Alone Together

Hello again! In this edition of Quarantining Today, we'll catch you up on all the happenings of the last two weeks. Online school is going well, and the kids are pretty much on auto-pilot. With the routine of school right after breakfast, they are easily done well before lunch most days. Sometimes they even learn each other's lessons!

There have been experiments in bread making. FYI, proofing dough in the InstantPot works a lot better on the 'yogurt' setting, than it does on 'porridge'. Oops. This rosemary bread was actually pretty tasty!

On a particularly hot afternoon, we broke out the sprinkler for the kids to play in while I had a Zoom call. They were having a great time, so I had to sneak some pictures through the upstairs window. :) We then celebrated successful school progress reports with some call-ahead FroYo.

Over a month into social distancing, everyone was in need of a haircut. Hadley got a summer length, and Owen got more of a fade (new skill for Mom!) on his short side, rather than a single length. Are pigs taking flight during this pandemic? Because even Dad got a haircut from his spouse! I definitely need to get a picture of that.

We've been trying to be creative and productive, too. This stained glass driveway project almost wiped out our sidewalk chalk supply. It's nearly impossible to find more chalk online, by the way. I guess that was among the hoarders' selections...

Hadley broke out the Perler beads and even entered a bookmark contest at the local library, where she placed 2nd to what looked like a professional graphic designer's entry.

And the house projects also continue. The most notable one this month was replacing our half-fence. It was very weathered and warped, and the gate latch was hardly ever closed properly because it didn't move like it should anymore. This is the gate that the kids, who used to come through it every day after school, started to avoid because they could never open or close it successfully. Much improved, right?

This project was all J, with a little help from Hadley. Luckily the posts seemed to be in good shape, so we didn't have to chip them out of the concrete. It just required all new everything else. It was still quite an undertaking, but it is so nice to have a gate that closes so smoothly. We even coated it in varnish to hopefully help it last a little longer.

The resident carpenter put his newly-acquired fencing skills to work again by replacing our side gate too. I didn't get a picture from before, but the original gate was nearly the width of the new wood you see here, so it was very unwieldy to open and close. The gate latch was installed incorrectly and missing a piece (Thanks, Per!), and when J was working on fixing it, the gate basically fell off because the supporting post had rotted through. So, this project required posthole digging and concrete pouring, as well as the regular fence and latch work. Now we have a normal-sized gate that actually latches and is stable and solidly built. Was that too much to ask?

The garage door handle became much more secure when J installed a new one. I don't think we ever got a key for the original doorknob, so our garage was never actually able to be locked. Nothing like a little peace of mind.

One of my favorite upgrades was replacing the ceiling fan in the master bedroom. The original fan had provided a noisy (think random metallic, scraping sounds) serenade for quite a while. While we are still figuring the remote lighting setup, the new fan is much more attractive, quiet, and powerful. Besides these photo-documented projects, we also got a new garage door opener (after the 20 year-old one finally died), pulled out another obstructive Sago palm, and covered a dangerous hole in the playset. Who knows what another month of home isolation will mean to our house to do list!