It looks like the fifth wave might be here slightly earlier than was predicted. So early days (literally), but things are certainly beginning to tick over a bit more quickly…
Wastewater being those poo studies we mentioned a long while back, test positivity being this:
Reading backwards, i.e. most recent data on the left. (Otherwise it would be looking great!) And Gauteng numbers are looking like this:
We’re certainly not there yet (we’d need a 20% week-on-week change in positivity for it to be classed as a “resurgence”) and the Western Cape is currently recording an increase of just under 10% for that figure. But this is how every other wave has begun, so why should we expect anything different this time?
Spotted on Twitter last week and Pocketed, and now he’s written it up in a handy blog post. Excellent, and well worth my procrastination in sharing it.
(FO because it tried to render the Faroese flag and failed)
But yes, it does exactly what it says in the title. Our man flies to Torshavn, hires a van, and spends a couple of days visiting local football stadiums. The experience is magical and the views are incredible.
There’s a lovely little passage about each of the grounds he visited, and some great photos.
The crazy thing is, you can literally just rock up to any ground and go have a kick about… Imagine doing that at Hampden or Wembley!
That does sound like fun. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that I’m going to get to the Faroes any time soon, so I’m living vicariously through Andy’s blog right now.
But that’s not to say that we don’t have some amazing pitches of our own. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of playing at Camps Bay High will know that this image from the school’s website:
…really doesn’t do it justice.
It’s got mountains; it’s got sea. Less snow, though. In case that’s what you were after.
Am I alone in repeatedly thinking that today is/was Saturday? End of week public holidays can have that effect, and even though BBC 6 Music kept trying to remind me of what was going on with a normal weekday lineup, it’s now 8pm and I think I’m waking up on Sunday tomorrow.
Awoken disappointingly early this morning into a sunny – but chilly – day, I managed a 40 minute sesh on the gym before a couple of hours work in the garden, and then a little corrective/remedial work on said gym. It is all complete now and working perfectly. I no longer have any excuses.
Not that I want any. I’m finally healthy enough to actually get on with things and get back to full fitness.
And then some disastrous football. Just because I love to have my emotions played with and my sense of hope destroyed.
I need a nice glass of red wine and a nice early night.
Not flatpackED avoidance, although wouldn’t that be a useful thing to have? A couple of screws (careful now) and a bit of banging (oi!) and you wouldn’t have to do anything like assembling a Chinese-made (but SA-imported) flat pack home gym.
Because that’s what I’m going to be trying to do this weekmonth year.
Bought because I want to get back into my pre-Covid shape (or better) and the actual public gym is expensive and will be chockful of every subsequent Covid variant for the next few years. Let’s face it, it was never the most hygienic of environments, but that was entirely manageable with just your normal, run-of-the-mill, endemic pathogens around the place. Lob in a novel, airborne virus and it’s just not as much fun. With this fancy new home gym, we can get fit, toned and muscular without risking Covid, the common cold or athlete’s foot.
If… I can build it.
Because, as I mentioned yesterday, I don’t mind flat packs. They are designed with nerdy, methodical, practical, analytical people like me in mind. I would happily set up a business going to people’s house and building their flat pack furniture for them. It’s relaxing, even possibly cathartic: creating function and order where once there was chaos.
But this one is nasty:
It’s insanely complicated: the diagram above is far from the whole thing, there is very limited assistance from the instruction booklet, there are occasional parts missing (nothing crucial so far), and there are some bits which… um… “could have been manufactured with a little more care”.
Diplomacy can like to be my middle name.
And so the beagle has been bathed, that leaking irrigation pipe has been fixed, the dishwasher unpacked and repacked, payments have been made, a load of washing done, and a blog post (almost) written. I’m thinking of making dinner, even though it’s only 9:30am. Anything to avoid going back out there and tackling… that. Perversely, procrastination is actually a great way of getting jobs done.
Well, some of them.
Look, I will prevail, but by the time I do, I might well have had enough heartbeats for the whole year, and therefore not need any more exercise anyway.
We have to do a census thing. It’s been at least 10 years since the last one and we need to stand up and be counted – for reasons. There’s an option to do it online (thank the heavens) and I gladly grasped that with both hands, so that the beagle wouldn’t eat the local volunteer. But then I noticed that the URL it sent me to ended with gov.za and my heart sank. It’ll be shit, I thought. And it is. Because in true South African government style, the UI is just horrible, nothing works properly and the things it is asking me are… well… bizarre.
Like:
So, I put our house number (let’s say it’s 25) and then “House”, because we live in a house (I didn’t think it actually needed to know what colour it was from the Plascon range) and now – even though it said that it was going to ask for my address later in the process – it thinks my address is “25 House”. Which is going to get it rejected immediately. Perhaps a field asking for – I don’t know – my “Address” might have been a better way forward. Because no-one wanting your details in any other circumstance asks:
OK, and could I have your name, unit/flat number and further description of the structure/unit, please?
Do they?
And who lives at “500 Green House”, anyway? The SA Post Office isn’t going to be able to deliver anything to you with an address like that, are they? Mind you, the SA Post Office is so dysfunctional and wrecked by corruption and theft that it isn’t really able to deliver anything to anyone anyway, so why not go for 500 Green House? Just for the giggles.
And it’s already a LOT of work. Especially if you have moved from “8 House” to “25 House” since the last census. Which we have. So I tell it that we’ve moved and it asks “where from?”, but won’t allow me to enter anything but Athlone, Belhar or Bellville. So now I’ve moved from Belhar simply because at least it’s an answer I can give, and it asks “Why did you move?”.
I mean, have you seen Belhar?
But more seriously, I selected that the household had moved. Just moved house. No divorce, no fire, no death or destruction: we just moved house. But then, even though it already knows exactly who lives in my household, I have to jump through all the same hoops for my wife. And my son. And my daughter. One of us now comes from Athlone. I think it’s the missus.
Ugh. Just populate the form for me. I don’t have time for 176 drop down menus for each person – most of which don’t work (the menus, not the people) – when I’ve already given you all the same information, anyway.
And I wasn’t even halfway through the very first section.
To add insult to injury, the site then crashed. And I can’t get back in. So, long story short, I’ve given up. I’ll try again tomorrow now I’m more aware of the size of the mountain of bullshit between me and the finish line. I will prepare with coffee and biltong and lock myself away in my office until it’s all done.
