The Seven Eleven up the road
First thought was walk up to the KFC up the road ( remember Christmas when my plan was to eat KFC and whatever I could find at the Seven Eleven across the road except I decided not to in the end?) to pick up something to take home to eat but I never made it there again, instead I purchased a lamb wrap from the Seven Eleven across the road to eat for dinner. Along the way there is a petrol station with a "DAVID JONES FOOD" sign displayed outside it's concession building - I've always been curious as to why there would be a David Jones Food concession in the middle of nowhere attached to a petrol station so I walked in and spent a bit of time looking at what groceries were available. The crackers were cheaper then the crackers for sale at the Seven Eleven across the road. Although they were on my shopping list to buy, I decided against purchasing them there. Lamb sausages were also on my shopping list to purchase and these were also available however were rather pricey and with a used by date of tomorrow - no thanks David Jones Food! OK enough looking around time to head home after purchasing my lamb wrap and have my dinner.
A bit more of Tiktok, a bit more of tv ( the SBB Food channel only) , a bit more of Scottish Banter on Facebook and a final watch of YouTube then off to bed. End of another boring Saturday night!
Sunday I dragged myself out of my apartment today for a big trip to the supermarket. A big trip meaning my usual weekly shop of groceries except maybe 2 weeks worth as it has been a while since I went to the supermarket and I only went because I really was down to my last bits of food. I don't hoard months of food like a lot of people and after 3 weeks of being unable to get my hands on toliet paper ( single rolls) - it was still unavailable. Plenty of tissues though ( as Americans would say no toliet paper but plenty of tissues GO FIGURE!) .
First stop was Aldi - no toliet paper or tissues but I managed to get food, it's a start. No flour either or chickpeas so next stop I tried Coles - again no toliet paper but plenty of tissues- cartons of them! No plain flour but still quite a few packets of self raising flour on the shelves - I didn't really need self raising flour just plain flour but grabbed a packet anyway as I never know when I will be able to get my hands on any again. On my list apart from toliet paper wipes disinfectant and laundry liquid/laundry sanitiser were French onion soup packets and a can of Campbells condensed tomato soup - plenty of Heinz condensed tomato soup but no Campbells condensed tomato soup ( it has to be Campbells brand - it has to do with what's in it) or French onion soup packets. Chickpeas yes! and not much choice in the meat and poultry section so I purchased some lamb steaks, 2 tail pieces of fresh salmon and something naughty- Southern style chicken ribs because it had a longer expiry date - should be yummy as they are precrumbed and cooked & all I have to do is place them in the oven to bake. Almost done as there were quite a few items on my shopping list that were still unavailable at both supermarkets and I won't bother going to the Woolworths Metro as I know there will be no chance of getting anything there except extra boxes of tissues which I already had 2 boxes of from a previous shop there.
I get to the register and decided to remove 2 items I had in my shopping trolley - a bar of Coles brand dark Belgian chocolate ( it wasn't on sale and there was only 1 packet left when I needed 2) and an avocado. Why?because I only wanted to spend as close to my $50 budget as I could. I was a few cents under so usually I buy a chocolate snack but the cashier said how about a bag? - I didn't really need yet another disposable plastic bag then she thought of something better - a box of plain $1 tissues - I thought why not I might as well since I haven't been able to find a single roll of toliet paper for 3 weeks! Shopping done time to head home.
End of another Sunday!
Monday 6th & Tuesday 7th April 2020
I didn't leave my apartment for 2 days except to sneak out very briefly on Monday afternoon to take my rubbish out to the bins in the rubbish area. Besides hating to go to the supermarket to get groceries and essentials, I also hate taking my garbage out too. I only do it when my bin is full which could be once a week and sometimes once a fortnight if I don't have much rubbish. My bins don't really stink as I separate my rubbish into 2 fully sealed bins lined with scented bin liners.
