Once again the cat alarm woke us up earlier than I was hoping, I was so tired that I fed the cats, but managed to throw dry cat food everywhere.
I snoozed a bit longer and then got up around 9.30am and tidied and cleaned the kitchen from dinner yesterday evening and had some cornflakes and an Americano for breakfast made from our lovely coffee machine (our over indulgence to commiserate our abrupt end to our honeymoon and make lockdown more bearable when our cheaper machine broke down - I do recommend highly!) I also recommend the lovely Modern Standard coffee that we use and is far to easy to plough through a bag of!
I noticed my right knee was really quite sore this morning, I'd not done anything yesterday to be concerned about my knee, although I'd had some perifirmis issues. When I rubbed around the knee cap it was really crunchy compared to the left knee.
I was excited this morning as I'd signed up for a 2 hour Flash Fiction course that my friend Lauren had told me about with Arvon. At the start of the the year I'd thought about doing a residential there as they have a site in Hebden Bridge, but obviously Corona got in the way of these plans, so it was a great way to still do something in keeping with my 20 things 20 times in 2020 which included 20 hours learning something new and 20 creative writting sessions or blog entries.
The course started at 11am via Zoom and was hosted and facilitated by Dr Tania Hershman I had a quick chat with Lauren first about the writing challenges we'd been doing together this week. We signed on and after Tania was introduced she said that she was going to "work us hard" and she really did!
We had a first exercise of word cricket where she gave us a starting phrase and we had to build a short story by just writing continously for 15 minutes and at certain points she threw in some extra words to include. We then read a short story together called "The Yacht Man" and moved onto our next exercise which was taking 6 random excerpts from books grabbed off the shelf including a coffee machine manual and weaving as many as possible into a story - this was a really good fun one and I managed to write on that featured many current events. We again read together a few more pieces of flash fiction and in very different and interesting styles and our next excerise was to take very serious trigger words and write as many descriptive words that related to that word. Tania then announced that these were "banned" words and we had to write for 7 minutes about that word - it was both harder and easier than you would think. Our final exercise was on Drabbles and Dribbles and this one I found much harder as I didn't have an obvious inspiration starting point.
2 hours totally flew by and I would highly recommend this as great value for money (£35) and great content, but most importantly a great faciliator who was encouraging, energetic and fun!
I made some lunch for me and Alan - creamy garlic mushroom pasta and then Lauren and I read what we'd written back to each other which was fascinating as even with a very similar start and end to one of the pieces we were very different in content. We decided to try and find a flash fiction competition to enter and talked about a few films and books that we recommended including Arrival which Alan and I decided to watch this evening.
I got bogged down watching the Daily Briefing again today and I'm yet to be convinced that we are ready to ease the lockdown based on the number of infections and where the R number is at. What concerned me more was how Whitty and Vallance weren't allowed to respond to some of the journalist questions as Johnson stepped in. I totally understand that they don't want to be "dragged into politics" but it was palpable to see what their opinions have beens towards some of the comments by politians that they visibly disagree with. I was especially impressed with Sam Coates at Sky News for asking them if they had been gagged and forbidden to answer questions and how they felt about it.
Alan went out for a run and I decided not to today as my knee was sore, but when he'd got back I decided to go for a walk as it was such lovely weather and I strolled through the nearby fields and took the time to take some pictures and videos including one for my daily photo challenge with my friends Hayley and Sam which was "All the Small Things" today. I walked for 45 minutes and about 3K.
I listened to the High Low Podcast as I was walking and then when I'd got home as I made tea. Another Hello Fresh recipe of Cod with a cheesy crumb and mashed potato with spring greens - delicious! We then had treacle tart and clotted cream for dessert and watched Arrival. Arrival really reminded me of Interstellar and it had a really interesting plot and it is definitely one of those that I really want to rewatch and am slightly sad I didn't see in a cinema as I bet it's great on the big screen.
Since then I've been messing around on my phone and trying to film Qubit having a conversation about Dominic Cummings, but he's been noisy and then camera shy. Some of the comments about this from members of my family have made me so angry that my heart has been racing. I'm most worried that it's all part of his plan and a deliberate plot to distract us from our awful death rate. I also feel frustrated that I can't do more to tangibly help.
I managed to totally forget the 8pm clap, I hadn't planned on clapping as I feel uncomfortable being press ganged by the neighbourhood whatsapp group (allthough I could be completely misinterpreting things) and the fact that I'm not sure we all have the same interpretation of social distancing, so this evening I made another donation to Selby District Foodbank. I liked the initial idea of the clap, but no one near me is a carer and so it felt a bit like keeping up appearances for the neighbours so instead I've tried to do more tangible things each week like donations or helping to make hampers of hand santisers, hand cream and treats for the local GP surgery.
I never thought keeping an isolation lockdown blog would actually give me so much to write about each day as nothing really happens and the concept of time has changed - this from the High Low today made me smile in describing how time works now.
