The Craziness Continues

EDIT: I totally forgot to write about my DIY skills!  The first week of lockdown the washing machine started beeping about "water problems".  After playing with it, I realised it was taking AGES to fill up, water was basically dripping in.  Not cool, but it was still working.  But then I decided I'd better fix it.  So I took out the drawers in the laundry to get to the pipes, turned off the water and unscrewed it.  Low and behold it was full of shit!  So I cleaned all the shit out of it and tested the washing machine!  And it... didn't work.  It was still buggered.  So I pulled the washing machine out and unscrewed pipes etc and looked the pipe going into the back of the machine and it's little filter was blocked too.  So I cleaned that as well and tada! It worked great!

Then I noticed the kitchen tap was going really slowly too.  I mean it'd been sort of slowish for a while, but now I thought about it, compared to the other taps it was slow too.  So same thing, pulled out the kitchen drawers, turned off the house water and found two little filters that were full of shit.  Cleaned those, boom! Working great, back to full pressure.

So lockdown forced me to do two jobs that I probably would just have called a plumber to fix before.  Kinda happy with that.

So here we are still in lockdown.  I went to the supermarket at 6:50am last Thursday to get stuff for Easter, just chocolate eggs and a few other small things for the kids.  The supermarket opened at 7am so I thought I'd be first in until I got there and saw the huge queue of people around nearly out of the carpark.  I was quite dismayed, until I realised that of course because they weren't open the most of those people would be let in as soon as it did open and that's exactly what happened.  I was out of there with my bits and bobs by 7:10am.  There were lots of other parents standing in the Easter Egg isle too looking confused and dismayed at the wide array of things.  Still the most surreal Easter Egg shopping I'll ever do, getting up at 6am and being prepared to stand in the cold just to get into the supermarket.

Easter was "fun".  I say fun in quotes because like every other day, we were stuck at home.  I got the tent out on Friday and the kids helped me to put it up, which was quite fun actually.  If a little bit annoying with the question "Is the tent up yet Daddy can we play in it?" being asked about 57 hundred times while I was still, quite obviously, struggling to get the fly on or the pegs nailed in or one of the 20 other tent related issues.  Still once it was up it was as fun as always, the kids dragged half the toys they own in there and got comfortable.  Because it's got 3 rooms, Theo took one room, Beth too the other and the middle was "for Daddy".  Sarah stayed inside to guard the house!  So we slept out there on Friday and Saturday night, which was pretty fun really.  It was super cold, but they had extra blankets and big thick doonas so they didn't seem to notice really.  Theo was quite upset on the first night because it was too dark, but I went and got his star machine and put batteries in it and that calmed him down.  That plus the fact he was utterly knackered and he was off to sleep pretty soon.

Saturday was a nice day so I spent it putting all the wood we'd had ordered in the woodshed, stacking all the old wood at the front of the house to try and rotate it.  Seemed a bit silly really to be removing two rows of wood from the shed, but they've been in there for 2-3 years now and are bone dry, so it made more sense to stack that on the front deck and then to fill up the shed from the back with the new stuff.  Which seems pretty good and dry already, but hey, the longer you can leave it the better really.

So Sunday morning the kids were up early of course to go egg hunting.  We hadn't even really hyped it up but little brains like theirs don't forget easily!  So I had to distract them while Sarah snuck outside and hid eggs in the front garden.,  Usually we'd go the back but Biscuit would sniff them out and eat them no doubt.  They had a great time after breakfast running around trying to find them, then wanting to go out the back and keep looking.  Peter and Mary arrived in the afternoon and claimed to have "seen the Bunny again!" down on the very back section, so they went down there and found a couple more Easter treats that'd been left for them.

Monday we went for a ride up to Holly and Adrian's and did a little Easter Egg hunt for them, gave us something to do to break up the boredom.

And yea, that's it really.  The kids have been pretty good during the day, we make them a lunchbox.  School has "started" this week, with Beth's Teachers sending her things to do/learn and there's some educational material on the TV during the day.  We are still doing a Zoom conference call each day for work, just to check in on each other.  I think some people are handling the lockdown better than others.

Oh one cool thing we did over the Easter weekend was to organise a Pub Quiz on Facetime.  First night Sarah was the quizmaster, with me, Holly + Age and Peter + Mary joining.   Second time we did it Adrian was the quizmaster.  Lots of fun and a good way to break up the boredom for an hour or two.

I guess that's it.  I mean I should talk about lining up for 15 minutes to get into the dairy to buy bread and milk, or having to order the dogfood online and the pet shop dropping it off, how much we could all go for a takeaway curry. A takeaway anything.  How we can't sell (well, we could, but bad karama) the Feijoa's.  We're just giving them away.  How sick to death of the news about it I am, there's nothing new to add anymore and the news channels are now showing us "what the hospital bed you end up on" looks like etc.  How poor Tim Brook-Taylor died of it etc etc but there's no point going on about it.  History will record much better than my diary what a shit time this is for everyone, not just us!  We're quite lucky really, we have lots of room to run around, easy access to food (foodbag delivered each week etc)

The Chats new album came out a few weeks ago, that's pretty neat.  I ordered it on Vinyl because, well, I could.  It's a green and gold vinyl.  Couldn't tell you the last time I ordered/bought physical media for music.  But I was looking forward to this album for a while and it seems like a good way to support them.

It's nearly 8am and the kids aren't up! Oh, there's a door opening now.  Time to push "Publish" on this entry dear diary.

Tim