Ordinary Time

Finally, after months of living with barely functioning phones, J. and I ordered new ones which will arrive tomorrow. I hate the fact that cell phones are not designed to last more than a few years. We've only had these for just three a half years. It really seems that having something last for at least five years is not too much to ask. My children inform me otherwise. This unwillingness to accept the current disposable phone culture is what caused us to wait so long to replace them. But yesterday, while I was talking with another parent about ways to help connect to her son who was struggling, my phone dies not once but twice. It is infuriating when the battery goes from 40% to 15% to 0% within the span of one minute. I didn't even have time to get it plugged into the charger before it died. (And plugging it in is no guarantee it will actually charge. If the plug isn't positioned in exactly the correct manner, it won't charge.) Did I mention how infuriating this is? I...

Captain's Log Quarantine date: 58.75 We remain in a holding pattern being unable to move the ship out of its current orbit. We are in no current danger and are waiting until we are free to move again. Star Fleet's current orders regarding future movement have not been entirely clear. The crew is faring well for the most part, though it seems that time is starting to hang heavy on their hands. Getting some semblance of fresh air and freedom by visiting the various outdoor programming on the holodeck has proven popular and healthy, but for some inexplicable reason the holodeck can only produce outside venues with pouring rain at the moment. We are having engineering look into the matter, but for the most part the crew has not wanted to make us of this particular form of entertainment. Another popular form of recreation that the crew has been making use of is to search the computer database for archaic entertainment in the form of 20th century television shows. A show calle...

There have been a few things over the past days that have helped distract us from the fact that someone hit the pause button on life. On the off chance that you haven't heard of them, I thought I would write about a few because everyone needs help getting through the days. 1. Settlers of Catan This game is not new by any stretch of the imagination, but our youngest children have recently discovered it and it has been played at least once a day for the past several weeks. It is a really good game if you are not familiar with it. I like it so much that I will play even if I don't always win. My family will tell you that doesn't happen with a game very often. For those not familiar with it, a board is laid out and each player tries to build settlements and roads using various raw materials that you gain based on the role of the dice. One thing that I like about it is that the board is different every time you play, so it is a new challenge each time. What works for one p...

My stress brain continues in that I just can't concentrate, so the trick is to find things that I can do which are not overly mentally taxing. I feel as though I'm starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel, here. On Saturday I got out my new pressure canner and decided to figure out how to use it. It turns out pressure canning is not really any more difficult than other canning. I wasn't sure about it, though, so I decided to can water in case something went wrong. That way I wasn't wasting any food if something didn't go quite right. Well, it went right, so now I have four quarts of canned water. It could be handy at some point so I stuck it in the pantry. I'm contemplating trying to pressure can meatballs next since I haven't even planted the seeds for the vegetables I hope to use it for. But, I didn't have anything thawed, and decided the matter wasn't urgent enough to go to the store to buy produce to can. (Though a local store has the good...

This is the week that never ends It just goes on and on my friends We started on Monday because that's how a week begins But Monday seemed to last forever just because This is the week that never ends... Anyone with me on this? I have never had a week that seemed to last for so long or where I have been so disoriented time-wise. There have multiple times this week where I truly thought it was one day and it turned out to be a totally different day. One of those instances was trying to convince the household that R.'s birthday was not on the day it really was because I thought I was on a different day. I can't decide whether it is more frustrating or concerning. Part of the difficulty is that other than video church on Sunday morning, this week has had no appointments or any sort of event(other than R.'s birthday which clearly wasn't enough) to mark the days. They just start blending one into the next. J. has been much better able to keep track of days but he...

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to come up with things to write about that aren't a list of what I baked today? Some seasons are trickier than others to come up with blog fodder, but this shelter at home thing, with no one coming and no one going is tough! We're doing things... baking, figuring out how to keep food in the house, working on whittling down my in-progress sewing projects, gardening, caring for animals, generally just living our lives. But much of those things are very similar from day to day. I find the trick is to figure out how to write about them without just making lists and posting pictures. The other part of the problem is that currently I feel as though we are all living with a good dose of pretty pervasive low-level stress. The bulk of my mental energies these days are focused on the well being and safety of my family; it seems there is not a lot of brain space left over for anything else. This is true even though there is very little immediat...

The day started off well enough. Our two new bee packages (that's six pounds of bees, folks) arrived and B. put them in the hives. It wasn't the greatest weather with the heavy rain, so we're hoping they will be all right. People were generally happy, and I had plans for things to do. Since no one could play outside and I had just said no to a for an activity a certain child tends to fixate on, I thought I'd be the fun mom and make some slime. L. and G. (who particularly appreciated the slime) H. and Y. Y. decided that she did NOT like the feel of slime, and went back to playing with water in her tide pool. Y. and K.  K. made a taco and proceeded to pretend to eat it for the camera. The child for whom I had really made the slime decided that she was going to be unhappy no matter what I did. What ensued was a very unpleasant hour. A sad fact of life around here is that more often than I can do no right with this child. Her father is a slightly differ...

