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Day 5 – Sunday 22nd March 2020 Mother’s Day

Lucy (in cat costume) going to read poetry to her mum (photo: James Kemp)

Today is Mother’s Day, so we started with Lucy getting upset that Alexander wasn’t doing exactly what she wanted to follow her Mother’s Day plan. While she complained loudly about it Alexander got on with making his mum a cup of tea in the biggest cup he could find. It was a two tea bag job and he proudly delivered it to his mum.

Breakfast in bed was the next order of the day, along with making some vouchers. Everything had to pause while Lucy cut some card up to make the vouchers. Once that was done cards were given to Tracy along with the presents, and an order for breakfast was taken. The presents were Jack Monroe’s Vegan-ish cookbook, two Lily O’Brien dessert chocolates, and the bottle of syrup that I’d ordered to meet the minimum price on Amazon pantry when I’d ordered the chocolates. The syrup wasn’t supposed to be a present, but the kids just wrapped everything in the box!

Alex made everyone breakfast, bacon sandwiches for most of us, and cereal for Lucy. It was very civilised.

Tidying Up

What we spent most time doing during the day was tidying up. We started in the bathroom with a general clean and sorting out the basket of bath toys that has been there for about a decade. A number of older ones for thrown away, some that weren’t properly bath toys got washed and put in the right place. The rest got a decent soak in the bottom of the bath for a few hours before being scrubbed and rinsed and returned to the newly cleaned basket.

This is the ‘after’ picture of our garage, if I’d remembered to take a before picture you wouldn’t have seen the chairs at the back! (photo: James Kemp)

I spent a couple of hours before lunch in the garage. I moved a lot of stuff onto the driveway where Tracy and Lucy sorted the toys into ones to pass on to others, some to bring inside and things that were beyond playing with to be recycled. While they did this I moved the bikes round the back, pumped up all the tyres and then put things on the shelves in the garage. Lots of stuff had been randomly brought in, and we had so much stuff that it was hard to get to the shelves. So I used the space I’d created to restack a bit and put things together, and make better use of the space. In the end it felt like we could get to everything, which is a good result.

 

 

Alexander used the pressure washer to clean the driveway, and when he was done I had a sneaky shot of it on the car. It was dirtier than I’d expected.

While I was finishing off Tracy and Lucy came back out and painted some of the blocks on the drive. Lucy had painted a rainbow for the window a bit earlier, so this was a way to avoid wasting paint, and to brighten up the drive.

School Prep

A new thing tonight was prepping for Lucy’s lessons. We’ve not had to do this for Alexander because the school assign him work and at 14 he’s pretty good at just doing it. Lucy is only 7, so we need to work out how we’re going to keep her busy learning. She’s bright, and good at learning, but we can’t just tell her to get on with some maths.

Luckily we’ve got her logins for Mathletics and Reading Eggs. We’ve also got some material for her topic this term, which is the Romans. I’ve dug out three books she can read, and a couple of more advanced ones with lots of pictures that I can read with her to get in more depth if she’s interested in any particular topic. I also thought I’d get her to read some Asterix.

Overall I think today has been pretty good, although I’ve done way more than any other day this week. I even managed to hit 10,000 steps, probably down to a bit of dancing with Tracy and Lucy to some loud music after dinner.

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Day 4 – Saturday 21st March 2020

Today was our first non work day of self isolation. Even only a few days in it’s a hard gear shift. There’s not the usual work/life delineation. Both my wife and I work from home now and again, but the bulk of our work is in the office (or on a hospital ward in my wife’s case). Either way today didn’t seem that different from the last few days.

In the morning we had a slower start than normal, no alarms were set, and we resisted the urge to go downstairs when we finally woke. I did get drawn into fixing the mail server though. It turned out that ufw had blocked the mail server. So I turned it back off after I’d checked the logs to make sure that it hadn’t been switched on before I’d tried to install jitsi meet.

Gardening

A big chunk of the morning was spent in the garden. Or more accurately for me in the hut. I pulled some of the things we’d piled up inside in the autumn out. Then I cleared and swept the work bench, throwing away a load of old fragmented plastic and some other rubbish that had accumulated. Once I’d done that I sorted out the seed trays, some potting compost and got it all ready so that we can start some seedlings. I ought to have remembered to take a photo of that, but my phone didn’t charge overnight so I’d left it in the house.

While I was sorting out the potting shed my wife took the hedge clippers to the left hand border and chopped down the overgrowth that we never quite manage to get rid of. I’m not sure what is growing there, but I do know from last year’s effort that the reason it always comes back is a network of roots about four inches down. The patch that I dug before planting the olive tree was relatively clear. So tomorrow we’ll be doing a lot of digging in that border. We also have some more digging to do in the front to keep the borders clear enough that the things we want in there aren’t overwhelmed by the weeds.

D&D

Laptop with Roll20 on it next to a D&D Monster Manual
Moving from pencil and paper to online roleplaying (photo: James Kemp)

Before things all went they way they have we’d arranged for Alexander and his friends from school to play some more Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Originally this was going to be the usual face to face session. However we converted it into an online game.

We used discord for a mixture of voice and text chat. It mostly worked OK, but there were some feedback issues with the kit people had. It was also difficult to follow when the boys got excited and all tried to speak at once.

We also had Roll20 for the maps and dice rolls. This is where we got stuck the most, but that was because we’d not really used it properly before. It took us about an hour to get everyone logged in and to level up their characters to the right level. It needs more prep than I usually do for a tabletop game. It’s a lot harder to spontaneously generate an encounter. Often I hand draw the map while describing it and throw some enemies down. My prep is usually about knowing the rough size and capabilities of the adversary and what their objectives are. With Roll20 I’m going to need to plan the locations in detail as well. I also need to generate some tokens to replace the assorted miniatures and markers I have.

Mother’s Day prep

Earlier in the week Lucy did a plan for how she wanted Mother’s Day to go. We did it together and I ordered the things she wanted to get her mum for Mother’s Day. Thankfully the box arrived this afternoon. So when I’d finished with the gaming we went upstairs and annoyed Alexander, who was playing the newly released Doom Eternal.

The kids had an animated discussion on the plan, which resolved in Lucy’s favour. So they had a bit of a competitive card construction, and made their mum a card each. After what seemed like an age, they finally wrapped the presents and tidied up a bit. Just in time for dinner, which spent some time on hold in the oven while they did it.

After Dinner

Alexander disappeared upstairs to carry on with Doom Eternal on his Xbox. So no family games tonight.

Lucy spent the afternoon and evening in a cat costume that was passed to her by the older girls. She pretended to be a cat, including a saucer of milk, while watching Puss In Boots on E4.

While that was on I was in a WhatsApp chat with some of the other cub scout leaders at 5th Reigate Scouts about what we could do as an alternative if camp is cancelled. We threw some options around and came up with a back garden camp. We need a bit more work on it, but in concept we’d do a programme for cubs to camp in their own garden. We could loan tents to some, and provide some online content for activities, and maybe even a campfire.