12 of 12, June 2020

This month’s 12 of 12 fell on a Friday in the middle of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which means I stayed at home for work while the kids went off to school which they can now do without my assistance, since the elder of the two now has her Ps (we were pleased to be able to achieve this last month despite all the craziness of the year).

I had a morning of meetings, including one with one of my PhD students in China.

Although we’re not as “locked down” as we were earlier in the pandemic, I still feel a little fenced in, especially as I haven’t been able to go to uni to work. This feeling gets exacerbated when it rains … although at least the spring bulbs and daisies have put in an appearance to brighten things up a bit.

When the rain eased off a bit it was still light, and I seized the moment to go for a walk to get my step count up (and to get out of the house). My brother does a weekly podcast as he goes through his collection of owned-but-as-yet-unwatched movies, and if my walk is later in the week I listen to his latest episode.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am fortunate to be able to have some tolerably scenic walks that I can do from my house, without having to venture very far afield. Often, as with tonight’s trip, my outward route is along streets, but my return journey follows the foreshore path alongside the river. When I lived in Melbourne, not only did I miss “my mountain” but I struggled with being so relatively far from a decent body of water.

And when I got home I finished printing off some maps that I’d constructed by putting pseudo-proper UTM gridlines onto a Google map image (since I needed a large scale map AND I needed to be able to interpret UTM coordinates on it because … wait for it … we’re going to have an outside face-to-face Scout activity tomorrow, after nearly three months of not being able to do anything apart from online.

[This is the 130th “12 of 12” post since I began this strange habit in 2009, bringing you 12 photos on the 12th of each month, capturing the ordinary and the imaginative, depending on circumstances and inspiration.]