Another Covid shot

 These days, I qualify as an 'Older Australian', which for now means that I get a free Covid booster shot every six months or so, just as I get a free flu shot at the start of winter.

Our local pharmacy hasn't yet got stock of the government approved flu vaccine for us oldies which meant that yesterday it was simply a Covid booster.

During the pandemic I used to get quite an unpleasant reaction to both Astra Zeneca and Pfizer, but last time I had a Pfizer booster and it wasn't too bad.

This time they were giving out the latest Moderna vaccine that has been rated by  the TGA as particularly effective against the latest Omicron strains.

As I hadn't had Moderna before I was expecting the usual side effects, but no, they were pretty mild - the worst was what we'll politely describe as 'copious urination' or less politely 'having to get up a couple of times at night and pee like a horse'.

I certainly needed my usual two mugs of tea before breakfast, but otherwise I'm fine - perhaps a slight headache, but the the fire people have been back burning and it's a cold morning (snow forecast down to 1300m), cold enough for people to light their wood stoves, so there's some smoke in the air, so I wouldn't ascribe my sinusy feeling this morning to my Covid shot yesterday.

Changing the clock

 Today's Clock Change day, the day when the south east of Australia finally acknowledges the imminent onset of winter and puts the clock back an hour.

The cats, of course, were merely puzzled as to why the humans were still in bed and bounded in to demand breakfast and to be let out because, hey, the sun was up, even though officially it was not quite six thirty in the morning.

There will doubtless be more feline grumpiness later today when they find dinner's going to be later than usual, but they'll adjust.

In the old days, when I still had family overseas, clock change day was important as suddenly we went from being eleven hours ahead of the UK to nine hours - at one time for some weird reason Canberra used to go forward when Europe went back and vice versa, which was a bit silly - by the last weekend in October we were well into spring, and the last weekend in March was a little too early.

Nowadays we change on first weekend in October and the first weekend in April.

The one advantage of following Europe was we didn't have a few weeks in October and a week around Easter when the time difference was ten hours - scheduling calls is definitely easier when the difference is only nine hours rather than eleven.

In the old days, and I'm talking thirty or forty years ago, when there was no internet wide time synchronisation and time servers needed to be reset and reconfigured by hand clock change day was always a bit stressful as inevitably there would be one server in an inaccessible cupboard somewhere that hadn't picked up the update.

However that's all in the past - we're down to the oven, the microwave and the big pretend railway station clock in the loungeroom needing to be changed manually - since we replaced all the other clocks with either Lenovo smart clocks or Google smart displays everything else just does it automagically ...

Tasmanian election fun (we should get out more)

While we were in Tasmania, they were having an election.

That is of course their business but for us it was a source of amusement, from counting the number of rural candidates with hats - a sort of ‘I spy with my little eye’ on long drives across the hinterland, and of course double points if it was someone we hadn’t seen before, to looking out for candidates with implausible names.

This game was a bit of a failure, the only candidate with a vaguely amusing name was the Greens' Tabatha Badger, whose name irresistibly reminded us of the mythical Gerald Tree-Frogg, a character in a BBC late night satire show who once appeared in a moth eaten baggy gardening jumper claiming to be the Greens’ defence spokesperson and suggesting that they would scrap the defence forces and replace them with a very large hedge. 

(I’m sure that Ms Badger is in reality a serious politician, and has no plans regarding the deployment of hedges, large or small.)

There was also a minor scandal caused by a satirical video by Juice Media that the Liberals claimed was defamatory - if you’re interested you can watch it via the Guardian’s website, which given the complete lunacy of some of Tasmanian politics is not as detached from reality as you might think.

For example, the Liberals proposed helping fund a chocolate fountain and promoted as job creation program that would encourage tourists to visit - like, you’re giving money to a multinational to build a chocolate fountain  ...

Anyway we don’t live there, so we’ll move on ...

The end of the growing season

 The days are getting shorter and the nights are growing colder, so here on the edge of the Australian Alps Easter usually marks the end of the growing season.

This year's not been the best, dry then cold and wet in spring. 

We did get some decent broad beans and early potatoes, but the capsicums and chillis were a total failure this year and both the tomatoes and zucchini nearly so.

After the possums, who've never been much of a problem in previous years, destroyed my zucchini and tomato plants several times over I resorted to rearing them in cages.

The zucchini were really started too late and didn't do much more than produce a lot of leaf, but the tomatoes finally came sort of ok while we were away in Tasmania. 

In normal years we usually have an embarrassingly large crop and it doesn't matter if the local wildlife steal a few, but this year it was a race with the pouched demons as to who got there first.

There are still a few green tomatoes left, but the plants are beginning to visibly die off, so I suspect that next week's threatened few days of cold and wet will kill them off.

We still have a couple of smallish Japanese kobacha pumpkins that are still growing. I'd expect to harvest them towards the end of April about the time of the local pumpkin festival, and that will be that for 2024's growing season.

