All or Nothing

[izmeina]

It was Monday 23rd March that everything started shutting down in Oz. By the following week, all my part time jobs had gone and I suddenly had nothing to do and all day to do it

But because the places that I usually lurk when not working are cafes, libraries, museums and the zoo and they were all included in the giant shut down, that meant that I had to find new ways to spend all this spare time



Luckily I have the Lair all to myself along with a garden so I amused myself with gardening, sitting in the garden reading or doing housework or trawling on Twitter
I was going to have to get used to the idea of buying newspapers to read in the garden and to basically turn the lair into a private cafe
First step was to clear and clean the plastic garden table, to dust off the kettle and bone china cups and boxes of tea leaves or tea bags.

So I slowly got into the habit of lurking in the garden and once or twice per week venturing out to do shopping.
Middle May was when the cafes opened again for dine in customers but I quickly realised that reading the newspapers there was going to be a rare feature indeed unless I brought my own. I guess it is an obvious infection control risk

I did manage a few day trips to some little towns once the regional travel restrictions were lifted but once again mostly spent time lurking around the Lair
But as of last week, things are almost back to normal. The tree nursery where I used to volunteer on Fridays is back as was the charity shop. On Monday I also had some tradies turning up at 7.30am to instal roller shutters. So I went from endless snoozes and sleep ins to getting up around 7am 4 days in the one week

I had forgotten how much more I got done by getting up 4 hours earlier than 11am. I had also forgotten that it is strangely easier to feel wide awake at 7am than at 11.
But most importantly of all, last week reminded me that I had the best of intentions several times during those 3 months to get up early and either do stuff or go some place interesting but the lure of lurking longer in the serpent sack proved too tempting
However, getting up on time because I had made commitments to other people to turn up was no problem at all

I have occasionally made use of this silly trait to find sneaky ways of getting things past the inner saboteur

No need to do that any more because all the deadlines and get up times from this week on are external in origin

Comments

[ozfille]

Things are back to near normal here, except for the people living near the Victorian border. I've been deliberately getting up at about 6 am for the last few months and doing things before I go out for a walk, shopping, etc or before my zoom sessions start for the courses that I'm doing with WEA. One of the courses is better than the other because there are less people which allows greater student participation while the other one, though informative has a larger group so it is really just a straight lecture with no back and forth if the teacher is to get through all the information she wants to present, though she has an informal zoom meeting to discuss some of the original documents that she e-mailed us and a smaller group of people attend those sessions and it is more lively. Even though the second one was less lively she provided a lot of good information which really explained why German people accepted the Nazis'rule.

[izmeina]

I am impressed with your ability to be so disciplined especially when it comes to getting up so early. Especially now that it is the middle of winter.

All ears about the courses you are doing. Especially the one about the Nazis. Is it about the rise of the Nazi regime, life during the Third Reich, the Weimar republic or something completely different?
When I was living in Germany, I often took the opportunity to go to various exhibitions on themes on how the Nazi party took over the legal system, the medical profession and of course their favorite - anthropology. They were just obsessed with anthropology
The image of the frog in the slowly warming pot kept coming to mind along with the disturbing revelation that the Nuremberg race laws were pretty much copied and pasted from the USA southern states. Jim Crow I guess is the unofficial name of the rules

I am far too much of a Luddite to use Zoom. I simply hate being in photos let alone video and even when using Facetime or Whats app, I only ever use audio mode. Both Toastmasters and the book clubs I belong to all went over to Zoom and I just said that I would wait it out until we can all meet again in person

That is looking increasingly less likely over in your neck of the woods. The thing with this virus is that everything moves so damned fast
I feel bad for Dan Andrews because he was maintaining a slow return to normal in spite of the pressure from business and the Murdoch mobsters
Was it just a case of very bad luck or did most of the outbreak come from the dodgy security at the hotels? Funny how all the states that deployed army and police at the quarantine hotels did not seem to have the problem or at least not to that extent

I think it is clear by now that I will need to reschedule my planned trip to September next year. There is no way now that the Federal Govt will relax any travel rules. I still don't understand why so many Australians are still returning from overseas after so long. I thought most of them would have returned by the end of May
The West Oz govt is now talking of cutting arrivals to a max of 500 persons per week I think. Because as we know now, that is the weakest link

I would rather know and decide now than to live in limbo for the next 6 weeks

Today I went to the chemist and noticed the large stashes of hand sanitizer and masks. The masks are outrageously expensive. $15 for a packet of 10 basic blue masks or $69 for a box of 100. As they are all made in China, someone is making a killing

[ozfille]

I'd be awake anyway as the dawn chorus of the birds starts around about then. The first glimmerings of light and they start chirping at each other. They can be very loud. Lots of Rainbow lorikeets, Australian Mynahs as well as the pesky Indian version, a few honeyeaters as we still have some gum blossom on some of the street trees. There are still some magpies around and down by the canal there are some herons. I thought they'd be gone considering that Sydney Water is there with their heavy machines ripping up the cement in Johnston's Creek and replacing it with sandstone. The corellas and cockatoos the really raucous ones are not around at the moment. They'll be back along with the fruit bats in Spring when there is more blossom and the early fruit appearing on the trees. Unfortunately the Channel Bill Cuckoo awful bird will be back from North Queensland in late Spring.

The course started in the Weimar Republic period and finished up in 1939 just before WW2 started. Yes Hitler really admired the US Race Laws and the concept of Lebensraum was developed by his admiration of the invasion by the Europeans of the rest of the North American continent but he did it in reverse, moving East. You see Germans'perceptions of Hitler from the early '20's as being the mad uncle in the attic caricature change to the admiration he garnered by the end of the 1930's. The keypoint being that the rich industrialists and the conservative politicians in Germany thought they'd back him because they thought they could control him. Sounds like The Trumpster almost achieved something like that but we should be thankful for Covid-19. Surely this will be his undoing.

Well the situation in Victoria certainly frightened Gladys into closing the border, the very thing she has been preaching against from the beginning. As for the hypocrites from the Lying Nasty Party I don't think the current Opposition in Victoria would have done a great job. They've been recruiting from the RWNJ sector of society for a while and I'm not sure enough of their MPs understand much about how viral diseases get spread, they would probably prescribe a good dose of praying and self-flagellation. I had a peek at the News.com.au site and yup they're already predicting Dan Andrews fall with glee, not giving a stuff about the cause of it. They did the same thing when there were a few new cases of Covid-19 in NZ, exulting that Jacinda Ardern had been wrong. That was all that counted but I guess they will have to pipe down as the NZ Opposition look like they have shot themselves in the foot when a Nationals MP leaked the private details of a group of Covid-19 patients to the media. Why they would do that is beyond belief, unless perhaps the patients were the dreaded foreigners. One of the individuals has been accused early of racism so I assume there is a strong streak in the Nationals in NZ just as there is in Oz.

The weakest link was actually not using police and defence force personnel who would be more reliable for the duties required in enforcing quarantine. They do understand that they shouldn't sleep with those being quarantined and they know how to follow orders. Security guards are not hightly trained and from the idiocy of their behaviour are not that bright.

I succumbed yesterday and bought some masks at the chemist. I went into town to look for some books I couldn't get in the smaller bookshops in the local area. This was the first time I've caught the bus into town for a few weeks and there were a lot more people and when I got into town I noticed so many more ignoring social distancing. It is school holidays and in one of the centres there was a long queue of mothers and children all standing together, taking no notice of social distancing rules and some of the cafes in the older, smaller arcades had their tables much too close together. And yes they are making a killing on the pricing of masks. Your prices are 50% higher than the ones I bought.