health – Page 8 – dangermouse.net

The meaning of life

COVID news: 199 new cases in NSW in the past 24 hour period. It’s dropped below 200, but may still be statistical fluctuation. At least it’s not growing rapidly, although secondary indicators show that our health system may be beginning to struggle. There are outbreaks in several hospitals, with dozens of medical staff now in isolation. And for the first time our contact tracers have been unable to do 100% follow-up of suspected COVID exposure contacts within 24 hours. If the contact tracing system starts failing, there will be more potential cases circulating in the community without isolating during their infectious period, and things could go south quickly.

Every day this past couple of weeks has felt like teetering on a knife-edge. All we can do is maintain distancing from all our friends and family, stay at home, and hope tomorrow’s news is better.

In a more positive piece of news today, Telstra (our major telecommunications carrier) has announced that from now on all payphones will no longer be “pay” phones – they are going to be free of charge. All calls to Australian land lines and mobile phones made from a public phone will be completely free. We still have around 15,000 public phones in Australia, because of a government requirement of Telstra to maintain infrastructure to allow convenient access to communication for all Australians. Public phones have become more scarce in major cities (although I know of several within walking distance of my home), but are still common in rural towns and Outback communities. In a somewhat uncharacteristic moment of civic generosity, Telstra has decided that they can afford to write-off the $5 million a year it takes to maintain the public phones, and simply allow anyone to make calls for free. I tried to find out if any other countries have made this move, but Google was particularly unhelpful with any search query I tried, so I don’t know.

I spent time today writing and making Darths & Droids comics.

But this evening I had a special ethics lesson, as part of the NSW Primary Ethics volunteer teaching that I would normally be doing eevery Wednesday morning at a local school. Those classes have not begun this term due to the Sydney COVID lockdown and schools being closed, so Primary Ethics has organised a series of Zoom classes for the volunteer teachers, led by a staff member who runs a class form the new high school ethics curriculum.

So tonight I joined a class of 16 teachers, and we answered questions based on the high school ethics topic of “The Meaning of Life”. A big question! This is a brand new topic, which hasn’t been trialled in high schools yet, due to the course only starting this year, and being interrupted by COVID. Obviously we weren’t going to actually come up with an answer to the meaning of life – the class was structured around pondering questions like: “Can there even be any simply definable meaning of life?” “If we could know the meaning of life, would it change how we behave?” and, my favourite, “Why did the aliens in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy go to such great lengths to try to find the meaning of life?” (really a proxy question for: Why do we try to figure out the meaning of life?)

It was fun, and it gave me some cool ideas for tackling a similar topic in my own online ethics classes.

Random photo I took while out walking around the neighbourhood yesterday:

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Double century day

It was really all about the COVID here in Sydney today. NSW recorded 239 new cases, which is now the highest number of cases reported in the state in a single day, beating the previous record of 212 which was set during the worst outbreak last year.

Today’s daily press conference was very raucous, with a lot of reporters asking why Sydney wasn’t locked down faster and harder, and if the government had failed. Victoria got up to a high of 723 cases in one day during Melbourne’s horror outbreak last year – exactly one year ago to the day. The Victorian government enacted the strongest lockdown measures Australia has seen, closing down basically every retail shop except supermarkets and pharmacies. We’re nowhere near that here in Sydney yet – cafes and restaurants are still open, albeit for take-away food only. The NSW Government is facing increasing criticism that it’s not doing as much as Victoria did last year.

Where we go from here, who knows? They’re saying they hope to be able to lift the lockdown restrictions by October. Hopefully, yes. But maybe we’ll have another Christmas where we can’t see our families.

More personally, my wife and I have a big significant wedding anniversary coming up before then. Originally our plan was to celebrate it with a trip to Europe. A month or so ago, I was looking into booking a fancy restaurant so we could at least have a nice dinner out. Now I think we may end up celebrating this anniversary sitting at home.

In other anniversaries, this sign has been in the lift of my apartment building for a year today:

In some final good news, it’s taken her over three years, but Scully has finally learnt the pleasure of snoozing in a winter sunbeam:

I’m very surprised she’s never done this before. I figured dogs would be like cats and be all over this, but I guess not.

New content today:

Sourdough spätzle!

