Monday, July 28, 2014

The Grape Update...Escape...and Other Observations








The yeast and "must" has stopped working...and the still clarifying white wine siphoned and strained off into a holding container at this time.

Gratefully the grassy green colour seems to have dissipated. Using the egg white method of clarification. Ten thousand ancient Italians can't be wrong.

Tasted a sip of the raw product and damn...hoping it mellows a bit in the settling process. Wishing I  had a proofing bead...because this is not your Nonni's wine.
Maybe a tad too much yeast and sugar because right now this is strong like "shine". I seriously think you could flame it.

The "Message in This Bottle" may be:

                           Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!!!!

We will see when the settling/clarification/initial ageing is over at the end of August.

Adding the finishing touches to "Escape" (my Dune painting) today with a
ghost balloon in the upper left hand corner floating away...and soon to be sealed.







And finished "Idgy's" requested sky painting.

Which is...well...just a sky.  :)

But she is very happy with it. A slice of summertime!

Personally, I think it needs a couple of ghost balloons intertwined.  

Enjoyed the kids and grands company over the weekend...and bathing later with Chris practicing Bach's  Minuet # 3 in the living room. Kind of pleasantly surrealistic.

Not so pleasantly surrealistic...the news out of West Africa...somewhat alarming.  From 29 cases/deaths in March localized in one small country in Africa (Guinea) to (currently) 660 deaths spread over four countries (Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone) and over a thousand known contacts being followed. Between political manoeuvring, rampant misinformation, fear and ignorance-- something that could have been quickly quarantined and eliminated has become an epidemic.

But that isn't even the really alarming part...Bear with me.

Within the past two weeks in Liberia there have been 8 deaths that defy the normal transmission patterns.

One of these was a Liberian man who boarded a plane infected and flew to Nigeria. He collapsed in the airport and died 2 days later. During that time he assured medical personnel that he had not been in contact with anyone who had the disease and had not attended any funerals.   

Now i would disregard this as incidental...and assume that he MUST have unknowingly had some form of contact...if it weren't for the following seven cases-

Four nurses...and three doctors.

All in Liberia. All infected during the same 2 week period. Several of them already dead...and all who maintain..insist...that at no time was their protective protocol breached.

If it were an isolated incident I can see where that might happen-- but seven health care professionals in the midst of a "hot-zone". People who are watching patients liquefy from the inside and die in front of them? 

(To put this in perspective, in the 15 years I was a nurse, I had one careless moment resulting in a needle-stick. That was over 20 years ago and I can still remember the shaky, horrified pit-of-your-stomach, I might actually throw-up-here...reaction. The incident reports required. The post testing for well over a year. HIV/Hep C being the biggest risks that I faced at the time. I was amazingly lucky.)

Bottom line: There is absolutely no way that 7 doctors and/or nurses breached protocol with Ebola at the same general location, within a week of each other and not one of them realized that they had a breach.  You would stand better odds buying a winning lottery ticket, okay? It isn't just unlikely.  It is impossible.


What could be happening?

Intentional Internal sabotage? (...perhaps an infiltrator...)

Intentional External sabotage? (...the local villagers haven't been exactly welcoming recently...)

A Substrain of the Ebola virus beginning to mutate to another form of transmission...possibly airborne? (...viruses mutate...Ebola has already went through 6 mutations since its discovery...)

Time will tell. 

 But something is not right with this picture.

More anon...






Je présente
"Escape"