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.
I didn’t do any work today, instead I tried to make sure the children did some school work and that everyone was fed. I’m not convinced that I was terribly successful, although we did have a pretty good dinner. Or at least Tracy and I did. I don’t think the kids appreciated the vegetables.
Also, we ran out of milk.
It’s just as well that I’m not a teacher. Although I expect that if I’d done the PGCE then I’d have some relevant skills and practices to help.
As always Alex was pretty good at getting his homework done, although he did slope off to play Doom Eternal at one point mid afternoon.
Lucy was a lot less up for doing school work and stopped every time I wasn’t watching her. Our start point was getting her to practice writing. So I suggested that she write a short story. It was one of the suggestions that were sent home from school. Also Lucy really likes making up stories with her dolls, so I thought it would go down well. She started with a good plan, identified some characters and a problem for them to solve. We also got half a page of intro for the story, as well as acting some of it with a collection of her toys in the main parts…
Most of the rest of the day was a write off, apart from reading the first twenty pages of one of the books that school sent home for her to read. We also watched an hour of Steve Backshall doing Q&A, which I’m putting down as a science lesson!
Tracy got a large joint of meat out of the freezer yesterday and left it to defrost overnight. So I decided that as we had mushrooms to use up and some puff pastry that I would make beef wellington. I found a recipe, collected all the stuff I needed and switched on the oven to roast the beef.
When I was ready to get started I took the joint out of the bag that it was in so that I could cut it into three pieces. It wasn’t quite the red colour I was expecting. Closer inspection and a bit of a sniff, suggested that rather than being beef it was pork. This threw me at first, until I checked and saw that there were also recipes for pork wellington, and they were almost identical.
It turned out really nice, and the puff pastry expanded well in the oven with a tray of potatoes roasting underneath it. As accompaniment I stir fried a mix of sliced carrots, broccoli and baby sweetcorn with soy sauce. The portion size was pretty big, and we still have a generous slice of pork wellington left for tomorrow.
There’s also two other similarly sized pork joints in the fridge. One of them is going to become pulled pork for Friday. Not sure about the other one.
We took delivery of a degusta box today. It was the first food to enter the house since we realised that we needed to self isolate just over a week ago.
It’s been a while since we had one of these boxes. They’re a bit of a gamble, but we usually enjoy what we get sent. The basic idea is that you get a bunch of random food in a box. Usually it’s new products, or promo versions of things. It’s pretty rare to get something that we normally buy, which is why we like getting them every now and then.
Today’s box had some alcohol free gin, two varieties – one already premixed and the other a miniature. Alexander had a taste of the AF pink gin and tonic and declared that it was disgusting. I actually thought that it was quite nice, but then I do actually like a G&T every once in a while.
There were also some new flavours of wotsits, a Yorkie with apple and things in it, some flour optimised for light sponges, chocolate flavoured oat milk, and a few other random things. These will serve as treats over the next week or so.
It took me two attempts to get some exercise in today. I started a walk round the square about 3pm, but it was really busy with people washing cars, moving lawns and going for walks. So I abandoned it after only one circuit.
Later, just after six, I pretty much had the place to myself and spent about 25 minutes walking round the square, pausing once or twice to take pictures of the still bare trees against the sunset. I thought they silhouetted nicely against the sky.