For the past 3 days or so I have been suffering from really bad vertigo brought on by a bad ear ache and very blocked ear. Everytime I got up the world would spin around me and to equalise myself I would have to put my head down on my knees and wait until the spinning stopped, it was constant. Standing up was the only way I could avoid this happening. To unblock my ear I placed a few drops of olive oil in my ear before running water into it when I had a shower to try and loosen the wax to unblock my ear. This partially worked to the point my vertigo has decreased to about 80% but my ear was still a little blocked so I decided to walk to a pharmacy on Wednesday about 20 minutes away to purchase some proper ear wax remover. I hope this will clear my ear.
I stayed up on Tuesday night to play with Blockly Turtle (coding game) which was used as part of the Future Learn Introduction To Coding Course I had been working on online. It was a bit of fun similar to the Creative Coding Course I completed a few years ago also online through Future Learn ( refer my previous blog). This course is a lot simpler and shorter as it is a beginner course. If you have ever used the kid's coding program called Scratch - this is similar to that.
I even went onto Flickr and search in the archives to try and find my old artwork. I may have lost all the coding behind creating the artworks but I managed to find them on Flickr and took screenshots of them ( as I wasn't sure how else I could download them) to share with you all as very few if any of my readers would have seen them. ( See below)
This was my second creative coding exercise. The first exercise I completed I had no idea what I was doing and what the result was suppose to be but it was correct and had something to do with a circle or a bullseye. This piece of artwork I created was by mistake but it turned out to be a very creative mistake. Look at it closely - what do you see? Do you see the optical illusion I created?
Towards the end of the course, one of our final exercises in creative coding was to create a digital postcard. I had heaps of trouble with this one but it was mostly with photo rotation. My initial idea was to create snow randomly falling on a tree but I could not rotate the photo of the tree ( snow does not fall upside down or sideways) so I abandoned that for the above photo of snow randomly falling over this photo of the Boatshed at Cradle Mountain ( see previous blog on Bruny Island Tasmania - it really is my Winter Wonderland although there was snow it actually wasn't snowing at the time I was there so I added just a touch of random snow to it)
This was one of my creative coding attempts about 2/3 of the way through the course. By this stage I was still having a lot of trouble with my coding so decided to "cheat" and combine my knowledge of basic coding with physics - specifically "gears". How I created this piece of artwork was with a library of code used to draw on the screen with some type of stylus. I used my tablet which is pen enabled, grabbed different spirograph thingamejigs and just drew repeated spirals on the screen. You can see my love of that pantone pink and blue in my artworks.
Wednesday 8th April 2020
Today I actually left my apartment ( although not to do my laundry which I have put off doing for 2 weeks now!) but to take a walk down to the supermarket - a different one or two to try and find toliet paper and things that I could not find on my last shopping trip. First stop Coles - no luck with toliet paper disinfectant wipes or laundry detergent or sanitizer or dark chocolate but there were lots of boxes of tissues so I grabbed 2 boxes before making a last minute decision to put them back after I read they were not made locally but imported - no thanks! How about French onion soup and condensed tomato soup - ok found. After picking up and managing to find only a few items on my shopping list it was then off to find a pharmacy that had ear drops - found. Onto another larger supermarket Woolworths. Still no toliet paper but plenty of boxes of tissues - fraganced or with something added to them to make them extra soft - no thanks, if I get desperate and need to use them if I can't find toliet paper they have to be the cheapest locally made no frills non fraganced 1 ply variety as not to clog up the septic systems.
Plenty of $4 larger bottles of Woolworths brand laundry sanitizer nobody has bought since last time I was here - I am trying to figure out why - Is it too expensive? I don't think so the similar sized bottles of brand named laundry sanitizer were more expensive and were sold out. Maybe because it was positioned right next to all the washing machine cleaners and people thought that the laundry sanitizer was actually not laundry sanitizer but washing machine sanitizer. I read the bottle at least twice and it was definitely laundry sanitizer and antibacterial to be put in a small quantity with your laundry detergent or fabric softener - did not buy any though as I did not need it at this stage - remember I don't hoard.
Ok onto some real groceries - sausages ( lamb only) , some baby cucumbers and some cherry tomatos to top up my supplies, how about some mocha hot cross buns? ( I should not be eating these as they give me a reaction) and no good plain dark blocks of chocolate so how about some soft strawberry licorice instead? ( these were the best thing I have tasted - not artifical or overly sweet and very important Woolworths brand and made in Australia @ $2 a packet - if I don't eat them all I may cut them up and put them in my chocolate brownies along with some crushed up biscuits to make a black forest brownie - there are no marshmallows ( which I don't really like) in a black forest brownie by the way - it's not a Rocky Road Chocolate Brownie!
