It has been a bit more than a month since we have been in lockdown mode, so I thought I would do a blog post. Blogging... very ironic -- here I spend all day every day during the week in front of a computer, and now here it is on the weekend, and I am ... on the computer?!? Well, what the heck, it's not like I have anything else to do (smirk).
Amy and I have been regularly counting our blessings, we have a lot to be thankful for -- we have a place to live, I still have a job (that can be easily done from home), we have plenty of food to eat and a good internet connection... that's really about all you can ask for these days. The main enemies seem to be boredom and "the same old routine".
Oscar is here with us weathering the viral storm. His UVM classes are still being conducted in "distance learning" mode, but from what we can tell this way of learning is really not his favorite... he very much misses the energy that comes from being in a "live" class and engaging with professors and other students directly. Before the shutdown he had been working very actively on lining up a summer job in Burlington, but the prospects for that now seem pretty close to zero, so he is now eyeing the prospect of doing UVM summer courses (oh joy, more distance learning).
Also in the "coronavirus irony" department: we had actually been thinking seriously about selling our house this spring and downsizing. With both kids away, we were kind of rattling around in the place, and we had started to think about how it might be nice to live in a smaller place a little closer Cambridge and Boston. Well, all those thoughts have gone out the window, needless to say. Having a house with a bit of extra room is definitely useful every now and then.
Masks: when it became clear that it would be helpful to have masks to wear while out in public, Amy sprang into action and tackled the problem of mask manufacture. She exhumed Oscar's sewing machine and got him to set it up for her, then raided the rag bag for fabric and other materials. We had plenty of cloth; the tricky part was finding enough elastic for the ties. She had to get creative there, and tried a number of different options. I helped a little bit (I managed to make just one mask), but my efforts were pretty pathetic compared to what she made.
The maestro at work:
Oscar's machine:
A finished mask. This one uses old bra straps for the ties I believe:
More masks:
While dredging through our closets looking for sources of elastic, I found these: old swim tags from the Lexingon town pool:
Pattern and fabric:
Ordering things through the mail: we've been trying to avoid going overboard with online shopping, since we have most of what we need already, and it doesn't seem right to be forcing the Fedex/UPS people to risk their lives making deliveries of frivolous non-essential stuff. I have bent the rules a bit and ordered a couple of books online, which have come through very quickly. Other things seem to get "stuck" for no discernible reason. A shirt that I ordered back in early March (before the shutdown) finally straggled in around mid April, for example, and a couple of things that Amy ordered a while back seem to be completely in limbo (not clear at all when they will ship, if ever).
Food supply: Amy has been working hard on making sure that we have enough things coming into the fridge + pantry to keep us going. The first couple of weeks or so she would go to the grocery store and shop there, which was a pretty nervous time, since not everyone had figured out the physical distancing thing yet. We then tried placing an order with a grocery delivery service; that was a mixed bag. They did wind up sending us most of what we asked for, but the lead times on the orders have gotten to the point where you might have to wait a week, week and a half for a delivery to come through. After some experimentation, she eventually found a market in Watertown that was doing "food boxes", pre-populated boxes with an array of vegetables/fruit/eggs/milk (etc), where you pay for the box online, then drive to the place and they will drop it into the trunk of your car. That seems to be working out pretty well, although you do wind up with too much of some things and not enough of other things. One of the last vegetable boxes that Amy ordered turned out to have two rather large cabbages, five pounds of potatoes, and nearly eight pounds of bok choy in several varieties (our fridge was packed so tight you can hardly imagine).
Amy has a well-rehearsed routine now for the food orders; she gets the stuff out of the car and shuffles it over to our porch, where she wipes things down (the packaged foods that is) with a mild bleach solution or something along those lines just to avoid any surprises.
There seem to be some things that are almost impossible to get in local stores, especially flour and yeast, so there we had to get a little creative. On the flour front, I discovered a clever guy at work who had an interesting angle for buying flour. He had done some research and found out that only about 4% of all flour sold in the USA goes to grocery stores -- the vast bulk of it gets shipped to things like bakeries and restaurants. There were plenty of restaurant supply places with web sites, so he hopped on line and placed an order with one for fifty bags (each bag fifty pounds) to be delivered to his house, and he emailed around to recruit other folks from work to participate. I signed on for a bag, and when the order came in I drove out to pick it up from his porch (there was an enormous shipping pallet there with the goods). So now we have enough flour to last for a while (it was also surprisingly inexpensive, at least on a per pound basis). For yeast, Amy scoured the internet for a while without any luck, then finally hit the jackpot on an obscure specialty store in California specializing in equipment and supplies for making waffles (who knew), so she put in an order, and in a week or so we had the goods.
