The places with the biggest increase in new virus cases are unsurprisingly Madrid and Cataluña. Interestingly, a huge number of the new cases are in young people (10 – 19) who are asymptomatic and have been found through contact tracing. This is quite a shift in demographic from earlier in the year – but of course asymptomatic cases were much less understood.
The mood is relatively relaxed, despite the increase in cases. This is no doubt fuelled that there is currently no pressure on ICUs in hospitals with so many of the new cases not being ill or requiring care.
It seems that in the village, most people are adhering to the face mask rules. I’ve seen builders not wearing masks, but I don’t think people doing physical jobs are required to wear them.
Normally, this time of year I focus on making clip art for my clip art store. I work on requests I receive during the year and this is usually very varied. This year, however, I the majority of requests has been for mask related clip art – which is a sign of the times.
This is my favourite set so far – ‘how not to wear a mask’ – the biggest challenge was that I didn’t want the characters to look happy or ‘cool’ as they shouldn’t be aspirational. I’ve also been asked for a ‘not touching’ set – which will be an interesting challenge. This is for PE departments where students are not supposed to touch equipment without washing their hands.
We are also mid heatwave. It’s been going on for quite a while, I think we’ve seen little yellow or orange warning signs on the weather app for what feels like weeks now. It’s that time of year when we can shower comfortably with ‘cold’ water – which is just as well a our boiler is playing up!
Ian has embraced the heatwave and has taken to going for an early morning cycle ride. It’s still pretty warm even around 7ish, however he doesn’t seem to mind. I did have to rescue him earlier this week, however, from an over zealous sheep dog that appeared to be highly suspicious of his intentions!
We have been teaching Ludvig how to get Alexa to whistle to him – by teaching him to say ‘Alexa, whistle’. He has had problems with ‘Alexa Whistle’ as he has been getting unusually confused saying Alexa with a Bristol accent (Alexal) – however he’s becoming better at it. The reason we did this is to try and give him some focus and stop him from asking random things or getting it to play random tunes. He likes whistling, both listening to and whistling himself, so this is a good way to keep him entertained, without subjecting us to the weather forecast in Seattle, number of leaves eaten by slothes or the offer of Alexa or Google to tell us a fact – or other random things. He has learned to say ‘Google Stop’ as he had also learned to ask Google to play a tune, and that resulted in either Ian or I shouting ‘Google Stop’ a couple of seconds after. Now at least he can play music AND switch it off!!