Shutting down, and a simple craft

The local schools are closing tomorrow, the governor has banned restaurants and similar establishments from offering dining-in services, and the library is maybe closed--their website has conflicting information. My husband's employer is having everyone start working from home soon, which is going to force us to upgrade to faster internet.

No one seems to have a plan beyond the next couple of weeks. The present measures are not so much "flattening the curve" as they are just delaying it a few weeks. From this post by The Silicon Graybeard, it appears that we had better be increasing our medical system's capacity to cope with coronavirus cases as quickly as possible. That is possible, with a focused mobilization of resources.

I am viewing this season as something like an unplanned sabbatical on a large scale. The difficulty is that our society is not at all set up for it, and instead requires a regular income to pay for debt and all the other services that people and businesses are now dependent on.

Being reasonably well-supplied on food and toilet paper, I spent a very small amount over the weekend to stock up on intellectual stimulation for the coming weeks. I went to the library's book sale area, which I had all to myself, and bought a German-English dictionary and the only other book in German that they had, which appears to be a collection of articles by Sigmund Freud on the unconscious mind. I've never gotten very far with German; we have one book on the language, but it's from the 1940's, with Gothic-like type that is difficult to decipher.

I also looked at craft and decorating books, but didn't buy any. I did pick up some ideas for projects, both from the books that I looked at, and the thrift store that I visited next. It was also sparsely populated, with one cashier in a mask and gloves.

Yesterday, I mixed a little red craft paint with some shaving cream that we had, and we made marbled shaving cream prints. We learned that the technique works even when the paint is mixed evenly into the shaving cream; you just have to swirl the shaving cream around, and the paper picks up irregular amounts of color from the irregular surface.

Mostly we printed onto sheets of paper, but I also tried printing directly onto a white cardboard box that I had, and a piece of white fabric. These prints came out, but they were affected by the surface textures:  the paper surface of the box is slightly coarser than office paper, and the fabric's woven texture visually competes with the marbling.