August 13, 2020
Day 162
I’m in a bad movie. Intermission is over. On with the show.
Tag Archives: Diary of a Pandemic
As Long as the Red Earth Rolls
8 Jun
Jun 8, 2020
Day 79
Today I rested.
Early morning clouds hid the moon again and so the chance to duplicate May’s full moon photograph is gone. “Another time, Highlander”, growls the Kurgon somewhere in the back of my mind.
No quail this morning. Temperature is down into ‘see your breath territory’. Back to sleep for a while. Wake to beauty. Breakfast in bed. Sun streams through the bedroom window.
Valerie and I walked in the midday sun through our compound, seeing areas that need work and noting where a brush stroke here or there would add to the canvas. She inspected the neat double stacked row of foundation posts in the tiny hollow just off the drive and I showed her how I’ll be able to pull them one by one down through a gap in the trees to the worksite. A Tui sang crazily above us and we walked to the top of the drive and up the road for a while. The sun was bright and the sky a turquoise backdrop to the green ridges that frame our land. Back at the entrance to our drive I showed her where I want to build a cantilevered gate that will slide out of the forest on silent bearings when we want to keep the world at bay. We walked hand in hand down the drive cataloging the damage to the ponga done by the drought. We lost at least ten of the tall fern trees along each side, not to mention what has happened throughout the forest. I will harvest the trunks and use them somewhere along the line, honouring their life as best I can.
After lunch I cleaned dead ponga branches from the grove and removed spider webs from the interior walls of the entrance porch. The ease with which they can be seen is probably the only drawback of having black walls. I used a small paint brush and found it worked pretty well, but as I brushed I imagined of a battery powered rotary tool with a bottle brush on the business end… And added it to the list.
Around mid afternoon Valerie checked the numbers and told me, “Zero new cases and you’ll be glad to know that the one person who’s been holding out has recovered…” I let that news sink in as I reached for my computer to see for myself. Sure enough, today’s numbers tell the tale…
Zero New cases. One Recovered case. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases and probable cases plus deaths is 100%. Zero active cases.
WHISKEY. OSCAR. WHISKEY.
Bloody marvellous and while not a laurel to rest on, it is a milestone a long time coming and one to be proud of and thankful for. I think I’ll have a beer and raise a toast to us.
So… Where do we go from here? The country is going to Alert Level 1 for the second time in history. What that means for us is that all businesses will be open with only minor restrictions. Gatherings can be held without regard to size. Social distancing will still be encouraged and the wearing of masks may be mandated on public transport and in certain other situations. Anyone coming into the country will be quarantined for a minimum of fourteen days while authorities examine options and begin to sort out how to re-open the country to travellers from disease free nations. There will be many more details to iron out, some anticipated and others wholly unanticipated. It’s the nature of the beast.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wisely made it very clear in her announcement today that there will be more cases, but that what we have learned thus far will help us to find, diagnose, track and eliminate any new cases that show up.
We are in a good place and things are only going to get better.
All of which has me thinking that my subtitle, Diary of a Pandemic, is no longer appropriate, nor accurate. Especially since it looks as though, for the semi-foreseeable future, any dying I do won’t be because of Covid-19. That being said, I’m still glad I decided to write about it all. At the outset of lockdown the odds were good that it was going to be a serious Charlie Foxtrot and there was no way of telling how it would all work out. http://acronymsandslang.com/definition/7720898/CHARLIE+FOXTROT-meaning.html
I’ve learned a great deal in the past three months, not the least of which is that…
Nevertheless, I have no illusions that it’s over. The fears that started me writing what was, in many ways, my death bed testimonial still exist. They are founded on long years of experience and the events of the first half of 2020 have only strengthened them.
The Pandemic is still on in the rest of the world. Covid-19 is probably out there for good now, unless smarter folks than I can find a way to put it back in the bottle it was let out of. New Zealand will have to bend like a reed as the storm continues to rage elsewhere.
No man is an island, as Mr. Donne so eloquently said, and that statement applies to islands as well. So we will watch and wait, hope and dream, love and laugh. And I will remember to be grateful for the miracles that I am privileged to see every moment I’m alive, and to thank those of you who have stood by me as I added a few more planks to my raft. It is all I can do. I hope it is enough.