Night night!
I snoozed a bit longer and then got up around 9.30am and tidied and cleaned the kitchen from dinner yesterday evening and had some cornflakes and an Americano for breakfast made from our lovely coffee machine (our over indulgence to commiserate our abrupt end to our honeymoon and make lockdown more bearable when our cheaper machine broke down - I do recommend highly!) I also recommend the lovely Modern Standard coffee that we use and is far to easy to plough through a bag of!
I noticed my right knee was really quite sore this morning, I'd not done anything yesterday to be concerned about my knee, although I'd had some perifirmis issues. When I rubbed around the knee cap it was really crunchy compared to the left knee.
I was excited this morning as I'd signed up for a 2 hour Flash Fiction course that my friend Lauren had told me about with Arvon. At the start of the the year I'd thought about doing a residential there as they have a site in Hebden Bridge, but obviously Corona got in the way of these plans, so it was a great way to still do something in keeping with my 20 things 20 times in 2020 which included 20 hours learning something new and 20 creative writting sessions or blog entries.
The course started at 11am via Zoom and was hosted and facilitated by Dr Tania Hershman I had a quick chat with Lauren first about the writing challenges we'd been doing together this week. We signed on and after Tania was introduced she said that she was going to "work us hard" and she really did!
We had a first exercise of word cricket where she gave us a starting phrase and we had to build a short story by just writing continously for 15 minutes and at certain points she threw in some extra words to include. We then read a short story together called "The Yacht Man" and moved onto our next exercise which was taking 6 random excerpts from books grabbed off the shelf including a coffee machine manual and weaving as many as possible into a story - this was a really good fun one and I managed to write on that featured many current events. We again read together a few more pieces of flash fiction and in very different and interesting styles and our next excerise was to take very serious trigger words and write as many descriptive words that related to that word. Tania then announced that these were "banned" words and we had to write for 7 minutes about that word - it was both harder and easier than you would think. Our final exercise was on Drabbles and Dribbles and this one I found much harder as I didn't have an obvious inspiration starting point.
2 hours totally flew by and I would highly recommend this as great value for money (£35) and great content, but most importantly a great faciliator who was encouraging, energetic and fun!
I made some lunch for me and Alan - creamy garlic mushroom pasta and then Lauren and I read what we'd written back to each other which was fascinating as even with a very similar start and end to one of the pieces we were very different in content. We decided to try and find a flash fiction competition to enter and talked about a few films and books that we recommended including Arrival which Alan and I decided to watch this evening.
I got bogged down watching the Daily Briefing again today and I'm yet to be convinced that we are ready to ease the lockdown based on the number of infections and where the R number is at. What concerned me more was how Whitty and Vallance weren't allowed to respond to some of the journalist questions as Johnson stepped in. I totally understand that they don't want to be "dragged into politics" but it was palpable to see what their opinions have beens towards some of the comments by politians that they visibly disagree with. I was especially impressed with Sam Coates at Sky News for asking them if they had been gagged and forbidden to answer questions and how they felt about it.
Alan went out for a run and I decided not to today as my knee was sore, but when he'd got back I decided to go for a walk as it was such lovely weather and I strolled through the nearby fields and took the time to take some pictures and videos including one for my daily photo challenge with my friends Hayley and Sam which was "All the Small Things" today. I walked for 45 minutes and about 3K.
I listened to the High Low Podcast as I was walking and then when I'd got home as I made tea. Another Hello Fresh recipe of Cod with a cheesy crumb and mashed potato with spring greens - delicious! We then had treacle tart and clotted cream for dessert and watched Arrival. Arrival really reminded me of Interstellar and it had a really interesting plot and it is definitely one of those that I really want to rewatch and am slightly sad I didn't see in a cinema as I bet it's great on the big screen.
Since then I've been messing around on my phone and trying to film Qubit having a conversation about Dominic Cummings, but he's been noisy and then camera shy. Some of the comments about this from members of my family have made me so angry that my heart has been racing. I'm most worried that it's all part of his plan and a deliberate plot to distract us from our awful death rate. I also feel frustrated that I can't do more to tangibly help.
I managed to totally forget the 8pm clap, I hadn't planned on clapping as I feel uncomfortable being press ganged by the neighbourhood whatsapp group (allthough I could be completely misinterpreting things) and the fact that I'm not sure we all have the same interpretation of social distancing, so this evening I made another donation to Selby District Foodbank. I liked the initial idea of the clap, but no one near me is a carer and so it felt a bit like keeping up appearances for the neighbours so instead I've tried to do more tangible things each week like donations or helping to make hampers of hand santisers, hand cream and treats for the local GP surgery.
I never thought keeping an isolation lockdown blog would actually give me so much to write about each day as nothing really happens and the concept of time has changed - this from the High Low today made me smile in describing how time works now.
Night night!
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