Hi Globetrotters,
As a self-proclaimed homebody, even I am going a little stir crazy during this stay-at-home order. I now see why I would go out to eat so much during “normal” times. I didn’t know what else to do with myself, so I would default to eating with friends as an activity.
Well, with any negative, a silver lining is waiting. I have time now to discover new activities and also to look more inwards at myself. I am very fortunate to have a job during this time. My job is all based on the computer, so the majority of the time I do work from home.
The downside is I work more than normal. I have trouble stepping away from my computer, because I like to complete tasks. Before, I would mostly leave my laptop at work. It prevented me from connecting to dual monitors, which made my job harder to do. That will have to come with self-discipline to set a cut-off time.
Besides that here are some things I have been doing to occupy my time. If any of things resonate with you, I say its worth trying it.
Packing
We’re currently in our transition apartment, so for one month we slowly packed our belongings. It was literally down the street, so we had one big moving day. For the other items that couldn’t fit in the truck, we would walk back and forth each day to transfer them to the new apartment.
Reading
I personally don’t want anything on my bookshelf that I haven’t attempted to read. When I went on the Queretaro, MX trip, I bought a book to occupy myself. However, I ended sleeping the whole plane ride. With the downtime, I was able to start and finish “Where the Crawdad Sings” in a week. It’s a 5-star read in case you were wondering.
Ice Cream Maker
I decided to enhance my cooking skills and bought Jeni’s cookbook. Jeni’s is a Colombus, OH Ice Cream company. They have a few open shops in Chicago, and it is my favorite ice cream of all time. I tried her pistachio recipe and I was actually successful (for once). I loved the process and the ability to customize it. I highly recommend you try this out.
Online Social Hour
To spend time with our friends, Mr. Lumberjack and I played Code Name or watched a 30 minute travel video. Nothing beats a little competition with Code Names. Also, for me, I like to travel so I do get serious wanderlust now and again. Try those ideas if you want to do activities with friends.
Puzzle
You might notice I put puzzle, not puzzles. Let me tell you how hard it is to get a puzzle nowadays. I looked at the beginning of stay-at-home and all the good ones were out of stock. The bad ones were in stock, but would take months to arrive. I ordered one, but it was so delayed that I cancelled the order. Another one was a mis-ship, and I ended up with a book about crunches being a sham.
I managed to get my hands on at least one puzzle. I was so excited for the puzzle and I just like to finish things, that I spent two days to finish the 1000-piece puzzle. The end result was a beautiful pink, informative, cat puzzle.
Alright, that’s all I have for you. Mr. Lumberjack and I did take a road trip, which I’ll go into detail in next week’s post on where we went and how we followed the CDC guidelines.
Ciao,
Amy
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