Cabin Fever Day Four - I'm free! plus celebratory cake

Free, free at last! The ADHB called late this afternoon to tell me they'd finally got around to testing my throat swab, and gosh, I don't have swine flu.

And they cleared up the 72-hour thing too: once the test result is negative, the five-day quarantine turns into a three-day quarantine. The purpose of still having a three day quarantine after the first Tamiflu is to cater for the 0.001% of actual swine flu cases which return a negative test result. Quite frankly I wasn't listening too hard to the explanation by that point.

I'm free! My 72 hours ended today and I rushed out of the house... to the supermarket.

You see, earlier in the week my friend Karl had sent me a Five Minute Chocolate Cake In a Mug recipe which I've been dying to try. But it needed an egg, and I didn't have any. This evening I got an egg. I tried the recipe. Here's a photo. Note the Elvis Presley mug; I felt it was appropriate to the occasion.

Now before I tuck in, I should fill you in: I did Google the recipe before trying it, because it looked a bit odd to me (as a baker) - no baking powder, no baking soda, so what's making it rise? and seriously, a whole egg for a cake that small? Google first pointed me to a forum overflowing with complaints from people who'd tried it... but then pointed me to Not Quite Nigella, who has a very pretty website and who had modified the recipe a bit, making it look more likely to work. I used her recipe.

And now, live on the internet, I taste the cake ...

nom nom nom ...

... and find it quite okay! Not awesome, and it would definitely be improved by adding the prescribed chocolate chips, and possibly some cream and raspberries, but a perfectly acceptable little cakey treat.

The only problem is that Not-Nigella's modified recipe actually makes two little cakey treats. Oh, this could be dangerous.

That concludes my Cabin Fever series. I'll be back at the office tomorrow. Thank you for your attention.

Symptoms present: hacking cough, still.
Symptoms missing: swine flu!
Boredom level: not at all.
Days to go: none!

Cabin Fever, Day 4

I've become invisible! Quoting from the Ministry of Health's swine flu media release for yesterday, 10 June:

"There are 92 people in isolation or quarantine and being treated with Tamiflu. This is down from 161 yesterday (Tuesday June 9 June 2009). The numbers of people in isolation vary according to when they complete 72 hours of the five-day course of Tamiflu.

After today, suspected cases and numbers of people in isolation will no longer be reported. Fewer reporting requirements on public health services helps to relieve administrative pressure and allows them to focus on the increasing number of calls on their services in response to H1N1 cases."

Two things strike me as interesting:
1) they say the isolation period ends after 72 hours of the five day Tamiflu course. That's not what I was told: I was told to stay in isolation for the entire five days.
2) they're going to stop reporting numbers! Does it really take that much effort to query a database and write a sentence containing the number? Or, and I believe this is more likely, do they not have a database, and have to collate all the data manually.

Given that I still haven't been contacted directly by the Auckland District Health Board, and that they still haven't processed my swab, I think the latter explanation is more likely.

Which makes me fear what would happen if this was a serious pandemic, not just a normal flu with added oinking.

Symptoms today: hacking cough, sore stomach muscles and throat from coughing incessantly all night.
Symptoms missing: all other flu symptoms. this is definitely just a cold.
Boredom level: nil. Actually not bored at all, but craving human interaction.
Days to go: one and a half.

Cabin Fever, Day 3 - updates

Catherine the sender of lovely soup and milk said I should see who else was in quarantine, and set up a Twitter group. I haven't succumbed to Twitter yet but over at Stuff, Guy MacGibbon is in quarantine and blogging incessantly. I have borrowed his idea and started to anthropomorphise my Wii (not a sentence you'd want to read out loud).

Cabin Fever, Day 2 (Tuesday)

I had been thinking about sneaking out to the shops in the early morning, to get some milk. But I'm glad I didn't - even though I am sure I don't have the flu, I don't fancy being arrested and fined. Besides, it was raining.

