Salt and corrosion

I have talked to more people this week than I have in months. By Zoom, because that's how we live now. But still, lots of people and I am exhausted. How did I use to function in the open world?

This is the week where we review the monthly financial statements: each accountant is assigned to a couple of departments and we sit down with them and go through their budget. I normally have three departments to meet, but another accountant has changed jobs this month, so I'm also doing her three departments until they fill her position. Once there is a new accountant, they are going to switch around our departments to even out the workload, which I am quite sad about. My current three departments are Facilities, Infrastructure and Maintenance, and I've only just started to get my head around them. I quite liked learning about the airport and rivers and street trees.

Tomorrow: I get to leave the house!

Today's photo: Stage two

It turns out that instead of a small number of one species of greater glider (a small marsupial), Australia has even smaller numbers of three different species of them. (Honestly, do click that link to see the cutest little ball of fur. It looks like a toy. The ears!)

This week, I'm going to do a daily photo. Today:

My half-day at work. I planned to write today's entry in my long, free afternoon, but here we are, nearly bed-time, and I'm only just doing it. Not that I was busy, mind. Just that I am a world-class waster of time. What I did this afternoon: went to Bunnings to buy some basil seedlings and a tomato cage; let a sparrow out of the cat enclosure; went to the Post Office to pick up a parcel.

According to an email I received from a stationery shop, today is World Fountain Pen today. I'm not sure how we're meant to commemorate this momentous day. Buy fountain pens, I suppose. I already have two, so I won't be doing that. One in my bag, one at work, but both currently on my desk at home. Both basic LAMY ones to use with bottled ink, but with beautiful extra-fine nibs. I do like a pointy nib.

I think my entry four years ago started "Oh, America" and that about sums it up again.

In other news, my kettle broke today. Simply refuses to boil water. It was just that sort of day.

A good week, this week. Here in locked down Victoria, we had donut days, the first in months. Three days of double donuts, even: zero new cases, zero deaths.

Also this week, the City by the Sea took part in a trial for the new census website. So that was a bit of fun.

Also also this week, my permanent contract at work hasn't yet been finalised, but I seem to have been promoted up a grade. Permanent job and pay rise, if/when it eventually happens.

A random lady walking past while I was in the front garden said to me, over the fence, "I love walking past your garden, it's so wild and colourful." It does look good just now, with blue love-in-a-mist, red poppies and purple irises all jumbled together.

Today I made pecan shortbread, which was unimpressive, and used up some leftover wonton wrappers by filling them with strawberries and Nutella and frying them, which was delicious.

The downside of this week is that Alistair has coughed up furballs on three separate days, including one night when he jumped on my bed specifically to start coughing on my pillow. Fortunately I managed to get him onto the wooden floorboards in time.

October books read

A light reading month, this one. It took me ages to get into this and ages to finish and ages to get started on something new. A reading fog.

* Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures - Stephen Fry (2019) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

I have a month's worth of notes, reminders of what I was going to write about but haven't. So let's just read the notes without further explanation:
- Mince pies and hot cross buns in the supermarket at the same time. They should be like lions and tigers and never meet.
- Uncle G's farm used for cross-border tractor sales.
- Free goldfish sign at the dodgy house across the road.
- 1910 coffee recipe made with eggs in, shell and all.
- Kim Next Door broke her foot mowing the lawn.
- Man named Orpheus Pledger.
- Someone spent $1 at a sari shop on my credit card and now I have to get a new one.
- My mother and her friend got into a ridiculous argument trying to give each other a twenty dollar note.
- My job is apparently being made permanent and dauntingly busy.

And now we're all caught up on September, except for this:

September books read

* Crossed Skis - Carol Carnac (1952) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Spoilt Kill - Mary Kelly (1961) ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Accordionist - Fred Vargas (1997) (trans. Siân Reynolds, 2017) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

* The Authenticity Project - Clare Pooley (2020) ★ ★
( Read more... )

* Vittoria Cottage - DE Stevenson (1949) ★ ★ ★ ★
( Read more... )

My mother has been haunting the local nursery's website, waiting for sugar cane mulch to be back in stock. It appeared last Sunday, so she did her order, and a delivery truck turned up on Monday. Ten bales of dried sugar cane, all stacked in the garage. It smells like rum.

There is a fairy ring of toadstools on the back lawn.

Back in the early days of lockdown, when there was a run on flour in the supermarket, I had to buy the only plain flour left on the shelves, which was normal plain flour, but in a (more expensive but reusable) fancy blue tin, instead of a paper bag. This week, I noticed that now they had a red tin for the self-raising flour, so I bought one of them, and now I have matching fancy tins of flour.

