Bingo!

 I'm reading the Indonesian COVID report this morning, which seems to show a daily total of 10,614. The report takes care to share the information that medical masks won't make you breathe in too little oxygen or too much carbon dioxide, that drinking alcohol won't prevent or cure COVID, and that consuming bleach or disinfectant is dangerous and won't prevent COVID. Yes, it is necessary, even on the far side of the world, to reject the prescription of 'the former guy' in America in no uncertain terms. The new vaccination plan here in Indonesia appears now to include rather than disqualify people over the age of 65, which seems quite reasonable indeed. Although if you have been feeling that the response in America was slow, you ain't seen nothing compared to Indonesia. In fact, the written protocol for actually signing up for a vaccine seems tangled in complexity beyond compare. 

In other news, there are two men digging in my wall garden area this morning, their task being to create a way for the flooding rain waters to escape before running into the house. The usual way, of course, to create this drainage would be to have done it before putting the house on top of the property, but hey it's Bali and Balinese building standards. Put up the house first, take care of the preliminary measures later. Moreover, the well water, which the house uses, is now so full of dirt, perhaps because of the constant rains, that I'm having to remove the shower head every day and clean out the filter before I can take a shower. 

Someone said recently, after about twenty houses had been erected on this particular sector of land, that the land was never meant to hose dwellings. It is a 'natural area', and had been used heretofore mostly for rice fields and other green crops. Nonetheless ....

I hope all this digging and banging will not bother the wall garden ghost, who herself was probably a rice farmer in past times and may even have felt more at home lately in the ankle deep water that had  gathered each day at the back of my house. 

The leaks in the wall have now been stopped, it appears, after the outer wall was patched and water-proofed by the workers Louis was compelled to hire when it was found that the original builder had skipped this job (as he had done with many others). Here, you build a house, then you fix all the mistakes and omissions as best as can.

Here at the Starbucks outdoor patio, a mother has just released her two little girls, lugging baskets filled with packets of Kleenex, to see what sort of money they can collect. I don't need any Kleenex, but I did have a pocket heavy with coins of all denominations, so I just gave the little girl the coins, like a human slot machine. Bingo!