Quaran-crafts

So many crafts.

I've long been a believer in the power of productive boredom.  The key piece of my doctoral thesis fell into place in my head while I was scrubbing a kitchen floor.  I discovered the main theorem in one of my recent papers while I was up in the middle of the night with insomnia.  The idea for making bicycle chandeliers came to me when I was stuck on a long layover in an airport.

So the quarantine we've all been slogging our way through has proved to be fertile ground for wild ideas, and even for tame ideas, these past two months.  Even though I have had classes to teach and committee meetings to attend, the fact that my kids are grown and out of the house means that I have had pockets of time scattered through my days.  We all know how valuable pockets are, women more than anyone.  

Ideas keep growing out of my time-pockets, like weeds grow out of an unwatched garden.  One of the most delicious ideas turned into soup.  Last summer's move to this new house meant that I had canned a lot of fruit and a bunch of turkey stock, but no tomatoes.   It turns out, though, that turkey-peach soup is Most Excellent.  The peaches provide a mild acidity in lieu of the tomatoes, and because I do low-sugar (actually, no-sugar) canning, the combination is sweet without being overwhelmingly so.

Other "creative" ideas are almost boring to relate,  . . .

like, I figured out how to reattach a part of our front door frame that had gotten loose. 

And while I was out on the porch, I hung up a peacock that came out of a neighbor's "FREE" box.
Welcome to our porch, Peacock!  

This is the same porch that features the Scary Doorknob, by the way.

Also, while this might not seem super creative to other people, it is to me:  I figured out how to hang our cast iron frying pans.  It took me months to come up with a way to do this that didn't involve drilling holes into the decorative tile around the stove.  I finally, last week, figured out I could install a board underneath the cabinets in a secure way, and then put the hooks in this board.  I'd foresightedly snagged the board from a construction project at my school last fall, just before the workers chucked it into a dumpster.  The placement of the board means that people can't really even see it, but it's perfectly effective at holding a bunch of very sturdy hooks for a bunch of very heavy pans.  This new arrangement has me so happy, because our pans are much easier to get at now, and I think they look nice.  My whole question-mark-shaped kitchen is just full of geometry puzzles begging to be solved.  

Hanging pans!  Yay!

And also: new dog tricks!  Some of us might be climbing the walls, but I've been teaching Prewash to walk on walls. There's a wall near our campus that has lots of pillars, and she's learning to jump up and down and traverse this wall as I walk beside her on the sidewalk.  

Or maybe she's practicing to be a gargoyle.  

Plus, of course, masks galore, in various shapes and disguises.   And also, homemade birthday presents, made from stuff I happen to have lying around.  

A double-birthday breakfast

I know I already bragged on my daughter's R2Dtrashcan, but let me flaunt my hot-gun prowess one more time:

This is not the droid you're looking for!

In addition, I gave my husband (aka the Lord of the Laundry) something for those times when we wanted to do a little bit of laundry.  

See the little jeans ands t-shirt and laundry bag?  aww

There's a soap drawer, of course.

The inside drum, courtesy of a peanut container that my daughter gifted me with.  

And it turns out, he liked it so much he put it on his dresser, a place of honor.  I'd suggested we could keep it downstairs with the real washer, but he pooh-poohed the idea because "the humidity would get to it."  So this morning when I came back from my run to find my guy still in bed, he asked me, "do you have a little laundry for me to throw in the washer?"  He likes it.

Next week, I'll be done with online teaching and with grading, and my pockets of time will get bigger and deeper.  I'm kinda excited to see what happens.