The nights are starting to draw in. It's not dark when I finish work, but it's definitely no longer day. I've taken to going for a walk during my lunch break just to get a bit of sunlight. That's how I found out the house on the corner has guinea pigs, two hutches of them: one with four and one with two. They put them in their front garden during the day.

Across the road from the guinea pigs the other day was a woman out walking with three little girls and a dachshund pup. The pup noticed a little black and white cat sitting on a fence. The cat sat. The dachshund yipped. The cat looked away. The dachshund kept yipping. The little girls giggled. The woman eventually had to pick the pup up to keep going.

Next Doors have had a new front door installed.

Alistair's anniversary was on Friday. Five years he's been here now. I bought him some fancy kangaroo mince to mark the occasion. He didn't like it.

And that's all the excitement for this week.

( Weekly knitting photo )

(Finally, some good advice from these old ads.)

It was a warm weekend, a last gasp of summer before autumn sets in. Saturday was quite the occasion here: we decided to get takeaway from one of the many restaurants that have turned themselves into takeaway shops. I drove to pick it up, pleased to be out in the balmy boronia air, noting the well-spaced queues outside the fish and chipperies and pizza places I passed. I waited in the car until they texted me that the order was ready to pick up; meanwhile one of the waiters was flat out running bags of food out to taxies for delivery. (Or to eat themselves, I suppose, but there was such a steady stream of taxies I assumed it was a delivery thing.) Once I got inside, the restaurant was empty of tables, with Xs taped on the polished wood floorboards to show where to stand, and its long galley kitchen was protected by glass panels, with just a small cut-out for them to slide the bag through.

Sunday was the weekly shop. The first thing I noticed at the shopping centre was that two of the entrances were boarded up and covered with orange plastic. Nothing to do with coronavirus, it turned out: someone had rammed a stolen SUV through one entrance the night before, driven around the empty shopping centre, then rammed out through another door. As you do. Inside the supermarket: the toilet paper aisle was nearly full, but there was no flour, sugar (except coconut sugar) or hand wash. The ubiquitous Xs are taped on the floor, and you now have to pack your own bags.

Monday, I had to make an unexpected trip out. I had organised to go into work on Tuesday evening to do the month end reports and rollover, because doing them on one tiny laptop screen would be a pain. On Monday, though, the IT department let me know they had organised a second monitor for me and left it on my desk. I went in and picked it up. A ghost office with bottles of hand sanitiser at every door. I could hear someone talking in an office somewhere, but I didn't see anyone — except the Mayor, who was parking his silver sports car out the front of the building when I left carrying my monitor under my arm.

Which meant I didn't have to go in on Tuesday, and could do the month end rollover from the comfort of my own home. The month end rollover is my special, scary job. My first month, I did it supervised by my predecessor, the week before she went on maternity leave; last month, I did it alone, but my boss stayed in the office so I could get help if necessary; Tuesday was my first time solo. It went well. I treated myself to a chocolate mini-egg by way of celebration.

What else? At some point during the week I used up the last of our rhubarb to make white chocolate and rhubarb jam drop biscuits; well worth it, because they were good. The council organises free flu vaccinations for all employees who want one, so I booked in for that next week. And that's about all.

(Never mind the smelling bottle to cure the flu, what about the arsenical soap, ideal for the complexion?)

A weird, end-of-term feeling at work yesterday. The building was already closed to the public and a lot of the admin staff working from home already, so the ground floor was deserted. Word came through after lunch that those of us on the first floor were being sent home too.

The payroll lady had to get groceries for her parents at lunch time, so she also bought a carton of chocolate eggs for us to have a farewell party, sitting at our well-spaced desks. Then I signed my Working From Home During the Covid-19 Pandemic Emergency Agreement, packed my stuff, picked up my new council-issued laptop, and came home for the foreseeable future. Except for next Tuesday, when I have permission to enter the building in the afternoon to do the month-end rollover.

Being the New Person at work is humbling. Everyone has been very helpful, showing me the way round the software. And now the tables have turned: they're all long-term council employees, used to working in the same space, and here's me, veteran of multi-office organisations, knowledgeable about electronic signatures and instant messaging. Finally, I am useful.

The news tonight was twenty-five solid minutes on covid-19, followed by the newsreader saying this: "And now for some non-coronavirus news, a five-point-two metre rare white snake was found in a Queensland house today." The apocalypse rolls on, then.

It's too hot to write anything. TOO HOT.

And I have a sore toe.