My company asked me/us again whether we would llike to work from home or to go the office.

Of course I chosed to work from home. It is so much more convenient and can save me from commuting time of more than 3 hours a day. I can work very OK at home, at least so far there is no significant sign of stress/melancholia. I spend less on train tickets and much less on foods for lunch. And most of all, I am safer from the virus.

However just a bit deeper thought shows that life is that easy. Restaurants in Birmingham, where I used to go to work, all close now. BBC shows city center of Manchester without any one. No restaurant, no barber shop, no shopping. So who will pay the taxes and keep the economy running? And  no train services, very few cars on the road. So who will need to build any train lines, any development of infrastructures?

And if there is no more need for those, who will need me/us to build or design anything?

To some extent I think leaders like Trump or Boris Johnson are not stupid. They need to rush people to work because they know that without working, we can die even more quickly.

Please be nice to opossums if you find them in your barns, garages or sheds. They are North America's only marsupial (pouched mammal) and they are ill-equipped for the snow. They have no fur on their feet, ears or tail, so are very susceptible to frost bite. Often when opossums are seen, they are ravaged by frostbite, so they are missing toes, missing part of their tails, and their ears are crumpled.

They are beautiful, gentle animals and one of the few mammals that rarely, if ever, get rabies. Why? Because they have a normal body temperature that is below most other mammals. The rabies virus can't survive at this lower body temperature. A healthy opossum's normal reaction to the presence of a human is to stay still, open its mouth and drool. This is a normal reaction! Many people think these are symptoms of rabies in an opossum and that is not true! Opossums are not athletes. They can't run fast, jump well or climb well, so their only defense is to be very still, and show you all 50 of their teeth and pray that you just go away. Opossums are omnivores and help us by consuming ticks and tick eggs. They are also the "clean up crew" of our roads, eating roadkill, but in the process, often becoming roadkill themselves. They are often drawn to areas where outdoor pets, such as cats are fed, as they eat cat food, dog food, and even birdseed. Often, opossums take shelter under sheds and decks or in feral cat shelters which are usually small boxes filled with hay.

Please, be kind to opossums!

Source: FB page Green Rocks Rescue Inc

Don't know how to say thank you to all my kind friends who guided us and helped us around. And to thank you to all the beautiful and interesting sites that we were so lucky to be to. I try to write down and post as much as I can, before being busy with life.

Edinburgh is a city surrounded by sea, mingled with mountains and vast green spaces. We can see mountains and hills wherever we are in the city. They are the Colton hill with the Nelson column and the remains of some Roman time looking colonnades, which requires a bit of affort to climb onto. They are the hill of 251m of height where we can find Arthur's Seat, which is imposingly next to the Assembly of Scotland. 

And maybe because the city is so next to moutains, its houses look also like mountains! Or at least as they were carved from moutain rocky block and windows were intruded. The houses are imposing, big, rigid and unornamented in forms. House walls are mostly in rocks, and they are so tainted in black colour. A quick Google look up explained that it was industrial revolution time smoke that made these walls so dark and black. So impressive the destructive power of the industry and of the animals named human sapien, isn't it?

However my closer look showed that this colour of black could be due to some kind of rocky moulds. Still need to be studied more on this.

The Old City of Edinburgh comprises mainly of the Royal Mile which is the main cobbled road that leads from the Holyrood House to the Edinburgh castle on top of the hill. On the two sides of this are centuries old blocks of houses separated by small "closes" or very small alleys. Four centuries ago, these houses and alleys were overpopulated by many families that shared shabby tiny rooms. Sanity condition was extremely bad, diseases were rampaging. One of the best places to see these is the Mary King's close museum, one of the rare venues that still open in Scotland during these days of pandemic.

I took a photo with Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations, and Father of Capitalism. Behind the statue is St Giles Cathedral where I first knew about John Knox and his contributions to the Reformation in Scotland.

Scotland these days is particularly rainy, even stormy and very windy. On the 20 August, we followed some of our friends to visit Loch Lomond and Trassord national park North of Glasgow. Very annoyed by the lack of internet and phone network in some remotes areas. Why don't they install lots of 3G, 4G and 5G Huawei poles on top of their mountains and around their beautiful lakes?