I was really busy today. I believe it's called displacement activity. All those little household chores.... I planted out some new herbs, which have been languishing in their little plastic pottles since I bought them over a week ago:


I defrosted the freezer, for the first time in years (I'm not a domestic goddess). It took ages:I studied for my exams:


And I did some paid work, although not as much as I should have. My workstation at home is not very ergonomic:


I miss proper coffee.

My friends are finding this quite entertaining. The lovely Catherine sent me some delicious pea and ham soup with bread and MILK, YAY!, and the New Bloke's workmates ginned up a very authentic-looking health warning containing our names (he's fine).

Symptoms present: cough, rusty voice
Symptoms not present: sniffles, aches, headache, fever, curly tail.
Boredom: actually lower than yesterday - I'm more alert and have lots to do
Days to go: two and a half

Cabin Fever, Day 1

As at 8 June, 56 people in the Auckland region are isolated with flu-like symptoms, awaiting the results of tests to confirm whether they've got it or not. One of them is me.

I'm pretty sure I haven't got it. In fact I don't think I've got flu at all; I think it's just a bad cold. But I've just come back from a fabulous Melbourne holiday with the New Bloke, and the doctor couldn't rule out swine flu, so here I am, stuck at home for the next five days, taking Tamiflu and waiting for my test results. (I'm not completely quarantined, just can't go to work or spend lots of time around people.)

Visual representation of my first day:


Finished the top book, read the middle one start to finish (but... it's a children's book, and a re-read), started the bottom book, and did the small amount of work on the scribbled pages. Pathetic.

In my defence, I am actually sick. I spent about half the day asleep, trying to escape the headache and cough, and my brain's pretty much non-operational. I've nearly lost my voice, but it's amazing how this isn't an issue when you're stuck at home alone.

After the bird flu scare, I'd made half-assed plans for what I'd do if I had to stay at home for a while. So I've got a whole lot of canned food and so on in a box, and that's about it. This will be a good test of my readiness for a real emergency.

If I feel better tomorrow I'm going to get better organised about this. How often do you get a chance to test your disaster plan AND get all those odd jobs done around the house?

Symptoms present: cough, sore throat, blocked nose, headache, tired, stupid.
Symptoms missing: fever, aches, oinking.
Boredom level: moderate. Too sick to be bored, really.
Days to go: four.

First signs of spring

The daffodils think Spring is near. They've started pushing up through the soil.

I like daffodils, they're so optimistic.

It's strange, so it must be art?

In the square below my apartment there's a closed, locked, shipping container. There's a fireworks display going off inside it. No, really. I am not making this up.

There is a small crowd of people watching it, in the square and on balconies in the building. What we can see is: smoke leaking from the edges of the container. A very few flashes of light and coloured sparks squeezing out below the doors. What we can hear is: bangs of various sizes and tenors.

It's finished now. Applause. We drift away. It's cold tonight.

Apparently this is art. I think I am a fogey. It doesn't make me think or feel anything in particular... and it's not beautiful. So is it art, just because an official artist made it?

Although, I guess, it did make me blog.

High Flight

Did my first take-off today. Still shaking.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless falls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor eer eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

`High Flight,' a sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War.

In honour of Ada Lovelace Day, a post about Grace Hopper

I know I should blog about Ada Lovelace today, in honour of Ada Lovelace day. But I've actually always been more of a fan of Grace Hopper.

Here's why:

When I was just a wee girl my Dad bought a computer. My brother and I started writing little programs for it in BASIC and Dad thought that was pretty cool. To encourage me to keep it up, he told me a story about a lady long ago (ie, before I was born) who had been one of the very first computer programmers, and since he was an electronics engineer he told me his favourite story about her: the visible nanosecond.

Computer scientists are pretty fond of analogies. Car analogies, usually, but anything will do. The reason for this is that so much of what we do is in our heads, intangible, can't be touched or smelt or seen. I use analogies all the time. Admiral Grace Hopper, came up with a beauty: a wire "one nanosecond" long. She got a real wire, and worked out how far electricity could flow along it in a nanosecond, and chopped it off to that length - about a foot. A coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long became a microsecond. A speck of pepper became a picosecond.

