A Quarantine Pencil Meet

We recently got a bunch of photos printed, which is a lovely thing to do and something we should do more often. In doing so, while scrolling through all the pictures on my phone, I stumbled across a bunch of photos I took back over Christmas break. We had gotten Caleb and Naomi some pencils for Christmas, and we, in all of the excitement of quarantine, had a pencil meet in our home. We sharpened them all up, and we discussed scintillating features including colour, scratchiness and whether or not we liked pencils with erasers on the end.

Sometimes people ask us what we do without a TV, and I guess this is it, what we do. We have organized discussions about stationery. Here, from deep in the archives, in a blog post about another pencil meet that once occurred in a bubble tea shop, something that seems like a dream.

In any case, it was a delight to look back on something. Christmas was just a couple of months ago, but it seems like ages and ages. We are still in that exact same endless twilight zone, being in quarantine, shop closed, studio shop a cavernous, dark space, traversed only by dust motes and mail through the slot, but time has been particularly fickle these last several months.

Life continues to stagger forward, news of new releases trickling in through emails and on social media. Jon has been hassling me to post more on Instagram, and all I have most days are pictures of Chicken. Caleb broke his backpack zipper the other day so I spent an inordinate amount of time online shopping around for a new one for him, and ended up getting him the exact same one but in a different colour. Deja vu, but slightly different, the world repeats itself, time cycles back and forth.

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Currently reading: Isabel Allende’s In the Midst of Winter

Currently looking forward to: take out sushi and a movie night on the projector

Currently enjoying: trail mix

Current number of overdue library books: 14

Latest heard from the mouth of babes:

Naomi: Did you know that Alex’s mom is also named mama?

Caleb and Naomi got wooden swords for Christmas. Here is Chicken, looking at me, ascertaining the new dangers in his world.