EXCHANGE INTERFACE

Well, today I have a headache. This afternoon.

...Oh wait, I could take painkillers!

...If I can find any. Hm.

eta: took a painkiller and still had a headache. Went looking for some potato chips (I had a yen) and had a few and...no more headache!

I don't know if it was the salt or if it was the panadol, but I'll take it!

--

Something spattered across the kitchen ceiling today - or in the last couple of days. Whatver it is, sugar soap is not bringing it off with a cursory scrub. We might end up needing to repaint the kitchen/dining ceiling! But I will go over the ceiling more thoroughly tonight.

TO DO
- clean ceiling
- put up chairs for cleaners tomorrow
- write 400 words

--

Still feeling like I have a respiratory issue - which, I guess I do. I just hate the feeling of it.

I have some old antibiotics (expired 2020) which need to be taken back to the chemist and I am seriously thinking of taking them. I've taken expired painkillers before, and...well, let's just say that was a bit trippy and I am not eager to be doing that again.

Should just contact the doctor and ask for some more antibiotics, though. Although I do have the ones I got from Mexico...

--

I definitely need more sleep. I need to get to bed around 11pm, just lie down and let sleep take me. It usually does when I just lie down.

Damn. The headache has come back.

Well, I no longer feel flat-out awful, just tired and a bit under-the-weather.

Antivirals FTW. Also (probably) vaccinations.

Today, mostly brain fog and exhaustion and coughing. Thinking is painful. But not-thinking is hard. I got up for a bit this morning, made breakfast and stuck some English Paper Pieceing stars together while chatting in the Crafter's Zoom chat that's regularly on Tuesday mornings AEST.



And then I found myself unable to concentrate, so I hung up the washing I'd done earlier, answered a work call, and went back to bed for a couple of hours.

Waiting for lunch to cook now, because why heat up pumpkin-chickpea soup when you can heat up the frozen lasagne?

I'm resting more, but getting my brain to rest is harder. I'm used to thinking of things that need to be done even when I'm not necessarily doing them. Of course, thinking right now actually ends up giving me a headache, so I try to steer my brain towards darkness and non-thinky thoughts.

( C19 )

Masking in the house to minimise the odds for B1. Unfortunately, I also did most of the cooking of soup the last few days, unmasked, which both B1 and B2 have been liberally eating.

Today, we registered 35,000 cases. And that was only from symptomatic people who managed to get PCR tests.

( lots of local issues )

That said, this is an excellent twitter thread about a coherent, cohesive way to go forward, acknowledging that there is no 'zero-inconvenience' option for the pandemic, and perhaps there never was. It's just taken us two years to get there.

Still feeling 'bronchial', but the RapidAntigens (Tuesday, yesterday, today) come back negative. No point in trying to get a PCR until at least Monday, I think.

Then I'm due to head up to a friend's farm in the general region of antivax-Central, Australia, staying for at least a few days, possibly an entire week. Going with friends - all from Sydney, vaxxed, and the friends who own the farm are also vaxxed.

My friends from Sydney are camping outside; I've opted to stay in the house.

Problem is, according to inquiries, around 15% of the people who'll be staying at the farm won't be vaccinated - we're not sure why not; allegedly they're not antivaxxers or medically fragile. HOWEVER, as I said, general region of antivax-Central, Australia. And I am suspecting that most of them will be staying in the house.

I've asked the host about it - particularly about the guy I'm sharing a (long)room (curtain separation) with. I'll have the booster by Monday, but it really takes 2 weeks to kick in with full protection.

And, yes, I can play health roulette; data is suggesting that while you can catch Omicron more easily while vaccinated, vaccination reduces the severity. Still, one would much rather not, thank you very much.

Also: weather indications are that it's going to rain quite heavily while we're up there, which is going to result in a lot of staying inside, rather than roaming outside.

*sigh* Freaking bloody Dominic Perrottet (NSW Premier) finally put health measures back in place (mask wearing, QR codes, venue limits) but it's really a case of too little too late.

( ten days is a long stretch in COVID time )

This is not the post I wanted to make on Christmas Eve, but it's getting made because I just want to put my thoughts down somewhere and I'm afraid you guys are it.

--

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Joyous Yule, and please look after yourselves - physically, emotionally, mentally - in the coming days.

May we all have the best season available to us.

♥

I had my first summer social!

GOOD: It went well! People enjoyed it! (There were only 4 people and they were 'regulars' in visiting. That's fine.)

BAD: After everyone left for the evening, suddenly I felt like my chest had a hole in it.

GOOD: Panadol helped me sleep.

BAD: I think something I ate gave me issues.

GOOD: I was planning to go for a COVID test anyway.

BAD: I wonder if the antibiotics I was taking for the foot masked the chest issue (I've been having chest issues for at least 9 months tbh), and now that I've stopped taking them, the bugs have come back with a vengeance.

No test results yet.

COVID is shooting back into the 1000s here: a week ago, we were at ~500 cases, today it's ~1700. And our state premier (maybe two months in the job) is the 'don't let the economy die' neocon economist sort, so there'll be no further lockdowns happening in NSW, and screw the health professionals.