I hope each and every one of you find your way to the happiness you deserve. Breathe deep and know that no matter what happens to you or yours, this is not the end…
If the time comes when anyone wants to know more and I’m not around to ask, let it be said that…
And that he wished for all to…
Internet Maintenance Day
4 Jun
June 4, 2020
Day 75
Went into town this morning to get supplies to fix a problem with the power to a section of the kitchen. A huge old tree on the turn by the estate picnic area had fallen, its splintered trunk, broken a metre above the ground, revealed rot through and through. We were lucky that it fell downhill and away from the road or we would have been blocked and I would most likely have been part of a working bee to remove it. This would have been possible because we are, as a community, gradually realising that only one person has Covid-19 in New Zealand and the likelihood of catching it is pretty small. It was raining off and on all the way to town. New slips along the road are showing up as the land reaches saturation. The weight of water pulls great swathes of clay and forest floor, trees and all, down sodden slopes to new resting places. They usually aren’t as bad as the one below that happened yesterday in Norway, but you never know.
The whole of New Zealand, indeed, the entire world, is headed toward sea level and the universe toward its eventual heat death. I probably won’t be around for it.
We arrived in Whitianga in the middle of a sudden downpour and I stopped at a hardware store that had a three-foot wide river running in through the main entrance and down the centre aisle for fifty feet. It turned to the right and disappeared from view under the tool section and I knew it would find its way out the back door the same way it had come in the front. The staff were taking pictures and putting up cones everywhere as I paid for my gear and left. It was still coming down cats and dogs on the way home and we could see where the Whangamaroro River had flooded a few days earlier. The highway runs down the centre of an alluvial flood plain next to the estuary that opens up into Mercury Bay and whenever it rains hard for any length of time the road is overtopped by the river. There is a crossroad at this point that leads up into the foothills of the eastern Coromandel Range. I don’t know how the road got its name, but I think I do and I smile every time I see the sign post for Wade Road.
I spent the afternoon replacing wiring and outlets and putting things back together again and testing to see whether it all worked. Once again I finished as the light was fading outside. My repairs of the roof on the previous day were half successful, which means I still have a leak from the roof into the house. Half is better than none, but we’re still seeing water coming in through the wall. The thing to do is bite the bullet and replace the temporary roof with a permanent one, but summer is gone and the rains are here (and inside) so I’m caught on the horns of a dilemma.
Checked the numbers and found we are still in stasis…
No change. Good news.
Elsewhere in the world some interesting things are happening. Sweden has said that given a chance they would have altered their policy of staying open for business during the first wave of Covid-19. The very fact that there is a free and open discussion about the issue and that a member of their government has admitted that they could have done things better stands in stark contrast to China, where no such admissions will ever be made while the CCP is in control.
Today in China it is Internet Maintenance Day.
It is also known as A Day to Remember, but not if you are being recorded…
Can you imagine what it must be like to live in a country where one-thousand-four-hundred-million people are afraid to say anything on camera?
History is being erased day by day in the…
Don’t forget.
I’m Here to Help
3 Jun
June 3, 2020
Day 74
Though the weather forecast said rain, we had a respite from the showers that have been soaking the land for the past week. Sunshine streamed in the bedroom window this morning on an angle that tells me it is nearly the beginning of winter. Only one quail and a host of chaffinches showed up for breakfast. Light wind from the west, cool but not cold. After a breakfast of fried bread I rose to do battle with the temporary kitchen’s leaky west wall. We’ve been mopping up water from the floor in the two closets that sit on either side of the china cabinet and I even drilled two large holes in the floor to see if the water would drain. No luck there as the water bypassed them both through the strength of capillary action between the floor and the base board of the left hand closet. Time to see what could be done on the outside.
Yesterday I built a walkway spanning the entire length of the wall so that I could work on the upper edge detail of the roof without having to constantly reposition a ladder wherever I needed to work. I cut ten pillars to length, drove them into the clay with a mattock, attached two long header rails and then capped it with a plywood deck and an outer edge piece to keep the ladder feet from sliding off. The gap between the verandah on the north side and the end of the walkway was bridged by a two-by-ten and the epiphytes on the house side of a huge tree were trimmed so that I could make my way easily along the walkway.
This morning I cut a small section out of the verandah rail so that I can get to the walkway without having to negotiate that obstacle. When that was done I began the painstaking and tedious work of figuring out how, where and why the wall was leaking and then fixing it. Morning turned to afternoon and I skipped lunch because the sky had clouded over and rain was threatening. The job finished with a new tarp being attached to the upper header of the temporary kitchen wall and the roof tarps weighted and draped over the entire span. As the sun slipped behind Totokoroa and the light began to fade I put the final touches on my repairs, inspected the work, picked up all my tools and stopped for the day. I hope it works.
