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Day 55 – Thank You Monday

A fairly standard Monday, even though it followed my five day weekend and everyone else’s four day weekend. Tracy was back at the hospital and I was working from home with the kids doing their school work.

For her writing challenge Lucy decided to write thank you notes for her friends that had dropped off presents in her birthday or shortly afterwards. So she found some paper and envelopes and wrote them out.

In the afternoon when I took some time off from work to help her with school we went for a walk to deliver the cards. We started with Amalie-Grace who lives a few doors down, and then walked through Furzefield Woods to deliver Kirsten & Ella’s card. We weren’t able to deliver Isabel’s because I didn’t know her address, but we did a circular walk back to the house, clocking up a mile.

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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.

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Day 48 – May the Fourth…

We live Star Wars in this house, and both the kids got very into it. Alexander wore his sith costume, and Lucy did her best. I had a star wars t-shirt on, but Tracy had to wear her uniform for work.

School was Star Wars themed for Lucy. She wrote a review of why Rey was her favourite Star Wars character, and when reading time came she read a page of a Star Wars roleplaying game sourcebook before swapping to a Lego Star Wars book, because she said the print was too small. Being fair it was about 9 point font on a page a bit bigger than A4.

After dinner the kids staged a lightsaber fight on the drive. Although Lucy had a stick rather than an actual lightsaber.


We also watched the Phineas and Ferb Star Wars special, which was really good and well worth watching. After dinner Disney+ served us up Episode III Revenge of the Sith, which unsurprisingly is Alexander’s favourite.

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Day 43 – Poetry

Another rainy day, and the forecast is for a couple of weeks of rain, although we had some sunny spells over the course of the day.

I was off today, and Tracy was at work. We played a bit with zoom backgrounds, did school work and took a breadmaker apart.

Zoom backgrounds

We’ve seen many people with fancy backgrounds in the zoom meetings we’ve done. However I couldn’t work out how to enable it. What I realised recently was that you can’t do it on a phone, nor on the Linux client. Out of the 11 devices we have that could run zoom only two aren’t android or Linux.

So we got a Windows 10 machine and turned on a single person zoom meeting so we could try them out. I was wearing a green t-shirt, and it became the zoom background!

We then worked out how to spot the colour, and made it blue like a room divider we had. Both Alexander and Lucy were wearing blue and they also blended in.

Disembodied heads and hands were a strong draw and made us all laugh a bit. We also tried a number of other things, like Lego marvel models, Alexander’s shield and a mug.

Once we’d had enough fun I hung a blanket so we’d get a full background next time we’ve got a zoom meeting.

Poetry

For writing practice Lucy chose the option to write a poem with Hello as the first word. She did a plan, thought of all the rhyming words she could and wrote them in a circle. Then she decided that she’d pick a form. Once she’d done that she practiced it out loud and then wrote it on the computer because she didn’t want to keep copying it out when she changed it. You can read Hello on the earlier post today.

While she was doing that I also wrote a poem. Mine was a villanelle, a format I quite like, and which has a standardised rhyme scheme. Mine is titled Hello, Hullo, Hallo.

Breadmaker disassembly

On Monday the breadmaker stopped spinning the paddle about ten seconds after we switched it on. The motor was still going, so it wasn’t completely dead. However I couldn’t get into it because I couldn’t find the U shaped screwdriver head.

Today the replacement U shaped head arrived. So Lucy and I undid all the screws on the bottom of the breadmaker (a Morphy Richards fastbake breadmaker model 48280 for the record).

It was clear from our initial attempt that the manufacturer didn’t intend for people to fix this themself. It was particularly awkward to take apart. We took five screws off the base, and used a screwdriver to separate the base from the body, but it wouldn’t come off.

At that point we were able to dislodge the control panel from the front plate. I also took the lid off, which was super easy. I guess they expected that we might want to wash the lid!

