Since March, many have been struggling with boredom and searching for something to do with the extra time on their hands. Three Burlingame students share their newfound hobbies which they have acquired since shelter-in-place began.

Over quarantine, freshman Melia Kramer took up baking with her mother. After hearing that their friends had started, they decided to try for themselves. Kramer and her mother found tutorials on YouTube for sourdough bread and they purchased sourdough starter from the farmers market. 

“It was really fun. It took quite a long time, especially for sourdough because you have to let us sit. It took almost a whole day,” Kramer said.

Kramer and her mother also take baking classes on Friday afternoons. 

“We made these really good cookies from this lady named Jennifer Tyler Lee. She has a cookbook,” Kramer said. 

Kramer has made challah, sourdough, whole wheat and white bread as well as scones and cookies. 

 “My mom and I have gotten to spend a lot more time together at home. We’ve given it to our friends and they’ve enjoyed it. It’s nice to do stuff for other people.”

Worm composting is using worms to compost and recycle organic material. It is great for the environment and a way to help support the local community. Senior Sydney Roncal started her own worm compost bin over the summer.      

“It’s a huge Rubbermaid bin, and you put some dirt and some newspaper in with the worms; and unlike normal composting where everything breaks down by itself, the worms eat the food that I put and their poop is compost,” senior Sydney Roncal said. 

In June, Roncal started volunteering with the Burlingame Parks and Recreation Center and is working with them to build a worm composting bin in the community garden. 

“We haven’t started the compost there yet because the project is a work in progress, that’s why I was doing all this research to help them figure out how to help people compost,” Roncal said. 

Roncal recommends reading blogs and watching videos to get a general idea of the task, but the set up itself isn’t too complicated. 

“All I had to do was buy worms, a Rubbermaid bin and drill some holes in it,” Roncal said. “It’s a little bit easier to do than regular composting.”

Losing track of time and feeling unproductive and overwhelmed is a common struggle since school has started up again. Bullet journaling is a fun and creative remedy for junior Ann Ding and helped her structure her life.  

“It was [June] and everything was chaotic and messy in my schedule,” Ding said. 

After finding inspiration on Pinterest for bullet journals she decided to try and make her own. 

To start, Ding got her materials and stationary from Amazon. She uses pens, highlighters and colored pencils. 

“There’s all kinds of things you could track in a bullet journal. Right now it’s mainly school and my extracurriculars, like volunteering. I also like to keep track of how much water I’m drinking, a little bit about what happened that day so I can record what’s happening in my life,” Ding said. 

When she first started, Ding struggled with trying to make everything look perfect and it took a longer time to finish drawing out the pages. 

“I always really wanted it to be perfect, and it was kind of stressful to do, which is contradicting the reason why I was doing it. So I would say that it’s okay to mess up,” Ding said. “The more you do it the more fun it becomes and the better you get at it.”