Inside the sitting room the heater was going and the warmth made the space feel even cosier than normal. I sat in my big chair and checked todays numbers…
Zero New cases (for the twelfth straight day). Zero recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active and probable cases (plus 22 deaths) is still 99.93%. One active case remains and the entire nation is quietly waiting for that person to recover. The media must have their headlines ready and the editors are standing by. So we wait…
…And while we wait, many of America’s major cities are seeing the worst riots since Rodney King was beaten down by a gang of policemen in May of 1992. This time the trigger was the needless and tragic death of George Floyd at the hands (and knee) of another policeman and aided and abetted by the inaction of three other officers on the scene. Protesters rightly took to the streets to say this should not have happened and that something must be done to prevent it in the future. Then, inevitably, some protests became riots. The two are mutually exclusive. You can protest or you can riot. The former is understandable, the latter is a crime. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Thugs and thugettes want free big screen TV’s and cheesecakes and the protests are a great excuse. Al Sharpton showed up to say that burning black owned businesses was ‘reckless’. What about white owned businesses? Hispanic owned businesses? Korean owned? Those okay to burn, Al?
The people who are rioting and looting have revenue enhancement goals, entertainment goals, and some have political goals. It is my opinion that very few of them give a rats ass about George Floyd. They have agendas, they know the police are outnumbered and have their hands tied by the ‘optics’ of arresting anyone for anything. Some rioters even convince themselves their actions are justified. If asked, they’ll say, “We are protesting…”
This lunacy is further compounded by the organisation Black Lives Matter and a great deal of their supporters who care not a whit for the hundreds of black men, women and children killed by black offenders in Chicago last year, this year, and, seemingly, every year. Where is the outrage. Where are the protests? No riots for them? No looting?
But when a white cop kills a black man in the course, however flawed, of an arrest, it’s game on. Cue the victimhood speeches, cry for reparations, interview Colin Kaepernick, page Al and Jesse, break out the masks (and not for Covid-19) and meet up at your local Target store for free stuff. Dare to ask where is the outrage when a black man kills another black man and you will be dismissed as a racist, the throwaway line for every situation when someone doesn’t agree with the aggrieved nowadays. Yes, it is wrong for a man to be denied due process by being killed during his arrest. Yes, I support the right to peaceful protest and agree that even one such death is one too many. But if citizens aren’t motivated enough to get out and do the hard, constructive work required to change the system, I have no respect for them when they foment violence and tolerate or try to explain away the deliberate theft or destruction of property in the name of advancing their agendas. It is despicable and beneath contempt.
Why do the very people affected by this ignore the question? To continue to ignore it is a choice.
Do Not Rejoice
30 May
May 30, 2020
Day 70
First the good news…
The Zeroes say it all on this day. For the first time ever we are one zero away from there being nine out of nine total zeroes on the board. 1 Active case. Zero recovered cases. Ratio of recovered (or otherwise) cases to confirmed and probable cases is 99.93%
Now for the bad news…
So, you tell me. Are we as a species doomed to repeat the same tired, tragic and timeworn tales generation after generation? Is it impossible to stop the cycle of the rise of totalitarian governments and the wars necessary to ensure they do not take over the world with their poisonous ideologies?
If you would like to know what the peoples of the world thought and felt while Hitler and the cancer of Nazism was growing in Europe, look around you as China takes over Hong Kong and destroys a tiny remnant of freedom clinging to the shore of Asia’s mainland. Eighty some years ago it was Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, the Anschluss, Norway, Belgium, France, Italy….
Now it’s Tibet, Nepal, the South China Sea and Taiwan. The concentration camps have already been built and the Uighurs, an ethnic minority, are imprisoned there by the millions for the simple crime of being ‘other’. They have no champions and no hope. Those not yet in the camps live under mass surveillance and the threat of imminent arrest. Once inside, the inmates are subject to re-education, torture and possible organ harvesting. Outside, systematic oppression includes the destruction of graveyards and the disappearance of entire communities from the land, maps and eventually, memory. It is happening now and we tolerate it.
Toasters are cheap here because life is cheaper there.
It is not only lives in the balance, but judgement of history as well. Just as Hitler had a plan for South and North America, the Chinese Communist Party has a plan for you. When all is said and done they’ll rewrite the curriculum of all schools, dismantle statues, destroy landmarks and erase history all while rebuilding the world as they imagine it should be. To the victor go the spoils.