With the front panel off we could see more screws inside. Five more screws later, which were unscrewed through the hole in the fascia, and the front part lifted. It wasn’t free yet, but we could see that the drive belt had disintegrated. We could also see two more screws at the back of the breadmaker. They were behind the oven compartment and completely inaccessible.

Lucy decided that she’d seen enough and went off to build Lego. I watched a couple of YouTube videos. This included one that said the easiest way was just to take a Stanley knife to the bottom cover! I think that’s true.

I found another site that said to remove the seal round the main compartment. Once that was off the top cover just lifted off. This gave access to the last two screws. With both covers off I removed the fragments of the old belt. Then came the job of finding a replacement. All the branded ones were very expensive, about five times the price of the generic ones. However I couldn’t really tell from the online pictures whether or not they were compatible. Usually I’d have gone to a shop and had a look. But I couldn’t, so I bit the bullet and ordered the cheapest that would arrive in the next week or two.

Scouts

We had another scout meeting on zoom. There were 14 scouts and 4 leaders online. Like last week I found the zoom connection unstable. Afterwards I realised that Alexander was playing an online game.

I ran a bit of it, questions on a segment of an OS map. I’d wanted to put the scouts into breakout rooms, but we didn’t set them up in advance. So instead we put them all on mute and let them find the answers individually. We then used the annotate function to identify the places on the map that answered the questions.

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Day 41 – Making Monday

We’re getting into routine now. Excluding Easter Monday this is our fifth Monday in lockdown. I’m working from home while persuading the children to do school work. Tracy was at the hospital saving people.

I didn’t take many photos today, I just sort of forgot. Alexander got on with his school work, which included some questions on Banquo for his English homework. Lucy made stuff though. Her writing homework was to invent a card game and write instructions. She decided to go a bit further and designed a board game and made her own cards to go with it.

After she’d done that I had an extended lunch break and we made bread together. Lucy did the mixing and the kneading and we chatted about what ingredients it needed and how it rose. We were going to take the breadmaker apart, because it stopped working. However we didn’t have a u shaped screwdriver (there was a gap in my set of screwdriver bits).

After dinner (Alexander made chilli), we went for a walk. This was a wee bit different from our usual walks in that we recorded our random conversation and then edited it into some short podcasts.

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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.

The fridge stocked with drinks for the weekend. (photo: James Kemp)

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.

Lucy’s sunflower plants doing well on the patio. (Photo: James Kemp)

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.

The barbecue lit with a single match. (Photo: James Kemp)

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.

Getting the burgers on the grill, halloumi and sausageskeeping warm on the right. (Photo: James Kemp)

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.

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Day 37 – St George’s Day

I was working from home again while encouraging the children to do their schoolwork. Alexander seems to have done a fair amount. Lucy less so, but she has done quite a lot of computer skills, specifically finding images and saving them. Also the importance of file extensions, what they tell you about the type of file, and also how to attach files to email. Learning a lot, but I’m not sure how much of it is on the national curriculum!

Car Problems

The car is unwell. The electronics have been cutting out intermittently. When Tracy came home from the hospital yesterday the electrics failed while she was driving down the hill from Caterham, even though the engine kept going. It cut out again when she pulled up on the drive.

So at lunchtime the recovery truck came to take it to the garage. Before that though I persuaded the kids to help me empty the car of all our stuff, and to put the rubbish in the bin. The crate in the boot went into the garage, and a load of Lucy’s books and toys came into the house.

Breadmaker

While we were stashing things from the back of the car in the garage I spotted our breadmaker. We thought we’d given it away, because we’d stopped using it. It was in the part of the garage where we stage things before they go to the tip or a charity shop. There were other things on top of it, which I moved to make space. So I brought it back into the kitchen and cleaned it up.

The instructions were tucked inside it, with the specific recipes optimised for it. In my lunch break I decided to make some bread with the wholemeal bread flour we got at the weekend. I couldn’t find the measuring cup that came with it, so I extemporised with scales and a rough approximation of a cup being 8 ounces, a tablespoon one ounce and doing teaspoons as 5 grams.

