Halfway there ...

Today is day 7 of quarantine, the halfway mark. We were visited by the Tasmanian police mid-afternoon to check that we were indeed isolating on the property. They surely weren’t concerned about our welfare, merely that we were isolating! 

Cath says the time in isolation has gone slowly; I think it has gone quite fast. I guess that reflects the fact that the life of an emergency physician is a lot more exciting than that of an econometrician! 

Quarantine has had its challenges, no fridge and no dining table to name but two. We have, however,  managed to eat quite well. Cath has excelled at baking blueberry muffins and I have produced the odd focaccia loaf. The laundry is doubling as the fridge, but as it was -2 degrees this morning with a thick frost we aren’t too concerned about the milk going off.

So what have we achieved so far? My early years of primary school were in the northern part of what is now KwaZulu-Natal. My (much) elder brother, with whom we lived, was a coal miner and we spent this time bouncing around different coal mines in the area. Perhaps it is the memory of a pretty happy time or perhaps it’s some deep psychological flaw that has persisted since childhood, but I have an obsession with building huge fires. So I have built two huge bonfires and burnt an extraordinary amount of stuff. I maintain the residue of these fires, when composted properly, will serve as superb bio-char for the fruit orchards (yet to be established).

Cath, as the photo suggests, has unleashed her inner archaeologist and uncovered a curious structure at the front of the cottage which could become a terrace or even the site of a beautiful veggie patch. She has also managed to dismantle a number of unattractive structures left by our previous tenants and created a lovely site for a future garden. Perhaps you can see a pattern developing here …

Oh and I guess we can both take credit for rebuilding a stone retaining wall. The larger foundation stones which are too big to carry were luckily already in place, but you cannot imagine how many other stones between 2kg and 20kg go into a retaining wall. It is no wonder that we are eating early and sleeping 9 hours a day …