A bit of tutuing around in Excel tells me that the exact length of that nanosecond-wire was 29.98cm. The microsecond wire was 299.8 metres long, and a length of wire one second long would be 299,792,450m - which would wrap nearly 7.5 times around the Earth.

I think she chose the right fraction of a second to make into wire.

Admiral Hopper did other cool things too, which had a more significant effect on the world and on me. She pretty much invented compilers in the 1950s, for example, which made it possible to program computers in something sort of like English, which in turn made it possible for a nine-year-old girl in Auckland to learn BASIC in the 1980s and wind up in IT in the 21st century.

She's also credited with my favourite axiom: "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

More detail here and here . Tell your daughters.

Quite possibly the most inappropriate new hobby

... for someone who is forever going on about reducing her CO2 emissions, is ... drum roll....

... learning to fly.

First theory lesson was tonight. We're doing Meteorology first, so we started with the hard stuff - Environmental Lapse Rate, Dry and Saturated Adiabatic Lapse Rates, and Dew Point and Relative Humidity, and how some jiggery pokery with all of them tells you how high up the clouds are going to form and how unstable the weather's going to be.

The Met theory book (Weather to Fly, hur hur) is about a centimetre thick, and has lots of juicy graphs and charts. I'm already geeking out on it a bit... I like that feeling when something which was previously gobbledygook to me becomes sense. Like this (a Creative Commons image):


There are six of us in the class - me, Dad (hi Dad!), Alan who didn't say anything at all, Ryan who is about fifteen and had to leave early because he's still on his restricted drivers' licence, Matt who is Australian and has already done the Law module and is looking for a plane to buy, and Sina who didn't say anything either. I hope we get a bit more discussion later.

I also proved (yet again) that I suck at navigation; missed the offramp on the way out, and two turns on the way home. Can't wait to see how bad I am when I'm navigating in 3D rather than 2D.

Must book a practical lesson soon. Go see these cloud formations for myself.

How does my garden grow?

The wildflowers are pushing their faces to the sky.

Biggest. Harvest. Ever.

Tomatoes grown on the balcony really do taste better than ones grown in a supermarket...

Google searches: a new CO2 emissions category?

The Times Online is reporting that each time I search Google, it generates about 7g of CO2.

That still means I'd have to do 143 searches to generate one single kg of CO2, but it's an interesting statistic. I'm counting, today, how many times I do a Google search. I'm up to 10 already, and it's not even midday.

The article also namechecks a couple more count-your-CO2-here sites. I think I need an iPhone app.

My favourite quote from the article: "...maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian." I assume they mean a person living in Brazil.

2008 in review: choices and their consequences

I've been tracking my CO2 output for a year now. Time for a summing up. My choices over the year have resulted in emissions of 12,800 kg of CO2 (which is quite a lot more than the national average of 8,600kg). That's according to my own calculations of course, but here's how it breaks down:

"Flying for work" covers two return trips to Memphis, and two to Wellington.

"NZ Apartment CO2 depreciation" is twenty percent of the CO2 emitted in building my apartment, and emitted by the building materials over the life of the building. I got the figures from NZWood - they have a handy calculator. It's probably a bit off but it's an interesting thing to consider.

"Flying for fun" covers one flight from Little Rock to Houston return to visit Pete and Ben and Adrienne, and one flight to Sydney to go for a run and do a little shopping.

"US Condo life" and "NZ Apartment life" are the costs of lighting and heating/cooling and generally using electricity in each home - about four times the emissions per day for my temporary American home, due mostly to the huge cost of heating and airconditioning.

That's without counting the CO2 emitted in the production of the food I ate, in the manufacturing off the stuff I used and bought, in the maintenance of the golf courses and movie theatres and restaurants and gyms I frequented (infrequently). I've excluded that because I don't know yet how to count it.