As you can see it sort of worked. I think I might have got too much fluid in it because I used milk in place of dried milk powder. I also measured everything by weight rather than volume, and that’s likely to have skewed it a bit. It tastes fine though and has a good crumb, even if it has sunk on top.

Food

With us both working, and Alexander catching up on a heavy day of school work, I went freezer diving to see what would go with fresh bread. We’ve got a lot of meat still in the freezer, but it’s a lot emptier looking than it usually is.

The cancelled Easter trip to see Tracy’s parents meant that it didn’t get filled with fish and farm meat. Trips to Lincolnshire always have a full coolbox on the return leg because the market in Cleethorpes is close to both the fishing industry and the food preparation factories that get it direct from the farm. Everything is both fresher and cheaper than Surrey.

I eventually pulled out some bacon and tomato based pasta sauce we’d prepared some time ago. There was also some ham and cheese tortellini in the freezer. I thought that might supplement the dried penne and go well with some fresh bread.

Scouts Promise Renewal

This year’s St George’s Day event was online rather than in person. We got 47 families connected on our zoom account, many with more than one beaver, cub, or scout. We renewed our promise and then we watched a video from the Surrey Scouts County Commissioner. Lucy thought it was a very nice video. She also enjoyed the opportunity to wear her cub uniform for the first time at an official event.

After the event we went out for the Thursday evening clap for carers and essential workers. We took a couple of photos because it was suggested as a good idea by the scout association.

When the clap was over Alexander and I went out for a walk to get some exercise. We stopped and had a chat with a couple of neighbours, maintaining a safe distance. One of our neighbours thought he has had the virus. He’d just got up from ten days mostly in bed. At one point he was coughing up blood and was seriously considering dialling for an ambulance.

Car postscript

Tracy was a bit late home, which is getting pretty normal lately. However she came home in the car. The garage ran a load of tests, cleaned some bits and took it for a test drive. It seems to be okay, for now. If it goes again we’ll need to get a specialist mechanic to look at the electrical systems in it.

Or maybe we’ll just trade in for a newer car.

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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.

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Day 34 – Summer (term) is here!

It was the start of the new term today, although we were still all at home, except Tracy who was at work. I rolled out of bed very early and got in about an hour of work before the children surfaced, in fact I had to wake them. They were both breakfasted and dressed by 0840 when I started their school day with checking they were ready and knew what they were doing.

Back to School

Alexander had five new tasks set for him on his homework app, as well as four from before the holidays. He was really good at getting on with it and planning his own workload, I only had to check a couple of times over the day that he was actually working!

For morning break Alexander made bread dough and left it to rise until lunchtime. He’s been doing this frequently over the last couple of weeks. So he had flatbreads for lunch, and then used the remaining dough to make a small loaf.

Alexander made a small loaf at lunchtime. (Photo: James Kemp)

Lucy was following the timetable we did for her before the Easter holidays. She stuck to it across the morning while I was on a number of work calls. She read a book (Captain Underpants), did Purple Mash maths, and also the PE challenge where she has a sheet to do a set of exercises every day and record how many she can do of each in 45 seconds (per rep).

Rotten Romans

After lunch I spent two hours with her for two lessons, one on her topic (Romans) and the other on botany (AKA gardening). She had to write three questions to research, and she was really quick, they were:

  • When were the romans around?
  • How many Roman emperors were there?
  • Were the Romans involved in democracy?

She then decided to eschew the pile of books that I have on the table and look for her horrible histories Rotten Romans. She realised when it wasn’t on the shelf that she’d taken it to school and left it there. So she fired up the laptop and hit a search engine. She found the answers to the first two questions easily (from 753BC) and about 70 emperors (although she wasn’t impressed when Alexander asked if that was Eastern or Western). The third question was a bit trickier, and we ended up with a philosophical point about absence of evidence not being the same as evidence of absence, and how hard it is to prove a negative.

