Jay @ozguvnor@eigenmagic.net

Listening to Hoodoo Gurus - 1000 miles away. Except I am 10,000 miles away. Really feeling the tyranny of distance from home.

Finding it hard to be positive. Just read the Melb quarantine hotel inquiry report got delayed from Sep to Nov (maybe lawyers can’t work Zoom?) Which means there’s a good chance the resumption of international flights back into MEL (and hotel QT) could get pushed back too. In which case we will be stuck in an LA hotel with no home in Florida to go back to (lease is up) little belongings no kids in school and no way home.

Good afternoons progress on the assignment. Time to cook for the family.

Meant to be busy working on MBA assignment but brain wanted to procrastinate. So instead I finally got around to creating a cloud secondary backup target for the home NAS - BackBlaze B2

I used to have lots of those dreams where I’m in class or at work and missing something everyone else has. Now face masks are the stressor item in the dreams.

More Gloomhaven iso painting from a few weeks ago. The Tinkerer and Mindthief

My latest craft creation. Painted the Gloomhaven Spellweaver. It's 3cm tall.

On the plus side, used car prices are rising here in the USA, and we sold our 2016 Ford Mustang for not that much less than the price we paid for it 2.5 years ago. Considering we barely drive anywhere, it made no sense to keep such a frivolous asset.

Having repeatedly had the phrase, "Too late, too bad" thrown at us would-be returning Australian citizens on FB repeatedly demonstrates wilful ignorance.

I decided to write letters to politicians advocating not only on our own behalf, but also for the other returning citizens who are experiencing problems returning to Oz as well.

Wow what a week. Fighting government bureaucracy head on. I have every expectation our return flights are going to go completely pear shaped come mid November when we leave. :(

I relented and downloaded Tik-Tok. Oops! I think I just found a new pain relieving drug for the back pain.

Back Pain: My L3/L4 disc is not in great shape, but 95% of the time I manage it so I am pain free and mobile. These last 2 days I’m in quite a bit of pain as it has been aggravated. To make it harder I can’t get nurofen plus without a prescription (even then the cost would be over $200 USD). No access to a swimming pool to relieve it due to covid. Uurggh. 😣

So Harvard released a new tool tracking US COVID-19 infections because all the various state and county tools are hard to compare with each other. Our county has a population of 201K, has had 601 total cases, 6 deaths, 7 day moving average of 13.6 cases per 100K people. Puts us as orange out of Green, Yellow, Orange and Red for percentile.

Here are my mostly finished but still work in progress miniatures for Gloomhaven. Still need to do eyes, some detailing on clothes and the bases. Last time I painted figurines Ronald Reagan was the POTUS.

So our veteran, highly-experienced return to Australia liaison has announced he is retiring for personal reasons starting end of July. No replacement is yet announced. Um ... so how are we supposed to get back actually?

My youngest really overstepped the bounds of acceptable behavior. He has earned a days loss of PC. Which is heavier punishment than I have previously dished out. He isn’t happy.

I took my corked thigh running this morning. I was a minute off for the 5K time, but it feels better for the workout.

We have been researching FB newsgroups on Melbourne quarantine hotels. It’s hard to get kitchen any sort of facilities in Melbourne. Our youngest is special needs and he is not going to eat hotel food. He eats only a few recipes that I cook. We are quite worried.

We are trying to plan for our return to Aus in November. The government is slow to move and they have no sense of urgency. Flights are becoming hard to get.