Staying Home: Day 16

After several disturbed and unsettled nights as the reality of what coronavirus was going to mean hit, I have settled into a good sleeping pattern, getting around eight hours and waking at about 7am. This morning I woke up, played scrabble on my phone for a while and read a bit of the Benjamin Britten biography I have just started on my Kindle (not sure whether I will persist with it as so far it is quite heavy going). I got up just before 8.30, showered and dressed and looked at the BBC News website. The news as ever is depressing, but there were some lovely, cheering spring pictures "painted" on an iPad released by the artist David Hockney. As he released the pictures publicly, I presume it is OK to put a credited copy of one here. My mother came from the same part of Bradford as David Hockney and knew him as a child - at one time she was his Sunday school teacher. He is now 83 so this was a very long time ago!

"Do Remember They Can't Cancel Spring"

(C) David Hockney

I started work on the latest batch of questions just before 9, took a breakfast break an hour later, and finished around 12.30. No archives work today. Teen Girl started clearing out her room yesterday and carried on with that this morning. She found various things we hadn't realised were in there, including her elder sisters' favourite childhood soft toys. After that she did some school work while H worked on revisions to an essay and M did some housework. H made cauliflower cheese for herself and her sister for lunch, I ate up some left over fish curry, and M (who doesn't like either cheese or curry) had beans on toast.

H and I did some more menu planning and sorted out a shopping list as she wants to go to Tesco tomorrow, hoping it will be quieter on a Thursday than a Friday. I use a shopping app called Bring, which I can add things to via Alexa. I was baffled by something called "gummihandschuhe" which had appeared on the list. After a bit of googling I discovered this is German for rubber gloves. We had indeed tried to add rubber gloves to the list for washing up - how Alexa managed to translate it into German is a mystery. I love that the German for gloves is "hand-shoes"!

In the afternoon we watched Disney Move number ten, which was Incredibles 2 - we agreed that we think it is better than the original. While watching I made it to the end of February on my weather scarf; two months down, ten to go. After that we all went for walks, in two pairs. M and I walked round the streets, while the two girls went to nearby Bluebell Woods (no bluebells yet, of course) and managed not to get lost.  After our walks I did another half an hour's work, and Teen Girl finished off her final piece of schoolwork for the day. My turn to cook dinner, which was Spanish-style potatoes roasted with tomato puree and paprika, baked mackerel fillets with lemon and lime dressing, and spring greens. After dinner I played the piano for about 30 minutes before my energy ran out. Now I'm going to read for a while before going to bed.

The wonders of the internet never cease. Teen Girl has just shown me a video of a farting seal.