About gaining the quarantine 15

It has finally happened! For the first time in my life, I'm part of a current phenomenon, and not about 5 years behind, which is usually my style. No, this time I'm right in the front with so many of us who have all experienced yet another delightful experience of 2020: weight gain. As with everything else, some people have taken offence to naming it something amusing like "Quarantine 15" or "gaining the Covid 19", but I like it. I appreciate puns and jokes, and I love people who find humour in everything. It makes life so much more fun.

Trying to recapture my balance

I'm sitting in my freshly cleaned, cozy cabin. The fire is going, Taylor Swift is softly crooning in the background, the big dogs are lying next to me and I'm finally, finally, on day 3 of my mini-staycation, starting to relax. 

This morning was the first morning in I don't know how long where I didn't wake up at 6 am. My internal clock is tuned to that annoyingly early time since that's when I usually have to get up for work. 

I slept soundly until 8, then made coffee and read in bed for an hour. After that I fed the horses, played with the dogs, and then roasted a chicken for lunch. We butchered a bunch of our chickens this week, cleaned and froze them, and today we had our first taste. It's a lot of work, but worth it - it was delicious!

I can't see you now?

I found out that I needed glasses when I was 10 years old. It was done in the typical no-nonsense, insensitive German way I do not like.

We had an eye test at school, the first one I'd ever been exposed to, and I, a shy, tongue-tied child, was struggling to say correctly all the letters I was supposed to be seeing.

"Try harder, girl," the lady who was conducting the eye-test told me impatiently. Her tone of voice did nothing to help me see any better. I had been close to tears before, but now the dam burst. I cried hard.

At that age, I wanted nothing more than to please my superiors, and so far I had been fairly successful. I did all my homework, got good grades, and practiced my piano lessons until exhaustion.

But this time, I couldn't prepare for a test. It came to me out of nowhere, I was bombing it, and there was nothing I could do. My eyesight was failing, and I was mortified.

Was that the moment I decided to move to Canada one day?

Maybe not. But it certainly came up again in my list of pros and cons 12 years later when I was faced with the decision whether to move to Canada or not.

(Let's be real: there never was any question. But that incident certainly helped in the pro-department.)

The summer of 2020

With labour day signalling the end of summer, I sat down yesterday and made a little video of the summer of 2020. Like most people, we didn't go anywhere and didn't see too many people outside our bubble, but we had a great summer!

Living on a farm to us is the best thing in the world. Our animals are our family.