Seven-ish month check-in

When I look back at the Three Month Check-in post I have to kind of laugh at the "At this point, I think we're expecting at least 3-4 more weeks of working from home." sentence as I sit here at FOUR AND A HALF MONTHS after the shut down, still working from home. And there doesn't seem to be much of a chance that will change in the near future since Texas is one of the current coronavirus hot zones right now. The dean of my college at the university sent out an email a couple of weeks ago that basically told us to keep working from home through the fall if we can and since we don't have visitors, star parties, and field trips, I can and will. But I am hoping to go up a couple of afternoons a week to work on the lab classroom that I'm in charge of since this is the best time to finally clean out old equipment and get our demo stuff in order since no one else can use the room.

This continues to feel like some weird time-warp since almost everything I wrote three months ago is still pretty much how things are going. I haven't lost any weight - in fact, I gained a couple of pounds since I'm still not getting enough exercise. Now the weather is too hot instead of too wet and we had a bonus Saharan dust influx, which my lungs can't handle. Although I have been regularly getting in some arm weight exercises! I'm also still keeping up with the Shakespeare 2020 Project and I'm still getting in some more stitching time! I haven't done quite as much stitching in the past few months since I actually did some work on my Tudor History website. (My webhost is moving to new servers and so I had to do some work regardless because things would break if I didn't!)

I've been on a "cooking things from scratch" kick for the past few weeks and have learned to make my own tzatziki after I discovered that my grocery store has gyro meat in the frozen foods section. Not as good as fresh from the Greek deli, but not bad at all! I also made a pot of Boston baked beans a couple of weeks ago to finally break in my Dutch oven that I bought for myself at the holidays. Of course, I picked a day that would get up to 106°F to cook beans in the oven all day... Next up will be some homemade charro beans and the restaurant-style Mexican rice that I like (I've done that one several times now, but not with my new Dutch oven!). And probably some cook-all-day marinara too. I kind of wish this had come over me earlier in the stay-at-home time when it wasn't so damn hot!

That's it for now. I hope anyone who stumbles across this is doing well and staying safe!