What's Been Going On: Thursday, 3 February - Sunday, 6 February, 2022

 Monday, Monday. Here we are again! It’s been…a weekend. Some potential changes coming around here, but nothing is certain yet, and I’ll get to that in a minute. This is a bit of a longer post today, because of some of those issues, so bear with me! Here's a cat picture to make up for it.

Here’s what I’ve been up to during the second part of last week.

Thursday, 3 February 2022

After coffee and breakfast, I worked on my Thursday post, got dressed, and scooped the litterbox. I filled and ran the dishwasher, put a batch of chickpeas in the Instant Pot, then finished and posted my Thursday post. I edited and posted my review for Playing with Matches by Suri Rosen over on my book blog, and then it was time for a very snowy and cold school drop-off!

I ran to a local grocery store for some green peppers and tomatoes and ended up coming home with some packages of marked-down cheese ends (they don’t always have these, so it’s a nice surprise when they do!) and a marked-down pizza/focaccia thing that would go well with the leftover soup for dinner. Back at home, I did an hour of volunteer work, unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher, and hung out on the computer for the little bit of time I had left before taking lunch to my daughter. (If you’re new here, I take her lunch every day and she eats in the car. It’s a way to help calm both of our anxieties about being unmasked in the lunch room.)

I stopped by the library to pick up my book from interlibrary loan, then came home to have lunch myself, and I did my 30 minutes of my own personal Read Harder project, reading American Literary Almanac, edited by Karen L. Rood. And then I dozed for a bit!

I put the cooked chickpeas in the fridge, put dinner on to warm when it was time, and after we ate, I did my Duolingo. I biked for 25 minutes, showered, put my daughter to bed, and read Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford. My husband and I watched an episode of Deadly Women before bed.

 

Friday, 4 February, 2022

I had breakfast and coffee, wrote my Friday post, got dressed, edited and posted Friday’s post, filled and ran the dishwasher, and then it was time for a very cold, walk-right-in school drop-off!

I ran to another local grocery store for a few items (zucchini, coffee creamer, and frozen noodles), and they had their discount produce rack out again. Lo and behold, they had THREE bags of mixed mushrooms!!! They used to have these all the time, and I was SO disappointed when the rack disappeared. Needless to say, I took all three bags ($1 each; all kinds of mushrooms in there!), along with a large bag full of perfectly good green beans. JACKPOT!!!

At home, I did an hour of volunteer work, then cooked a batch of taco-flavored lentils in the Instant Pot. I unloaded the dishwasher, took out the compost and recycling, then spent a few minutes on the computer before taking lunch to my daughter.

After my own lunch, I did my 30 minutes of my personal Read Harder project, then took the cooked chickpeas from the day before and made a batch of taco-flavored hummus. And then I prepared the taco dip I’d been craving: the bottom layer of taco hummus, a layer of taco-flavored lentils, a sprinkling of cheese, a layer of yogurt mixed with salsa, and a top layer of cheese, tomatoes, and some torn up spinach. Yum! Into the fridge it went.

I spent some time on the computer and got an idea I may try to turn into a piece of writing, depending on whether I can find the time and an outlet that wants to publish it, then I finished reading Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford. After dinner, I showered, did my Duolingo, and worked on some cross-stitching and knitting. At 7:30, it was time to sign in to virtual services at my synagogue. I so appreciate the virtual services (and they’ll come in handy in the future for me when my back is out- sometimes I can’t sit upright without pain so bad it makes me sweat, which is just SUPER fun), but man, I’m looking forward to when things have calmed down and I’m able to attend in person.

After services concluded, I began reading After Long Silence by Helen Fremont, and my husband and I watched one episode of Deadly Women before bed.

 

Saturday, 5 February, 2022

After coffee and breakfast, I wrote two book reviews (which always takes me a bit) and got dressed. I loaded and ran the dishwasher and took out the recycling. I tidied the living room, and by this time, it was time for lunch!

My son came over, which was wonderful, since I hadn’t really seen him since December. He’s likely going to move back in next month, so we’re all looking forward to that! I gave him a ride back to where he’s currently living, then took his and my own books back to the library.

