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Saturday 28th March 2020
07:59 GMT
 
  Once again the forecast for yesterday seemed to suggest a good day, but the wind continued to spoil things by making it feel a lot colder. For a few hours in the afternoon the air temperature was 13° C, and in direct sunshine, in still air, it would have felt good, but alas it still felt chilly. Of course there is the problem that in these days when going out is a rare luxury, I may not have appreciated in the same way as when actually walking in the sun.
bright. amd slightly less cold start to
                            the day
   The sky was clear enough for the sunny periods shown for 6am to be actual non stop sunshine. To my great surprise, the clear sky did not mean a frost this morning. It is still a very chilly morning, but not that chilly. It should stay sunny this morning, but the sun may finally disappear behind cloud at 2pm. It won't even get that warm - just 11° C maximum. As it clouds over there is a very small chance of rain, but I expect it will stay dry. Maybe the only good news is that tomorrow may now see some sunny spells in the morning, but the afternoon will probably be very dull. Tomorrow may well be a very chilly day with most of the morning barely higher than 4° C, and the afternoon only touching 7 or 8° C. It is possible we will have to wait until 6th April to see the sun again.

   Yesterday was another day where I didn't feel that good, but I also didn't feel that bad. It is still my belief that I am fighting some sort of infection, but happily I seem to be winning. Of course it is always possible that it now takes me a full day to get over the sort of walk that I should get over overnight. I am relying on some very vague memories, but I think I can remember my dad, who seemed very old to me, complaining about aches and pains typical of old age. He did when he was 52, and so he obviously was not that old. Now my mum, was always complaining about her "screws" (meaning her leg joints) in any bad weather when she was not that far into her 60s. By that standard I am doing quite well - maybe even very well.

  There is a very strong bias towards blaming any ache or pain, not matter how small, on Corona virus, and I am not immune to it. If anything I am even more biassed towards it for some sort of comedy values. I find myself not being able to take this thing seriously until something serious happens. One curious thing is that in the last week or two I have heard of several people dying, and none of them have died from anything related to corona virus. I have no doubt that some will be dying from this virus, but as far as I am aware not even a friend, of a friend, of a friend, of a friend has reported any deaths. What I have seen is things like a 93 year old woman, who is theoretically in the "instant death" category spending less than a week in hospital, and making a full recovery. This virus may be very infective, rather unpleasant, but not as lethal as predicted. I predict some will die because they are so neurotic that they can't be bothered to fight it.

  In cases like yesterday, when I was feeling a bit achey, and maybe a bit under the weather, the only thing to do was to stress test myself. I can't say I was keen, but I forced myself into the garden to do some work out there. It was one of those sessions where I probably achieved a lot when considered from the point of view of preparing the ground for later work. It was also another of those work sessions where photos don't really show much unless you know there is an absence of something.
back of the lawn
                          area
  This is one of those pictures that does not convey any impression of the sweat that went into the work. It shows the house end of the lawn-to-be area. I had two objectives, actually three. Once upon a time this was a rockery, but not by design. It was where I had piled up a load of rubble. So one objective with to thin out the rubble, and at the same time I pulled out some weeds. It is going to need a lot more work to get rid of all the rubble, and some I might just attempt to bury. The other objective was to shovel away all that had spilled over the edge of the path. Once again it is not a fully finished job, but at least I can where I am going now. Odd bricks and tree roots make the job harder.
right hand side of
                          the back of my garden
  Once again I had another go at clearing the right hand side of the back of the garden. The most successful thing was pulling ivy off the fence, and also off the rotted tree stumps that are sticking up just left of centre of the picture. It is a real bugger of a job, but I feel I have made good progress. There are still a lot of shoots and roots below the bricks at the very back, but once I remove them, and stack them up elsewhere, I reckon I can finally eradicate the ivy - or at least eradicate it enough that keeping it down will be easier/possible.
A discovery
   It has been many years since I last saw all of the garden path. I thought it stopped at the tree that is now just a stump after it was cut down. I was wrong. Before that tree grew from nothing, through the path, into the 40ft + high tree that was cut down, there were two trees behind it. Trees that may once have been fruit trees. The path, which I laid, went up to those trees that are now just rotten stumps by the fence. Yesterday I uncovered two more flag stones that can just be seen on the middle left of the picture.

