Category Archives: Kitchen

Time for some home updates!

Kitchen

Well the end of March brought some unexpected home updates! Our dishwasher died. Which ultimately led to replacing all our kitchen appliances. We bought them all about 15 years ago, so it was time!

We decided to go ahead and paint the kitchen, so it would all be fresh. Which then led to, maybe we should also freshen up our main upstairs bathroom.

We both love to cook and prefer to cook on Gas. Our house had a natural gas line already plumbed though the range we had was electric. We replaced the electric with gas, which was very exciting. As all home improvement goes, it is never as simple as one might think! The power for the electric range was 220 and the gas line in the wall was so close to the cabinet it would crimp the gas line. So we needed to a new 110 electrical outlet and some extra parts to route the gas line up so it would not crimp.

Happily…..after one week of intensive daily labor, the kitchen was ready.

Stash busting….fun hotpads or mug rugs

Embroidery, Kitchen

Well, nothing like a quarantine to provide time for working on projects.   Unless of course you are  now teaching remotely without any tools or training!  Lucky for me this is my second career – my accounting, project management, and systems background skills are all in play!

What is hard to balance – for an A type personality who has worked really hard to leave work-at-work and home-at-home – is worlds colliding.

The students are VERY thankful for something that feels predictable and normal. Teaching this way actually takes even more time.  A single 10 minute video needs to be scripted, recorded, saved and compressed, exported then posted to the platform students are able to access.  It easily takes 30 minutes for an 8 min lesson.

To ensure the greatest flexibility and accessibility, providing videos allows students to access their lessons on their available time.  Using video conferencing needs to really balance students’ ability to connect with their peers – the only way if you are truly sheltering – while making the most to ensure learning can happen for the week.

It also needs to allow students and families to manage what works best for them, many families are in crisis.  Adding more stress to their already ‘weirdly strange world’ is not what I want for my students.  I love them and miss them every single day.

My sweetie worries about me because I honestly do work from 6AM through 9PM every day of the week currently.

Today I took the afternoon to step away….I love winter, snow, and Christmas.  So…..I made frolicking snowmen.  They can been used as hot pads (they have insul brite) or happy little mug rugs.