I haven't really reached out to my Tasmanian correspondent in recent weeks. Ever since our road trip and the associated "unpleasantness" I thought I had better leave her to calm down for a while. As to the unpleasantness itself, my lips are sealed. All I will say is that it involved an unlocked door, some "special" clothing I own and a box of kumquats. However, since this blog long passed the point where I can sustain it with my own creativity I forced myself to make the connection. Fortunately she appeared to be prepared to let bygones be bygones and greeted me in her usual style.
"What the hell do you want you depraved freak?"
I mentioned that the whole point of being a correspondent is that she's supposed to correspond every so often but it turned out she had good reason for her silence. Her palms were covered in fungus. I made the appropriate sympathetic noises and offered to send her some penicillin. I have a large store of this since I physically can't consume all of the medications my tech support press on me. Besides some of them claw their way out of the boxes and escape.
At some point during the obscenity riddled rant that followed I did glean the fact that she was referring to her house plants and not, as I had first thought, an unfortunate medical condition. Although I guess its pretty unfortunate for the palms. My tech support who were listening in suggested scouring the palms with acid. When I pointed out that we were talking about plants they retracted their advice and subsided into silence.
In fact my correspondent is doing the lowgrade, domestic version of scouring them with acid. She's spraying them with apple cider vinegar. If nothing else they should be delicious by the time the fungus kills them off. With the diseased plant situation safely under control my correspondent unbent sufficiently to provide me with the latest information from her little patch of Tasmania.
One of her fish is continually faking its death. As alert readers of this blog will be aware fish don't generally need to fake their death once they enter the care of my correspondent. However the unexpected survival of quite a few of the fish she possesses has prompted every friend, relative and random stranger with an unwanted piscine to dump them on her and then flee the state. The result of which is that her home is starting to resemble a low rent aquarium with fungus riddled palms.
The child who presented the fish in question warned my correspondent that it was a drama queen. My correspondent replied with the kindly warmth adults use to hide their contempt when children say something particularly stupid and ignored it. The next day the fish was floating belly up in the fish tank. With a weary sigh (and no doubt a sense of deja vu) my correspondent went off to fetch a net to snag the floating corpse and return it to the sea via the sewage system. On her return said fish was happily swimming around down at the bottom of the tank. It has done this several times now and it has got to the point where when the thing finally dies my correspondent is likely to leave it floating in the tank for a month out of sheer skepticism.
With diseased palms and semi dead fish removed as talking points my correspondent turned instead to the lockdown I am currently suffering under with great glee. Apparently my being locked down is something she feels is long overdue. When I pointed out that the entire of Greater Sydney was locked down as well she thought that was a little unfair but worth it if it stopped me leaving the house.
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