last bottle of Irn Bru in the shop.

With the mission complete Lucy insisted that we call Tracy for a lift. So we crossed the road and put some space between us and the still massive queue. Lucy opened the Freddo treasure chest that I’d bought her as a treat for walking with me.

Fence

Alexander finished painting the fence when I was out with Lucy. He did a pretty good job, although he’d focused on the parts that Lucy couldn’t reach when she’d been helping him. I noticed when I went out to tidy up after dinner that there were some bare patches near the bottom. So I decided to touch them up. It went pretty well until I stepped back to check for more and trod on a nail. It went straight into the middle of my left foot. A few hours later it still hurts.

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Day 23 – 9th April 2020

Both Tracy and I were working today, I started super early to clear as much as I could before needing to look after Lucy and Alexander. However they were both quite good at amusing themself.

My work involved quite a few meetings today, evenly split between zoom and straight phone calls. More than usual as both my peers were on leave as was my boss, so I was covering everything that couldn’t be delegated. Our remit is evolving and becoming clearer, and we’re plugged in to most of what is going on. So I spent the day directing traffic. I also did the quiz at our team meeting with the extreme close ups we took at the weekend. The team did really well with them, I only had to give extra clues on four of the ten. Only one wasn’t guessed.

Lego Houses

Lucy had taken out conversation during last night’s walk about building to heart. She started building modular rooms and then connecting them together.

It was a very iterative process for her, because the 3d joins weren’t strong and stable. So bits came crashing down from time to time. I was quite proud though that she didn’t lose her temper with it and instead rebuilt it afresh, usually with quite a different design.

She had a few attempts at making a video to explain it, and shared one of them with her cousins via WhatsApp. She was also very patient with me in meetings. When I got off the call she would ask how long until my next meeting. When there was more than a few minutes I’d get taken through the latest remodeling. It was rather like some of the construction projects I’ve worked on, although with a much shorter time between the highlight reports!

After lunch Lucy began watching YouTube videos about Lego friends construction and room design. The house was progressively moved from the table into the floor and it became a bungalow in style because that reduced the complexity of her build.

By the time Tracy came home from work Lucy was on videos showing her how to modify Lego friends figurines to make them into child sized figurines. That’s her next thing that she wants to do. I suggested that she asks Alexander to help as he has a track record of customising Lego figures.

Food

For lunch Alexander and I had paninis made with the bread rolls he made yesterday. We also took the cover off the patio furniture and had lunch outside. We decided that it must have been the self-raising flour that made it rise, because there was a very tight crumb, like a cake. The bread was also very dense. It tasted nice, but definitely not a sourdough.

Dinner was a defrost and heat meal, I worked until after six. We had chilli con carne with tortilla chips and a side order of breaded chicken from the freezer. No preparation, just applied heat.

After that we got our daily exercise in, three times round the green with Lucy and then down to the Merstham rec and back for Alexander and I to get us up to 10k steps. We chatted about the d&d campaign and also about subverting tropes when you design stories or games.

Washing Dishes

We’ve been getting our dishwasher and washing detergent from Smol. They post eco friendly detergent to you in demand. It’s a just in time sort of system, and like most other just in time systems of late it’s got a bit disrupted. I also didn’t get Tracy’s reminder to get dishwasher tablets when I was at the supermarket yesterday. So we’ve run out.

However we have plenty of washing up liquid. So, only realising when I’d filled the dishwasher with dirty dishes I had a moment. I decided that I’d just squirt a bit of washing up liquid into the machine. I gave it what I’d usually put in a bowl if I was washing by hand.

When I got back in from my walk I realised that there’s a reason why we use dishwasher tablets.

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Day 22 – 8th April 2020

Today is Wednesday, my usual non-working day. So I’m not working and Tracy is. We had a fairly relaxed morning. Lucy found the camera tripod I used to take pictures of the moon last night and we played with attaching it to the banister upstairs and took some selfies.

One of the better selfies.

Gardening

After we’d done that we spent a brief period in the back garden doing some more hoeing and prepping the raised beds to receive the seedlings we’ve planted. So far one bed (of five) is completely ready to have things planted in it. Another has been turned over but needs the lumps of turf shaken out and thrown into the compost heap. We could probably do with digging over the compost heap and sticking some of it in the raised beds too.

Making Bread

After a very brief stint in the garden we went back indoors to make sure Alexander was making his bread.

