Covid

So now both Jim and Stella have tested positive for covid. 

I can't talk to Jim directly all that often. He managed to disable his phone again and I have decommissioned it. He had more or less stopped using it anyway and it didn't seem worth getting it fixed just for him to disable it again. I can organise to speak to him on the nurses' phone, which I do once or twice a week. Briefly, it must be said. But the nurses tell me that he isn't too bad. He is as vaccinated as it is possible to be, plus they got him onto antiviral medication very quickly and they say he seems cheerful enough.

I can speak to Stella directly. She has her phone with her and uses it. She says she isn't feeling all that well, but is not feeling as though she has a particularly dreadful illness. She says she feels tired, not hungry and under the weather, but not absolutely awful. She too is fully vaccinated and has just started on the antiviral medication. So fingers crossed for both of them. Although Stella is unimpressed that she has obediently stayed in her room since they were locked down and still the virus managed to sneak its way in!

I have observed before that one of the significant advantages of owning rather than renting a place is that you do not get six monthly visits from estate agents wanting to check on the state of your home. This is also a significant disadvantage.  There is no regular incentive to deep clean and tidy up. I have recently discovered that this is also true of visits from district nurses and carers. On the days that they were expected I would run the vacuum cleaner round, sweep the dining room and kitchen floors and tidy things up. Now that they don't come anymore, I don't think about the floors until I look at them closely and realise just how many crumbs there are and how much cat hair is on the carpet. Tidying isn't such a bother - I tend not to have too much stuff lying about, unless it is in a room that I am clearing out. (Don't venture into the study at the moment!!)

Mind you - I accidentally swept under my bed at Hill House this morning. I used a broom to fish out a slipper which was lurking out of reach under the bed and swept out a surprising number of other things and a startling amount of dust, debris and Great Dane hair. Then, of course, I had to properly sweep under the bed which meant I also had to do the rest of the bedroom floor. Perhaps I should organise some sort of inspection of that room every six months or so! I now have three pairs of slippers (when I started this enterprise I had three slippers; I wasn't expecting to get another three). Bizarrely, I now have three thongs/flipflops. I have no idea at all where the fourth one is. I had completely forgotten there was supposed to be another pair. 

I suppose now I should look under my bed at home and see what's under that. Or might that be a Bad Plan?

Hugo was behaving very oddly when I got up here on Sunday afternoon. He was standing in the hallway, refusing to come into the lounge room. Then he went outside and flatly refused to come back in again. He would not come in through the laundry door. I rang Lindsey, who was on her way to a birthday party in Melbourne. She said he had been doing that during the morning and she had enticed him into the lounge room with a packet of cheezels. I had already tried chicken and cheese but hadn't though of cheezels. Even with cheezels, he would not come in through the laundry door. I managed to get him in through the outside door up in the visitors' wing. Then more cheezels to get him into the lounge room. Plus, of course, Rupert expected to get his fair share of cheezels, if Hugo was having them.

I don't know what had spooked Hugo so much. He was behaving in very much the way that he did when he and Rupert were puppies and Rupert had done something so egregiously awful that Hugo was expecting them both to be yelled at. But no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't see any evidence of extremely bad behaviour. I wonder if something had fallen on him, or near him. He doesn't like it when things fall on him or near him and there are lots of things in the laundry and by the laundry door which might have spooked him. He's back to his old self now. Tail wagging, playing with squeaky toys, delighted by the discovery of long forgotten squeaky toys hiding under my bed. His appetite had not been affected, which suggested that he was spooked and not sick.

There are no more cheezels at Rupert and Hugo's house. Just cheese twisties. I suspect they would also do as an enticement.