Murder by Death

Everybody’s killing time in the kitchen during the self-isolation, and while I do everything I can to avoid cooking, I can occasionally be moved to bake.

There’s a french patisserie on our shopping street that makes something they call a Viennese, but I call brioche with chocolate chips (they get very irritated about it too) and I woke up this morning wanting one.  Thinking it was Saturday, I thought I might be able to con MT into getting me one on his way back from his pilates (1-on-1 and medically necessary).  This backfired on two fronts:  it’s Friday, and everything is well and truly shut because it’s Good Friday.

So then I thought, the next best thing might be chocolate chip bread, and I have a bread machine.  So I googled, and I found this recipe.  3 hours later I had a loaf shaped nirvana.  Seriously, it’s amazing.  Even MT has been sneaking slices and he usually isn’t moved by baked goods.  He says it tastes like hot cross buns, which makes this the first time I’ve ever been prepared for a holiday, even if accidentally.

Did I mention it has cinnamon in it?  No?  It does.  I doubt this will make it through the night.

If you read my last post, you know MT and I have been living our own version of a suspense novel (1 star – totally rubbish plot), waiting to find out about a government response to leases and rentals.

We finally heard from the Prime Idiot a few days ago, and after spending 4 minutes thanking everyone in the government like he was accepting a damn academy award, he finally, finally put us out of our misery.  A ‘Code of Conduct’ is to be legislated that says commercial landlords must lower rents proportional to lost revenue, with half the difference being waived, and half being deferred, with the deferment being spread out out over the remainder of the lease.  I have never been so happy to be 6 months into a 5 year lease.  This will save the business and the jobs of 4 men.  The legislation still has to be finalised, on a state-by-state basis, so curveballs are still possible, but if they adhere to the basics we should be ok.  Of course, if they do stick with what Morrison announced, I’m going to have to stop calling him the prime idiot, because I’m painfully aware that this is far more generous than what a lot of countries are offering to business owners.

We also got re-stocked with TP yesterday when our tri-annual subscription arrived.  Which sounds a little weird, but not as weird as when I say it’s from a company called ‘Who Gives a Crap’.  Half their profits go towards building sanitary toilets in under-developed areas of the world, and I don’t mind the bamboo roll.  You can buy it in the grocery stores, but they offer a discount if you buy direct, and a further discount if you ‘subscribe’, which is how we ended up getting a box of 48 rolls of TP delivered to MT’s office 3 times a year.  This used to be a big joke, because, as you can see in the pics below, there’s no hiding what’s being delivered:

Now that we’re still in the midst of the Great TP Panic of 2020, I’m the one laughing (and sharing TP with anyone caught short).  We don’t have space to store it, so we toss it in the attic.

By the way, anyone in the UK or USA who’s interested, they sell there too.  Because people have lost their minds over TP, the Australian website, at least, has everything marked as sold out so they can continue to fulfil standing orders – not sure about US / UK availability though.

It was also announced this week that schools will remain shut for term 2, which is a relief for me as it alleviates my misplaced guilt about not being able to leave home to work.

So all in all, a weirdly ‘good’ week.   All things being relative.

Archived from BookLikes.  Keeping for posterity.

(This is a covid 19 venting session – likely the only one I’ll make, so it’s long – so please, if you’ve had it up to your eyeballs with this stuff, skip this post; the catharsis is in the writing of it.)  –mbd

So how is everybody doing so far?  It’s sort of a rhetorical question, because I’ve seen beautiful, creative posts from most of my BookLikes friends, which leads me to believe people are coping well, but it’s sort of not a rhetorical question, because my BookLikes friends are generally anything but the sort to ‘let it all hang out’.  So I ask – how is everybody doing so far?

We’re coping here, but honestly, not as well as we could be.  The Australian government’s concern about the health of its constituency has finally caught up with its concern about the economy, and the entire country is under lockdown – only don’t call it a lockdown because that would be bad for the economy.

Australia has 7 states and territories, and every one of them has closed their borders to everyone, including other Australians, except for Victoria and New South Wales.  Attempting to close our borders would be futile at best and as we’re already the hardest hit states, why bother?  One state, Western Australia (it’s a big state) has gone a step further and closed regional borders within the state as well.