Wow, eighteen days since the last post – sorry about that. Life’s a bit hum drum, that’s all. (Hum drum, strange saying. I wonder where that comes from. I must look it up. It’s good that we have Google and Wikipedia and so on to easily find things like that these days.)

I’ve had no side effects from my two vaccinations and it’s three weeks since the last one, so I’m all armoured up. Boy, don’t we live in the safest place on Earth? Sure, it’s the most isolated city on Earth but for once, it works in our favour.

It’s a rare fine day today, in the midst of the wettest July in many years. I’ll bet the farmers are happy. This is like the winters of old, rain nearly every day, soggy paddocks. Still, better not speak too loudly or there’ll be some new anomaly – like the driest August and September on record, or something.

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I watched the Olympics Opening Ceremony last night and quite enjoyed it. Agreed, it didn’t have the spectacle of the ones in years gone by, but it was dignified and had enough sparkle, but no too much. For me, the drone display was a highlight (literally!) and the perfect opening of the ball on top of the Fujiyama mountain replica was impressive. Typical Japanese engineering, smooth and reliable.

I only read this morning that not all teams were in full strength due to crowd limits. Russia sure looked diminished. The Americans were on form, showing some of their usual arrogance with their chants of U-S-A, U-S-A, but they stopped after a few.

I’m not a fan of the Aussie team colours. Green and gold are not a pleasant combination to me, and sharing the colours with Brazil grates. Red, white and blue, with green and gold flashes mixed with red, black and yellow for the Aboriginal flag. It can be done.

I’m not much interested in watching the sports themselves, but no doubt I’ll dip in at times. It’s good that it’s in our time zone.

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I do feel something for the Sydney people and I wouldn’t like to be going through their ordeal with the COVID Delta virus outbreak there.

BUT…. we’ve had to put up with their slander of our state all last year, and this. Their arrogance and “Masters of the Universe” attitude is too much to take.

So when they appeal to us to send our supplies of vaccine over, well Gladys, perhaps you should apologise for the bad things you’ve said about us, even just the ones this year. Only two months ago she was criticising Victoria in know-it-all tones. It’s about time she listened to Mark McGowan on how to do lock-downs properly. Fat chance of that.

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The tyre pressure warning has come on in Evie. It feels normal and looks normal so I don’t think I’ve got a flat tyre, but it’s good to see that it works. I have my trusty Aldi pump and I’ll check them asap.

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I’ve just finished another Kindle book, another one of 770 pages, called the War Planners Vol. 1. It’s quite a clever plot: a couple of dozen people (in the USA, of course) are contacted and asked to go voluntarily from their high level, high tech jobs, and be flown to a secret location, to fulfil their commitments to a CIA/NSA group for a national emergency.

When they get there, they’re told that China is secretly planning to invade the USA. Their task is to anticipate the ways China could arrange this attack, using their highly secret knowledge.

It all appears to be legitimate and they believe what they’re told, for the first few days. But odd things start to happen and one of the US guys gets suspicious. Sure enough, it becomes clear that the Chinese, using implanted people within the US, are getting information from this group to plan an attack.

From then on, it’s a bit like a very long action movie, but it’s very well written. The author is a former Navy pilot and writes authentically, about helicopters, especially. The author is Andrew Watts and he’s a much better writer than James Rosone was, with the exception that Watts writes the micro story, full of detail on a smaller scale, whereas Rosone’s scope is nothing less than nation against nation, full of strategy and the big picture. But full of spelling mistakes and silly errors too. Both are good.

There are another five or six books by Watts, so it looks like I’ve got a lotta reading ahead.

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I had an odd thing yesterday. I went to Aldi (for the first time in months, more later). I usually carry a couple of dollar coins in my shorts pocket for the trolley, but this day I didn’t have a coin, nor in my wallet.

A young boy was returning a trolley and I asked him if I could have his coin, in exchange for silver coins. He looked very doubtful and said, “I’ll have to ask my mum.” OK, so I waited while he went over to a car nearby. Nothing happened, he didn’t come back, so I started walking towards the car. But she moved off, and the closer I got, the more she accelerated away. Zoom, gone. So I went back to the trolley to get my free coin and I found it was an Aldi token, the kind you put on your key ring. Bonus. So I’ve got a free trolley token. Strange.

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The reason I haven’t been to Aldi for months is that they used to sell a lot of tools, hardware and machinery, and I bought a lot. But for some reason, they seemed to stop selling that stuff, so I stopped going.

A few days ago they emailed their latest catalogue and bingo, they were selling all my kind of stuff, so I went on Thursday. But there was almost nothing there, not even any evidence of where it had been. Maybe I’ve got the wrong day, I thought.

I asked the checkout lady on the way out: “It’s all sold out”, she said. Huh?

So that shows how popular it is. Surely they should realise this, and realise that when that’s being sold, that gets me in for my regular shopping as well. Otherwise, I don’t go.