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:

The COVID, it hurts

New South Wales recorded 163 new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24-hour reporting period, well up from yesterday’s record of 136. It takes a week or two before the effects of increased lockdown restrictions make themselves felt in lowering case numbers, but this is starting to look depressingly like they’re not working. The state and federal governments are scrambling trying to get this under control before it spirals into a complete disaster, ruining the year and a half of good work we’ve done in keeping the virus at bay in Australia. This is the scariest and most dangerous period in this country so far. And the mood of people is really starting to reflect it.

There was a fairly large protest in the heart of Sydney today, by people unhappy with the current lockdown restrictions. I knew about it from looking at some news reports during the day, but it wasn’t until I saw video coverage on the evening news on TV that I realised just how terrible it was. It turned into close to a full-on riot, with people throwing dangerous objects at police. There was an image of a man striking a police horse in the face. 57 people have been arrested and charged, and police are analysing video and interviewing people trying to track down more offenders so they can be charged as well. Story here.

And this in the middle of a time when people should be staying away from other people. It’s feared this event may end up spreading the Delta COVID variant to hundreds, if not thousands more people. I’m just absolutely sickened by what has happened here in my city today.

Trying to not think about it too much, I spent much of today collaborating with friends solving puzzles in the Galactic Puzzle Hunt, which began this morning our time. We’ve solved four of the puzzles so far, and have made substantial progress on a few others. They’re good puzzles, well constructed, but gosh some of them are difficult.

I’m about to go offline for the evening and just switch off, watching a movie…

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COVID-Virtual games night Friday

Tonight would have been face-to-face games night with the guys, but under the current COVID lockdown we’ve converted it to virtual once again. The COVID numbers rose again today, with 97 new cases in NSW. Nothing particularly new in terms of lockdown restrictions, just more urging people to do the right thing and stay home.

I did mostly. It was time for the weekly grocery shopping, but rather than go through the supermarket myself, I signed up for online shopping. Unfortunately the delivery fee scale is such that for people like me who do small weekly shops, the fee is high, whereas it gets lower if you buy more, until if you buy over $300 of groceries delivery is free. I kind of get it, but as someone who usually spends $80-$120 a week, I don’t want to have to add another $15 on top for delivery.

So instead I chose the free “pick up from store” option. At least it saves me from walking around the aisles, and I could spend only a couple of minutes in the supermarket picking up my stuff instead of half an hour. As it turned out, when I got there they didn’t have my order quite ready, so I had to wait a little while they ran around grabbing bags from storage lockers and fridges and stuff. But it was quicker than doing the shopping myself, so that was worthwhile.

The other reason to go out today was that Scully was booked in for her grooming day. She was getting very shaggy, but now after picking her up she’s velvety smooth.

For games night, the first game we played was Nidavellir, which is a game I enjoy, but I haven’t really got to grips with the strategy yet. Yet, somehow, I managed to win! By a single point. But a win is a win! Now we’re playing some games of 7 Wonders, which is a virtual games night staple. I came second in the first game, and… just won my second game! With an unconventional science + military strategy.

New content today:

COVID lockdown – super extended edition

COVID case numbers for New South Wales – 65 new cases in the past 24 hours, plus 97 yesterday (Wednesday) and 89 on Tuesday which I didn’t report. Down on the peak of 112 cases we had on Monday, but still too much, and too early to know if it’s a downward trend or just day to day statistical variation. With that, the Government announced that the current Sydney lockdown will continue for (at least) another two weeks, until the end of 30 July.

There’s been a lot of criticism of the Government for making this lockdown too weak and wishy-washy. Although the rules say that you can’t leave home except for “essential work that can’t be done from home” the Government refuses to define what is “essential work” or what “can’t be done from home”. Which means effectively that any boss who thinks their workers need to be in the office instead of working from home can just say “you have to come into the office”. Also a lot of retailers are staying open, and calling their staff in, because the Government refuses to define what is an essential business. So, for example, you can go shopping for jewellery, because the Government refuses to say that jewellery shops aren’t essential, so jewellers are all staying open, because if they close, then their competition will get all the business.

So there’s incentive for businesses to stay open, and neither incentive nor direct order for them to shut down and keep their workers at home. In the previous Sydney lockdown last year, we had Federal support with payments for people whose work was impacted, which meant businesses could shut down – but not this time.

Epidemiologists are saying that with the current restrictions and behaviour, they can’t see infection numbers going down before the end of August. Australia had been doing so well up until three weeks ago, but now we’re being undone by politics. It’s very annoying.

