Lockdown Life: Month er...

 So things continue without much change. However, living in an area which is not greatly affected by the virus means we see things differently to people in Madrid. Extremadura is seeing a rise in infections, but nothing like some of the big cities.

There's a very real concern that the health service in Madrid will get overwhelmed as we move into autumn. However, there are differing views about this, as the huge majority of new cases are in young people who are not showing symptoms. The worry, of course, is that they will infect more vunerable people.

It's difficult to remember, sometimes, what's going on, as we adapted to the 'new normal' very well. The only real difference is we now continue get our food shopping delivered. 

Last week we went into Zafra for the first time since March which wasn't for a vet visit. We went to a couple of shops and again - didn't really see much difference - other than hand wash at the entry of one shop.

Schools start back in a couple of weeks. Again, I think it will be easy here as for a couple of months at least, they will be able to give classes outside, and the class sizes are so small anyway, it will be pretty easy for them to social distance. But it will be a lot more challenging in the big cities.

In other news, Sam is much better after his last set of seizures. There's something about us saying 'I think it's time we took him to Antonio' which seems to work its magic and Sam seems to snap out of it! This must be the 4th or 5th time, we've braced ourselves to say goodbye, only for him to come round quickly. Of course, he's very frail and is a very old dog now, but he's first out for his food, joining in any mayhem, albeit in a shakey way, and at the moment, seems still to be enjoying life.

How wrong can you be...

 Well, as it turns out, very.

Yesterday we were trying to work out when Wilbur was ill last year so I looked through the blog and found out (July) and I read another post around that time where I was talking about Daisy and now she had 'no fetch instincts whatsoever'. So not sure when that all changed, but it obviously did. She could quite happily play fetch all day and night. Ian had to do some ball throwing duties on our walk as I had worn my arm out and couldn't throw!

And I was browsing through earlier in the year where I was musing about Ludvig and predicting he wouldn't be a very chatty parrot. Obviously little did I know what was about to come!

Sam has been poorly again - he's had another set of seizures and we have said we wouldn't let him go through another cluster. But the challenge is to know when it is going to be a cluster, and when there is just two or three which seems to be his pattern. Anyway, he came out of them quite quickly and is walking OK and knows his name, when it's food time... but we think if he has another now we'll take him to be put to sleep as I think that would suggest it's going to be a cluster.  He is sleeping peacefully now, so we'll see what happens.

When I was looking through the blog, I noticed that it was this time last year when Pixie was going to the vet because of her fur loss. She's now almost completely refurred - except for one small patch on her tail.

In other news,  new covid measures are being introduced in Extremadura today. Smoking is now banned in public unless people can maintain social distancing, big gatherings can only be held by application and a whole tranche of measures to do with care homes. 

The vast majority of the new cases are in Madrid, Aragon and Cataluña and among young people - but our mayor sent us a 'stay vigilant' message to keep Villagarcia virus free!

Lockdown Life

Spain is experiencing an increase in cases of the virus, but people seem pretty relaxed about it. The figure that everyone watches is the ICU capacity - and that is pretty much back to normal. More ICU units are being created, however, as they are forecasting an increase in October.

Another reason why they seem quite relaxed is that a lot of the cases that are being found are asymptomatic, and this is a larger than expected proportion. There's quite an aggressive track and trace system in place which is why they are uncovering this large percentage of asymptomatic cases. 

As before, the vast majority of the cases are in the big cities although two villages in Extremadura did go back a phase last week because of infections.

Worryingly, there's been an outbreak of Meningitis in Seville, which is a strain that has come from Egypt. This isn't anything to do with the coronavirus, however one of the fears is what pressure these two together might put on the ICU units.

On the plus side, telefonica has been working hard upgrading the network in rural areas in Extremadura and we should have improved connectivity soon. Which will be nice. We pay a huge amount for an extremely poor service at the moment, so the new service will not only bring us forward by two decades will also give us a lot more for the same or less money - which will be nice. 

I'm attending a virtual conference this weekend. This was in the details I received and I thought this was funny - apparently this has been quite a thing with people forgetting that they are on camera!

Anniversary Balls and Daisy's Amazing Nose

 We celebrated our anniversary with a cheese feast, nice bottle of red wine and throwing a luminous ball for Daisy. It was coincidental that the luminous ball arrived on our anniversary, however it did make a fun end to the evening watching Daisy chasing the ball in darkness on the patio. It took her a bit of time to get used to it - it must have been a bit odd to see a luminous (or fluorescent - not sure of the difference), flying past her ear, but when she realized what it was - she was happy enough to chase after it. 

Daisy impressed us with her sniffing abilities yesterday. Earlier this week we (I) lost her ball in a bank of grass and weeds. I had been using the flingy thing so I'd thrown the ball much further than I would have done otherwise, and we weren't quite sure where is landed - let alone see it in all the weeds. Daisy, who was actually chasing the ball at the time, was no help so we went home without it. I went out with her the next day to have a better look - to no avail. However, yesterday, we were walking past and she sort of got her nose engaged and sniffed the ball out. There's no way we would have found it. It was very impressive to watch - but bemusing all the same as she's had no interest in finding it on previous occasions. It's quite interesting watching her when she starts sniffing, it is really like she switches her nose on and goes into full bloodhound mode. 

When Daisy runs round the patio after the ball, the others just stand and look at her. We have to watch Sam as he is so frail he gets knocked over, but he quite likes having a wander out there. 

We're still mid-heatwave, with it continuing into next week. The house is full of floppy animals as they hug the cool floor when it is hot. Sensible of them!!!