The Big Pause

This particular blog post was supposed to be the first day of our trip to New Orleans. COVID19 changed that and everything else in our lives. When all of this started I wasn't planning on documenting it. It looked like Canada was going to avoid the worst of it but that quickly changed.

Our trip to New Orleans and Orlando was scheduled to start on March 16th and things looked promising in February and even into the first week of March. The counts were low in Orlando and New Orleans, there were no travel warnings and there was no specific reason not to go. It was early March that things started looking bad in Italy and when we started learning about the models. The models of where different countries sat on the Italy curve and things in the US didn't look good. Major centers had hundreds of cases despite low testing. It was at this time that I decided it would be prudent to buy toilet paper. Not in a hoarding kind of way but more in a making sure we had certain staples on hand in case supply chains started breaking down. On a trip to Costco on a Thursday it was apparent we weren't the only people thinking this way. Toilet paper, flour and cleaning supplies were all running low. Soon after this the number of cases in BC started to raise and a warning went out recommending against travel outside the province. This was the last straw for us because it was apparent that even if we went we would be asked to self-quarantine upon our return, likely without pay for Kerry. Within days Disneyland closed, cases started rising in New Orleans and then Disney World closed. We weren't happy but we knew we had made the right decision.

The first week of vacation was not what we had planned. Barb and Reg came down anyways because they were planning on looking after Oliver while we were away.  After a quick visit they went home to Oliver and Kerry and the kids joined them. The kids really wanted to get some sort of vacation in. I stayed behind and took the week off work so that I could get some things done around the house. I managed to order dirt and mulch for the garden just before our local nursery closed up. The garden was ready a month earlier then it usually is.

The second week of vacation the kids were home and I went back to work. By this time, stay at home orders were in place and the recommendation was that BC Hydro staff work from home. I went in one night and grabbed my keyboard, mouse, monitor and plants. I set up a temporary office in the guest room and tried to get a home routine in place. This involved starting around 7:30 am and making sure I got a bike ride in. Work was slow as people got used to working from home. The kids finished off their spring break and Kerry started preparing to help teachers work from home.

After Spring Break ended on the first two days of what was supposed to be back to school we still had no direction from the kids schools. Kerry went into her school for two days and the kids started to realize what life was going to be like stuck at home. We got together on the Tuesday night and agreed to having a family meeting at 8:00 am each morning where we would work out the plan for the day. It was going to important that we had a routine and that we all knew what everyone was expecting each day. 2000 square feet for four people is not a lot of space. Starting tomorrow I'll be trying to blog our experience daily. These are unprecedented times and deserve to be recorded.

Carter's Science Fair

Last year Carter got to go to the district science fair and won gold so this year there were high expectations, mostly from him. The easy thing for him to do would have been to just use his passion project and build a science fair project around that, however he felt he needed something he could test rather than just demonstrating hydraulic force. We offered him many suggestions but in the end he decided he wanted to hammer nails. That's it, just hammer nails into wood. There was an example on one of the sites he felt he was allowed to reference and from there he had to build a science fair project.

Once again he paired up with his best friend Jevin and for this project it was even more important that the two of them do the vast majority of the work themsleves. The hypothesis centered around whether the density of wood impacted how hard it was to hammer a nail into it. I helped by providing 8 different types of wood with different densities and I also happened to have a small shoemakers anvil that they could use to do the hammering. It was important that they had a consistent hammering force so they used the anvil and a pulley and built a tower that would drop the anvil on the nail. They then did this for 5 nails per board and determined their results. I was a bit surprised based on how simple the effort was but they created a great presentation board and were able to speak to their whole project. Once again they were finalists for their class and school and got to go to the District fair where they won gold. Even higher expectations for next year.

Carter's Passion Project

Carter is in grade six this year and was given an interesting assignment. He got 4 months to do a 'Passion Project'. He could pick any topic and do whatever he wanted as long as he was passionate about it. It could be a report or in his case a physical build. We had seen plans for this hydraulic arm before and decided it would be a good project to work on. He teamed up with his best friend Jevin and his initial plan was to do a prototype in cardboard since that was what many of the online videos showed. This seemed like a good idea but I think we didn't really have the right cardboard so the first example was less than successful.