Lucy then did a timeline of the first eight emperors on a piece of paper, having decided that it was possibly too tricky for her to do in a slide show on the computer. Next time we have topic on the timetable we’ll be doing a Roman timeline, and Alexander and I have already suggested that while it might start at 753 BC it ought to include the three Roman Empires and go up to the 19th century.

Botany (AKA Gardening)

With the Romans played out we put our shoes on and went into the garden. The first stop was into the shed to see the seedlings that have sprouted since we planted them about two weeks ago. At the time we forgot to label them, mostly because I couldn’t find the jar with all the labels. So we had a look at them and tried to identify them. The onions and the lettuce were easy to identify, the former had one round leaf, and the lettuce had a pair of rounded leaves. The peppers and tomatoes are very similar looking, so we weren’t quite sure which were which, although it’ll be easier in a week or so when the tomatoes start to develop their distinctive leaf shape.

Lucy writing the labels for the seedlings we planted a couple of weeks ago (Photo: James Kemp)

Lucy decided that the plants needed some more water. So while the watering can was filling up from the almost empty rain barrel, she wrote the names on the plant labels. Once we’d finished watering the seedlings, not forgetting the sunflowers on the patio, we put the labels in.

There was only one more thing that Lucy wanted to do. She wanted to write on the patio doors with her new chalk pens. So I showed her how to do mirror writing so that what she wrote could be read from the other side of the window. I gave her a quick demo and she got stuck in.

Lucy practices mirror writing on the patio door so that we can read it from inside the house. (Photo: James Kemp)

It was three o’clock by then, and Lucy informed me that school was over. I went back to work for a couple of hours while Lucy played with the lego bungalow that she’d built.

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Day 32 – Stocking Up Saturday

We were all off today. We didn’t do a whole lot, some shopping, sorting out school for next week, and watching movies. Breakfast for me was the spelt loaf with cheese.

Stocking Up

We took a visit to Caterham for 11 today. Tracy had booked us a slot to visit Pedrick’s which is in the High Street. Pedrick’s is a new old-fashioned food shop. You label all your boxes with what you want in them and then the staff fill them. So we got some pasta, some wholemeal bread flour, plain flour, yeast, and some eco-friendly handwash and fabric conditioner. We also got some pick’n’mix and some fresh vegetables from local suppliers.

While Tracy waited for the Pedrick’s order to be filled I took a walk along to Waitrose with Lucy. We didn’t have a big shopping list, just some head and shoulders shampoo, and skimmed milk. While we were waiting in the queue outside I spotted some rosemary in the plants section, so I added that into the trolley. We also bought a Lego Friends magazine for Lucy, a couple of reduced smarties chocolate bunnies, and some chocolate mini-egg nest cakes.

Sorting School

No hats involved in sort out out what we’re doing about school for next week. Monday is the start of the summer term. So we had a chat with the kids about how we would go back to school work. We’re all going to sit at the dinner table during school time unless we’re doing practical stuff that’s best done elsewhere.

Alexander will keep on getting his work from the Go4schools app. He’s got RE and Computing to do for Monday, plus whatever English and Maths gets set on the day. One good thing is that he no longer has to do subjects that he’s not doing the GCSE for. So from Monday he only had English, Maths, Triple Science, Computing, Art and RE. We’ve also asked him to help Lucy with some of the science experiments that she’d like to do (for example making some home made vegetable dyes).

We also decided that since we’re not teachers, and we have our own jobs to do, that we aren’t going to try and work to a timetable or curriculum. The main concern is that Lucy continues to learn new things, reads, and is happy. So we’ve packaged up several things that the teachers have sent us into work for a day. We’ve also found all the educational books, and lined them up on the table. I’ve installed Scratch and a painting app on Lucy’s laptop.

Cloak

Tracy made Lucy a cloak for her dressing up this afternoon. I thought it looked awesome.

Dinner

Alexander made us Chicken Paprikash from the Binging with Babish book, and we also watched Civil War while we ate.