stunt_muppet | well this sure the fuck is a thing that's happening isn't it

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well this sure the fuck is a thing that's happening isn't it

So. huh. last time I posted here there like. wasn't a worldwide pandemic and it hadn't been a week and a half since I left my house.

I'm okay - I'm actually very fortunate in that I'm able to work from home, I'm still getting paid, we're well-stocked on food and toilet paper, and i have Fiance living with me so I'm not completely alone. no one I know is sick so far, and my family's able to stay home as well; Fiance's family is also safe and well.

I'm scared - of course I am - but in a weird way it feels like the outside world is finally matching how I've been feeling since 2018 with the sense of looming doom and uncertainty/fear of the future, which ironically makes it way easier to talk to people about it and way easier to make logical preparations for emergencies and, i don't know. believe that i might be able to band together with other people and help each other or something.

I've been doing a lot of cooking and freezing soups to stretch out our necessary trips to the grocery, including trying some new recipes, and I'm in the process of disassembling some old bedsheets to make into masks and washrags. Saving scraps for compost and bones to make my own broth, and I was able to get some yeast on our last grocery outing so I can potentially make my own bread for the first time. It's not real self-sufficiency, not by a long shot, but it feels like a start, and one I needed to make.

Hope you're all holding up okay out there, and if you're stuck working the "essentials" you're able to stay safe.

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I’ve made a couple of posts about what I’ve been doing since things started closing down, but today I left the house for the first time in a week to work at work, i.e. empty the book drops, shelve, etc. I don’t care, I would much rather do that than online video classes at home.

I’ve been doing a sort of crash course in library science for people who don’t have a library degree. It’s very informative but I think the video narrator is a robot. (I first said this as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more I suspect that it really IS a text-to-speech program.) I’d much rather be at the library. 🤷‍♀️

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Lots of love from the other side of the internet! I’m glad y’all are doing ok - let me know how the bread baking goes (or if you have some bread baking questions)!

Not much to do here except work on projects at home, but the cats have been super spoiled lately, since I’m always home, I usually keep the windows open. If I don’t wake up when the sun is up, they get upset and try to open the blinds and windows themselves (Not Good).

Anyway, here’s to at-home solidarity.💕

and, i don't know. believe that i might be able to band together with other people and help each other or something.

Aww, I'm really glad.

Meanwhile -- composting, that's awesome! And since you mention making bread, have you seen/would you be interested in the twitter thread about nursing store bought yeast into a self-sustaining starter? I haven't tried it myself, but it just seems so cool.

I've been doing a lot of cooking and freezing soups to stretch out our necessary trips to the grocery, including trying some new recipes, and I'm in the process of disassembling some old bedsheets to make into masks and washrags. Saving scraps for compost and bones to make my own broth, and I was able to get some yeast on our last grocery outing so I can potentially make my own bread for the first time.

This is so cool!!

<3

Edited 2020-04-10 17:12 (UTC)

Our bosses at work have been really talking up the virtual classes we can take if we have nothing to do, which is nice, but if I really wanted to switch fields at this point I'd probably have to go get a whole other degree, so just taking extra classes feels sort of pointless when I could instead be clearing out the backlog that I normally never have time to work on.

If there's no one physically in the library I don't know that there'd be much harm in you going there to take care of things like the book drops, provided you had gloves and everything. I'm glad you're able to do that and keep on top of things.

Oh gosh, I hope your blinds have held up okay. >___> Apparently Lucas is having the time of his life over at my mom's. My uncle is staying at her place so that he can telework wince his internet at home isn't up to it, so he has extra people to pay attention to him at all times every day.

I haven't quite got around to bread-making yet, since I've been focused on cooking more soups to freeze and making masks, the latter of which ended up being a little more complicated than I thought it was going to be. Since I was making it out of a bedsheet, it frayed a lot more than I expected, so I've had to adjust what I'm going to do to make straps to attach the mask. I did pick out elastic from the bedsheets I'm using, so I could potentially use those instead of the sewn straps that the tutorial called for. I tried doing an overlock stitch to keep the straps from fraying, but the trouble with that is that it takes ten million years. Maybe I can do that while I'm waiting for bread to rise!

I haven't seen the Twitter thread! I'd seen one on how to grow your own yeast with dried fruit, flour, and water, but not one on using store-bought yeast to grow your own. I actually have a thing of dried fruit in my cabinet that I could potentially use for that, but that involved a degree of experimenting that I wasn't quite comfortable with in case it made a huge mess.