  If I could cut that tree stump off flush, or even slightly below the level of the path, I could potentially relay the path, slightly higher to avoid some bastards of tree roots, and once again have a garden path to the end of the garden. I think only dynamite would do the job properly, but I haven't got any, and it would be the sort of thing the neighbours might complain about. I think I just have to be patient, and wait for another 10 to 20 years for the remains of the tree to decay.

  I don't think I was working in the garden for more than an hour. At the end I had exchanged some aches and pains brought about by being inactive, and sitting at my PC for two many hours, for the sorts of pains that are easy to explain. I will admit that I didn't think they would be as bad as they were, but they didn't seem to be the sort of pains you might get from, for instance, 'flu. Maybe they were the sort of pains you might get while fighting an infection, but they faded to a low level surprisingly quickly.

  They left a sort of tenderness - the sort that is a warning not to do that again too quickly. Well I didn't intend to do more gardening too quickly. I have got to the point where I would have to commit to a lot of work next time....well,  probably. I guess I could still find lots of little bits of tidying up, and I have to admit that they do build up to make a big difference over time. I had a bit of a rest before tackling my next stress test of my body.

  The rest gave time for some of the mud I had brought into the house from the garden to dry out. It did so quicker than I imagined so that when I got the hoover out it made short work of it. I had really only intended just to hoover over a couple of muddy footprints, but I ended up hoovering the back room, the front hall, and the front room.  For someone who can only derive a little bit of pleasure from hoovering after it has made a good difference, I felt quite satisfied to achieve what I did.

  I am not sure if it was the gardening or the hoovering, but I did seem to hurt my dodgy ribs along the way. There was no real static pain, but they were not shy in letting me know if I made a movement they didn't like. With hindsight, it was probably tugging at Ivy roots that did the damage, although shovelling up stuff can put some strain on my chest.

  By early to mid evening I was feeling sort of ill, and sort of not ill. I find it really hard to describe in any sensible way how I could ache, and yet not ache, to feel tired, but not to feel tired. Perhaps I could sum it as by saying I felt tender, or that I felt fine provided I didn't think about how I felt. i still couldn't shake off the idea that I was fighting an infection - and winning - but it was taking it's toll on me.

  At one point in the evening I felt a bit cooler than I thought I should be. That made me check my temperature to see if I had a fever - I had, but only if you stretch the definition far beyond anything sane. My temperature was 37.4° C, and that is 0.1° C above one of the many definitions of normal. A quick online check showed this - "Your body temperature of 37.4°C (99.3°F) is within normal range. Your body temperature is about right! Congratulations!" I conclude I am fit and healthy. Shame it doesn't quite feel that way.
new toy for camera
                          work
  I finally had the last part of an Amazon delivery delivered yesterday. The biggest item was this relatively cheap camera stabiliser. It is purely a mechanic device, and it boils down to nothing more sophisticated than dangling a weight underneath the camera to make any movement a bit smoother. I had actually experimented with something similar, but made up of odds and ends held together with gaffer tape. My experiment was for a much smaller, and lighter camera, and it did sort of work. This new one is supposed to be robust enough for a full DSLR camera, but I am thinking it will probably work much better with a lighter camera. The big problem now is that with all gigs cancelled, there is nowhere to try it. I might take it for a walk around the park today, but as yet I am not sure if I am going out.

  At a time when entertainment might be useful, there was little on TV to catch my attention last night. By 9pm I had been in bed reading for half an hour, and at 9pm I turned out the light, and I was soon fast asleep. It seems odd that at a time like this, with a killer virus on the loose, when our freedom to go out is severely curtailed, when the days can seem long and boring, that I seem to be sleeping rather well recently. If I have any complaint it is that I seem to wake up at sunrise - and sunrise is getting earlier and earlier ! In other circumstance I could like it, but when it is struggle to keep amused all day, a long day taxes the imagination.

  Once again I am unsure how I feel this morning - apart from one particular aspect. It feels like hay fever, and my nose has really been itching in the last hour or so. In theory I should be mostly protected from any tree pollen (for that is what I seem to be sensitive to) while indoors, and away from any open window - but the bathroom window is open, and only 40ft or so away from me. It might be wise to treat this as a cold if it perseveres, and stay in to avoid alarming any body who might see me sneeze. There are many neurotic people out there who constantly believe they are about to die - even the young and fit who tend to suffer least from corona virus.

  I don't think I really have any idea what I will do today. I'll just make it up as I go along. I think I might start with laying on my bed reading. If I should happen to doze off, it will be a good thing.
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