Luckily I happen to have a fairly well equipped shop and the skills to take a fun project and take it to the extreme. I of course did help them with deciding on things like materials but my goal was to have them do as many of the steps that they could. This included using the scroll saw, drill press, handsaw, drill and hammer. They were also responsible for any sort of painting and when it came to the build, I helped with the initial assembly but as we were nearing the end we took the whole thing apart and they had to build it themselves. In the end we were successful in lifting and moving a pop can. Great fun!

BC Hydro Christmas Party

Every year I think it will be our last year at the BC Hydro Christmas party but every year someone decides we should go. This year Carter asked about it in advance and made sure that I signed up. The age limit is 12 so technically he has one more year but even this year it became quite noticeable that our family had the oldest kids. The event was once again at Science World which is nice but also gets a bit monotonous. They open the doors early from 7:30 to 9:30 for only BC Hydro family members and we get to wander the exhibits before everything opens and we can stay into the day if we want.

One of the reasons that this might be our last year is because they switched up the format a bit this year. Not sure if it was BC Hydro or Science World but instead of an open buffet of morning goodies, there were pre-boxed breakfasts. The food was okay but we weren't happy about all the packaging and the limited selection. The highlight was that one of the exhibits was dog and cat themed. We put in an hour or two and then headed back home so Callie could go to dance.

Our New Second Car Modo

Our household now needs approximately 1.1 vehicles. 90% of the time the one vehicle is fine but sometimes we have events that require us to separate and use two vehicles. I figure it's $5k to $8k to have a vehicle so rather than buying we are lucky enough in the lower mainland to have access to car sharing networks. There is now one that has a car just a few blocks from our house plus other vehicles at the skytrain station. I tried it out for the first time when I had to get to a blood donation. I could have taken transit but the car was faster and I wanted to try it out. I picked it up at the Skytrain with no trouble and now know what to do when we need a second vehicle. Much more economical.

Gingerbread Mayhem

A very short post on Gingerbread making this year, mainly because it went so quickly and I didn't get a lot of pictures. The kids still wanted to decorate so I made the house parts on the Saturday and we picked up materials the same day for decorating on Sunday. We went to the cake decorating store which I now regret because it made this much more expensive than it should be. We might as well have bought kits. Callie had two friends and Carter had one and we had just enough icing to put together five houses. I may try to plan more next year so we can do some more interesting things like lights or moving parts.

Mark Hall - Celebrity Tree

For the past several years we've been getting a live tree. Or at least a tree that was recently live. One year I'd like to get a tree with the roots still attached that gets planted after Christmas but I'm not sure where to go for that. The tree farm we've settled on is called Dogwood Christmas Tree farm and it opens at the end of November and is usually sold out within the first few weekends. It's the actual farm so you get to cut your own trees or take one of the ones they've already cut. Those are typically pretty expensive because they cut the tall ones and you pay by the foot.

Kerry was very excited during our hunt because we were warned that some of the trees that had blue ribbon on them may have a bit of fake snow from filming a Hallmark film in the summer time. Hallmark has started making these utterly ridiculous movies that they release at Christmas time. This year there was 30 new ones and when you're making that many you know the quality has to be high. I follow the Christmas tree farm on Facebook so I knew about it in advance and with a little sleuthing we determined that the movie was the "Mistletoe Secret" staring Patrick Duffy and Kelly Pickler.

We found the marked trees and Kerry insisted on getting a celebrity tree so after a bit of searching we found our tree and named him Mark Hall. He's a noble fir and we later discovered he had his part cut when they did the final editing. It's a shame too because he was a great tree. We got a good deal during the height measurement too because the tree measuring guy works at Kerry's new school. We strapped Mark to the top of our car and he fit nicely into our living for the whole month of December. We watched the parts with the tree farm in the movie but Kerry couldn't stand to watch this particular movie. Even she has her limits.