Staying Home: Day 13

The clocks went forward last night, which made no difference to us whatsoever. It will be nice though to have the extra hour of daylight in the evening. Today is M's birthday, so once the girls surfaced he opened his cards and presents. These included two sets of theatre tickets - the tickets for early May will almost certainly have to be exchanged, but we are hoping for better luck with the others, which are for July.

This morning I tackled various financial jobs. The little car is now insured and has breakdown cover, even though it is stuck in the garage waiting to be fixed. I checked bank and card statements, updated the spreadsheet we use to keep track of spending,  and finished updating our new annual budget  - we run our personal financial year from April, to tie in with the tax year. We are very fortunate that coronavirus and the lockdown aren't likely to have any significant effect on our income.

H was happy because after much effort she had managed to order a 10 kilogram kettlebell which arrived today. She misses working out at the gym, but reasonably priced home weights have become almost unobtainable. Both girls have been relaxing with adult colouring books, and H decided today to do some painting. She is a good artist, but hadn't painted since she finished GCSE Art six years ago. After a bit of digging around we managed to find a decent number of acrylic paints which hadn't dried up, two watercolour paint boxes which were both short on white, and an unused set of oils. She finished a small picture of the Disneyland castle in acrylics, and has ordered a canvas so she can tackle something larger. She also finished an essay on Italian crime fiction she has been working on. Teen Girl has acquired a new Sims 4 expansion pack, so spent quite a bit of time on that. Disney movie of the day was Big Hero Six, another one new to all of us.

This evening to celebrate M's birthday we had a virtual dinner with our former neighbours. Obviously we couldn't actually share the food, only the company, but it was lovely to catch up. We intended to use Zoom, but for some reason the microphone on my laptop wasn't working with it, so ended up using FaceTime on an iPad. To give the meal an international flavour, which is always a feature of our real life dinners, I cooked Catalonian braised hake with Spanish potatoes and broccoli (there is fish somewhere under that sauce!), followed by a Swedish style berry crumble.