I really miss gardening now that I'm living in a condo, so having the compost bucket is actually really comforting. If you balance the materials right, it just smells like dirt, which I miss, it's taught me a lot about soil composition and how to restore potting soil that's already had something growing in it, and on a basic level it's fascinating watching bits of celery and coffee grounds and paper towel break down and combine into something recognizable as soil. I've been using sharewaste.com to find people nearby who have yards or mixers I can take my compost to, so that way I just keep a bucket on my balcony, keep it carbon balanced so it doesn't smell, and drop it off at someone else's house every month or so.

I went back today for the first time since last week, and there’s actually very little shelving to be done. But yeah, no public, minimal staff who try to spread out, everything from the book drops sits on a cart for three days before it’s checked in, etc.

I haven’t gotten involved with it yet, but the library took on a project to sew cloth face masks for the city’s health department. The first batch was a huge hit, because they requested 2500 more. So staff from every branch have been working a few at a time (so it’s not too crowded) to make those. I’ve been reluctant to get involved since I don’t want people to know how helpless I am with a sewing machine, but apparently a few people measure and cut the fabric, a few people sew, and a few thread the ribbons or elastic. So I guess I can still get involved without embarrassing myself.

ETA: I meant to ask if you’re still getting married in June or if that’s shot to hell now.

Edited 2020-04-15 02:58 (UTC)

I'd seen one on how to grow your own yeast with dried fruit, flour, and water, but not one on using store-bought yeast to grow your own.

This turns out to be the same thread I saw, just remembered more accurately by you than by me!

(In figuring that out, I also noticed that in the replies there's another fascinating thread on capturing wild yeast -- really wild, just floating around under a tree wild -- and relentlessly feeding it flour until everything that doesn't eat flour dies off and you can bake with it. I never would have imagined it could be that simple!)

I've been using sharewaste.com to find people nearby who have yards or mixers I can take my compost to, so that way I just keep a bucket on my balcony, keep it carbon balanced so it doesn't smell, and drop it off at someone else's house every month or so.

That is so incredibly cool! I never realized compost didn't have to smell unpleasant if it's well tended, and it's so awesome that you can find people to take yours so it doesn't just keep building up. It makes me wonder if we could manage a little bit too... I'll have to do some reading!

Aw, thank you! Admittedly I've only done two of the things on this list - I've yet to make the bread or the broth. Some of those frozen bones are from cooked poultry and some are from raw, and according to the Joy of Cooking you shouldn't simmer raw bones and cooked bones together since they have a long gap between cooking times, so that's an extra step I'd have to take. And as far as the bread, I haven't looked up the recipe yet. This weekend, maybe!

Good on the library both for keeping everyone safe and for getting involved with that mask project! And yeah, I know even with my rudimentary mask-making it's helped a lot to have Fiance on fabric-cutting duty while I focused on the sewing, so you'll be plenty helpful without getting on the sewing machine.

We did have to reschedule the wedding. Right now the state the venue's in is closing all stores and events until June 10th, and we were scheduled for June 20th; it was outside the closure deadline but it still felt like cutting it too close. So far we've moved it up to early September, which should be early enough that the pastel-y color palate we picked doesn't look too weird. Even if it did, whatever. I'm sure people will get it if I just pick up the summer wedding I had planned and move it slightly later in the year. It's not like everyone else's lives haven't been put on hold.

Good luck!!! :'D

So I realized I'd emailed you but not replied to this comment! Thank you for linking me to the thread about retrieving wild yeast, because that was both informative and hysterical. Especially the thing with the muntjac, which I had no idea lived in the UK! I don't know where I thought they lived, and tbh if one was to collect wild yeast I hadn't considered that wild animals eating your flour as one of the hazards involved.

As far as the compost, I mentioned it my email, but the number one thing I've done to stop it from stinking is making sure there's enough paper, cardboard, dried leaves, etc. in the bucket. It's made dealing with it a lot more pleasant and therefore makes it easier to keep composting!

It's amazing to me that deer the size of small dogs are spreading feral over the UK. Sometimes the world is more a really amazing place.

And thank you so much for the composting tips! I am really intrigued by this whole greens versus browns business, and I'm tentatively hopeful about selling other household members on the idea. I will definitely report back if that goes anywhere!

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