It’s Lucy’s birthday and she was so excited that she woke us all up at 0530, not quite dawn because it was fully daylight. We had a pretty full on day, and there were an awful lot of pictures.
Day 51 – Dawn until Dusk
Day 50 – Birthday Eve
It’s the day before, and after Lucy went to bed we got prepping to make tomorrow as special as we can. Three hours of blowing up balloons, hanging bunting, wrapping presents and tidying up afterwards and I’m hoping she’ll squeal when she sees it!
The day involved Alexander clearing all his homework before making dinner. I spent about two hours on the phone to Virgin Media and running broadband tests, and putting stuff back in the garage so that we had room for tomorrow.
Lucy has been doing VE Day themed school work, and she read the horrible histories book woeful second world war. We also did a WW2 theme for the alphabet game when we went on a walk this afternoon.
After the walk Lucy did a martial arts session via zoom. This worked really well, although I think she’d like a mat for the floor when she was lying on it trying to do sit-ups.
Broadband Bother
I’ve noticed that the zoom meetings I’ve been on have had unstable connections and are pretty wobbly. So I found the time to do a speed test. It registered my broadband speed as about 7Mbps down. This isn’t bad, but I’m paying Virgin Media for 200Mbps. So it’s a bit short.
I first did the test about a week ago. I was in WiFi then, and also thought it might be split several ways with other devices. I found a couple of Ethernet cables and got the powerline going. On Monday I joined a work call while wired in and it was noticeably better. So I ordered a few new cables.
This morning I tested the broadband speed again. It was still around 7Mbps, even when wired directly to the router. After poking around the Virgin Media website I gave in and called them. There was no way to contact them via web form or email. The woman was pretty patronising, clearly following a script and told me that I’d need to do a hard reset of the router every 10-15 days. When I did do the reset and got the same speed she said it would settle in an hour or so.
I called back an hour and a half later when the speed was still the same. The second lady was much more helpful and seemed to know what she was about. None of the tests showed anything wrong, but she decided that the router was a bit long in the tooth and ordered a new one to see if it will make a difference.
Decorations
Tracy pushed the boat out for Lucy’s birthday, given that we’ve cancelled the birthday party with her friends we want to make the day special. So Tracy bought a helium canister and a load of balloons. We’ve also got extra banners and bunting. All three of us spent the evening decorating the living room.
Day 40 – Sunshine, Trampoline Fun, Party Prep, and Marshmallows
The original meaning of quarantine was forty days. So I’ve been not going to work for longer than an old fashioned quarantine period.We’ve had a great day today. Most of it spent outdoors enjoying the sunshine, apart from a bit after lunch when we stayed indoors because it was too warm to do more digging. We’ve also eaten well.
Clean Trampoline Fun
While I was digging the patch in front of the hut in a search for the old concrete path, Alexander and Lucy decided to clean the trampoline. Armed with a bottle of washing up liquid, a couple of brushes and the garden hose they bounced and scrubbed the trampoline. As always it quickly turned into a water fight. Tracy and I threw buckets of water at the kids and they sprayed us with the hose.
Lots and lots of fun on a lovely warm day.
Food
We had croissants with raspberry jam for breakfast. These came from yesterday’s shopping trip and made a nice change from cereal.Lunch was a home made quesadilla. We also had nachos as a small starter. Tracy made it all while the kids were getting dried and changed from their time on the trampoline.Dinner was even more special. Tracy cooked steak with a blue cheese dressing. It was really good, melting in your mouth and pink in the middle. There was no real need for chewing.
Party Preparation
After lunch we stayed in for a bit to organise things for Lucy’s birthday party. Although it isn’t for a couple of weeks we need to lost things to people so they’ll have part bags, prizes for the games and also some other things.Lucy helped us both sort it out. She enjoyed loading the laminator with the bingo cards. She got pretty efficient with it after she’d done a couple. She also decorated the party bags and helped Tracy sort out the contents.
Garden
After dinner I went back out into the garden. I delivered another wheelbarrow load of topsoil to the furthest raised bed. Then, with the wheelbarrow empty I took a layer of clay soil off the first bed and carted it up to the back of the garden. This was step 1 of the plan to establish a new compost heap on the left side of the garden.
