Pandemic Timing and Other Distractions

I started writing a blog post couple of days ago about how 2020 has turned into a blur despite my living in what is currently one of the safest places on earth where we haven't had any COVID cases in the community for months - while there have been a few people in quarantine during that time, all have come in from other hotspots. Life, apart from social distancing and hard borders enforcing quarantine for anyone coming into the state, has largely returned to normal. While we're still at Level 4 restrictions and some major events like the Perth Royal Show have been cancelled we can travel freely within most of the state, businesses have reopened and face masks are a rare sight unlike in many other parts of Australia.

This blurring of time seems to be affecting us all because I'm seeing comments about how our perception of time has gone nuts everywhere - on blogs, in discussions - online and in person, in newspaper articles and opinion pieces online. Since it's apparently a pandemic thing common to us all it made me realise that maybe I should think about something else other than how discombobulated I feel.

This is what I came up with. See that little black dot at the end of the previous sentence? It's the humble period or full stop depending on where you live and in the last few days from two quite unrelated sources I've learned that for younger folk - that would be teens and early twenties - the full stop - that extremely useful indicator of when a sentence ends - is regarded as weird or even suggests annoyance, irritation or anger when it appears in a text or email. Really. Apparently this is because these folk communicate largely electronically using short separate messages for each sentence so making punctuation redundant and other demarcation unnecessary. However much it offends my pedantic streak I can see a certain logic to this in text messages where the whole message forms a sentence but - and you knew there'd be a but, didn't you - not all text messages are only one sentence and emails in my experience rarely are. So what happens then?

The answer is things can get really messy especially with emails a major means of communication within the business community now that postal services are being cut back. Does this abhorrence of the full stop mean that this generation sees all business communications as angry? Is it going to move on to written letters - you know, those on paper - and not just those sent electronically? And what about books? Will we see the demise of commas and question marks? You only have to look at any of the bad punctuation jokes going around where an unpunctuated sentence suggests instead of sitting down for a meal with someone we're actually about to eat them to see that this could lead us into scary territory and the increased possibility of misunderstandings. (In my opinion one of the best of these bad punctuation jokes - there are whole websites devoted to them should you want to go down that rabbit hole - is the panda one which Lyn Truss featured on the back cover of her book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. If you've never heard it you can find it here.)

I know that things change with every generation seeking to distinguish itself from previous ones by subverting accepted norms or language. I'm thinking of how a few years ago "sick" had a new positive meaning assigned to it by my kids and their friends while "cool", well, that has pretty much moved on to be mainstream. This really doesn't bother me and I've been happy to adapt to the electronic world we live in but sometimes the need to break from the past is counter-productive. Punctuation is merely a way of breaking up words to make the meaning clearer. With the exception of the exclamation mark it says nothing about meaning or status and I'm not at all convinced that assigning any other meaning to them is an improvement. What comes next? Replacing punctuation with emojis?

Plastic Free July -Update

July has been and gone so I decided to try to evaluate what I had achieved.

Shopping: we're still online grocery shopping partly because our local shopping centre is undergoing renovations that make shopping there a very depressing experience with shop closures due to the renovations limiting what we can actually buy and partly because walking around the shops is hard work for me. The downside to this is that due to the on-going pandemic the shopping is left at the front door in reusable plastic bags. While I'm not happy about this I don't see another option for us at present and at least these bags can be reused.

Cling wrap: I haven't used any since the beginning of July and Pisces finally seems to be realising that we have a cupboard full of reusable containers so has used very little, too, which I'm very pleased about.

Tea and Coffee: I've been using recyclable coffee pods and loose leaf tea for many years but we still have tea bags for the peppermint tea I like to drink. After hearing that most tea bags contain plastic I was even less keen on using them although as the peppermint ones do decompose in the compost they at least must be plastic free. Even so I would like to find a supplier of a loose leaf version of this tea but have had no luck. I do grow some peppermint but don't have the space to get a large enough yield to supply the amount we use. This is disappointing but I'll keep trying.

Recycling: I've been finding new places to recycle since our local council recycling is somewhat limited in what they accept. They won't take bottle tops for instance and are now refusing certain hard plastics. I've found a couple of locally charities which collect a wide range of items the Council doesn't and there's a whole bunch of 'stuff' ready to go there. I've also found a charity that takes old electronics so all that will be heading there. As well my decluttering has produced a pile of still usable items which are gradually making their way onto our local Buy Nothing site.

