I’ve been looking at the U.S. figures, 456,000 deaths and rising, closing in at 39,000 in Texas. Maybe people there are actually taking it seriously now?
There was a recent outbreak in Perth, but they didn’t get any more positive results and have ended their full lockdown, a lot of other measures are still in place for now. Our neighbour Patrick was over there on vacation and had to self isolate at home when he got back since he had been there after January 31. I saw him out feeding his chickens the other day, but we would have been about 50 yards apart. I think he will be released from that isolation obligation soon. In the meantime they had a worker from the Australian Open tennis quarantine in Victoria to test positive to the UK variant, so all the players and staff had to isolate again while everyone was re-tested. No new cases, so they are back out doing warm ups and the tennis will proceed. That’s the way it keeps happening here, weeks with nothing, then something slips out of quarantine. They may have finally wised up and are talking about quarantining people in more remote locations instead of the right in the cities, any fool could have told them that a LONG time ago.
We bought two Banksia, a Red Gum, and a Snow Gum at the garden centre and I planted them out in the back paddock, The eucalypts are very fast growing and can get to 20 metres tall and 10 metres wide, but the banksias take a bit longer to get established since they don’t have a tap root. The Black Cockatoos really love eating the seed cones off those. We have so much room out there we are going to buy a few more including some acacia and other shrubs. I figure I can spend maybe $500 to $1,000 and loosely plant out the entire area, and see some good results within 5 years. The big gum trees and banksias are only $13 for a 3′ tall plant. We may have to go again soon and get another bunch. We have had about 3 mm of rain so far today, but should get a bit more later this evening, they were predicting 40 – 80 mm but most of the heavy stuff has been a bit west of us here.
We had the guy from the Home Efficiency Group to come out and give us some information on the heat pump hot water system. It turns out our hot water tank was replaced just 4 months before we bought the place and there is nothing wrong with it, but it may cost about $1,000 to
get it moved outside. Basically it would not be worth it getting one of the heat pump systems, but the guy said we should go on the time of use electricity tariff, and get a timer for the hot water, and that would save us the most money. I got a spreadsheet and some graphs from our provider for the past quarter, and most of the use is from the hot water in the mornings, and then heating the tank after we have had our showers. It should be easy to fix that with a timer to happen at the cheaper rate. I suppose I need to organise that.