13-Aug-2020
If you count the day we got back, this is our sixth day of home quarantine.
I'm too superstitious to make the cross before the evening...
A routine is developing.
We like to stand on the balcony for a while in the cool of the morning, watching the world lighten, and listening to the frilly song of the earliest birds and the cry of the chooks. We eat our bowls of breakfast out there, too (standing up, as we hadn't got round to buying balcony chairs before we left in January).
Early morning views from our balcony
Our dance sessions continue. We now have Turkish, Indian, Japanese, and Malaysian tunes on the list.
Spring-cleaning has also continued, but is hopefully tailing off now.
My cooking duties have seemed never-ending. We had a second delivery of food on Tuesday, from Everrise this time. They had a good range of veggies, so we ordered lots, and I cooked them up for the freezer (which has probably never been so full).
As with all delivery services, the full range of goods is not available, so we're still doing without many items, but given our utter inability to score any supermarket delivery all the time we were in the UK, I'm really grateful for what we have been able to acquire.
It's very good to get back to our veggie-heavy, carb-light way of eating.
Soup with sayur pahit (I'm not sure of the English equivalent). First time cooking this vegetable, and it turned out quite tasty
Coconut chicken (with chilies, which are currently going in everything because I've missed them so much). Really nice wrapped up in wong bok leaves
The mug bread dough I used to make in UK can also be cooked in a pan, and is a good way of using processed cheese (the only type we can get delivered)
Continuing the habit we started in hospital, we're still progressing through Series 4 of Mad Men. Despite all the travails of our era (and one of my huge fears at the moment is that we'll move out of a major pandemic into a major conflict...), I'm glad we're not back in 1964...
Of course, alongside our usual pursuits, we try to keep abreast of the covid news.
As of yesterday, we'd had no local transmissions of covid in Sarawak for 14 days, which means we've gone back to being a "green zone".
So there was that little blip that we were unfortunately part of, but since then, it's simmered back down again.
But of course you can't trust this spiky little menace to stay simmered down. We're terribly saddened by its reappearance in New Zealand, while Victoria, also once our home, is still battling to contain its outbreak (although it looks as though it might have passed the worst).
So, all things considered, we're doing quite well. On Saturday we'll have a little celebration in honour of the half-way mark...
The fridge magnet we brought back from a country we visited a thousand years ago...