Watch Hong Kong in the coming weeks. There is a reason the CCP placed their boot on the neck of the island two weeks before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. When the former Hong Kong is a couple of news cycles in the past, watch Taiwan. Watch Australia, the South China Sea and Africa. Read your history books and learn, because if all you do is watch, there will come a time when you will see your children march off to a war that you let happen because you could not be bothered to stop it.
Bring manufacturing home to your own land or to countries that do not support totalitarian dictators. Stop, by whatever means, the conducting of business with China. Stop listening to their wolf diplomats scolding the west for interfering in their sovereign right to whatever they like. Stop thinking you can do nothing. Do a little bit each day. Open your eyes. Study your enemy. Speak out. Speak up. One battle is over. The next is well underway.
Goodnight and Good Luck
24 May
May 24, 2020
Day 64
A couple of things right off the bat. The quail haven’t left, the meteorologists were right about the rain and Hong Kong is in trouble.
In other news today a salon worker in Missouri infected 91 customers over seven days last week, Sweden stands by their plan and Putin’s approval ratings have dropped from 100% to 97%. In Moscow a third doctor who worked for an ambulance service has fallen to his death after expressing dismay about two doctors who earlier died in similar incidents. A government spokesperson is reported to have cited ‘unwarranted agitation for parachutes for health workers on the frontline of the fight against Covid-19’ as the cause of his ‘inadvertent and totally unrelated high speed convergence with the earth’. In Norway, BOC Aviation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the state owned Bank Of China, has purchased a majority share of Norwegian Air after the cash strapped startup completed a debt for equity swap in order to survive the downturn in revenue caused by the Covid-19 contagion. Media representatives for BOC Aviation were unavailable for comment at the time of the transaction as they were busy threatening Australia with ‘new much needed regulations’ on the import of beef and ‘technical inspection issues’ affecting the shipping of coal and iron ore. Elsewhere, North Korea still has zero reported cases and credits this to Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s ‘Superior Leadership and Beneficial Practices’. The Hermit Kingdom has offered to help the world combat Covid-19 by teaching these principles to all countries except Turkmenistan, citing a long standing dispute with that former Soviet republic about which nation had zero Covid-19 cases first. Resolution of this dispute is proving to be difficult as President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, has banned the word coronavirus. And in New Zealand toady, Ministry of Health figures were posted on their website and this is what they say…
Zero New cases. 1 Recovered case. Ratio of recovered cases to confirmed and probable cases is 96.8%. Five Zeroes on the board. 27 Active cases remaining.
And in our final story tonight…
Goodnight and good luck.
Progress
23 May
May 23, 2020
Day 63
The weather forecast calls for six days of rain starting tomorrow so today I collected two shovels, four new large pavers and a few smaller, older ones, some bricks, two bags of setting sand, two levels, a brick layer’s trowel, a pry bar and a rake, and proceeded to make a walkway that would allow us to approach the steps to the forest porch without slipping in the slick yellow clay that is the foundation of the forest floor. It took about four hours with a break for lunch around three in the afternoon. Levelling the path base took the most physical work because our garden used to be the lower part of the drive the original developers put in twenty years ago. They used a type of rock infused fill that resists traditional shovelling and the pry bar came in handy for levering up recalcitrant rocks about the size and shape of clenched fists. Once I had what seemed like a level area I confirmed this with the levels, then spread a bag of bedding sand and raked it smooth.
The large pavers followed, two abreast, checked and tamped until they were solid and as perfect as they were going to be, given the temporary nature of the walkway. (It’s going to be removed sometime before spring, but that’s another story.)
The smaller pavers were easier to lay, still using the same method, and then the bricks went down until I ran out of them. Another bag of bedding sand was spread on top and swept into all the joints. I’m hoping the rain will compact the sand deep into each joint and lock everything together. This may involve a little work in the rain tomorrow to add more sand but that’s not an issue as I have to go that way to get to the shop.
I finished just as the sun set and then used the last light to reroute the water supply hose to the washing machine so that it runs under the shipping container instead of on the garden grass. The new arrangement looked so clean I decided to hide the hose as best I could all the way to the faucet some eighty feet away at the back of the house. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Now the hose is tucked away and hidden for the most part and having done so I cannot help but think there is no better way to bring back the drought. For now though, and until it is needed elsewhere, the hose stays where it is.
