Isolation week one--what I've been doing

I consider Monday the 23rd of March, the year of our Lord 2020, the first day of our "stay home, stay healthy" social isolation date.  Mainly because that is when our governor gave the order.  So we are starting the second official week of isolation here in Oregon.

So what was I doing last week?

Like most everyone, we are watching our church sermon online and then meeting on Zoom for our small group. It's nice to at least see some friendly faces.  It really makes me realize how much I took for granted our face to face time.  Praying together over the internet takes some getting used to, but I'm thankful we can at least have this for now.  Really looking forward to the day when we can be together again.

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I'm also realizing just how out of practice I am at cooking all the meals it takes to feed four people at least two solid meals a day.  Feeding your people is no joke.

Our middle son came back from his discipleship school in Washington that had to shut down for now.  He is currently back at home with us until the end of all of this.  It's not where he would like to be, but he has a really good attitude despite it all.  So thankful for that, but all the food cooking and clean up is relentless.

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I've also tried to pull myself away from the near constant news and numbers and spend some time reading good books.  I'm halfway through with Francis Schaeffer's True Spirituality and it is really convicting.  It a brutal beautiful kind of book.  It's a lot to digest, so I read it a little at a time and text a friend who is also reading it and we share the pain together over text.  I miss our talks together over the lunch table at our co-op though!

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I was also busy failing miserably at sourdough. Just look at that. It's all gray and dense and HOLLOW.  That right there are two loaves of sadness.   My friends urge me to continue this quest for a decent loaf of sourdough but I'm not sure I have the strength to go through all that work and fussing and babying it just to end up with another two loaves of hollow hockey pucks.  These were a culmination of 14 days of building a starter and three days of following obnoxious rules to assemble and bake the bread.  (I literally have 7 printed pages of sourdough making notes, and have watched dozens of videos on YouTube.  I even bought a kitchen scale, because all the cool people were measuring in grams.  I was so excited! and then so very let down.)  I still have a little bit of the starter in my fridge.  It will probably die in there.

I've had much better luck with no knead bread.  So much easier.  And since I still have yeast for this apocalypse, I think I don't need to capture and grow my own wild yeast to survive.

But I did make some homemade English muffins (I was even fancy enough to fork split them). They taste like a fresh buttery biscuit but with the chewiness of an English muffin.  They make the bland grocery store ones seem pretty depressing.  How do they manage to remove all the good flavor out of mass produced bread?

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I have also decided to do a sketch a day while in my confinement.  So far it's going pretty well, but as time goes on, I'll have to look harder for things to sketch.  I have a contest going on with one of my students to send a pic each day of our sketches.  So far I'm winning (though I had a 5 picture head start on him before I mentioned it).  He's catching up though!  I tore pieces of watercolor paper to about 5x7 sizes and will have them bound at the end of this craziness as a journal of our time.  I don't have it in this pic, but on most pages I journal some thoughts directly on the page.

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I REALLY don't want to spend this time developing my laziness any more than it already is, so I'm trying to do a good workout at least 3x a week, and do something active every day (double digging our garden beds is a full body workout).  I caved and bought a subscription to Leslie Sansone's Walk at Home videos. It's only $5 a month and I actually kind of enjoy it!  It's simple and I don't have to worry about injuring myself doing some weird move, but man, it's a workout!  She has some free videos on YouTube if you want to do something and it's still too cold and rainy to get outside (like here).

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And I'm still trying to keep my morning routine of coffee, thankfulness journal, memory work, and Bible meditation.  This week I missed Friday's morning routine because I headed out bright and early to our store to pick up groceries for a few neighbors and our family.  I was so excited when I went down the paper goods aisle and scored a pack of paper towels AND toilet paper... only to realize when I got to the checkout that they were BOTH actually paper towels.  In my elation to find both, my mind tricked me into thinking I had both... and in my mind's defense, from the side those Scott paper towels look JUST LIKE toilet paper.

We've also posted reminders for all...

...and this was the line to get into the store.  They had tape every 6 feet and let 150 people into the store when it opened, and when one left, one got to go in.  Once the wait was over, it was actually pretty nice to shop.

How did you guys do this week?