Not quite true, but since we were slammed back into lockdown last Saturday with two hours notice my options have been limited - further work on documenting the contents of Dow's is suspended for the moment, meaning I havn't had an opportunity to test my methodology with our travel modem.
However, when life gives you lemons make lemonade, or at least a decent gin and tonic.
Our local hardware store, while closed, is offering contactless delivery of garden supplies meaning I can get on with preparing the garden beds for spring, and while the nurseries are closed, I managed to get a couple of pretty tidy tree fern seedlings to grow on on ebay - I have a minor tree fern obsession and I have this idea that in time we'll have a couple big ferns in pots on the back deck for the cats to destroy.
I've also been getting on with making our front garden look respectable instead of looking like an abandoned builder's yard.
Because we have what is, in Australian terms, an old house in an old town I sometimes turn up old glass and bottle fragments when working outside.
However, this week produced nothing in the way of garden archaeology other than a contextless fragment of the base of a nineteenth century beer bottle which really wasn't worth documenting, and given a nineteenth century brewery in the next street, not altogether surprising.
As far as I can work out, despite our house block being laid out in the mid nineteenth century, the block wasn't built on until later, sometime in the 1880's, and the land was used instead as an orchard and to stable the dray horses from the brewery.
Certainly I've found an old horseshoe and a broken pair of farriers' pincers which tends to support the idea of the land being used initially to stable the horses.
Other than that, not much. Cold days have alternated with wet days meaning that I havn't got as much done outside as I hoped, but next week promises to be better.
Elsewhere, the minimalist dogfood tablet continues to deliver as a e-reader for old digitised books, but there's been a little bit of creep - I've added twitter and the ABC news client, meaning that if I'm somewhere where there's no wifi, I can check the news headlines and my email via my phone in personal hotspot mode, as well as downloading additional material.
This has proved to be a useful enhancement when I'm out - not that I have been recently, and while it breaks the initial idea of a minimal distraction free device, turning off the hotspot capability on my phone switches it back to distraction free mode.
We've at least one more week of lockdown, but I'm not depressed about it, although I admit the off and on run of lockdowns this winter is a but harder to deal with than last winter where it was what it was.
In the meantime I've got myself some gardening jobs to get on with, and being almost spring it's no longer bone achingly cold in the morning, meaning that hopefully I can get a reasonable amount of time out in the garden, and if the weather's against me, there's always family history ...
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