Month: March 2020

The Plan: In order to stop this time becoming day after day of aimless drifting we need some sort of structure. The first trick seems to be to strike a balance between fun and Miss Trunchbull (“a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of pupils and teachers alike” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Trunchbull)

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the kids to get dressed during the week. Given the chance, they’d wear their pyjamas all day every day. After some grumbling, they conceded to get dressed and agreed to follow something along the lines of a school morning routine, but with less rigid time constraints.

That’s about as far as I got. The rest of our first day was mostly spent firefighting! The laptop network adaptor keeps disappearing, my daughter’s Safari browser won’t work well with some Google Docs and my son’s Microsoft account was locked out (when or why did I even create that account?).

Then it was 3pm and it’s only fair to call time on home school for the day. Tomorrow we’ll sit down and sketch out a high-level plan for the weekdays.

As for my own plans, I repurposed an old Facebook page of mine into this one and resurrected my own website (more on that at a later date).

I also went for a run and learned that “rush hour” is still a bit busy on the roads and the pavements were full of families, dogs and other runners. I’ll choose my route and time better on my next run.

Whilst working from home last Friday, my employer contacted me to tell me I’d be on furlough during April. It was a bolt from the blue. I am still employed, still getting paid, but I’m not to do any work, in fact, I mustn’t do any work! So it’s paid holiday? Yep, seems so.

Three days later and I’m still wondering what the catch is – more on that later, but in the short-term, there’s no catch.

Whilst my wife and I were both working from home, we have young(ish) children who weren’t really getting much of our attention during the working day. We’d only been working from home for seven days, but we had noticed that our youngest (9), in particular, was struggling to occupy himself.

Realising that this was also an opportunity to do some of the housebound things I’ve been wanting to do for ages, I grabbed a pencil and paper and started scribbling ideas for myself, the kids, all of us together, oh, and DIY to keep Mrs Furlough happy 😉

The resulting mindmap might contain more activities than I can realistically achieve, or even start, in the given month. That said, this situation could go on for longer, so I’ll plan for that.

Here follows, over a series of posts, how I took advantage of the time given to me.