Noro Virus

Noro virus

courtesy of www.dbtechno.com

For the past month or so Dunedin has been struck by suspected Noro virus where you get diarrhea and also vomiting.  Today I tried to visit a friend whose baby is in the children's ward but was turned away from the hospital with a sudden lock down at the hospital.  Yesterday, I was still able to visit her and her baby but we had to gel our hands before going up into the wards as well as on the way out.

All schools are affected by the outbreak with an average of 100 - 150 students away from our school for the past 2 weeks and teachers are out too with some sort of illness.  My daughter and I are hoping that we will survive through this very very long winter which started in as early as April and still snowing here and there now even though we are supposed to start our spring in September!  The cherry blossoms are out but the weather in Dunedin still hovers around 10 deg Celsius during the day and drops below 5 deg at night.  

It has also been very wet in the past 2 -3 weeks.  Two Saturdays ago, I went to the laundrette for my usual Saturday drying loads but was I surprised to see the long queue!  My usual 40 minutes to dry our clothes was not even enough wait time!  And people were getting grumpy if you used more than one drier!  One man mentioned that it was worst than watching paint dry!  I think I spent close to 3 hours there just to dry 2 loads of laundry!!!  What a waste of time but I had to dry my daughter's school uniform so had no choice!  Luckily, today it was almost empty when I got there at my usual time.

I wonder how long this winter is going to be.....  The only good thing now is that petrol price has come down to just $2 for 91 octane despite the lower oil price.  However, the economist are telling us that the price is not coming down as fast as the Kiwi dollar is weakening against other currencies......Oh well.....