Back at home, I re-tidied the living room, then settled down to work on chapter 5 of Prayerbook Hebrew the Easy Way. Oof, this one, which was on adjectives, turned my brain to soup a little bit (mostly the rule about using an adjective with a definite noun in a phrase and attaching an untranslated ה to the adjective. What counts as a noun phrase versus a complete sentence is what threw me off a bit, due to some of the examples they gave, because some of them with that extra ה were complete sentences!). I wish I had an instructor for this. I know my synagogue offers basic how-to-read-Hebrew classes (I can read it just fine, so I have no need of that), but I’m not sure about beyond that.

My Hebrew book has jokes, you guys.

 

#12 says, “Holy Moses!” I laughed.

I folded a load of laundry, then emptied and reloaded the dishwasher. After dinner, I did my Duolingo, biked for 30 minutes, showered, did a late-night 30 minutes of my own personal Read Harder project…and then I got the email from school.

Our school’s mask mandate has been going through the court, and a judge decided that, despite 191 people dying of COVID-19 in our state Friday, schools can’t require masks anymore. They can only recommend. My husband, who is a molecular biologist who works in a lab at a major research university, is FURIOUS about this, as am I. He was having an indoor campout with our daughter, though, so we decided to talk about it in the morning, and I did my best to focus on reading my book before going to bed.

 

Sunday, 6 February, 2022

Discussing school was the first item on our agenda in the morning. We came to the agreement that we’d send my daughter (who is double vaccinated) to school on Monday to kind of scout things out. If there are a bunch of maskless kids in her class, or even enough to make her feel uncomfortable (and she would), then we’ll bring her home and I’ll homeschool her. I homeschooled my older son until he was in fourth grade, so I have no problem doing this again, especially if it means protecting her from a novel virus whose long-term effects are unknown. I cannot believe the long-term health of our children has become a political pawn, and the depths of my disgust for the people who have made it this way knows no bounds. How. Dare. They.

After coffee and breakfast, I got dressed, unloaded the dishwasher, and set to work in the kitchen. I had about twenty peppers that needed to be chopped and put in the freezer (especially if homeschooling becomes part of our future, I need to get to work on the weekends so our weeks run smoothly!). I started with the red and ended up with two bags, then started in on the green, which gave me four bags. Phew! That was a lot of chopping; it took pretty much all of the morning!

 

After lunch, I chopped a bag and a half of the discount mushrooms I’d bought and got them set up in the dehydrator.

 

I took the chopped peppers out to the freezer, took the compost out, and wiped down the stove and countertops. I visited my bookmarked homemaking blogs, and then it was time for a trip to the library in order to pick up some books. I stopped for gas on the way home, which is what made me realize I did *not* want to go for a walk- it was 31 degrees out and sunny, but there was enough wind to hurt my ears. That’s no fun to walk through!

At home, I finished visiting all of you, then got to work on this post. I helped my daughter with her math, finished reading After Long Silence by Helen Fremont, and then, armed with some new information, my husband and I made the decision to not send our daughter to school on Monday. The fury we were feeling was pretty big, and while I trust the school to do everything they can to keep her safe, their hands are tied on this and they’re not allowed to do what needs to be done to protect their students. Thus, my daughter isn’t going. That’s that. The governor has applied for a stay, which would put the mitigations back in place; if that goes through, we’ll send her back, and if not, it’s homeschool time. I’m okay with either.

After dinner, I did my Duolingo and showered, and then my brain decided that all that stress was just too much, and I got another migraine, so off to bed with me at 7 pm. I woke up around midnight and took some more migraine meds and went back to bed, where I had weird dreams all night about working as a nanny/housekeeper for a large family whose mother had died.

 

And that’s that for now! Not the Monday I was expecting to have, but like I told my daughter in the beginning of the year, we’re being flexible this year and understanding that everything can change at any moment. This is just one of those moments, so today, we’re off to the library to pick up some books for our hopefully-temporary homeschooling! (Migraine-wise, I'm feeling okay so far, just tired and a little woozy. Definitely better than yesterday, when my vision was so smeared, I could barely see at all.) Hopefully your weeks are all going a little more predictably. :)