This time for the quarantine... O give me a home, where coyotes don't roam, And the poultry can all safely play. Where seldom is heard a bickering word, And the hot spots can last all the day. (Chorus:) O, shelter at home, No one leaves, no one comes through the day. Where Zoom meetings last 'till the time limit's past. Who knows how long we'll have to stay? But when we do leave, we must believe, That essential the errand must be. A mask we must wear, else others may stare, And away from us people may flee. (Chorus) The one thing we do, to help us get through, Is to bake all the good things to eat. Bread, cakes, and pies, it's a feast for the eyes, Every day it's a new type of treat. (Chorus) Some items are rare, hard find, few to share, As the weeks at home pass us all by. Trampolines, yeast,  TP, and elastic we need, Without them we may all just cry. (Chorus) We all want this to end, but do wonder when, The world returns to n...

I'm realizing that many children (and parents) are feeling a little bit house-bound at this point. With some of us looking at another four weeks of sheltering at home, I thought I would put together of list of things that you can do with your children to help pass the time and fill the days. Twenty-seven years of occupying children might as well be put to good use. I have done some brain-storming today as I sewed masks (they're not the most interesting or technical things to sew) to see how many different activities I could come up with. Here is my totally stream of consciousness list in no order what so ever. Not all activities will be good for every age, nor will every activity be useful for every family. Hopefully, you'll read through the list and it will trigger your own ideas, too. If that happens, feel free to add them in the comments to help out other families. Ready? Here we go! Make a blanket fort under a table Serve lunch Make more than one fort and have...

Am I the only who is fascinated by the unintended results of telling people they need to stay at home? I think it is so interesting following the various domino effects. For instance, yeast. Evidently yeast has been in short supply on store shelves. (I buy instant yeast in bulk, so haven't tried to buy any in a store in forever.) I know people are doing a lot more baking in their free time. I've never seen quite so many pictures of baked goods in my Facebook feed. It seems that yeast manufacturers have never had quite the demand spike they are experiencing right now. While they can increase production, they run into their own difficulties with shortages. The material they use to package the yeast so that they can sell it to stores is hard to come by. It seems jars are made in India, but due to the worldwide quarantine the factories which make the jars are closed. If a product cannot be packaged, it is difficult to sell it. Meanwhile, fresh yeast, a type of yeast normally sold t...

We now seem to have reached the point in the quarantine where I watch too many house hunting television shows, pie is allowed for breakfast, and I have unnecessary seconds for dinner. In my defense it was calzone and there was melted cheese, plus we are due to get possibly four inches of snow tomorrow. This was one of four. One wouldn't even begin to feed everyone. Something is going to need to change before I lose all touch with reality... either warm weather or activities starting again. I actually don't care which.

It's getting towards the end of the school year, which always feels as though it is a monumental effort to keep going, especially as the weather starts to warm up. You know, like is supposed to happen in spring instead of waking up to 28 degrees and quite a bit of snow on the ground. I feel as though perhaps we've entered a version of the movie, Groundhog Day, and we just get to repeat February and March over and over and over again. And then when you combine that with day 390,233 of staying at home.... Well, let's just say being super diligent with school is not really at the top of my list of things I feel up to doing. But maybe I should have prefaced this post by saying that I realize that my younger children, being grades 5-7, are probably ready to begin taking some ownership for their own learning. Middle school is about the time I start the process of off-loading developing responsibility for their own education. This seemed like a good thing to start. So, I went t...

This is what the loft in our house looks like more often than not. Blocks are constantly set up as houses and castles. Armies war against each other, usually of the intergalactic variety. And the children who build them have long, ongoing stories attached to each of them. I would say about half of many children's day is taken up with this long, involved imaginative play. I have written a lot about play over the years. At one point, I found the term ' master players ' in reference to children who had perfected the art of play. In my previous post about this (click the link), I noted that my master players were in the six year old age range, which was older than most sources assume when writing about children and play. It annoyed me, because six is still so very young and play is exactly what they should be doing. Here I am four years later. I have spent the afternoon listening to some very involved, complicated story lines from my much older master players. Th...

We had a lovely day yesterday, though it will rank as one of the most unusual Easters ever. The Easter table. I had warned people that it was not going to be an Easter with gifts. Everyone was okay with that. It tuns out that the low bar for Easter morning expectations is the wealth of jelly beans and chocolate eggs on the table. We "went" to church, in our family room. We hid and searched for eggs. The weather cooperated and it was lovely outside. We ate brunch. This was followed by quite a bit of game playing and baking followed by a Zoom meeting between us and Jud's siblings' families. It was fun to be able to see and talk with everyone, most of whom we would have shared Easter dinner with. We had a lovely dinner of lamb, scalloped potatoes, and asparagus, followed by three types of pie. It was a good day and a wonderful way to celebrate the Resurrection.