And it's also without counting the CO2 emitted by things I didn't actively choose - for example, the NZ government's activities. I chose to buy an apartment in a concrete building (rather than a wooden house), so I'm counting the amortised CO2 cost of building it, but I didn't choose the wooden condominium in Arkansas, so I'm not amortising the cost of building that (a pity - it was probably carbon negative). I chose to stay alive, so I'm counting the 200kg of CO2 I exhaled over the 366 days of the year :-)

To use up that CO2, it will take about 8.5 hectares of mature forest planted in a temperate land (like New Zealand) a year of living and leafing.

So what could I have chosen to do differently? The obvious choice is to avoid going to the US for five months. If I'd worked in NZ all year, and gone to Japan on holiday as I'd originally planned to, my output would be (after five minutes in Excel) about 4900kg, only 38% of what I actually caused to be emitted.

I started the year wondering if I could have any effect on my CO2 output. I think I've safely confirmed that I can.

The next step is to make those better choices which reduce my impact on the planet.

And the step after that is to make it easy for everyone else to make those choices too - by making it easy for them to see the consequences of each choice they make.

(And maybe there's a step involving buying 8.5 hectares of mature forest. )

2009 will be The Year Of Better Choices for me - for CO2 and for life in general. How about you?

Tracking my power usage with Wattzon

There should now be a "WattzOn" badge at the top of the right hand column (over there --->). WattzOn.com has a "personal energy usage" calculator, which can give you a rough idea of how much energy your lifestyle uses up. The number in the badge is my own usage. What's yours?

I went through the series of questions and the very first one piqued my curiosity: my energy usage halved when I changed my "country of residence" from USA to New Zealand. Apparently it's based on government policies which affect CO2 creation. I wonder if they've updated their estimate since the election?

Even though I did well out of living in NZ, I got all those watts back again from flying around the place. Maybe next year I should stay put.

First tomato!

Look, three little green tomatoes! And this year, I'm actually going to get to eat them.

Poo from balls of jelly is saving the world?

Heard on NatRad this morning while ironing a shirt: salps, which are little balls of jelly floating in the sea, are breathing in CO2 and pooing it out. And the poos are so heavy they sink into the abyssal depths, taking the CO2 out of our atmosphere for decades or even longer.

The NatRad reporter used words like fecal pellets and carbon sequestration, but that's what he meant.

Good on ya, little jelly balls.

In other news, I've been busy sponsoring Fronde's Mo Bros. You should too:

I went to the Sculpture on the Shore exhibition at the weekend with my mate Royden. I particularly liked this giant plane-crash. Royden particularly liked that it's a Zero, as all small Kiwi boys fantasised about attacking with their Spitfires and Mustangs. Apart from possibly the worst-designed catalogue in the known universe, the event was very well managed and over-staffed with friendly volunteers.

The whole thing was in aid of Women's Refuge, a worthy charity if you have a few dollars spare. Wouldn't it be nice if such refuges weren't necessary.

More strawberry amazement

Two lovely tasty strawberries. Ate them today: the first fruit of my garden!

Check this out for quick growth, too... 7:30 am this morning:


7:30pm this evening, a mere 12 hours later:


Long may this blessed strawberry-ripening sunshine continue.

I suggested at work today that we start a garden on our balcony to grow lunch-food. Let's see if we actually do....

New growth

Two things please me greatly today.

Thing one is the whole Obama-wins thing which is pleasing everybody sane.

Thing two is much smaller and more green (at least in the literal sense) and is pleasing only me:

Strawberries on 30 Oct


Strawberries on 2 Nov


Strawberries on 5 Nov


So quick! Look at the one on the bottom left!

It's oh so early

It's 6am. I've been awake since 3.

I woke up & couldn't get back to sleep. No particular reason, as far as I can tell. Might be the Codral Night&Day.

So I picked up a book and I've just finished it.

I know this is not normal.

But the book was really good.

And now the moon is going down behind the Vero tower, and tugs are pushing a container ship into the dock, and it's time to get up and go to work.

The book, by the way, is Social Intelligence by Karl Albrecht. Hmm.