I want to take a break from posting each day and I’m afraid that if I do, the discipline of posting each day will lead to an overall breakdown in Lockdown discipline.
Then what?
Sanity mostly intact, I’ve completed Lockdown Days 1 to 99 by gardening, scooping leaves from the pond, doing household chores (grocery shopping, etc.) cooking (vegetarian), reading and writing, walking the neighborhood and talking to neighborhood dogs, and isolated but communicating with faraway friends and family….
The next 100 days will bring us into mid-October.
What will happen between now and then?
Enquiring minds wanna know…
You can help. Email me info on how you’re coping and ideas you’d like to share: raisingsandradio at gmail.com.
News blues…
Dismal news on the Covid-19 front…- …a new form of the coronavirus has spread from Europe to the US. The new mutation makes the virus more likely to infect people but does not seem to make them any sicker than earlier variations of the virus…. researchers call the new mutation G614, and they show that it has almost completely replaced the first version to spread in Europe and the US, one called D614.
- There have been at least 182,260 cases of coronavirus in Texas, according to a New York Times database. As of Friday morning, at least 2,562 people had died. (My son and his family live near Houston. He works in a hospital and was unknowingly exposed to a Covid-positive patient this week.)
- The United States reported 55,220 new coronavirus cases Thursday, ... the largest daily increase for any state in the United States on Thursday.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Located on the border of a suburban village and “farming area,” the road outside this house changes from (pot-holed) tar to dirt. It’s dry this time of year and each vehicle that passes raises clouds of dust.Much of that dust appears to settle on my car.
In the US, I would either wash my car at a self-serve, coin operated facility or push coins into the slot of a fully automatic car wash.
In SA, everything at a petrol/gas station is conducted by attendants: drivers wait while attendants pump petrol/gas, check oil and water, and clean windows.
After months of dust accumulating on my car, I elected, for the first time, to use a local car wash.
What I could see of the car wash facility as I waited in line appeared fully automatic.
An attendant with an official-looking receipt book showed me a menu of options - wash only; wash and dry; wash, dry, wax; interiors detailed, etc.
I selected wash and dry.
At the attendant’s signal, I moved my car into the facility.
Surprise! The entire process is manual: two workers (including the menu-wielding attendant) hand wash, hand dry, and, I assume, hand wax, all vehicles!
Manual washing makes sense in a country where employees vastly outnumber employment.
Cost for wash and dry? ZAR 85 - US$ 5.00 (That’s cheaper than a coin operated self-serve car wash in California – with drying-by-driving option.)
***
Another day to ponder the pandemic while making compost with a concrete mixer (and brewig compost tea/fertilizer).
Read Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10 | Week 11 | Week 12 | Week 13 | Week 14 |
Watch Videos of Garden Creatures 
No comments:
Post a Comment