Could I have done better? Of course. Have I achieved something? Also yes - and, as I will be continuing these practices and adding to them I hope, I feel reasonably satisfied and intend to keep doing this into the future.

Storm Damage

We've had a couple of days of gales and heavy rain and this is what I found when I went out into the vegetable garden this morning.  Although I had staked them as securely as I could in anticipation of the rough weather almost all my sugar snap and snow peas have been blown off the fence.  I've picked what I can but the plants are so badly damaged I think all I can do is to pull them out.

Not everything was wrecked although the rainbow chard is somewhat mangled as are some of the cabbages and lettuces but one vegetable seems to have survived well and that's the beetroot as you can see.in this photo showing of part of the beetroot bed.

You've probably guessed from this that Pisces and I like eating beetroot. Both the roots and the leaves regularly make their way into our meals and are shared with our neighbours. I grow a mix of traditional red beetroot and other variously coloured heritage varieties which is why this bowl of borscht, made from a mix of red, yellow, cream and pink beets, is more pink than the usual red. It's just as tasty, though.

Borscht isn't the only way I use beets of course. The roots are delicious as vegetables baked, steamed or boiled, you can use them in cakes and raw grated into salads or processed into vegetable smoothies while the leaves can be steamed, braised or microwaved with the tender young leaves a lovely addition to a leafy salad. It's a vegetable that just keeps on giving.

Scammers

We've had a spate of scam and nuisance phone calls on the land line in the past few days. There have been multiple calls when there's a lot of background noise but no-one speaks initially - my rule of thumb for any such delay is to say hello three times (there have been occasions when legitimate callers haven't spoken immediately so I give them this much opportunity) as well as a number when there's no sound or they hang up very quickly without speaking. Yes, I do know that some of these may be wrong numbers but they could be courteous enough to apologise if that's the case. I would.

Then there are the out and out scam callers such as the man who said he was from the security department of Visa and Mastercard, others saying they are from the ATO (Australian Tax Office) and the robot voice claiming to be from the Department of Home Affairs. As well Australia has been plagued by robot calls from "Nicole at the NBN" ever since that entity came into being before we even get to the supposed security department at Microsoft which has been annoying everyone for years. Usually I just hang up as soon as they begin their spiel but I'm getting more and more fed up with them disrupting my life.  Today I was very tired having slept badly and decided on a post lunch nap. We'd already had three scam calls during the morning and to get a period of peace I went as far as unplugging the landline which worked for that line but I was still woken by a call on my mobile. Another scammer.

I'm really fed up with this. Having to race to the phone is challenging for someone like me - and it's not only the phone. I get emails either phishing or threatening me with having various services cut off. I know there's no point in getting upset or appealing to their better nature - these people have no conscience or they wouldn't be doing what they are - but it would be nice if there was something I could do to irritate them as much as they irritate me.

I have had fun at the scammer's expense on a few occasions when I've had plenty of time. My favourite was probably when I let fly a string of abuse - without swearing once - at one man who obviously didn't quite grasp how to be a scam artist because he rang back after I'd hung up to tell me I was a very rude woman. On the other hand it might have been another I've just remembered. I was out watering the garden with the hose and one of the kids took the call allegedly from Microsoft security and brought the phone out to me. I entertained myself at their expense for a full ten minutes as the woman tried to get me to follow her instructions to input some computer code. I pretended that I didn't understand and things were going wrong as for example when I sobbed "Oh no, the screen has gone blank. How do I fix it?" I could practically hear her gritting her teeth as she explained over and over again until I got bored and told her she should be ashamed of herself. She was so stunned that she didn't even hang up, just listened as I ranted at her.

But while this amused me for a time - and prevented them from calling someone else for a little while - it doesn't solve the problem. Even caller ID doesn't stop the phone ringing and that for me at least is the real problem because until you get to the phone you don't know who it is. I guess we're stuck with these inconveniences since there'll always be people who seek to take advantage of others. It's sad, though, isn't it.

In the garden.

First poppy of the season and it's in surprisingly good condition after yesterday's heavy rain which it must have just missed.

The winter flowers have been pretty sparse this year apart from the calendulas like these that are part of a border in the vegetable garden

 
and alyssum here bordering the poppy bed.

I told Miss Four that alyssum is also called Sweet Alice and she gave me a sideways look of disbelief. Just wait until the Johnny Jump Ups jump up.  Maybe I'd better stick to calling them heartsease.