Maribou’s best friend (well, the one who isn’t me) is still exceptionally apprehensive about the whole “pandemic” thing. A few months back, when Maribou wanted to visit, she asked me if I would do stuff like mask 100% of the time when I wasn’t in the house or car and, if I could swing it, work from home and if I couldn’t work from home, could I please take some days off and spend them in the basement. She wanted to be able to tell her bestie that, hey, I haven’t been exposed at all in the last week and neither has Jaybird.
I admit, I sort of rankled at this. I got my shots. I got my booster. I got my bivalent booster. The numbers in El Paso County are really good. This caused a little bit of tension and we were talking about what is and isn’t reasonable at this point in the pandemic when… *MY* bestie told me “Dude! You know how we were finishing the basement? Well, I finished it! Come over! Spend the night! We’ll get a pizza and play video games!” “Can I come over for a week?” “HELL YES!!!!”
And so I went over there for a week. We took time off and just spent the days cooking and watching movies and playing video games and it was like a mini-vacation. He’s got three kiddos. The youngest is 2, the oldest is 6. It is my job to be “Uncle Jaybird”.
So part of my job while I’m over there is to help be funny and distracting for the kids and do stuff like burp for them and have little conversations about the differences between ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise and ranch dressing. This gives Mom and Dad an opportunity to eat their food in silence and just stare off into the middle distance for five minutes. Other times, while they’re dealing with the chaos of the kiddos, I can cook or take the doggy out to the yard and just be an extra pair of hands while they’re doing important other stuff and so they can finish up and then come back to some hot food or a doggy that is ready to play instead of one more chore.
I try to be the absolute best house guest that I can possibly be and it’s really interesting to be around little kids since I never had any.
And to be around little kids outside of any given 10-minute “best behavior” window. To actually sit and talk with them and listen to them discuss the injustice of having to sit in *THIS* chair instead of *THAT* chair, the problems of going to school when other kids are sometimes mean, and the occasional meltdown.
Half of me says “man, I really messed up by not having children.” The other half says “Yeah, you seriously made the right call.”
They are very, very bright lights and I am used to darkened basements.
All that to say, I’ve spent the last week at my buddy’s while Maribou was in quarantine in prep for visiting her bestie and I put Maribou (in an N100 mask) on a plane today after a lovely drive to the airport. As such, this weekend will be spent batchin’ it in a darkened basement after a wonderful week spent with dear friends and dear kiddos and, oh my goodness, it’s nice to be back home.
So I’m going to do some laundry, do some grocery shopping, and maybe go for a jog but I will be doing all of those all by my lonesome. Whew.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Where’s the bearded one?”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
My wife and I are both recovering from COVID. Third time. We hardly leave the house. My wife works from home most days. I work with just a few people. It’s pretty frustrating. What’s ironic is that we got it three months ago, and we went on Saturday to get our boosters, because that’s about the time our immunity would be wearing off. We started coming down with symptoms that day, but assumed it was just a reaction to the vaccine, but they did not clear up.
Weekend plans involve trying to catch up on some of the chores that we didn’t get to during the week due to lack of energy, though I doubt we will get around to everything. Also, the new Fire Emblem comes out today, so there will probably be a lot of laying on the couch and playing that.Report
Ugh, that sucks.
I have no idea why some people manage to avoid it easily despite not trying and others catch it despite trying very hard.Report
I think there is a certain element of natural immunity in some people, or maybe they just remain asymptomatic. There seems to be a lot of variability in how it affects people.
That being said, this was much less severe than the previous times, though I think I will still have lingering bronchitis and fatigue for the next week or two.Report
I bet there’s a genetic explanation. Because I’ve never had it, and yes, I am kind of a hermit, but this past fall I taught unmasked and am teaching unmasked this spring and OCCASIONALLY go in a store (if it’s not crowded) without a mask, and I have eaten maybe three meals in a restaurant in the past six months….but I also know people equally careful to me who have had it three times.
If my having a tetchy immune system that gets riled up at almost every kind of pollen and some foods keeps me from getting COVID…..well, maybe not being able to eat peanuts or watermelon or carrots is worth it.Report
My buddy (the one whose house I stayed at) was against it to the point where I thought it was excessive. He was 100% WFH. He had his groceries delivered. Hand-washing, hand-sanitizer, and double-masking. I would be able to hang out with him if I tested first (he’s a good guy, I don’t mind testing).
And he got it from one of his kiddos.
