The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

Strange days in Dursleyville..
Since Tuesday 20th I have tested positive for COVID and the tests I did on Wednesday and Thursday are still positive in spite of now having little more than a sniffle to show for it.

When I woke up on the morning of Monday 19th December delirious, hot and clammy with a splitting headache, my first thought turned to hot flushes. Since that was impossible in my case I then turned to the slice of SPINACH quiche I had in a cafe for lunch on Sunday.

It never even occured to me that it could be COVID until a coworker suggested doing a RAT test. Since I had a stash of 20 of RAT freebies just lying around the house, I figured why not. Not least because I had been invited to lunch with old friends on Thursday so better safe than sorry.

I did manage to go for my long awaited Graveyard Picnic on Christmas Day. I masked up on the empty bus and there was no danger of Petunia or anyone else at the cemetery catching it from me.

( Lurking )

I am so so tempted to just become a grumpy hermit and vanish without trace. It has taken more than 10 minutes just to get to the Dreamwidth post page on the Big Mac. I have to wade through endless piles of evil spinning beach balls or just boring old blank pages that take an eternity to load. That partly explains why my visits are less and less frequent.

Often it will be 2 weeks between sessions. I can tell how long it has been because the calendar shows the last time I logged on and takes a while to update to the current time. This time it was only a few days for the simple reason that I had to fill in the census. I just assumed it would be a total nightmare trying to do it on the Tweet Stone so I wasn't even going to try. Also Dreamwidth is dreadful on the Tweet stone. I guess it is simply not designed for such devices. It is especially awful if inserting images or using HTML code for links and things. So this means of course that I have not been replying to so many juicy thought provoking comments.

( Dursleyville Dramas )

PS I hate the new look Dreamwidth posting rules.  It had been so long since I have posted that I don't even know when these changes were brought in.

I thought I was being clever  by going straight to Rich Text to solve the horrid spacing problem only to discover that it is much more difficult to do the cut text thing and that once you go over to RT  you cannot go back to whatever it used to be for the same post.

It took ages to even find the icon for cutting/ hiding text and then I found out the hard way that you have to put it in some special box and if it is shaded then you know that it will be hidden when posted.
This ancient serpent is not in the mood for learning so many new tricks so I guess I will stick to making short posts in future to avoid having to fart around with all this complicat4ed editing.

It's a strange start to the new Goblin year. I got up early to go to the day job only to discover that the place is shut and nobody had bothered to pass the message on which they have always done in the past via email.
It is funny because last year the shop was shut from Wednesday 1st April and reopened on Wednesday 1st July. This time it was closed for 1st July but probably also yesterday and the day before too.

I suspected it could be closed on account of the lockdown since a second hand charity shop does not quite count as an essential service the way a chemist or supermarket does.

So I just pottered around the other shops nearby before catching the bus back to the Lair. I ended up waiting 30 minutes for a bus that usually turns up every 10 minutes. Then of course 2 of them turned up at the same time.
So I was back at the Lair just in time for midday and spent the afternoon sitting in the garden soaking up the sunshine, reading the paper, planting a weed or two and doing a few Duolingo lessons.

Tomorrow will be more of the same since both the nursery and the op shop are closed. There is no point actually going anywhere since all the cafes if not closed are take away only. Since for me the whole point of going to a cafe is to sit down for an hour, read the paper and watch the world go by, if I cannot do that then I just don't bother at all since it is not the caffeine that I am addicted to but the ritual.

It is so sad and weird seeing nearly everything closed. After the last year of on and off lockdowns, many businesses have long used up their reserves and each lockdown could mean death row.
Especially since the cafe, pub and restaurant industry were so happy that all Covid restrictions had been lifted only 2 weeks ago so they were all back at maximum capacity and looking forward to the lucrative school holiday season.

There is a giant shit show in Canberra on account of the federal government's complete Covid incompetence. OZ did very well last year keeping the death toll low. It was one of the big success stories of 2020. But no thanks to sQomo and his happy clappy mates in Canberra. Like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, they wanted to just let it rip and keep the economy going. They were dragged kicking and screaming back into the real world by the state governments who would be left burying the bodies.

The Feds have tried to piggy back off the success of the states but everything they touch turns to shit. Now there are giant shouting matches between the Feds and assorted Chief Health Officers and medical organizations about who should get the AZ vaccine because that crowd screwed up getting sufficient supplies of Pfizer.

I had AZ just over 6 weeks ago. If I had known that they would have extended the age group for Pfizer I might have chosen to wait. Mind you know that the virus is doing the rounds, a lot of vaccine hesitant people have changed their minds so there is an even bigger shortage than usual.