I'm doing the weekly stream of consciousness post today since starting tomorrow begins the days leading up to Easter. I have things basically planned for Easter, but I'm so unsure what day it is, I realized that I never planned for doing a Seder. We have done Seder dinners in the past, but I haven't managed to pull one together since we moved. This was going to be my year to get that tradition started again. Until the month of March lasted forever and I lost track of time, that is. Next year. I'll pull it together next year. I have new little sprouts starting to come up where I planted the first garden bed. It looks as though some lettuce and radishes are the first ones growing. I always find it so heartening when those first little seeds sprout. I can never quite believe that something will happen when I initially plant them. Java and Bristol seem to be on the mend. Java is not bothered in the least by having fifty stitches and a drain on her hind end. She doesn...

With all this time at home, I initially thought that I would be able to get tons of stuff done around the house. Then the first realization hit that because we were still living a fairly typical life for us, all the imagined free time was just that, imagined. But the other day I realized that that was not quite true. I do have more free time than usual. Once everything is somewhat caught up, keeping it up isn't as time consuming as digging out. This past week I was finding myself with a little bit of down time during the day. Did I do anything with that free time? No. Not at all. Never have I been so unproductive with so much extra time. A friend posted something the other day which clarified my thinking. This current season of all of our lives is indeed traumatic. For some, the trauma is more apparent... those who work in hospitals, first responders, those who have contracted the virus and their family members, those who have lost loved ones. I know it might feel a little silly ...

So do you long time readers remember when our last dog, Gretel, was a puppy and she tore (somehow, we still don't know how) the skin off of her entire side , ending up with a long trip to the doggy ER followed by another surgery by our vet because her skin had become necrotic? She spent weeks wearing old toddler sized t-shirts because the cone scared her too much. Good times. I felt as though I was in a bizarre Groundhog Day version of that scenario this morning, except with a horse. Somehow Java caught herself on a piece of wood that we didn't think was a problem, and did the same thing except on her back end. (I'm going to post a funny picture of Java first, so that the injury image is not the one that is shown with the post.) After the vet visit, Java is not all stitched up with 50 stitches and a drain. I have a pharmacy full of pain killer and antibiotics to give her. Even better, I get to take a syringe and irrigate the drain twice a day for two weeks. Do I kno...

It's that time again. After three weeks of not having to plan meals, I had to do it. Because I have a freezer full of food, I did the backwards-thing again, and planned meals for three more weeks based around what we already had. I know we will have to stock up on a few fresh things, but the entrees' ingredients are already on hand. (I realize that some of the recipes I have already written out on my blog. Where you see an *, I've linked to the recipe.) Monday, April 6 Stuffed cabbage rolls     I still have some cabbages from my first shopping trip. They need to get eaten. Cooked carrots Tuesday, April 7 Hamburgers      We'll grill if the weather cooperates... it's supposed to be warm! I'll also make the hamburger buns. Garlic potatoes      These are easy. Peel and cube your potatoes, put them in a bowl and coat with olive oil and lots of chopped garlic. Put in greased 9 x 13's. Bake at 425 until they are golden brown. I stir them aft...

B. set up his slack line today. With the trees we have, I'm not quite sure why it took so long, but I imagine it will get quite a bit of use. I have already notified people that I have no intention of taking anyone to the ER right now, so they must plan accordingly. B. and D. helping Y. J. and D. helping R. I went to the grocery store while all this fun was going on. But, actually? I kind of enjoyed going to the grocery store. It was my big outing for the week. I seem to have lost my shopping mojo. Even with all the food I have bought recently, it seems that we always need more. I don't get it. This evening we celebrated K.'s 14th birthday because no one had work. It is always wonderful when everyone can sit down at the dinner table together. Of course, we didn't start serving cake and ice cream until 9pm. Our dinner time seems to be getting later and later. And then there were presents to open. When, exactly, did he get so old?

Does anyone else feel as though April has already lasted for several weeks already? Let's get the blog business-type stuff out of the way first. Has anyone heard of the new website that acts as a giant Amazon-like website for small, independent booksellers from around the country? It's pretty new. I'm excited by it because it is an Amazon alternative which has nearly the same number of titles, but supports small bookstores. It also has an affiliate program. So from now on, when I link to books I have written about, the link is going to send you to this new website. I will also get a small percentage of any books bought through my links, but the small percentage will be a bit larger than I was getting. My only beef is that they are all new books, so that any books I recommend which are out of print (such as The Wheel on the School or The Return of the Twelves I just discovered), will have to be through Amazon because of the their third party links. Possibly some homescho...