After he got it? He lost all anxiety about it.Report
yeah I flip flop between “well, if I get it, maybe I’ll see that for most people, it’s not that bad” (of the 7 or 8 people I know who had it for sure, only 2 have had extended issues, and only one has had bad issues) but then I think “but what if you were one of the unlucky ones that got long covid or had a stroke or pulmonary embolism as a result”
so I don’t know.
I do know there aren’t any movies on current release that are good enough to entice me to want to sit in a theater with other people for an hour and a half. And most of the restaurants I like do take away….Report
Yeah, Maribou and I still aren’t going to restaurants the way we did in the beforetimes (like, we’d be out driving and then say “let’s go to Chili’s!” and then we went to Chili’s. Crazy!) but we have gone to… one or two in the last six months.
But I go to grocery stores and am almost to the point where I see the pack of surgical masks in the glove compartment and say “oh, yeah… we did that, didn’t we?”
Almost.Report
IIRC, for any given virus family, about 2% of the human population has an inherent immunity — their immune system stops it cold. This got a lot of play many years ago when researchers discovered that some prostitutes in Africa were immune to HIV, no matter how or how often exposed. Nothing useful ever seemed to come from it.
A friend once said about it, “Good old Mother Nature. If 2% of the population of an apex predator survives, they can make it up in a few generations.”Report
That sounds like an awesome week. I have the same feelings about dogs. Everyone has one, and everyone that has one says I should get one. The best thing about having friends with dogs is I get to visit them and play with their dogs, and then I get to go home having never picked up a pile of excrement.Report
I had my wisdom teeth out on Tuesday, so this weekend is (hopefully) the rest of my recovery.Report
Good luck. I had all 4 of mine taken out in college and to this day it may be the worst experience of my life. It was weeks before I was right again.Report
I only ever had one and I managed to keep it until the Air Force made me get it removed before a deployment in 1998. Later that day I felt pretty good so I made myself a sandwich. Big mistake.Report
I’m at 5 days and honestly I feel pretty close to normal, this may be an area where medicine has advanced a fair bit. Monday is a public holiday, so I won’t be going back to work before Tuesday at the earliest, but the way things are going I might be ready by then.Report
Glad to hear the recovery has been smooth so far!Report
Wow, I guess I was lucky. Once the anesthetic wore off (they took all mine at once, and used some kind of “twilight sleep” thing) I was fine. I was v. careful how I ate for a few days – broth and juice the first couple, then soft foods. I followed the icing and gentle-salt-rinse schedule the oral surgeon gave me. I only ever needed ibuprofen for pain.
when I went in a week later or so for a recheck, he said even he was surprised at how quickly I was healing up. Maybe my hypochondria/insistence on following the instructions served me well? But he was also an exceptionally good oral surgeon.Report
Sounds like you were very lucky.
I had all 4 seriously impacted and the top ones coming in almost diagonally. It was never going to go well for me. But I am also pretty sure I had the opposite of an exceptionally good oral surgeon (not even going to get into the details). I basically didn’t eat for two weeks, and it was rough going for a few weeks after. I remember I ended up being sent home from work because the combination of empty stomach and pain killers had me behaving very strangely, a condition I was oblivious to until my assistant manager told me to leave.Report
Sounds like your recovery was like mine has been – although they did give me codeine for the pain. But then, like you, I have been following the instructions quite closely.Report
they gave me a prescription for some kind of non-codeine (the real stuff makes me throw up) but kinda narcotic pain killer but I told my mom not to fill it unless I told her to. I didn’t need it. I was glad to just take ibuprofen and ice 10 minutes out of every hour or whatever it was the surgeon said.
I am the kind of person, though, who’d rather cope with a little pain than feel dopey.Report
Ugh. Good luck.
I spent two days on the couch with some baby food when I had mine out.
Blueberry Buckle was surprisingly good, as I recall.Report
Yeah, I’ve been eating very soft foods all week, I think I’m finally at the point where I can cook some chips in my air fryer tonight.Report
When mine were removed long ago, the dentist took both on one side and the two on the other side a month or so later. Under NJ state law at the time, taking all four at once would be “oral surgery” and would have had to be done in a hospital. Dental work has never given me much residual pain so I got by on ibuprofen, and chewing regular food but only on one side of my mouth.
Hopefully yours won’t be any more unpleasant than mine.Report
Honestly, it hasn’t been too bad. They were taken out under general anesthetic because two of them hadn’t erupted at all, and one was impacted. This was done at a hospital by an oral surgeon, but my insurance covered it so it was fine.Report