Folks, tonight in my The Distractions for y'all, I'll do snapshots. All taken w/ my pocket camera, so quality is bad, but taken today. I had to go to the bank to fill out forms. Along the way, I saw this bloke who had encouraged his dog up onto this turning thingy to have a ride https://twitter.com/darth/status/1283109308046012416

Inside the bank, where I had to fill out miles of electronic forms. It was weird. Perspex screen for COVID_19 safety, good, but the Wackeldackel was, well, weird.
Wackel = wobble, bobble
Dackel = dachshund
Wobblewiener?

This is a poor and rushed attempt of mine at an artistic self-portrait selfie in the reflection from the COVID_19 safety glass or perspex screen. About all you can make out is, I still have all my hair.

Just saying, for those like @sabartonwrites

also you can make out that I dress for the bank in this sleepy corner of Germany in exactly the same way I dress to face the Serengeti, or the man-eaters of Tsavo, or the mean mayhem of the streets of the USA. In other words, I dress like me, messy.

Today, @brownecfm remarked on how many shops in Northern Ireland are closed. This is the main (pedestrian) strip in this part of town; it can only be described as subdued, for a Monday afternoon, but only around 5% of shops were closed.

This is an optician, on the main strip. Note the statue in the niche up on that second floor; the optician also sells hearing-aids etc.. The statue is holding dark glasses (for the blind) and a hearing-trumpet

The statue is titled, "De Lusterpitter", which has to be local dialect. I speak a tiny bit of that dialect, but no-one could explain to me what that actually means. Maybe the glasses are just meant as near-sight/reading glasses.

But for a Tuesday (whoops, not Monday) afternoon, it's a little strange to see everything look so normal, yet almost deserted. In comparison to normal times, few around.

Then after the bank, I went looking for the local town planetarium/astronomical observatory. Along the way I saw this: it's a Kita (abbreviation), a day-care center for toddlers. Note the banner across the balcony; it's rather sad.

"Wir vermissen euch!" == "We miss you [plural]!"
Referring to all the toddlers they normally look after during the day, for working-mothers. Closed because of quarantine measures for COVID_19, I don't know when they re-open.

Some weird-ass building in one of the streets I hadn't seen before in this part of town.

Now we get to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This is where the umbrella I use to protect the hedgehog's food-bowl comes from; the town astronomical observatory and planetarium, partly built onto and housed in an old gasometer, the ball-like building.

The old gasometer part. Apparently they used to convert coal into gas, then store it in this gasometer, which then supplied a gas network for the town (including the old street lanterns). I have a secret ambition to one day cut a chain and climb the outside ladder, to take photos

*Underneath* the gasometer is quite a surprise; the whole construction (of steel) is supported by beams *around* it, with 4 extra beams a bit underneath it, clear of the ground. A rgid waterless gas holder, I guess. In use from 1892 or 1885, till gas was supplanted by electricity

anyway, the gasometer again. You can see how it all rests on the off-center ring, supported in turn by beams. One day, when I'm feeling particularly energetic and scofflawish, I may do the ladder.

This building would have belonged to the original gasworks. They must have heated coal in this area (maybe in this building) to produce gas, then stored the gas in the gasometer.

In the field there, I saw wild carrots (Daucus carota). One way to ID the wild carrot from lookalikes is a semi-central dark blossom (as below), in the flat, dense, single umbel. But that's not always present or visible.

Warning! Easy to confuse with poisonous Conium maculatum

Another umbel; as you can see, no semi-central dark blossom is visible, so the ID method is not foolproof. But the large, flat, single umbel is typical.

Do not confuse with cow parsley, or with poison hemlock, though!

I am like the @Casillic but of gasometers, not of cool things like reactors and nuclear bombs and so on, just of things like gasometers, specifically here rigid waterless gas holders. Today again; the chair on the far side helps with sense of scale.

One last photo from today for y'all, actually a crop from the very first photo I tweeted in this thread. Here's that dog again, slowly twirling around on the spinner made for children.