Quarantine: Mon. 4/27

I made cinnamon bread today: dough in the bread machine, then roll out and spread with cinnamon, another rise, then baking. Delicious. A loaf of bread suggests productivity. At the very least, it gives me something to do while navigating the kids through their homeschool assignments.

After lunch, there was some squabbling over the Lego sea in the basement. Though they've been dumped out for a week now, they're still not sorted, and now there's a big disagreement over HOW they should be sorted: by color or by shape? Lucia and I are saying color, but Greta is holding out for shape. My prediction? We'll end up putting them all back into the bins they came from, unsorted. 

I filled a bin with water on the art table today so we could use the rest of our gel balls--those tiny balls that expand into marble-size squishy balls. They're super fun, and we hadn't used them for a while. We didn't have many left so I put in an order for 50,000 more. (50,000 gel balls costs less than $10 and comes in a bag smaller than a quart-size ziploc.) Now we'll NEVER run out, no matter how long quarantine lasts.

The rest of the afternoon was spent with the girls playing with the gel balls and then reading while eating slices of cinnamon bread. I worked on an essay, exercised, and took Farrah for a walk. Dinner was Tuscan chicken pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and spinach, in the Instapot.

I have a new essay up today in Hypertext Magazine. It's the first thing to come out that talks about landlording, and how my own taste of it connects with my novel. It's so much fun seeing these pieces go live. 

Observation of the day: it's not easy to explain the expression "over my dead body" to a ten-year-old. I look forward to seeing the funny ways she uses this phrase in the days to come as she figures out how it fits into regular conversation. 

I forgot to mention yesterday that Andrew's response to my Wawa breakdown was a super inspiring and soothing reminder: "Don't get soft." I guess if he were the type to put up a fancy-text inspirational quote on Instagram, that's what it would say. DON'T GET SOFT.