Day 10 - SkyLines from the French Lock-down: Ordinary Life

Bonjour and Good morning you absolutely beautiful folks who are staying at home!

Café life has become a fond memory for now

You know what?  You make my day.  Whether it's by reading our posts here, commenting, leaving us notes on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, and those emails with memes that make us laugh, videos that inspire, and best of all - photos from your daily lives, you are lifting us up.  And so today, I hope I can do a little lifting for you.  Come into an ordinary day under quarantine.  How lucky we are to have a shelter during this storm and you for company!

Day 10 - After yesterday's seriously blunt dispatch on the gravity of this epidemic, I woke up

Rain, rain go away.. oh heck!
Just get on with it!

and said, "Gotta think about positive things today.  We're all up to our ears in bad news." (Right, maybe I used a French word for bad news, you know, like MERDE.)  My partner, Y opened the  shutters and it was raining!  Hard. Ugh.  I tried to think positive and stayed in bed.  No, not for the day, just long enough to check the messages and look at the headlines.  That definitely made me want to stop doing that and I pulled myself to a sitting position.  I heard the shower running and knew I'd better get going on my morning exercises.

My brain is foggy first thing in the morning.  The kids in my class could have told you, "Never go near the teacher until she'd finished her coffee and the morning quiet routine is done."  Little did they know that all those exercises they had to do first thing in the morning were actually designed not only to make them review the previous lessons

The headline: The Wave
Batters Paris

and establish the habit of routine tasks being done first - the routine was to help my foggy brain stay on task and get the roll taken, verify that homework was done and on the desk, get my head around the day's lessons to come, and breathe.  Now that I'm retired and a writer, I have my own exercise routine to keep me focused.  And it definitely makes me breathe.  I lay there a few more seconds not wanting to brave the cold just yet.

The inner dialogue prompted me, "What was that last thought when you finished reading and turned off the light?"  I wondered.  "No," my inner thoughts chided me, "Not the MU problem presented by Hofstadter... that clever writer."  Oh yeah, I remember - sometime between doing the blog, working on the novel, reading the news, fixing meals with my partner, drinking lots of hot herbal tea, doing exercises, playing with the cat to give her some exercise, and getting a bit of housework in, I'd take stock of the fridge and pantry.  Especially the meat my partner buys for his main dishes.  I've never had to deal with it, but I'm pretty sure those dates on the packages probably are important.  Most of my vegetarian stuff will just lose it's pretty sheen or consistency.  Most of it is fine after that date thing.  I've proven it many times when I was living alone.

Okay - I had my plan.  Anyway, it was time to exercise, shower, and join Y for breakfast.  I realized that there was something different when I saw that he hadn't eaten the tip off the

Baguette with and without
"Le Crouton."

baguette.  Now that is almost downright un-French!  But when I asked him about it, he

said, "It's glacial outside.  I had to keep my hands in my pockets!  Oh, that explained it.  I made up for it by breaking off the "Crouton"  as it it called and ate it right away.  It might be bad luck not to, you know.  (Oh yeah, I loved it too when I realized where we'd gotten the word crouton from!)  Gotta keep up these traditions.  The newspaper was next to my cereal bowl.  I read it while I savored my mug of coffee.  As I might have predicted, the news was not on my list of "makes me happy" today. 

So I decided to play with the cat.  The wind-up mouse proved to be a big hit.  It's always amusing to find that the simplest toys make her list.  A piece of wadded up paper, an empty bag or box, the price tag hanging from a new kitchen whisk.  Life if full of amazing things if you are a cat.  More than a dozen times I have bought something whiz-bang exciting that the

Someone loves to play

manufacturers say cats will love.  And a few times she is interested - for about two days.  Only two have actually worked out.  The boll trapped in the circle with a scratching surface at the center and the Shiny bird feathers on a fishing pole.  Those are both at my village house well outside the kilometer range of this confinement with my sweetheart.  I saw this toy at the supermarket for 2 euros on Tuesday and thought, it's worth a try.  And yes, she loves it.  Just the sound of me winding it up makes her eyes dilate in anticipation.  It's exercise form me too as I have to monitor and wind it up every few minutes.  Finally, the mouse was chased down the stairs and is somewhere in the garage now.  I let it be.

