a little magic during quarantine

the university where i teach has been getting creative to keep students engaged with the student activities office from a distance during quarantine.  they originally planned to have magician michael kent visit campus, but since we're all at home they decided to do the live magic show virtually via youtube live.  it was pretty neat to watch and i had to hand it to this magician because it couldn't have been easy to do a live magic show virtually!  it was a nice escape for an hour during this crazy time!

love, laurie

hands down, the best thing i've seen during quarantine!

people are getting really creative during quarantine, and i'm loving it.  one of my co-workers sent me this video of a family singing the song "one day more" from the broadway musical "les mis" with quarantine-themed lyrics.  this is, hands down, the best thing i've seen during quarantine.  brilliant!

love, laurie

a little creative project during quarantine

my brain needed to do something creative during the quarantine, so i made matching earrings for my co-worker and me.  we have this thing about having matching jewelry and wearing it together while working shows.  i took a picture and texted to her to show her what i was up to and she loved the earrings.  i can't wait to give them to her when i can see her again!

love, laurie

quarantine porch time

when it's warm enough, we have been enjoying sitting on our back screened-in porch.  leko also loves it.  we have played many rounds of scrabble and yahtzee to keep us entertained.  another board game that we recently dug out of our basement and dusted off was a 1960s parcheesi game.  it was fun to re-learn how to play that game.  playing parcheesi was the perfect way to pass the time while waiting for our baked chocolate doughnuts to bake in the oven before we dipped them in peanut butter glaze.  yum!

love, laurie

quarantine breakfast

even though we are still working remotely, we have so much more free time now than we ever have had before.  ryan and i joked the other day that we have never had free time in our lives, and then we realized that wasn't a joke, it was the truth.

not having to commute to and from work leaves us with extra time for making delicious food.  on sunday, we wanted to use up some apples that we had in our kitchen, so we make mini cast-iron skillet apple dutch baby pancakes.  they were so good!  yum!

love, laurie

quarantine clean up

we happen to have a scrap metal yard very close to our house.  this has come in handy countless times over the past nearly 10 years that we've lived in our house.  we have taken all sorts of things to the scrap metal yard from various home projects.  normally, we make trips to the scrap metal yard pretty regularly, but we have been so busy that we haven't gone in 2 years!  we had made piles of things in our basement and garage to take to the scrap metal yard "someday" but just never got around to it.  

on friday, we finally had the time so we collected everything that we've been holding on to for the past 2 years and loaded up the car.  we went to the scrap metal yard and unloaded it all which felt so good.  in total, we had 520 pound of metal!!!  normally we would have made a pretty penny off all of that, but since the price of metal is so low right now we got next to nothing.  regardless, we didn't care because we were just so happy to get it out of our way!

another quarantine house project checked off the list!

love, laurie

working remotely during quarantine

i mentioned last week that the university where i teach made the decision to move classes online for the rest of the semester, but in addition to that, the theatre where i work full time also has us working remotely from home for the time being.  it has been working out okay since the majority of what i've been working on can be done from anywhere with my laptop and internet access.

it has been really emotional to have to postpone and cancel all of our shows in march and april.  it has also kept me really busy to take care of all of the things that need to be done in order to reschedule a postponed show.  i spent months working on this year's theatre schedule and now we just keep rescheduling things and shifting things around.  we went from a schedule that was nice and evenly spaced out to a schedule where too many shows are shoved into a short period of time.  i'm just praying that shows in the month of may can stay as is and not need to be rescheduled!

working from home also means learning how to use facetime and skype to see my students and zoom to attend virtual meetings at work.  what crazy times we are living in right now!

love, laurie

quarantine project #5

today is friday and it has been one week since i've been quarantined.  i haven't left the house at all except to work outside in our yard or to take a walk in our neighborhood.  the only time ryan left was briefly for a few hours for work.  despite everything, morale remains high. :-)

we were thrilled that we were able to get some outside projects done last weekend when the weather was better, but it has been colder and wet outside most days this week.  we even had a touch of snow and ice one day this week!

so, we turned to some inside projects while it was raining/snowing.  we went around the house and washed every curtain in our house.  that's a project that doesn't happen as often as it should and some of our curtains were getting dusty.  it took several loads of laundry to clean them all, but it felt good to have all the curtains nice and clean.

after the curtains, we made some yummy tomato and arugula risotto for dinner which we had with mahi mahi.  yum!

 have a great (quarantined) weekend!

love, laurie

quarantine project #4

the university where i work announced over the weekend that they are moving classes online for the remainder of the semester . . . ugggggggggggg!!!

i mean, cooooooome on!  are we trying to kill teachers?

i sat down at the dining room table on sunday and spent hours revising my courses for the FOURTH time now.  good grief!  luckily, i had leko to help me out.

after dinner on sunday, we made an orange cranberry bundt cake with orange glaze.  it was so good and a nice treat after working so hard on recording countless virtual lectures for my students.

love, laurie

quarantine project #3

our third project during quarantine was to clean the back porch.  it gets so incredibly dirty over the winter and always needs a deep clean every spring.  it was so satisfying to have it so nice and clean.

the weather was nice enough on sunday that we were able to enjoy our nicely cleaned porch with leko, shrimp and grits for dinner, and two rounds of scrabble.  (if you're wondering, ryan won both rounds of scrabble and leko sat on the score notepad!)

love, laurie