11-Jun-2021
We're still, as we were last week, locked down under the Movement Control Order.
It's probably too early yet to say if it's working.
The national seven-day average is trending downwards, but we still have almost 80,000 active cases; daily fatalities remain high (the overall toll today stood at 3,768); Sarawak's share of the case numbers is still disappointingly large; and we're not out of the "festival-cluster" woods that have resulted from the various celebrations in the last month or so where people were obviously not careful enough about following the SOPs.
Anyway, let's start at the beginning...
Monday 7 was First Vaccination Day for the Tern household.
It was also the first day for the Borneo Convention Centre to swing into action as a "mega vaccination" site. At the moment it's the AstraZeneca vaccine they're pumping out.
For the first three days of the week, 1,000 people daily were scheduled to get their jabs. Later in the week, the assembly line was to be ramped up to 3,000 people per day.
Vaccinations across the country are gathering speed. Which is good news. They'll have to be careful with these huge venues, though...
It was all pretty well organized at the Borneo Convention Centre on Monday, and not too busy while we were there. Nigel had a bit of an issue with his passport identification. By the time I got there that had obviously ceased to be a problem. I was asked for a "medications letter" that no-one had ever mentioned before. But these are minor matters, and we were in and out fairly quickly.
Nigel's experience at the vaccination centre. I was a little later, and it was somewhat busier
On display in the observation area after vaccination (these reactions are extremely rare: there's more information here). In our scenario, a member of staff also talked to every newly vaccinated person individually, explaining what's a normal reaction, and what would be a cause for concern
Me, double-masked, awaiting release from the observation area
On Tuesday I experienced a number of the predicted normal reactions, but nothing that lots of sleep and a few doses of paracetamol couldn't handle. By Wednesday, I was totally fine again.
We're due our next shots in three months. There are still problems with supply, it seems, so here's hoping it happens as scheduled... Somehow there's always some cause for anxiety where this pandemic is concerned.
To other news...
The aircon in our main room has gone off on another of its periodic dripfests. Something keeps blocking up the pipe. We have no idea what. Nigel suspects a gang of spiders, refugees from his bathroom eviction campaign. I think it's probably some gecko. (These are cute but completely unbiddable animals, who occasionally leave calling cards in unwelcome places, and seem to do nothing at all in terms of keeping our insect population down...)
Anyway, there's still a LOT of confusion surrounding the currently valid SOPs, so it's far from clear whether we can call the technicians in (yet again) to sort the drip out.
Frankly, it's also far from clear whether we want to... Before we think of having other people in the house, given that covid is the worst it's ever been in Kuching at the moment, we feel we'd like to give these first shots time to at least build up some kind of protection...
So, we're currently making do.
Because the plop-plop-plop in the bucket gets annoying after a while -- and because we figure that continuing to run the unit might produce the undisciplined and thus unbucketable torrents we had last time, or make the thing grind to a halt altogether -- we use it only for an hour or so in the evening. For the rest of the time, when we're not on the balcony, in bed, or doing our approved neighbourhood walk, we've ensconced ourselves in the spare bedroom.
For me it doesn't make much difference whether I set up my handy computer stand on the sofa or on the spare bed. But Nigel's more of a desk person, and his normal table weighs about five tons, and can't be moved. So we needed some alternative arrangement for him.
Not ideal
Better -- excellent use for an ironing board (and means I can't iron for the foreseeable)
And we finally cracked it! You have to have the wardrobe door open, so there's room for the snout of the ironing board. The resistance band has since been evicted, and that's now where Nigel's chocolate plate sits
I often worry about what this long, long pandemic is doing to us all mentally.
One night last week, for example, I dreamt I was in a hotel room (jeez, it's so long since I've seen the inside of one of those...). Someone knocked on the door, twice, but I was in bed, so I didn't respond. The person came in anyway (I'm obviously so out of practice with hotel rooms that I hadn't set up either the deadlock or the "do not disturb" notice). It was a tall man, brandishing an extremely large and heavy spanner, and wearing nothing but an old-fashioned pair of underpants. He looked round a little wildly, and announced: "They've sent me to fix something, but I don't know what it is."
A somewhat alarming scenario, I'm sure you'll admit.
But can you guess which aspect I found most concerning -- the one the dream-me loudly berated the dream-visitor about, and angrily reported to reception when I'd eventually bundled him out again?
Yes, I'm sure you've got there already... What I found most terrifying was that the half-naked, spanner-wielding intruder wasn't wearing a MASK...
What else this week? Well, the picture at the top shows the poor tree that a huge thunderstorm brought down across our access road last weekend. As several people had already indicated to us, dry seasons aren't necessarily that dry these days.
Otherwise...
Not sure... An advert for something...?
Our bit of Himalayan rock... Can you see the snow leopard face? For us it's a reminder that there are bigger things than us in the world, and a symbol of hope that maybe one day we'll be able to go somewhere again...