Staying Home: Day 18

At the moment - and I realise this may well change as time goes on - I am finding quite a few positives in this quieter, stay-at-home life. I am normally terrible with routine, but since getting the balance of my day all wrong on Monday I have slipped into a daily pattern that is actually working well for me. I am getting up, showered and dressed soon after 8, getting started on my work at about 8.30 and working until lunch time or early afternoon, depending on how much I have to do. M & I go for a walk mid-afternoon, then come home and have tea and cake. Late afternoon is Disney movie time, and then we eat dinner about 7pm. The girls also mostly study in the mornings and exercise in the afternoons, and M either works or does jobs around the house or garden if he doesn't have any work to do. Before the shutdown my week was all over the place, with two full days at work out of the house, fitting freelance work in randomly during the rest of the week (sometimes including the weekend), and often spending far too much of the morning doing nothing much before I get into gear then chasing my tail later.  I really hope I am learning the lesson that routine is a good thing for me.

Other positives? Spending time with my family and enjoying their company, instead of all of us whizzing around to different places at different times. More intentional menu planning, with more variety, and mostly all eating the same thing; also sharing the cooking in a more organised way. Not having to rush, and never being late for anything - something of a novelty for me!

H ordered a couple of canvases so she could do some more painting, and has started work on a picture of Genoa, the Italian city where she spent the 2018/19 academic year. I didn't do anything much on my weather scarf today as I got distracted playing Scrabble Go on my phone. I might have been procrastinating because I don't like sewing ends in. My creative effort for the day was to make a lemon cake. Eggs have become hard to find and we are down to just one egg, so I used a vegan recipe. The recipe was for an iced cake, but I decided to turn it into a lemon drizzle on the assumption that any lemon cake could be drizzled. I assumed wrong. It didn't work properly with the texture of the cake, which ended up cakey on the bottom and soggy on the top. At least it still tasted good.

As I didn't knit today, I'm including photos of my last woolly creation - a crocheted blanket using Attic 24's dahlia kit.  I love how bright and happy and cosy it is.

Disney movie of the day: Dumbo (the recent one, new to all of us)
Dinner: salmon, roasted baby potatoes, leeks and peas, cooked by Teen Girl