From SS Quarantine #1

Officially it's called Self Isolation but really it is a quarantine.  A bit like pets. You come in from overseas and you need to stay put in one place for 14 days.  Fortunately, we have a house with multiple rooms and a garden. Others, less fortunate, have to stay in a hotel room, or a parental caravan, or other tiny spaces (I know this from talking to returning people in airports and on planes).

It is only day one and things may get boring or frustrating but I will try to remain grateful for having our own space to quarantine in.

Yesterday I went quite Old School.

I made a Yorkshire pudding batter.

I took some vegetable stock out of the freezer and chopped up loads of veg, added a tin of kidney beans (must add tinned beans to my shopping list when I can go shopping again!), some tinned tomatoes and some pasta and made a large pot of minestrone soup.

I am fortunate enough to have flour and yeast so I made a loaf of bread. We had some with the minestrone for lunch.

We had a lovely piece of beef that Lindsey had left in the fridge for us. I roasted that in the evening and we had it with roasted potatoes, from the crop at Hill House, green beans from our boxes and broccoli that Lindsey had got at the vegetable farm. And the Yorkshire puddings, of course with a mushroom gravy.

I have made an apple crumble with some sad looking apples that we left here when we went away. I meant to give them to Lindsey and forgot.  But they chopped up fine for a crumble.  We haven't eaten it yet but we will.

I went out to read the rain gauge yesterday and there was a very large grasshopper trying to get in through the front door.  I discouraged it.  Perhaps I should have let it in.  A short time later we saw a magpie sitting on the fence looking at something.  Then it swooped into the garden and flew off with a grasshopper in its beak.  I fear it was the one I denied entry into the house. I had only seen one.

Jim went out through another door a bit later and a skink (tiny lizard) dropped from above his head. We thought it was dead, it lay so still on the ground.  When I went out through that door later another (or the same) skink fell from above onto the ground and looked dead for a very short while.  Then it ran away.  I think it was the same skink, climbing up the fly screen and obviously also trying to get into the house.

I'm not sure why these creatures are finding our house so enticing. It's not as though we have much grasshopper or skink food lying about. Although I suppose they might fancy mu vegetable supply, now I come to think about it.