Tools put away, workshop closed up for the night, I went inside to have dinner and check today’s numbers…
Zero New cases. Zero Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to confirmed and probable cases remains unchanged from yesterday because there are 7 Zeroes on the board. No change in anything, which is a good thing. The more the merrier.
All day as I worked there was a huge wood pigeon sitting and feeding in a tree just on the other side of the windbreak to the left of the forest porch. In the morning Valerie and I sat for a few minutes in the sun and listened to a Tui high in the branches singing his wild discordant song. Just before lunch Mr. Lonely, a single quail we’ve seen here for four years, came and waited patiently while I spread some seed for him. After lunch three more showed up a received the same treatment. Their count today was a fraction of their usual numbers and I wonder whether the coming days of rain will keep them away. The chaffinches and sparrows kept a vigil in the grove and thundered into the air by the dozens every time I banged a rock with the shovel or scraped the rake on the growing path of pavers. One by two they return unnoticed to perch in the ponga and scan the steps for any new seed, then take flight again and again as I progressed*.
As I type these last sentences for today’s entry, the rain begins to fall outside, tapping lightly on the roof, slowly building. Soon it will be drumming steadily, running off the roof, into the gutters and downspouts, filling our water tank and our dreams.
Goodnight.
*Speaking of progress, here’s a handy link for you all to help you gauge yours. Enjoy.
Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day
18 May
May 18, 2020
Day 58
In seventeen days it will be the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Remember it while you can. Fifty years from now all records of the June Fourth Incident will have been purged, deleted, or otherwise erased from every institution, library, government archive or online cloud data storage centre. Your children’s children will be speaking to their parents about the great opportunities afforded to them if they are accepted for admission in universities across China. Permission to emigrate to Mars will be among these privileges as well as selection for retirement living on the moon. If you would like to know what it felt like to be alive as the glory that was Rome fell, keep your eyes open. Look around you. It is happening everywhere, all the time now. You can stop it in its tracks with a little determination and some sacrifice.
But that toaster is on sale now. Your call.
Whitianga was back to its old self today, save for new social distancing methods built into checkout areas and one way traffic in and out of larger stores. Everything was open again pretty much like two months ago. I checked with my new optometrist’s receptionist about whether the doctor would be wearing a mask for my examination tomorrow and we discussed common sense and courtesy and responsibility while I filled out a patient information sheet. Came up with a mnemonic to remember her name (Romeoed what Juliette) and then headed over to New World to help Valerie with the grocery shopping. From there I went to PlaceMakers and loaded up the roof rack with a sheet of form ply, some 2×3’s and 1×2’s. Got some bricks for a path to the new forest porch steps, two boxes of screws and some more silicone roof and gutter sealant. The fun never stops….
Oh, wait… It did stop for six weeks or so, didn’t it? But we did a good job of corralling those infected with the virus and the result is still reflected in today’s numbers.
Zero New cases. Zero Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to confirmed and probable cases is still 95.5%.
But wait, there’s more… Can you see it?
7 Zeroes on the board for the first time since we began watching these figures. Lucky number seven. Good to see, great to think about and let’s hope that soon we get to the big Zero we’ve all been waiting for.
The Sphinx in Moonlight
Live well and love. Time is gaining on you.
Tomorrow is Already Here
16 May
May 16, 2020
Day 56
Zero New cases. 7 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 95.3%. Four Zeroes on the board.
For the first time in a month I felt like myself today. Power washed the steps and walkway to get rid of the mold that makes them green and slippery. Repaired the west wall of the kitchen where I discovered a leak after the gully-washer rains of the night before. That took all afternoon and used up 80 square-feet of tar paper that a friend donated to us a year ago. I keep everything and this was one more time I’m glad I have that habit. Did one more job but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it was.
More for tomorrow, now that I’m back on my feet. Crossing things off the list and adding more to it as things judder forward. The quail are back again. Make up your mind, guys.
Getting lots of random followers from my tags or just pure luck of the draw. Hate to disappoint you all, but I’m just here for the comments and only visit the really rare site or three. You know who you are. Thanks for hanging with me thus far.
Good night all. Tomorrow is already here.
The Future Waits
15 May
May 15, 2020
Day 55
1 New case. 10 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 94.8%.
Thames was a no go. Valerie was not up to it and I discovered a bureaucratic glitch in the matrix so we postponed and had a quiet, relaxing day tucked in at home. I completed the repairs on the lamp and returned it to its place in the sitting room. Checked it off the list and made new plans for tomorrow (today:). All is well.
ironwoodwind 