Then I took stock.  I made lists with dates and began a rough outline of what we would have for our lunches and dinners until the end of the month.  And it's amazing the variety of spices and

Taking Stock and
Planning Meals

packets of things that are stored in the cupboards.  I'll have to improvise on the veggies and

meat sub that will go into that Pad Thai kit, but mmmm, it does look tempting.  As for serving it on Asian noodles, I'm sure spaghetti will do just fine.  However, today, we needed a main dish and it had to be quick.  I'd spent too long reading the paper, playing with the cat and taking stock.  It was nearly 13:00.  I looked at my list.  There were four large carrots in the veggie bin.  Yannick had the last of his roasted chicken in herbes de Provence to finish off and there were a few slices of two bell peppers and two eggs left in last week's carton.  The sesame seeds in the cupboard had reminded me how much we love glazed sesame carrots.  So, I scrambled my eggs with onion, bell pepper, and salsa while Y put his chicken in the over to get hot.  Then he peeled the carrots for me and worked on making our salad for the entree.

I took my scrambled eggs off the burner and put on a lid to keep them warm.  I thin sliced the

carrots  and heated oil in a sauce pan as he set the table.  The carrots went into the hot pan and

Glazed sesame carrots with a bit of
hot pepper - simple and tasty.

I sautéed them for a few moments, then added the magic ingredients:  something sweet (today it's maple syrup), something Piquanté (today it's pureed hot peppers - be sparing with it!)  a bit of dry mustard  and ground black pepper sprinkled across the top, and sesame seeds.  Next, I added a half cup of water, stirred it all up and covered the pan to let it simmer.  I turned down the heat to low-middle and joined my partner at the table.

We enjoyed the salad (he'd added Tabouli with a dash of curry to a traditional green mix then

adorned it with black Greek olives and raisins)  and discussed our plans for the house, when we

though we might do some yoga today (darling, if you will vacuum the floor, I'll descale the shower...)  and whether the rain had stopped. (It hadn't).  He got up and washed the salad bowl and I left the table to put my eggs back on low.  The carrots were cooked and almost ready to be a side dish. I took off the lid and set the burner on 9.  The water sizzled.  I added another drizzle of maple syrup  (if you don't have that - honey, brown sugar, corn syrup, or even white sugar in a pinch will do!)  

The water evaporated quickly and I added another dash of oil as I now flipped the carrots continuously.  (As a person who believes in buying special seasonings, oils and vinegar when I

Déjeuner - la salade et plat principale

can, I have a small reserve of sesame oil, but regular oil will do.)  I kept at it until I saw the first signs of braising - oh the smell is incredible!  I turned off the heat and kept turning the carrots.  The glaze was now even and there were many bits of almost burned sugar decorating the edges of the carrots.  We quickly put our main course on our plates and divided the carrots.  BLISS...  I'm having my coffee now as I write this to you.  He's done the dishes.  (Oh yeah, now that is one sexy quality, I assure you!!)  The cat is asleep in her basket.  

Soon, Y will vacuum and I will give the shower glass that treatment to keep the limescale away. 

I do love the results even if I don't love cleaning...  We'll turn on YouTube and do our Yoga. together.  I may fall over if I have to stand on one leg for too long, but we will laugh.  There will be more hot tea.  I'll work on the third Cinnamon Sands Academy Book.  (Those kids on Mars think they have it tough living under a domed city... at least they have parks to go out and play in!)

I think we'll build a fire on the hearth this afternoon, it's still rainy and feels unseasonably cold (10 Celsius/50 Fahrenheit) for the south of France.  And then there will be dinner - just like I've

Why does one of my books have
a different sized cover???

put down in the plan.  We'll have "Carol's Soup" as named for our sister-in-law who shared her recipe and then do our Carnivore/Vegetarian main dishes separately but eat together.  (I love this guy and fortunately for us I'm not that kind of Vegetarian.  I accept everybody's right to eat the way they choose.)  There will be baguette, there will be cheese and inexpensive table wine from a box.  We will binge watch our favorite zombie series until late and then read until midnight.  And it will have been another, very ordinary, very beautiful day under a cloud filled and rainy sky amidst reports that are much scarier than the zombies.  And we will have made it through Day 10 of the quarantine.  Yesterday, 231 people in France didn't have that chance.  They died from CV-19.  

Yeah, it's time to breathe deeply and gear up for the day.  I'm not talking about some metaphysical yoga thing here.  I mean take stock.  It's what we all need to do now.  The morning has come and our lives need a new routine in order to use this gift of time that has been imposed on us.  So breathe both physically and mentally - try to breathe in the good energy that your body and mind needs.  Face this challenge calmly and let's do it!  Ready, Set, GO!

How I envision the end of the day

À demain, nos amis!  Link to DAY 11