First the bad news: 172 new COVID cases in New South Wales, beating the record high for this outbreak set two days ago. Worse is that most of those were infectious and still going about their business in the community, rather than having been isolated as known contacts. The state government announced the lockdown will be extended for another 4 weeks, meaning until 27 August. Let’s hope that’s enough to get the cases back close to zero.
In other news, I started working on this week’s ethics lesson, which will be on the topic of peer pressure. Like prejudice last week, it may be eye opening to the kids to consider that peer pressure isn’t automatically a bad thing. I’m partway through writing the lesson, and will have to finish it tomorrow.
I took a very long walk with Scully today, while my wife was out getting her second COVID vaccination. I used the K9 Sport-Sack to carry Scully on my back outbound. She really seems to enjoy being in the backpack, getting a nice high view of everything. I took a route to a nearby suburb that I usually don’t walk to, after noticing on Google Maps that it’s about the same distance as some of the other places I walk to, just in a slightly less appealing direction as it’s along a major road. But I walked along some back streets more or less parallel to the road, and passing through a large park, which made it more pleasant.
I had lunch out, and then let Scully walk all the way home. And one the way we took a detour to the Italian cake shop to pick up some treats for my wife to celebrate her full vaccination, so the way home was significantly longer than the trip out. The total was 8.2 km, so Scully walked probably at least 4.5 km, and bot was she worn out when we got home! She’s been asleep for most of the afternoon. 🙂
For dinner tonight I tried an experiment:
That’s sourdough starter and an egg.
I added a bit of milk, and then flour until I had a runny dough, or a very stiff pancake batter consistency.
I put a big scoop of the dough onto a small cutting board, and used a knife to scrape off lumps into boiling water. Meanwhile I made a mushroom sauce in a frying pan.
The dough blobs sink initially, but float to the surface as they cook. I scooped them out and into a colander to drain while I continued adding more batches of dough to cook.
I finished the mushroom sauce with some crème fraîche.
And served! Sourdough spätzle with creamy mushroom sauce and broccolini. It turned out really good! I’ve been thinking about trying spätzle with sourdough starter for a while, and I’m glad I tried it.
New content today:
Getting cases close to zero will require widespread vaccination. I hope the Australian government is diverting doses to NSW, especially now that the Melbourne outbreak is over.
Why, yes, I do follow worldwide pandemic news very closely.
Even if everyone in NSW was vaccinated tomorrow, though, it would be another six weeks or so (depending on the vaccine) before people were fully immunized.