A day without water

At 5 pm this evening, one of my neighbours knocked on my front door. She’s on the owner’s corporation executive committee and was here in an official capacity, to tell me that Sydney Water was doing some work in the street and that all water would be turned off for our building from 6pm to midnight.

My thoughts rapidly progressed from “okay, that’s not long, no problem” through “wait, how am I going to cook dinner?” to “oh crap! Wife and I both need to have showers, and I need to get a sourdough loaf-in-progress made and kneaded and then clean up the mess before 6pm!!”

I spent the next hour running around like crazy, having a shower, filling a bunch of water jugs and containers, making sourdough, washing up mixing bowls and utensils, cleaning the kitchen generally, and then filling the sink with hot water so after we ate dinner I could at least put the dirty dishes and utensils in there so they don’t dry out and go all crusty. Fortunately we had just enough warning, and I got everything done in time.

It’s actually been a wet day, with light to medium rain in the morning and afternoon. There was a break of a couple of hours around midday, which we timed well for a long walk with Scully. Apart from that I’ve been looking at material for tomorrow’s image processing course lecture and the accompanying tutorial for which I’ll be teaching. The first real work looks straightforward enough, about image compression formats and simple preprocessing operations such as contras adjustment and histogram equalisation. Tomorrow I’ll play with the MatLab code and make sure I can manage it all.

In COVID news, NSW recorded 262 new cases, which is lower than yesterday’s 319. The numbers are still bouncing up and down, although with an overall upwards trend, so it’s not clear if this is actual good news yet.

A friend pointed out to me today that the USA has again recorded over 100,000 new cases in one day, which just sounds absolutely crazy. I’m here giving daily horrified reports of how we’re dealing with a couple of hundred cases where I live, and other parts of the world are in much worse situations. I’m thankful that we’ve really had it relatively easy in Australia compared to many countries, while at the same time concerned about the cases we do have. It’s an odd sort of disconnect. I guess I just can’t really imagine what it must be like to live in a place with roughly a hundred times as many cases per capita. I think I’d be too scared to leave the house at all.

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2 thoughts on “A day without water”

  1. Do keep in mind that our population is also quite a bit more than 10 times that of Australia. Still bad here, but not quite as bad as the raw numbers might make it seem.

  2. Yeah, I didn’t say anything, but those numbers of daily new cases you’ve been giving? In Argentina I hear numbers close to that ballpark, but for daily deaths.

    I get it, though, and I don’t mind. You’d been doing a good job of keeping it out of your country, you were almost “back to normal” a few months ago (which we never were), and now the situation is exploding right when the end was supposed to be near, because of vaccination. It’s still alarming and frustrating, even if others tell you “well, we have it worse than you”.

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