Still, I'll be planting my broad beans in May and hoping for a better growing year in 2024-5 ....

[Update 30/03/2024]

Conversations with other gardeners suggest its not just me - other people have had problems with possums and zucchini and tomatoes not cropping.

The local possum population is obviously hungry - some have even resorted to trying (and rejecting) windfall lemons. 

At the same time it wasn't the zucchini plants not flowering, it was the lack of a crop, suggesting a lack of pollinating insects, and that is worrying...

Another wart gone

 I was standing under the shower one January morning when I noticed a small black lump on my chest that didn't use to be there.

So I did the sensible thing and phoned the local health centre to make an appointment. Of course it takes forever to get a GP appointment these days so I had to wait about four weeks. Not ideal, but that's how things are.

Now I've been there before with nasty looking warts, so I was reasonably relaxed about it. More so than my GP, who was quite worried about it and even took a photograph to explain why.

Anyway, the upshot was that the Thursday before we left for Tasmania, I had it cut out. My new GP prefers Louis Armstrong to rugby, so I lay on my back while he worked away and listened to Louie from my GP's spotify account.

I'd talked to him about my going to Tasmania, and suggested using dissolving stitches. He was at first reluctant - apparently there's a higher risk of infection with dissolving stitches - but once he realised the impossibility of my getting to any health centre in Tasmania to get my stitches out we settled for dissolving stitches, a follow up phone call and a script for antibiotics in case the wound started misbehaving, plus my promising to come in to the health centre once I was back to have the nurse look at it to double check it was okay.

Well, when the results came back from pathology it wasn't a nasty malignant wart, just a nasty wart I was probably better off without.

The wound healed nicely, the only problem was that my backpack strap tended to catch the wound so I kept a dressing on it for longer than strictly necessary to protect it.

Obviously, I cleaned, checked and disinfected the area when I changed the dressing and had absolutely zero problems except for some mild irritation from the dressing adhesive - obviously the hypoallergenic dressings weren't quite hypo enough for prolonged use.

This morning I went to the health centre, and spent longer explaining the history to the nurse than she spent checking the wound - everything was fine and as it should be.

And I must say, despite all the problems and under resourcing of rural health care not only did they do a very good job, they listened to me and were prepared to do something a little out of the usual to fit in with my commitments ...

Making pesto at home

 Despite it being a poor summer for our zucchini and parsley (the jury's out on the tomatoes - the crop looks good but is sitting in a green glower at the moment) we have a zonkingly large crop of basil - more than we can eat, so last night we had pasta, peas and baby potatoes with home made pesto.

Pine nuts are almost unobtainable at the moment - I would guess sanctions as a lot are harvested in Siberia - so we did a little detective work as to alternatives.

Most commercial jar pestos use cashews as a substitute, but we thought we'd try something different.

We found a recipe at the University of Utrecht that looked good and used sunflower seeds as a more environmentally friendly substitute.

The only problem was that we were out of sunflower seeds. We used almonds, dry roasted in a pan and fed through the spice grinder as a substitute. Almonds are grown locally but are wasteful of water, something to consider when one lives on the driest inhabited continent on the planet. Walnuts - also grown locally - or macadamia nuts  would have been a better choice, and certainly something to experiment with next time.

Anyway, we followed the bouncing ball and put it together, and it was really good. Certainly we'd do it again, and for making fresh pesto out of season Utrecht suggests carrot greens as a substitute - maybe we'll try that as well, with macadamia nuts ....

The remembrance of things past

 For Proust it was tea and a madeleine that set off a train of memories, but for me it was finding a handful of  protest buttons from my student days, while looking for an old notebook...

Buttons protesting the building of Torness nuclear power plant in the seventies

Scotland already had a substantial investment in nuclear power by the 1970s, and in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, it was decided to build an additional plant in East Lothian, not particularly far from Edinburgh. 

At the time, almost no one appreciated the implication of the discovery of substantial oil and gas reserves under the North Sea, which changed the energy profile substantially with gas powered plants which were cheaper to build replacing  older oil fired plants and lessening a dependence on coal.

I, like a lot of people, felt we should invest more in energy conservation and move away from what was then essentially a dirty polluting coal powered nineteenth century style economy.

It didn't happen, but we did move to a less polluting economy courtesy of Margaret Thatcher shutting down most of heavy industry and almost by accident, reducing the impact of acid rain on Scandinavia.

Strangely Torness is now the last remaining working nuclear power plant in Scotland and due to close in 2028.

I also used to have a classic 'Nuclear Power No Thanks' button as well as a sticker on the tailgate of my Renault 4, but both the button and photographs from then seem to have disappeared, almost certainly lost in a move.

When I moved to Wales in the 1980s it was the time of the anti US cruise missile protests, and we were more concerned about nuclear war - to be truthful I always had been, and even more so at university where you could see air force Lightnings practising for Armageddon with repeated scrambles and pretend intercepts.

Bilingual Welsh/English peace button

But of course, it was always important to maintain a sense of humour about they way things were

enough said!