Earth Notes: Diarycast - Summer Catch-up (2020-09-25)

Diarycast

Hi, I'm Damon Hart-Davis, and welcome to Earth Notes podcast on all things eco and green and efficient @Home!

25th September 2020.

Wow, a long gap to fill in since the last diarycast...

This is a somewhat self-indulgent personal and EOU diary. From shattering a tooth, via a UKation and a new washing machine, to getting batty about Chiroptera in the 'hood!

[00:35]

• 2020-07-26: I shattered a tooth, probably from clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth in the night from stress! Something crunched when I was biting into a soft roll. Picking chunks of tooth out of my mouth wasn't great... Luckily I had a (covid-postponed) routine checkup booked just two days after, so it got seen quickly, with a few more days until a fix. The dentist told me that lots of people have broken their teeth under lockdown...
• 2020-07-30: there were what I took to be grasshoppers making themselves heard in the heat of solar noon in the cemetery: [...].
• 2020-08-01: I may have snuck in a visit to my old local, purely to help prop up the economy, with not a thought for myself. This may in fact have happened more than once... I've usually been able to sit outside, and distancing hasn't been an issue. Meeting up with friends is very much a good thing!
• 2020-08: in place of two cancelled visit/holiday bookings with parents, and no chance of a south-of-France summer fortnight, we went away for a week at at the end of the month. We went to intermittently-sunny Weymouth, for which I will do a soundscape. Away baseline energy consumption is evident, and with the Enphase AC Battery there is zero grid import, ie neither for electricity nor for gas for the duration! More in a statscast to come...
• 2020-09-04: though I don't normally bother with supplements, to reduce the risks of another run-in with covid, I have started taking D3 (1000iu or 25µg per day) as of today. Six months' supply was less than £4, so a very cheap risk reducer, along with my squats and press-ups and 1-mile walk most days.
• 2020-09-05: this morning our eleven-year-old washing machine died with a whimper. The new one was with us in five days, without fuss, covid notwithstanding. The old machine was actually a washer-dryer, but these days we hang everything up inside or out to dry, so the replacement was actually cheaper. I have hopes that the new Mix 20° wash will help save energy (compared to a 30°C programme) in mid-winter when a cold wash would not get some loads clean enough. [...]
• 2020-09-06: in sympathy, or because it was not getting enough attention, our dishwasher flooded. It had a rocky few days, and our wooden-laminate floor may never recover, but at least as of today the dishwasher continues to work.
• 2020-09-07: we put our son's chest of drawers (originally free, more than fifteen years ago) on Freegle to make space for an upgrade to a bigger and fancier wardrobe for him.
• 2020-09-12: this evening was a 90-minute soundwalk around the estate near 16WW, including bat detecting at the end!
• 2020-09-13: today we had the joy of assembling the flat-pack wardrobe and installing it. But again, a purchase, delivery and the rest not impeded noticeably by covid.
• 2020-09-21: and over the next few nights, I've been listening to common pipistrelles echolocating at 45kHz, overflying our back garden and at the front! [...]

[04:48]

Continuing thanks to Deniz for the loan of his Olympus field recorder! It's definitely feeling as if I should get my own, since I'm making good use of it in unexpected ways. From Weymouth beach to bat detection to cemetery grasshoppers...

Source tracks are available from the Show Notes.

There's more on my "Earth Notes" Web site at Earth.Org.UK.