Weekend schedules

Do you have a schedule for your weekend? Following on from last week’s post, I’ve been thinking more about time blocks and how useful they are - but also how important it is to not fill up all those blocks with chores. It’s just as important to set aside a few for fun things, or to do absolutely nothing. 

My mother had a tendency to fill her days with chores from morning until night, and to try to combat this environmental conditioning, my sisters and I have been encouraging one another to follow the practice laid down by one of our aunts for herself post-retirement - chores in the morning, fun in the afternoon. 

I can’t say that I’m fully succeeding at implementing this system for my weekends, especially as I regularly push the envelope by doing things like not eating lunch until 2pm. But I think it is making me more mindful about how I use my time. This includes paying attention to how long things actually take; I have a tendency not to notice that, and trying to estimate that more accurately ahead of time is helping me to better manage my own expectations of what’s feasible in a morning. And maybe also helping me to normalize that an hour or two on the couch with a book or a movie is a perfectly reasonable way to spend a weekend afternoon. Even if this weekend I instead gave chunks of my afternoons to an Instant Pot beef stew (very) loosely based on this recipe, and a longstanding family Valentine's Day tradition. It's all about progress, right?  

Day 66

We’ve been in quarantine for nine weeks. I still haven’t made a sourdough starter.

I’ve been reading blog posts and seeing social media photos for years showing other people’s amazing sourdough loaves. The pace at which these appear has ratcheted up significantly over the past two months as quarantine sourdough has become trendy.

Every time I see one of these, I think, maybe I should finally do it. I should commit. I already know how to make bread. I love sourdough. I could have all the sourdough I want. I should do it. Everybody else is doing it.

So I read the recipe again. And then I think the same thing, every time: it seems like so much work. You have to know you want to make bread, like, two days ahead of time in order to feed the starter enough to be ready, and you have to start the actual bread dough not much later than that.

And the thing is, I already make bread all the time. I always have bread dough in my refrigerator. I can pull it out and make homemade rolls for dinner on a whim, and when my dough container starts to look empty, I can whip up a batch of slow-rise bread in about 5 minutes in the morning or afternoon and have freshly baked bread the same day. I use the same dough to make pizza, pita bread, and recently, bagels. I always keep the end of the previous batch to act as a starter for the next batch, so it’s an integral part of the cycle in my kitchen. 

On Sunday morning, I woke up unusually early - my anxiety has been manifesting in weird ways during quarantine, and periodically waking up extra early has been one of the weirdest - wanting to make a pan loaf of bread. What Miss B calls a “toast loaf”. I already knew I had a big batch of dough in the fridge that I’d made the night before (using my standard recipe), so I went downstairs, ripped off a chunk of it, shaped it into a loaf, and dropped it into a small loaf pan that I’d greased and floured. I let it rise for over an hour until it had doubled in size, and then put it in the oven to cook while I was making Sunday breakfast.

It doesn’t look all that impressive, and it’s certainly won’t be confused for an artisan loaf. But it tastes good, and it does the job. And it’s a reminder that having the time, the ingredients, and the resources to make any bread at all is a privilege, now more than ever. 

Day 12

Since we’ve officially been in social isolation mode, that is. Here’s the update from our version of this strange new world where most of us find ourselves these days.

Family & home We were already more than a week into a 4-week school closure for Miss B when the announcement came on Monday that the governor of Virginia had closed the schools for the remainder of the year. That hit me hard - I already knew it was serious, but that magnitude of serious was a little overwhelming to process. In terms of day to day life, it doesn’t change things dramatically; we had already figured out a schoolwork schedule, and we’ll adjust that as input from the school becomes more consistent. And all of our international moves have helped us build our skills as a self-sufficient unit. Being able to get outside is key, though - Miss B and I both joke about how usually we’d never leave the house if we didn’t have to, but now if I don’t get outside once every day, things start to get on top of me.

Work Since I already work from home and have for more than a decade, I’m pretty much carrying on as normal. Many of the people I work with don’t, of course, so I’ve been watching their adjustment from afar - and anear too, since DP has now shifted from going into DC most days to running online seminars and meetings from the basement. And even as a veteran telecommuter, it’s challenging to carry on as normal when a) there are so many people in your house, and in all the other houses, taking up internet bandwidth; and b) all everyone can think about most of the time is this situation. Sometimes work is a welcome distraction, and sometimes it pushes me around the bend. It’s important to pay attention to the distinction, and adjust accordingly.

Food Yesterday made me realize this forcefully. Still processing the news about schools closing for the year (and acknowledging the attending grief), I was struggling to focus, to keep my patience, to accomplish anything useful. At 4pm I took a break as planned, and went for a walk with DP. We made a familiar circuit on the college campus near our house, including a stop to admire some cherry blossoms (see above). When I came home, I went straight into the kitchen and made a batch of bread dough, another of salsa, and finished off with a batch of Cheesy Potato Gnocchi from Love Your Leftovers that uses up leftover mashed potatoes. And for the moment, anyway, my equilibrium is restored.

Action I’m trying to take some responsible productive action every day; today’s is continuing my effort to repurpose food waste into food production - new lettuce growing from the stump of a head of romaine:

Hope you’re staying well, staying safe, and staying home.