I then daisy chained both the garden extension cables so that the hedge trimmer reached the back corner of the garden. Then I cut and raked up the brambles and all the other weeds until the light failed. It took two or three passes, raking up in between each one, to clear the area. I think I completely cleared about a dozen square metres. Here’s the after photo that matches the before photo above.
I saved a half dozen nettle plants for an experiment I want to do with Lucy and Alexander later in the week. I’d like to use the leaves to make nettle tea, and the stems to make string.Once I’d cleared enough space I decided to start prep for the new compost heap. This started with a bringing an old rug to throw over the fence to stop things growing through it, and also to contain the compost on this side. I then dumped the wheelbarrow load of clay soil and used it to flatten out the slight slope at the very back.
Marshmallows
We’ve got several piles of woody garden rubbish, and of brambles, that I don’t want to compost. The larger one has been building on our burning circle since the end of last year. The other piles only exist because we’ve tried to avoid burning garden rubbish.
Tonight we decided to give in and have a fire. Alexander started it by flicking a lit match at the pile. It caught really quickly.
While I was keeping an eye on it Tracy and Lucy came out to watch, and they brought marshmallows with them. The fire was a bit too hot to start with, but it soon died down. We spent a happy half hour watching the flames and toasting marshmallows.
Eventually it was time to go in, and I turned the garden hose on it.
Day 38 – TGIF
I’m so glad that today is Friday, and that there are two days of no work ahead. I’ve been feeling tired for a couple of days and it’s been getting harder to get up and go. I’m not the only one, the rest of the family have been later to rise too. We’re all finding it hard, and the lockdown meant that the Easter holidays didn’t feel like time off. Not least of which both Tracy and I worked days on and off rather than taking a week each like we’d originally planned.
Work & School
I started at 0700 this morning, and tried to get my emails under control, there were over 400 unread in the inbox, which I cleared back to almost none at the beginning of the month, and kept it under control for a couple of weeks. Mostly though I was trying to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything important in the last few days. I’m feeling a little out of the loop.
After Tracy went to work, and the kids had woken up, I organised the children to stock the fridge up with fizzy drinks from the coal shed. We were allowed three cans each, one each day of the weekend, starting with Friday night. We picked them from the selection on the shelf and stacked them all into the top shelf of the fridge. We also got some sausages and burgers out of the freezer so we could have barbecue for dinner.
After we’d organised that it was back to school work. Lucy started with some reading, and also did art and computing. Alexander did his best to complete all of his homework, and covered off a computing project, English, RE, and maths. The maths confused him, there were questions that didn’t make sense, and the answer bore no relation to what it looked like it should be. I couldn’t see how it worked either, and so Alexander emailed his maths teacher. It turned out that they hadn’t been taught about something that they needed to be able to do that question effectively.
I spent most of the morning on phone calls or zoom meetings. I set up on the patio for the zoom meetings and enjoyed sitting in the sunshine, but it was a little hard to see the screen. When we got to lunchtime I took an extended break to do things with Lucy. We did some botany and also got things out for the barbecue. I put the shade on the patio table, and we collected sticks for kindling. Lucy helped me to build a fire and put the charcoal on top. It was pretty hot though, and so we went back inside. Lucy did some more reading and Alexander finished off his homework.
I sat on the patio with a computer and sorted out the work planning for the team on trello. I then bribed the kids with two CBGs each if they would tidy away everything in the back part of the living room. I wanted the table cleared so that we could put things for dinner on it, and the floor cleared so that we could move around without worrying about standing on things. They did a really good job at it, and when they realised that they were faster co-operating it was cleared remarkably quickly. This gave me time to write four pages of guidance on using our trello boards for the team. I also got my work inbox down to under 100 unread emails.
With all that complete we finally lit the barbecue and started cooking dinner at about 6pm.
Bingo Cards
Most of my evening, after I’d tidied up, was taken up with pasting pictures over the words on the bingo cards we’ve got for Lucy’s birthday. It was a pretty straightforward process, but it wasn’t that speedy. So it was well after midnight when I finally got to bed. Some of that was down to trying to fix some technical issues with the computer, which I eventually gave up on.