A few other things and another round of the fresh food areas of the supermarket before deciding on not getting a pizza ( a lot of them were almost expired and on sale and were the brand that made the contaminated raw pizza dough I had purchased previously complained about and now offered a replacement product and refund for at the Woolworths Metro in Chatswood ( - refer my previous blog) , definitely no Easter eggs ( especially the licorice ones?) before heading to line up at the check out registers. There is a guy in front of me having a very loud and mad rant about something racist. I move away to another line and wait for another checkout operator before he does so to one of the other checkout operators who luckily is behind a perspex screen which is suppose to shield them from "droplets" - poor check out operator having to put up with that type of behaviour - what's worse then an unmasked mad Caucasian guy ranting on about some Chinese person with a mask on but no gloves in the deli section picking things up? - the guy himself was not even wearing a mask himself and not even practising social distancing?!
Time to pay and make my way back home. Will try and get out again to find toliet paper- chances are getting slimmer as the so called " Easter Long Weekend" is coming up and everyone will be out shopping - goodness knows why because shops that normally close on Good Friday and Easter Sunday are now open everyday over Easter this year so you don't have to act like it's Christmas when the shops are all closed for 1 day and poeople act as if they are closed for a week and panic buy everything! or is that a year they shop for? No hoarding remember. There is plenty of fresh meat poultry fruit vegetables and other grocery items for everyone except I am unsure about the current carrot shortage where some major supermarkets are limiting 1 or 2 bags per customer - this is worse then the toliet paper situation! The vitamins in carrots are not a cure for the corona virus nor are they going to prevent you from contracting it - good hygiene and social distancing will. Speaking of which - tonic water is now back on the shelves so for all you alcoholics out there go for it but wait - bottle shops are now enforcing limits on the amount of alcohol you can purchase per person - of course they are there is eventually going to be a shortage of it especially :
1. Gin due to distillers switching to distilling alcohol to make hand sanitiser
and
2.Vodka due to all those people who can't find any hand sanitiser so have decided to bootleg their own and for that the alcohol content has to be not too low and not too high and vodka is a rather expensive but has the perfect alcohol concentration above 70% but not more then 85% or so for making it.
So for all those alcoholics out there you will have to ration out your gin and vodka purchases! Don't even think about doing the hard stuff like metho ( I don't mean meth by the way don't get the 2 confused - for some it might not make a difference either or both will get you wasted!).
Thursday 9th April 2020
I can't even remember what I did today - definitely not laundry or go out . Watched a lot of tv, Tiktok, Youtube and played around with Blockly again - no longer taking my course very seriously. I have been cooking a bit too. So much I could make but I am rationing my fresh and pantry stable foods I have now - just in case we have to srlf isolate longer. My favourite SBS Food channel is New Scandinavian Cooking.
Get text messages today from my cousin in Canberra and my bus buddy checking up on me. Still no payment from Centrelink but that's ok I am being patient for now. Estimated processing date is 13th April and due to the Easter Long Weekend this could take longer. I am probably better off then a lot of people who have also lost their jobs. At least I had my LSL to live off although it will only last me a few more weeks and I had not intended to have to use it all this way - it was suppose to be saved for taking real leave not in lieu of redundancy.
Friday 10th April 2020
Still have not left my apartment not even to do my laundry or go to the garbage area. I was intending to go to the supermarket this morning to try yet again to get some toliet paper but could not be bothered as there are probably hundreds of people out hoarding - I mean shopping for groceries today being a public holiday. Good Friday and for once the supermarkets are open - Happy Easter everyone the annual Royal Easter Show has been cancelled this year but you can still hoard your Easter eggs and even better buy a selection of rip off showbags from Woolworths supermarkets for $30 a showbag! Other showbags which are probably better value might be also available online. Being non religious I don't celebrate Easter by the way. I still have not had a single Easter egg too.
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