Day Fifteen: Puppy Time!

We have a puppy at the house now! Daisy Snowball Prater joined our family officially yesterday when we took her from her doggy family on the hill down to live at our house with her new human family. So this morning when I woke up at six for my usual two hours of work before everyone else wakes up, it was to the sound of Daisy whining in her crate on the porch. I let her out and carried her off the porch in the dark so she could do her business. She then became my work buddy. I took my

Daisy "helping" me with
some e-mails. 

laptop outside and scratched and petted her while I checked e-mails. She soon fell back asleep, so I was able to sneak inside to do some video editing and e-mailing without her tugging at my nightie hem or slippers with her sharp little teeth.

William galumphed down the stairs at about seven, but he disappeared outside to play with Daisy so I could finish up my work. He did, however, wake up Taiya when he was barking loudly to the puppy, trying to get Daisy to follow him somewhere. 

It was a chilly morning, and overcast all day, ending in a slow and steady rain. Time seems to move more haltingly on rainy days. I did lots of fiddly things, interrupted by puppy and children at regular intervals: I fed my two-day-old sourdough starter that hasn't started doing anything yet, I rinsed my sprouts that haven't sprouted yet, made sweet red bean paste with adzuki beans, then made sticky rice cake with the paste later in the day for an afternoon snack. Taiya and William hated them, Jeremy thought they were okay, and I thought they were delicious. Taiya said they would be better with Nutella in the middle, and she is right. But I still liked them. The kids were "reading" books on Epic for much of the afternoon, which gave me some time to catch up on household work without feeling too guilty about their brains being melted by Glitter Force-like shows. 

Finished sticky rice cakes
with red bean paste filling.

Making sticky rice cakes.

Sourdough starter, day two. Still no activity.
I don't think our house is warm enough right now.

After a while Taiya and I sat down and she finished up her school work that she'd been putting off all "spring break" (last week). She hates doing it, so I tried to make it funny for her, making jokes about her fragmented sentences worksheet. After many minutes of me cracking her up by finishing sentence fragments in ridiculous ways, she said I was the funniest person she knows. Then she said actually Daddy was. Then she said actually Uncle Jared was. Stiff competition, certainly! I'm honored to be a bronze medalist among these jokers. 

For dinner I made a soup from my newest cookbook acquisition, Chetna's Healthy Indian, a soup with chickpeas, tomatoes, spinach, and butternut squash, spiced with cinnamon and cumin. It was so delicious. I made couscous to go with it, and it made it a warming, well-rounded meal. I highly recommend that cookbook, I have made several recipes in it and they all turned out well, even in spite of my having to leave things out or make substitutions, since I don't have easy access to many of the spices. 

You should make this the next time it's cold and rainy. 

The children watched a new Looney Tunes compilation Jeremy got at the store the other day after dinner, delighting in Tom & Jerry and Bugs Bunny. I sat downstairs working, enjoying the soundtrack to those old shows. There is so little talking in them, and the music is so expressive. I don't remember watching them much as a kid--we were mostly Sesame Street watchers--so it's all new to me, and it's a lot better (though there's a lot of painfully dated material) than I thought it would be. 

So, Day Fifteen, the third Monday of Stay Home Time, is put to bed. If there wasn't a global pandemic happening I would have been at NCAT's Soil Health Innovations Conference in Bozeman, Montana today, hobnobbing with some of the nations experts on soil health and sustainable and organic agriculture. It has been postponed until November so I haven't missed out entirely, but it was disappointing for it to be derailed. I know it is just one of many, many things that has been postponed, canceled, delayed, lost, or forgotten in this time. May we appreciate these events all the more when they are rescheduled!