Fortunately I’m in an area of Sydney that hasn’t yet had any COVID exposure site alerts. But my brother lives in a region which is pretty much the epicentre of the current outbreak. In that local area there are additional restrictions, including that anyone who travels to work must get a mandatory COVID test every 3 days. Fortunately he’s been staying home from work and basically not going out or seeing anyone at all.

One valid reason to leave home is still to take exercise, so my wife and I took the chance to go out at lunch together today to walk Scully. It was actually a gorgeous day, with the temperature reaching 23.4°C, making it the warmest day so far this winter. We went to a park by the harbour and let Scully run around and chase a ball. My wife asked me if I could take a photo of Scully running towards the camera. I’ve done this a couple of times with my DSLR, but I said that it wouldn’t really work with a phone camera.

I think I may have been wrong…

The focus isn’t quite where I’d like on the second one, but still not bad for a phone!

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Organising recipes

First the COVID news: 112 new cases in New South Wales in the last 24-hour reporting period. The Government expects the numbers to keep going up for a few more days until the effects of the lockdown start being felt and, hopefully, bring them back down towards zero.

And in personal health news, my throat is feeling a lot better after the tonsillectomy. There’s just a little residual pain when I yawn widely, or move my tongue around to extreme positions in my mouth. But it’s still improving day by day and feels pretty close to back to normal. I think the coughing and phlegminess is reducing each day as well.

I worked on writing Irregular Webcomic! strips today, hoping to have a batch done in time to photograph tomorrow morning, but I don’t think I’m going to make it. It’ll probably have to be photography on Wednesday.

Something else I did was look into recipe organiser apps for my desktop machine. I’ve been collecting recipes using OneNote, which I use as a general note-keeping app for many types of information. It’s been okay so far, but it’s getting to the point where it’s difficult to find recipes, and I’m wishing for features such as search by ingredient and better categorisation using tags. So I’ve looked around and am currently trying the free version of Recipe Keeper.

I’m impressed with it so far. It’s not overly complicated or feature-bloated, but it has just the right set of features for organising recipes. There are three different groups of customisable tag sets. It imports recipes automatically from URLs from many popular recipe sites – and worked flawlessly for one I use a bit, the Australian site SBS Food. And it does automatic unit conversions from American units! No longer will I have to wonder what an “oz.” is. It also has a meal planner and automatic shopping list generator, although at this stage I’m not sure how much I’ll be using those features. I’m going to give it a few days, but I’m already thinking I’ll pay for the “pro” version, which gives you unlimited recipe storage and ability to synch to phones and iPads.

Oh, I was out walking Scully this afternoon when we met Billy, a 14-week-old toy poodle, black like her! He reminded me exactly what Scully looked like when she was a puppy!

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Baking and waking in the rain

First, today’s COVID news. NSW recorded 77 new cases in the last 24-hour reporting period, up 27 from yesterday. 33 of those cases were not isolating, so potentially infection in the community. And in very bad news, Australia recorded its first COVID-19 death of 2021. The screws continue to tighten with new restrictions and stern recommendations. It’s now strongly recommended not to go into supermarkets or food stores at all – if you possibly can you should arrange home delivery of groceries. On the current trajectory, officials are expecting over 100 new cases tomorrow, with numbers continuing to rise due to the delay between implementing stronger lockdown measures and reduction in case numbers.

My wife and I took Scully for another big walk today. We also tested out a new accessory, a K9 Sport Sack carrying backpack for Scully. The reason for this is that we’ve been using ferries to travel around the city with Scully, since you could take dogs onto ferries as long as they’re on a lead. Well, it turns out that the law doesn’t actually say that – it says you can take dogs on ferries if they are confined within a carrying container. The ferry crews have long turned a blind eye to this and not enforced the rule. But that changed from 1 July – the State Government has ordered ferry crews to begin enforcing the rule, and not to allow dogs on board if only restrained by a leash. Apparently this change of policy was precipitated by a complaint from a ferry passenger after being bitten by a dog.

We were a bit concerned if Scully would like getting into the backpack, or if she’d struggle and try to wriggle out. We tempted her with peanut butter (one of her favourite treats) and did things slowly and gently, and she never protested once. And once clipped onto my wife’s back and we went outside, Scully positively seemed to enjoy being up there, looking around as we walked. So I think it was a positive experience for her and we’ll be able to carry her around in this backpack whenever we need to use some transport that demands dogs be confined. (Someone online checked specifically if these sort of backpacks would be acceptable on ferries and was told they are.)

