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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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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.