He needed some help recovering the sourdough. It had sat out for too long and it collapsed. It smelt pretty alcoholic, and it was runnier than it ought to have been. We ran out of plain flour, so it got a wee bit of the spelt I picked up yesterday, and also some self-raising flour. We also added a tiny bit of the starter to it. Alexander mixed it all up and split it into three batches.

One batch became pitta bread.

The other two batches became rolls, we were aiming for paninis for lunch tomorrow, and a loaf.

Lego Houses

During the afternoon Lucy decided to build a Lego house. She spent quite a time combing through the boxes of Lego and finding all the pieces she needed.

There are two levels. The lower level has a garage and some garden. The upper levels have a bedroom, complete with a very fancy bed with a hinged cover so that the Lego person can go inside. There’s also a closet with spare clothes and a robot from a TV show. Although one of the best bits is the built in zip wire for going out.

Hot Chocolate contest

After dinner (teriyaki chicken, noodles and stir fry vegetables) the children had a hot chocolate competition. They each made two cups worth of hot chocolate, one for them and the other split between two espresso cups for me and Tracy to taste.

Alexander made the Flanders Hot Chocolate from the Simpsons which was in the Binging with Babish book he got for Christmas. It was a very rich recipe and it produced a very dark chocolate.

Lucy made the cardamom hot chocolate from Nadiya’s Bake Me a Story book. Hers was a bit lighter and definitely had fewer calories.

Exercise

After two hot chocolates, even small ones, I needed to go for a walk. So I took Lucy round the green four times and we chatted about building Lego Houses and I reminded her about the modular rooms on the house she got for her 6th birthday. After that Alexander and I went on a longer walk to make up the balance of my 10,000 steps. We also talked about the sort of houses we’d have if money wasn’t an object.

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Day 21 – 7th April 2020

Today was a work day for me because Tracy was off. We’re covering the school holidays between us, so I’m working Tuesdays and Thursdays both weeks. So I spent most of the day hiding in our bedroom with my work laptop and phone.

I also discovered a new (to me) feature on Android phones from a futures report on AR/MR. It is the ability to have a 3D animal in your space via your phone camera. We’ve been watching the Tiger King recently (they’re all deranged), so I found this tiger in our bedroom.

Home Cinema

While I was working upstairs Tracy decided to turn the living room into a home cinema. She made some signs to advertise the now showing and also the concessions stall. The curtains were closed and some extra blanket added to make it a bit darker. The photos don’t do it justice because my phone camera is awesome in low light shots (see the full moon below).

We often go to the cinema, and we’d have done that at least once in the school holidays. So Tracy shelled out for Trolls World Tour via our Virgin media box. Lucy has managed to watch it twice (so far) in the 48 hour rental period.

As well as the movie Tracy made hotdogs, fries, popcorn and an impromptu pick and mix for the kids to have as lunch. It went down really well, although I took my share back upstairs to carry on working.

Shopping

After dinner (home made spaghetti carbonara) it was my turn to go do some shopping. We had a small list of things that Tracy couldn’t get on Sunday or that we’d run out of. I took both children to Sainsbury’s in Redhill. There was only a brief wait outside the shop. Inside they’d marked the floor in 2m segments with tape, but none of the other shoppers seemed to be taking any notice of this.

We managed to get most of what we wanted, although some sections of the shop were clearly empty. In the pasta aisle we got excited because amidst the empty shelves there was a section with orange penne and green fusili. On closer inspection it was red lentil penne and green pea fusili. Over in the home baking aisle I found some spelt flour, which I’d struggled to find a couple of months ago when I’d wanted it. There was no other flour of any kind.

Apart from the flour and the pasta the only thing on our list that we didn’t get was paprika. That was just the usual shortage as there were plenty of herbs and spices, and I got some smoked paprika as a substitute. The one noticeable thing was that there were absolutely no special offers. We often keep an eye out for those, but on a small trolley of shopping that cost just over £50 we didn’t get a single special offer. I guess that’s supply and demand in action.

Super Moon

Last night was the super moon, it should be back again tonight. So I thought I’d have a go at taking some photos. I couldn’t find my proper camera with the optical zoom lens. So I put my phone (a Pixel 3A) in the tripod and had a go on the night sight setting. It turns out that it had an automatic astrophotography mode. So the pictures look almost like daylight!

When I was taking these the moon was visible through the clouds. To the naked eye you could see the shadows of the craters. But the camera just kept the shutter open for too long for the details to show up.