by Sharlene

It’s Monday (August 24, 2020)

The kids are back in school this Wednesday! Of course by school I mean that they’ll be at home, distance learning. The school district has mandated a 150 minutes of live instruction, and the teachers sent out a schedule on Friday, which shows the school day broken up into a few different Zoom sessions, with breaks in between. Hopefully it will all work out.

Meanwhile, it’s been a weird week. If you follow my blog, you may have seen my mention of the lightning storm we had – over 10,000 lightning strikes in the Bay Area in 72 hours the weekend before last, especially unusual in a place with almost no lightning at all. So what has resulted from that are several huge wildfires, so many that they are being grouped into “complexes”. The one that is closest to us is huge – it’s comprised of 20 fires and is over 335,000 acres. But there are also others north (in the  Napa/Sonoma area), and southwest (Santa Cruz), also south (Carmel area).

It’s become a habit to check Purpleair.com several times a day. The numbers keep fluctuating, and we have gone from the 50s to over 200 in just one day.

But we’ve been staying indoors, keeping our windows closed, fans on, and if it gets hot (as it has been last week), the AC comes on for a bit.

Luckily for my birthday last month, we got a Nintendo Switch fitness game called Ringfit and we’ve been using that to exercise. It’s surprisingly effective at exercising the arms (you can pull and push on the ring which holds one of the controller), legs (the other controller is strapped on your leg and quite a few of the games require squats and jogging in place as well as other types of exercise), even the abs and there are yoga poses. It’s come in handy when it’s too smoky outside.

Been a while since we’ve had pancakes! I tend to make waffles more these days since the kids prefer that.

It hasn’t been as hot as previously but still warm enough to have to turn on the ac to cool the house down in the afternoons. So I’d been reluctant to bake. But I missed the smell of fresh bread in the house. So I made the basic hearth bread from the Bread Bible, adding the overnight rise in the fridge of the dough for a better taste. Kneading the dough by hand can be quite therapeutic.

Currently…

Reading:

Watching:

The Umbrella Academy Season 2 – I’m trying to slowly watch this, so I’m also watching Midnight Diner.

Listening:

Nothing at the moment as I recently finished On the Come Up

Eating:

Leftover pancakes for breakfast

Drinking:

Tea

Cooking:

I picked up a nice cauliflower from the farmers market, so some kind of skillet cauliflower cheese.

Maybe a pad thai?

Last week:

I read:

On the Come Up – Angie Thomas (audiobook)

I posted:

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

Library Loot (August 19 to 25)

Books that should be adapted #TopTenTuesday

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is a place to meet up and share what you have been, are and about to be reading over the week. This meme started with J Kaye’s Blog   and then was taken up by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn at the Book Date. 

7 Comments

  1. One of our daughters lives in the Bay Area and she and her fiancée were camping for the first time that weekend and ended up leaving the campsite at 2 am to drive home. There was no cell reception where they were but they saw flickering light that looked like a distant (not distant enough!) fire. They’ve been inside (in Oakland) with the windows closed too.
    I’m reading a NetGalley ARC of Utopia Avenue which is probably going to expire soon if I don’t hurry up. Thanks for visiting my blog today!

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  3. I didn’t realise you were having online only school. We are all going back in 2 weeks, like a lot of the rest of Europe. Let’s see how it turns out.

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    1. Schools can’t open in California until the county gets taken off the California watchlist and it doesn’t look like our county is even close to that at the moment. There’s all kinds of numbers they’re looking at, especially new infections per capita, and while I think my city itself isn’t doing too badly, the county on the whole is not doing good at all!
      Good luck with school!

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  4. Good thing your school didn’t start today as Zoom had an outage this morning. I tend to prefer waffles but now I’m craving pancakes. It has cooled a bit so I’m willing to have the oven on some and made homemade pizza on Friday. It was yummy.

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