{"id":1649,"date":"2021-01-24T20:36:49","date_gmt":"2021-01-24T20:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1649"},"modified":"2021-01-24T20:36:49","modified_gmt":"2021-01-24T20:36:49","slug":"sunday-24th-january-2021-day-314","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/01\/24\/sunday-24th-january-2021-day-314\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday, 24th January, 2021 [Day 314]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was a snow-laden day and we were speculating how much snow had fallen overnight since our dump of snow the previous day. We got up at a reasonable time and I set out on foot to get our supplies of the Sunday newspapers. The snow was reasonably\u00a0thick and crisp but relatively easy to walk upon. Although I took my ‘three-legged’ portable stool with me \u00a0(which\u00a0doubles as a walking stick), I did not really need it. The most\u00a0unpleasant part of the whole journey was a stinging snow in my face as I walked down the hill – as the wind was heading towards me, I finished up at the\u00a0newsagents looking like an\u00a0abominable snowman by the time I had\u00a0accumulated snow all the way down my front. I was relieved to see newsagent was open and so having collected my newspapers, I ate my customary banana for a quick burst of energy and then headed for home and the snow seemed to be falling a little less intensely. \u00a0I must say I felt fairly tired having trudged through the snow so I was pleased to get to watch the Andrew\u00a0Marr<\/em> show as is customary on a Sunday. To get ourselves warmed up, I\u00a0treated myself to a cup of powdered soup as I felt rather\u00a0chilled to the marrow and then felt all the\u00a0better for it. \u00a0We had a quick consultation with the rest of the\u00a0family as to when we\u00a0would clear the snow from our communal driveways (about 150-170 metres all in all) and decided that we would eat in the middle of the day and then start to clear the snow at at about 2.30. We actually started off a little\u00a0earlier this with a trusted team of myself, son and daughter-in-law (for whose benefit we\u00a0were clearing the driveway in case she has to make it into work in the morning). We had a combination of tools to help us – my son was utilising a conventional plastic snow clearing implement\u00a0whilst the daughter-in-law and myself were\u00a0equipped with huge plastic shovels which, I believe, are designed primarily for mucking out the cow sheds. These proved to be worth their weight in gold as they prove highly\u00a0effective in snow clearance. Whilst we were at it, we cleared the driveways of our immediate neighbours such\u00a0that emergency vehicles, postmen etc. can easily get to them. The temperature is predicted to be -5\u00b0 tomorrow and we suspect that our driveways will be especially slippery tomorrow. We need to get\u00a0in a supply of rock salt and\/or ice clearing material – I think that cat litter might prove to be a good anti-slip agent but I haven’t tried this. I did a quick web search in which I found enough information to\u00a0discourage me – ‘Just don\u2019t put the cat litter on your walkways. It\u2019s clay and will form a paste once it\u2019s saturated with water. You\u2019ll have a hell of a time getting rid of it. You\u2019ll track grey muck into your house all winter. And it\u2019s somehow, slippery and sticky at the same time when it gets wet<\/em>‘ . Having ascertained this, we will stick to\u00a0rock salt and\/or sand in the future- we\u00a0managed to get all of our work done\u00a0within the hour. Our\u00a0daughter-in-law had to communicate with a lot of her staff using social media to\u00a0ascertain how many of them can get into\u00a0work in the morning.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had consulted my emails and so on first thing this morning and I get a feed from a local\u00a0news gathering app called ‘InYourArea’ <\/em>which can be a good source of local\u00a0news. We used to have a local Arts Centre called the Artrix <\/em>which doubled as a cinema\/theatre\/performance space. In the past, we have seen films of operas\u00a0transmitted there. \u00a0Under the impact of various lockdowns, this has had to close its doors.\u00a0However the whole building has now ben re-purposed as a specialised vaccination centre which is capable of performing 2,500\u00a0vaccinations per day (which according to my back-of-the-envelope\u00a0calculations is \u00be million per year). According to their press release, opening day should be tomorrow and we should expect letters to arrive on our doorsteps on Monday or Tuesday. As there is plenty of car parking and it has a reasonably central location, I wonder if this will become the permanent\u00a0vaccination centre for the whole of Bromsgrove – what with 2nd dosages of the COVID-19 vaccine and the ‘normal’ flue jabs, it should be quite well occupied in the\u00a0foreseeable future. Tonight, the total vaccination rate in the UK has hit 6.3 million (approx 12% of the population) so what with lots of new centres like the our local Artrix<\/em> centre, then perhaps the government target of having all vulnerable and 70+ people (some 15 million) vaccinated by mid-February could well be achieved. For once, the government might actually hit its own target but the debate whether it was wise to extend the period of time between the first and second doses of the vaccine from 3 to 12 weeks rages on.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Today was a snow-laden day and we were speculating how much snow had fallen overnight since our dump of snow the previous day. We got up at a reasonable time and I set out on foot to get our supplies of the Sunday newspapers. The snow was reasonably\u00a0thick and crisp but relatively easy to walk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1649"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1653,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions\/1653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}