Newly acquired flour supply:
Cooking: we have a family with lots of capable cooks, and we are stuck inside without much to do, so you can imagine how things played out. Here are some highlights.
Apple and ginger tart made by Oscar:
I decided to try my hand at home-made kimchi:
Cardamon biscuit rolls made by Amy -- these were really good:
For Amy's birthday dinner, I made (among other things), fresh asaparagus:
and shakshuka, a dish in which eggs are cooked in a bed of spicy tomato sauce (I'd never made it before, it was kind of fun):
Here's the chocolate almond birthday tart that Oscar made for his mom, it was superb:
Oscar also made croissants from scatch, yikes:
Check out the cool layering structure in the dough:
Finished product:
and of course good old sour dough, for waffles. Seems pretty boring and pedestrian compared with all the other gourmet stuff Oscar and Amy have made:
Exercise: we have a couple of exercise machines in our basement that we've had for a long time now, and we've been getting good use out of those. Amy somehow found a place that had a set of barbell weights and was able to order those for Oscar, but had no luck finding a bar to put the weights on. We decided to improvise -- here's a picture of the setup, which is basically a crowbar that I bought to use for replacing the post that supports our mailbox. Not ideal, but it's better than nothing.
The other unexpected exercise opportunity has come in the form of Zoom yoga -- Amy and I had been taking a live yoga class though a Town of Lexington program prior to the virus, that was of course shut down, but we found out that the teacher from that class was running an online (video conference) version of the class though a studio in Bedford. We signed on for that, and it has been really very good, it works surprisingly well. At the start of class there is the inevitable confused muddle as people try to get their cameras and microphones working, but things eventually settle down and we can do our thing while listening to the instructor.
Getting ready for the relaxation portion of the class:
This is kind of a weird shot -- for the 10 minute "guided relaxation" part of the class we've taken to turning the lights down a bit in our living room, but in this shot it looks kind of creepy. In the background is the dog, who is very puzzled at the yoga thing and wondering when it will be over so that he can come get his ears and neck scratched...
Weather: mother nature has been mostly nice to us throughout the shutdown, although we did get one day with buckets of rain and very high winds, which was a bit of a nervous time. This fall we one of the big pine trees next to our house came down during a big windstorm, but it wound up falling away from our house and towards our neighbor (completely destroyed his garage, in fact), so it was kind of scary to look out the window and see the other trees being whipped around in the storm. We also got a bit of snow this weekend, quite a surprise:
Video calls: needless to say, we've been doing these a lot. Face Time, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Google Meet, Skype, we've pretty much done them all, with varying degrees of success.
I put together a dedicated videoconference computing setup (pictured) that uses an el cheapo web cam that I had lying around, a Chromebox that I was using at one point for work telecommuting, and a monitor with integrated speakers. It seems to work ok (the microphone and speakers are not ideal, but they are good enough).
We have had a couple of "video call dinners", where we set up the gear in the kitchen and have a meal with friends, that has been good. We've also used it for family meetups (couple of calls with my dad and Joanie, and also session to celebrate Amy's birthday, which was last week).
Puzzles: Amy has been working on a fiendishly difficult 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and finally got the last pieces in this week. It was a lot harder than it looked:
Grooming: I had made an appointment to get my hair cut back on March 13th or so, and just around about the time that our shut-in started, and when I was getting ready to go I got a call saying that the hair person wasn't going to be in after all. I was already pretty shaggy at that point, so when the second week in April rolled around I was pretty desperate. Amy came to my rescue at last and agreed to give it a trim -- it turned out really well, I was very happy to be shorn. The "before" photo:
And the "after" photos:
Whew, that feels much better!
So we are doing our thing, reading the newspapers and wondering about the future. Very hard to predict how things will go, but we are hoping for the best, and hoping that all of our friends and family stay healthy.