Day 36 – Stories, Sunshine and Scouts
My turn to be off work today, while Tracy toiled saving people from the pandemic at the hospital. We had a morning of Lucy writing a story, and building the scene to go with it. Then we sat in the sunshine and had a picnic in the back garden. Afterwards we went for an afternoon walk, and when we got home we looked for pictures for the bingo cards we’re making for Lucy’s birthday party.
Stories
The first thing on this morning’s school timetable for Lucy was writing. Her class teacher sent us a writing activity to do this week, which was to think about a picture prompt, with an accompanying paragraph. There were two tasks, one to draw the scene, and the second to write a detailed description of it.The setting was some odd circles of creepers in a wood. The person saw a deer walk through and disappear.
Lucy decided that she would find a unicorn through the portal and looked for a picture to copy. She found a YouTube video of how to draw a unicorn and sat down to draw. However she wasn’t happy with her attempts and thought the unicorns looked too chubby. Her frustration at not being able to draw what she had in her head made her quite upset.
The compromise we eventually came to was that she could build the scene with her Lego. Alexander broke off from his biology homework to help, for which I rewarded him with a CBG. We all had some of they fabulous gingerbread that Tracy made yesterday for a midmorning snack.
Once the scene was built Lucy wrote some description, but wasn’t up for continuous writing for 20 minutes. She really just wanted to tell me about it. So I decided that it would be okay if I typed what she told me to, provided that she wrote it out later to practice her handwriting.
Once I’ve checked that it is to her satisfaction I’ll post her story to her teacher. It’s definitely a real brain twister…
EDIT: The Mysterious Forest, by Lucy Kemp
Sunshine
We managed to spend a couple of hours outside in the sunshine. The first part was in the back garden. While I was sorting out some of the birthday party preparation Lucy had taken a bag into the kitchen. She quizzed me about what I wanted for lunch and then disappeared.
Just as I finished printing out the bingo cards Lucy reappeared to drag me into the garden. We went out and she shook out a blanket on the grass, and emptied her bag. We had a plate each, and she’d packed me a chopping board, sharp knife, ham, a block of cheese and a punnet of cherry tomatoes, as well as a loaf. This was so that I could make myself a sandwich.
We had a very pleasant lunch outside, talking about what we could do for Lucy’s party. When it was done we packed up and went back in to get Alexander to come for a walk with us. We had to wait for him to get out of the shower, because he’d forgotten that I’d told him we were going for a walk.
We took a different route than usual and went round Spynes Mere. It was busier than I’d expected, we met several groups of people out for walks. Bearing in mind it was Wednesday late lunchtime, there were more people than we’d usually see on a Saturday afternoon when we’d walked it last year.
The sun made it look idyllic, and it certainly was warm enough to be okay in a t-shirt. We played eye spy for the walk to the lake, and then the alphabet game on the way round it and for some of the return trip. All in we walked 1.7 miles in about an hour.
Scouts
I joined in the local scouts weekly zoom this week. It was my first meeting as Scout Leader and Woodhouse Troop’s first meeting too. We did it jointly with Battlebridge Troop, who have only just adopted that name because until tonight they were our only scout troop.Woodhouse Troop is named after one of the early leaders in Merstham. Miss Woodhouse helped scouting during and after WW1. Her father was the local rector at St Katharine’s non Merstham, and her brother was killed in Mesopotamia in 1916. He’s commemorated both in the church and the scout hut.We had 14 scouts on zoom, 5 of whom were new members of Woodhouse Troop. I was formally invested as the Scout Leader and then I invested one of the Woodhouse scouts. He was so keen to start that he joined in a few weeks early. It was also the first time that I’ve invested anyone using an alternative promise, our first scout is Muslim, so we used that version.
The zoom session was pretty chaotic. We played pictionary, with a random word generator. Each scout took it in turn to draw, and their patrol had to guess. It sort of worked, but my connection was rather iffy and I had to join back in a few times.
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.