At home I had a bit of a baking afternoon. I’ve been making my own pastry for quiches recently, but previously I’ve been neglecting to chill the pastry in the fridge before rolling it out. So today I made the pastry at lunchtime and stuck it into the fridge until dinner time. I honestly haven’t been very pleased with my home made pastry – it’s turned out to be very friable and sort of powdery/floury when baked. It handles well when rolling not too sticky or too crumbly, so I think the consistency there is good. I was hoping that the refrigeration before rolling and baking would fix the post-bake consistency, but no, it turned out almost the same as before. So I’m not sure what to do to make it hold together better after baking. Google suggests it might need a bit more water when mixing, but I really don’t want to make it any stickier during the rolling phase. I guess I’ll try it next time and see what happens.

I also put together another sourdough loaf, to be let rise overnight for baking in the morning. It’s amazing how much flour you go through when you’re baking stuff all the time! I’ve also been making an apple crumble about every 5 days for a warming fruity dessert for me and my wife. Normally she eats raw apples, but she’s decided that a nice warm crumble is more acceptable for winter night…

New content today:

Triple plus lockdown Saturday

50 new COVID cases in NSW in the last 24-hour reporting period, with only 13 of those in isolation, meaning 37 were out in the community while infectious. With the numbers still going up, the lockdown rules have been tightened again. New today: masks are now mandatory in common property of strata residences (i.e. you have to wear a mask in corridors, lifts, and lobbies of apartment buildings); masks must be worn on outdoor construction sites; and only one person per household may leave home for shopping purposes for essential items, and only one time per day. Among some other new restrictions on things like crossing the boundary between Greater Sydney and surrounding areas.

The State Government seems intent on slowly turning the screw on tighter restrictions, and seeing on a daily basis if it makes any difference – rather than implementing a raft of hard restrictions in one hit. Officially the lockdown is still slated to end on Friday 16 July but epidemiological experts are of the opinion that it’s going to have to be extended until at least September.

It was also cold and gloomy today, though the rain held off until after lunch. We took the time to take Scully on a longish walk in the morning. We met one of her doggie friends in a park and the dogs played around while we chatted with the other owners from a distance of a few metres. It’s all a bit surreal again, like the lockdown we had last year.

This afternoon I started writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. Hopefully I’ll get them done tomorrow for photographing some time during the coming week.

Oh! And I spent time this morning watching a new live action performance of Darths & Droids. The stage show originally premiering in 2018 in Florida has been produced by Hole in the Wall Theater in Connecticutt, and they premiered their version today. It was really good – you can watch it on YouTube here.

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Double plus lockdown Friday

Today’s COVID news in Sydney was even worse than yesterday. 44 new cases in the 24-hour reporting period (6 more than yesterday), and more of those cases than yesterday were circulating in the community rather than being isolated as known contacts of infected people. So basically we have more people spreading the virus further. The NSW Government announced further lockdown restrictions, as well as indicating stricter enforcement.

We are now prohibited from leaving the house for any reason except (1) medical reasons, (2) to get food or other necessary supplies, (3) for work or education if those cannot be done at home, or (4) for exercise. Additionally, we are prohibited from travelling more than 10 km from home, and are strongly advised not to leave home for any shopping if we can arrange home delivery. If you do go shopping, it must be directly to buy specific needed items – browsing in shops is prohibited. If you leave home to exercise you may only meet one person who does not live in your household. You may not visit anyone else’s home, and you may not have any visitors in your home. Facemasks must be worn in every indoor location except your own home, plus on public transport, and also outdoor locations where people gather.

This lockdown is supposed to end Friday next week, but given the trajectory of cases at the moment I expect it will be extended further.

So, I spent the day at home. Which I probably would have done anyway given that it started raining today and it was extremely cold and miserable. The maximum temperature in Sydney was a bone-chilling 12.1°C, which made it the second coldest day of the year so far.

Fortunately I went out and did my weekly grocery shopping first thing in the morning, before the new restrictions were announced. Although that would have been allowed under them, since it’s food we’re going to eat. And toothpaste.

This evening we did a virtual board games night. Played a few games on Board Game Arena: 7 Wonders, 6 Nimmt, Coloretto, and also Sketchful, and an implementation of Codenames on the game’s own website.

Oh, and I forgot to mention yesterday that I got up to 365 consecutive days of Italian language practice on Duolingo. A full year since I started this daily streak. So that feels like an achievement!

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