Sunday 20th September – Photographing the ICB Interchange
Coronavirus Lockdown Day 182
1,1,52 cases: 2 new (an overseas arrival and a close contact of a known case, both in quarantine), 19 active.
Morning
Bronwen and I had a quiet morning, unaware that in only a few hours we’d be fighting for our lives.
ICB Interchange
After the aforementioned quiet morning, I decided life was boring and that we should take Wallace (the drone) out for a fly. Bronwen and I discussed the few drone photography ideas we’d come up with (based mostly on looking at other people’s drone photos) and we decided that Wallace would prefer to go to the ICB Interchange and take some photos there.
Having now completed the hard part—deciding what to do—we drove out to the ICB Interchange where Bronwen took Wallace for a test flight to see how high he’d need to be and if it was windy higher up, in the awful park they’ve built there to cover up the tunnel. After this we walked down to the absolutely horrid little pretend-river/swamp (apparently it’s called Enoggera Creek) they have set up along the bike path, and discovered that it’s full of midges—not just a few midges—not even bad midges—but absolutely atrocious midges. We almost immediately began to die from excess midge bites, and had to leave the area—but not before doing a quick test flight and discovering where we needed Wallace to be once it got dark.
We then went and sat in the park—far enough away from the awful midge creek—to await the turning-on of the street lights and discuss just how truly horrendous the midges were.
Once the lights turned on we ran back down to the midges, flew Wallace up to 109 metres, and took some photos. Bronwen had cleverly put long pants on so was only mostly bitten to death, but I didn’t have any and couldn’t fight off the midges at the same time as controlling Wallace, so I was completely bitten to death.
After getting our photos we ran screaming from the midges, collapsed into the car, and drove home to have antihistamines and a hot shower in the hopes that this would fend off my imminent midge-induced organ shutdown.
Night
A hot shower didn’t seem to do much, but after a surprisingly short time, the imminent-death thing went away and it was just itchy—and even that subsided quite quickly.