Uptick

Slowly, I feel like I'm maybe getting a handle on this new situation we all find ourselves in.  This is very much helped by Wonderful Husband coming up with a kind of structure to the day, specifically for Squiddle learning time.  The new setup is that he has to pick three educational activities each day (reading, writing, vocabulary, maths, P.E., science, technology, music... am I forgetting any?) and gets playtime between them.  Today he picked vocabulary, technology (which was working on building the actually pretty darn complex Lego fire truck his grandfather sent him), and I'm going to make him do reading at bedtime.  We also got in a little bit of P.E. by going on a walk (me) / scooters (Squiddle and Jazzy) around the neighborhood.

It was actually fair weather today.  It looks like the two cherry trees I planted are about to break dormancy.  The plum tree, not yet.  With Jazzy's "help" I harvested the mint that's growing against the back of the house, then I washed it and dried it in the oven.  It's cooling now; in a little bit I'll strip the leaves off and jar them for tea.  I think I'll take the area the mint is growing in and turn it into a herb bed.  Mint's impossible to get rid of, so I might as well work with it.  I wish my order from Botanical Interests would arrive already, but it will arrive when it arrives.

I know that cooking-wise, I'm relying perhaps too heavily on prepackaged foods, but we're not having to go to the store or pick up takeout, so I'm going to give myself a pass.  Lunch for the boys was corn dogs, carrot sticks, and grapes.  I made myself a sandwich and had some pickled garlic (most of which Jazzy stole) as a side.  Wonderful Husband finished off the last of the fried chicken.  Dinner was rice and prepackaged orange chicken, which went across fairly well.  I realized too close to dinner that we were out of milk, which would be a debacle in this household, so I took five cans of evaporated milk and reconstituted them into just shy of a gallon, which fit nicely in one of my sun tea jugs.  (Next time I'll get to it sooner and defrost one of the frozen jugs.)  I also reconstituted a jug of orange juice, and thawed a container of turkey that was in the deep freezer.  Tomorrow, turkey pot pie!

I also got sourdough starter going again last night (following this tutorial) and I can already tell it's got live yeast in it by the thin layer of waste alcohol on the top.  I'm hoping in a couple more days it'll be ready to go.

And tomorrow I go pick up my orders from both the co-ops.

There is no WAY we can completely self-isolate for months.  Even if I had a full garden setup, which I do not yet, we would need to go to the grocery store every so often.  But I can stretch it out as long as I can to help break contagion chains.  If using evaporated and frozen milk means we only need to go to the store every two or three weeks, so much the better.  We have meat (and probably not enough veg, but we'll make do) in the freezer.  We have beans and rice and spices.  Heck, the last time I went to the dollar store, I kind of knew this all was going to be coming, so I bought plastic eggs and chocolate and egg-dying kits, because city egg hunts at Easter are definitely cancelled.

Plus Wonderful Husband and I have been carving out "date night" for the first time in a long time, and watching Good Omens after the boys are in bed. ^_^

Monday, Monday...

Not much happened today because I was feeling rather under the weather.  (Not coronavirus; totally wrong symptoms set.  Just a generic bug.)  And the weather was kind of mercurial today, going from sunshine to downpours to hail and back again, so no beach outings or garden work happened.

I've been working on Edyta Sitar's quiltalong and am currently only one day behind.  I'm thinking after I finish hers, I'll switch over to either Quilted Twins' or Bonnie Hunter's and catch up on them.  It's not like social distancing is going away anytime soon!

The one thing that did happen today (other than Wonderful Husband chipping the ice buildup out of the deep freezer, so it closes properly again; hooray!) is that we finally experimented with turning evaporated milk into drinking milk.  It's a bit richer than the 2% we usually drink, but tastewise it's fine and the boys didn't mind it at all.  So we have a backup to our backup, as milk is 100% without a doubt the food item we go through fastest.

One Year

A year ago today, we kissed and hugged my parents good-bye, got in our cars, and began the drive up to the Pacific Northwest.

Since last night's torrential downpour turned into a lovely partly-cloudy day, we celebrated this anniversary by doing yardwork.  Wonderful Husband got out the bush trimmer and worked at getting the briars by the driveway down to a manageable height, then hammered the fruit tree fertilizer spikes into the ground around the second apple tree.  Only the quince left to go!

I helped with getting all the briars to fit in the (now very full) yard waste bin, which fortunately gets picked up tomorrow.  And I finally got the rhubarb crowns planted and mulched along the back deck!

After lunch, we took the boys, some bubble wands, and last year's Paw Patrol kite to the Purdy Sand Spit.  It ended up being too blustery for the bubbles, but the three of them had great fun with the kite:

There were a couple other families there, but we had no problem in keeping distant from one another.  Plenty of room for all.

Out of the Mouth of Babes

We've been working with Squiddle on the hundred sight reading words on his list for kindergarten.  (When he masters all hundred, the school is supposed to give him a shirt, which he wants.)  As part of this, he has to give us a sentence for each word.  (An awful lot of these sentences end up being cribbed from Green Eggs and Ham.)  He has about ninety-five of the words down pat.  Today, Wonderful Husband told him this was getting too easy for him, and that we might be making him put two words together into a sentence.

Wonderful Husband pulled out the words "be" and "old."

Squiddle: ..."Behold!"

The thing is, he's not entirely wrong....

Panic Buying, or Bread-Making Boom?

Today I went on a grocery run!  First Costco, then Albertson's.  At the latter, I was amused by this:

This was the baking section (flour, sugar).  The eggs area was similarly bare.  From this sole data point, I am drawing the conclusion that everyone in Gig Harbor is going down those "things to do now that you have all this time at home" lists and hitting the "learn to bake bread" checkpoint. :)

Luckily for me, I'd already purchased eggs and sugar at Costco ("limit: 1"), and have flour at home.

Gardening

Did no sewing today.  Instead, I went out into the back yard and dug the trench that marks the edge of one of the new garden beds.  It goes along two sides of the patio, then wraps around the side of the house and ends at the door into the crawlspace.  Fifty feet and four inches of digging.  UGH.  My hands are sore, my back is achy, and I know the rest of me will be as well tomorrow.  But I wanted to get it done today, since for the next week the forecast never drops below a 40% chance of rain.

About two thirds of the new bed has had cardboard on it for the last several months, so the plants have been smothered.  Now I just need to lay cardboard on the rest and cover it all with mulch.  (And plant those five rhubarbs!)

Catching Up

Ugh.  Kind of a no energy day all around, not helped by it being drizzly again rather than clear.

I made the boys help me (somewhat) with making pumpkin brownies this afternoon.  They turned out not bad, though a bit more cake-like than I was expecting.  I'm trying to get Squiddle into practical math (if a recipe needs 3/4 cup flour, how many times do we need to fill the 1/4 cup measure?), but it's a bit more difficult when Jazzy wants a turn scooping and stirring too.  For dinner, I made oven-fried chicken and Rice-a-Roni.

My cousin apparently had her daughter two weeks early, on the 23rd.  Now I really need to get moving on that baby quilt.  And I've finally caught up on Edyta Sitar's quilt-along, using the Crown of Thorns blocks as leader/enders.