Week 01

January 4, 2021 to January 10, 2021

After a few weeks of yo-yo'ing between Tier 2 and Tier 3, we welcomed in the New Year with a full national lockdown!

School started back up, with remote learning in full swing, and both kids having full schedules. The primary school schedule is a little more flexible, but secondary school is pretty much full lessons between 9am and 3pm, (with lunch and breaks, of course).

I'm not sure how we got through the previous national lockdowns with only one laptop between the kids, but this time it wasn't going to cut it, so had to buy an extra laptop. After much research to find a decently priced, well spec'd laptop - basically it had to be able to run Microsoft Teams (full app) and Roblox (for the kids own sanity), I settled on a Surface Laptop Go. Reasonably priced forthe spec, slightly higher than my budget in mind, but I've had other Surface devices and know what I'm dealing with, plus minimal adware/bloat.

I've struggled to get myself back into a work mindset. I'd relocated from my garage-office to back inside the house, at the dining table, a couple of weeks before Christmas, as my garage-office was starting to feel too cold, (poorly insulated). This was fine whilst the kids were at school, but the past week of remote-learning has proven to be not very productive for me.

Daily walks, mostly around the local park, quite repetitive towards the end of the week.

Watched quite a few movies, KK has convinced me to do the MCU marathon with her. This week was Phase One of the Infinity Saga - Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers. KK has really enjoyed them, but I'm slightly Marvel'd out for one week. Might give it a rest before starting Phase Two.

Our Saturday family movie night we watched Soul on Disney+, we enjoyed it very much.

Another lockdown thing I'm doing with a couple of my music-loving neighbours is, Alphabet Albums. Starting with "A", each fortnight we take the next letter of the alphabet and pick an album starting with the artist (band name or surname). Selections for "A" are: ABBA - The Visitors, Tori Amos - Under The Pink, and Paul Anka - Rock Swings.

I also completed a couple of jigsaws...