I am absolutely shattered (woke up 1:45am, went back to seel 2:30am, woke up 4:30am, went back to sleep 5am, woke up 7am...) and have to return a report on a new technology that we'll be implementing next year, and have to prepare the chook guest house for a chicken that we were willing to 'kennel' during the holidays when it was mentioned a month ago, but which we never heard back from the owner about. Until this morning. Dear reader, they are leaving tomorrow. Oy.

The rising COVID cases has made me a little chary of putting on the summer salon for the rest of the summer. It was one thing while our numbers were reasonable, but the increase in case numbers and the complete lack of any kind of restrictions (it's all "personal responsibility" now - and, of course, "personal risk" if you end up catching COVID) - is really concerning.

Stay at home weekend. I think. I know, how can I not know what I did on the weekend?

You know how lockdown goes: the days seem to blend into each other and I hardly know if I'm coming or going. I know I went out for coffee on Sunday - was going to get some non-urgent things from the hardware store, but it was already queued up outside at 7am - but I don't think I went out at all on Saturday.

The reason the hardware store was so queued up, is because our restrictions have just become more restrictive as of Monday. (After 9 weeks of slow increase in numbers and restrictions.) No browsing in big stores such as the supermarket, big stationary chains, or big hardware chains! Why was browsing in the shops allowed in the first place you ask? Well...

Actually I got nothin'. Our premier is conservative and so is the federal government, and they're all about 'reducing the economic impact' etc, which means they refused to shut down back when this could have done some good.

Anyway, back to the garden.

1. Did the lilies Sunday morning
2. Ranunculus on Saturday.
3. ginger/turmeric/galangal - got the turmeric and galangal planted, but was still deciding on the ginger. I guess two out of three ain't bad, and I can just add the ginger later.
4. Didn't manage to repot the black sapote
5. Didn't manage to move the composting frame to the banana circle, but did that just this morning.

Got a sister to help me move stuff away from the water tank ready for the guttering work next week. Still have three other downspouts that need to be redirected, but this is a start! They were going to come and do the work Tuesday but Tuesday is scheduled for heavy rain, so they're putting it off to Thursday.

Put up a second post to wire up so the apple netting has something to rest against.



Closed up the fruit fly netting around the peach/nectarine and set some traps.

This morning (Tuesday) with the rain going, I went around the garden, took the composting frame off and moved it to the banana circle, and now that compost can get wet and be dug through by the chooks.

The rest of today is planned to be quiet on the gardening front.

Unfortunately, I'm presently dealing with a work go-live that was supposed to take 30 minutes...and would have if we hadn't discovered that a key connection hadn't been set up between one system and another (the guy who did this in previous environments has left the project and didn't leave any instructions).

So it's going to be a day.

Welp. Canberra has gone into lockdown after a number of positive cases ran through the city, and there are now in excess of 3000 close-contacts in a city of maybe 500,000 people. (2016 census said 390,000.)

Which means a lot of offices in our capital are scrambling. A few things that were going in over the weekend have been put on hold, and people who were previously coming into a (very sparsely filled) office in a no-transmission area have been instructed to remain home. And of course, it's the day that the password for my private account stops working, the weekend before we were due to go live on a couple of things.

The go-lives have since been pushed back, but my password is still in limbo, alas.

So the day is definitely not ideal.

The state of NSW today recorded 390 new cases in the past 24 hours. The running total is 5,000 cases. There are over 300 people presently in hospital, and another 2 people are dead. One of the dead is a woman in her 40s.

I know that 5K cases doesn't seem like much anywhere else in the world. My father in Vietnam says that there are 3K cases a day and deaths in the hundreds. But it's worrying here in Sydney. And also worrying because our state government is treating this like it's the alpha variant, and can be dealt with solely in vaccination rates. But the indications are that it can't. (Atlantic article: Delta has changed the pandemic endgame)

Frankly, I'm okay in my little bubble, tired and grumpy and over it, but a lot of other people aren't okay and aren't doing okay. And, too, I'd like people to be able to focus on things outside of the pandemic and the numbers and 'mah freedumbs' - like the climate change report that just came out, and the Australian election next year. *sigh*

I've said I'm going to make chocolate cake all week. I think I'll make shortbread instead. And chocolate cake tomorrow. Maybe.

Got the vax Thursday, sore arm at the vax site Friday, achey vax site Saturday, marginal today. A bit more tired than usual, a few pinchy headaches that aren't usual but went away with the application of glasses of water.

I may have spent a couple of days DOING ALL THE THINGS because, well, I'm me.

Also, I am wondering if the psychology of me DOING ALL THE THINGS is because I haven't managed to do the Thing That I Always Wanted To Do which is get published. Of course, I haven't actually managed to finish a manuscript either, so there's that.

I am presently re-reading Meljean Brooks' Guardians series, which is the kind of urban fantasy that I aspire to. Does it sell? I have no idea, but it's right up my alley with the worldbuilding and the arching plots, and the variety of characters. I have bought and am reading another two Midnight Breed books. Which are, as usual, disappointing. They are always disappointing and yet I can't help but click 'buy now'.

Oh, and the period has turned up, which this time appears to mean a slow easing into the bloodletting over two days and then all of a sudden it's 'murder bathroom'time. *sigh*

Finished a scrap quilt last night, have started up my handpiecing project again.