Socially distanced

News blues

Update on Omicron in US and in SA  (7:00 mins)
Dr Salim Abdool Karim, epidemiologist and former co-chair of South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid-19, speaks to the latest developments in the data regarding the Omicron variant's spread in South Africa >>  (1:28 mins)

 
An analysis by NPR shows  that since the vaccine rollout, US counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump have had more than twice the COVID mortality rates of those that voted for Joe Biden. 

Editorial comment: Gosh! How surprising! Hmmm, maybe residents should try vaccine instead of cultish ideology?

Healthy planet, anyone?

Another foray into the life and times of bees: Honeybees survived for weeks under volcano ash after Canary Islands eruption: For roughly 50 days, thousands of honeybees sealed themselves in their hives, away from deadly gas, and feasted on honey. To humans this “is a very empowering story,” To bees? It’s business as usual. Eating honey, after all, is why bees make honey.  

Editorial comment: Hmmm, maybe humans could learn from bees to take better care of ourselves and our planet. Instead, we gamble when the stakes clearly are beyond our capacity to handle the outcomes – as in ignoring that:

Coal ash, an umbrella term for the residue that’s left over when utilities burn coal, one of the United States’ largest kinds of industrial waste. Coal ash contains metals — including lead, mercury, chromium, selenium, cadmium and arsenic — that never biodegrade.
…John Howard, who lives in Mobile County and has been fishing in southern Alabama for decades, said, “We’ve got an A-bomb up the river. It’s just waiting to happen.” Past environmental calamity spills include immediate fallout with ash blanketing up to 400 acres, killing hundreds of fish, damaging more than a dozen homes and polluting nearby waterways. That clean-up took years and cost more than $1 billion.

Read more >> 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Cold outside today so I entertain myself with culinary experimentation.
Despite being more interested in simplicity than in owing more kitchen gadgets, I fell in love with a friend’s air fryer. After many delicious and easy to make meals made with said air fryer, I splurged and purchased my own. The outcome? My love life has expanded: I love my own small, easy to use air fryer, perhaps more than I loved his air fryer.
My air frying learning curve includes making my own falafel – a dish I never made at home in the past due to antipathy toward frying food. Now? Delicious falafel that involves no frying comes out of the gadget.

Today’s culinary experimentation: homemade potato cakes made from “real” potatoes – Yukon Golds (potato cakes aka aloo tikki). I’ll freeze most and pull them out when I make my easy version of chole aloo tikki chaat.
I also made cilantro pesto and tzatziki.

Perhaps it’s the holiday season (SA dubs it the “festive season”) or perhaps the cold weather, but experimental cooking is on my daily agenda. 

After not making a cheese cake in decades, last week I made my version of cheese cake that uses plain yogurt instead of sour cream and includes a layer of lemon curd.
Roll on, festive season!

***

Working to ameliorate the isolation of social distancing, I became obsessed over tracking my cell phone’s battery usage.  

The reward of an ISP contract is a cell phone battery that last longer, sometimes twice as long, than a phone not logged onto a private wireless network.

Battery charge durations illustrated.
(Left) 2 short durations. (Right) 1 long - + 24 hour - duration.

With Covid’s social distancing keeping me home, I “twiddle my thumbs” making assorted “designs” with battery charging colors. Shown above, left, design created with short charge cycle pre-ISP contract - compared, right, to long charge post-ISP contract.
I pray the ISP contract relieves me of this obsession with battery charging .