The day that wasn't

Looking on eBay at tracking numbers is pretty painful. Watching things creep ever so slowly around the countryside at speeds that could easily be exceeded by a blind snail slithering backwards while towing an anvil can only be described as cruel and unusual punishment.

Yesterday my new rivets arrived in Columbia where they sat all day. They never made it to the local delivery office despite having been sitting for 24 hours. Either the Post Office has had an outbreak of the virus or they've lost them! I'll have to keep waiting. Today though I tried out my new riveter.

This was one of those eBay things that arrived with no instructions whatsoever so it took a few minutes to work out how it all worked, why I had so many wrench sizes etc. Having done that and dismantled the thing because it wouldn't grip a rivet, I tried it...

As I'll be using 3/16 and 1/4 rivets I tried it with a 3/16 rivet and found that the Harbor Freight battery drill was not powerful enough to complete pulling the rivet and also that my damaged right wrist is not capable of holding the drill. Gloves would also help, I'm sure.

So the end result was that this appears to be a very fiddly device that probably works just not on the rivets I wanted to use. Heaven help me when I need to use steel rivets! They're much tougher to pull!

I probably wouldn't have left things there but I heard a noise so I looked up and not six feet from me were two very large, very black cows. That's right - the kind that go "moo" and produce all those lovely milk products like cheese and butter and ice cream. It seemed to take an age to shoo them out of the yard. When they did leave, they didn't leave in the right direction and a neighbor had to shoo them out of his yard a few minutes later. Then they raced down the road at high speed. Clearly that neighbor has more skill than I in shooing cows. A horn or whistle or something louder than me would probably have been advantageous.

Fortunately the cows had not touched my young veggies. If they'd eaten my veggies, I'd have had to eat them! I can see it now - a few days and the guy comes knocking on doors, looking for his cows while we all whistle, look innocent and try to hide the barbecue pit, piles of cow bones and try to refrain from belching.

Today was one of those interesting days. The news was pretty gripping. Not only do we have the Coronavirus raging and 102,000 now dead from it in the USA alone and 367,000 dead worldwide but we had a space rocket launch to the international space station aboard an Elon Musk rocket and nationwide riots. In fact the nationwide riots were pretty close to home. They started peacefully enough but within hours vehicles were vandalized and on fire. In other cities whole housing estates have gone up in flames, shops have been looted and public buildings sacked.

Now perhaps people might appreciate the need for a mobile lifestyle. To get away from the chaos.