Have Yourself a Very Covid Christmas

[jducoeur]

No, it wasn't that bad -- by the standards of Christmas mishaps, it was relatively minor. But it's worth a diary entry.

Last Thursday, Kate and I flew down to Annapolis, to spend the holidays with her family. Mostly staying with her folks, but everybody going into DC for a show and museum on Saturday, then spending Sunday night at her brother's house in the DC suburbs, back to her folks on Monday, and fly home on Tuesday (today). It all sounded like a pretty good time.

In a fine demonstration of Applied Murphyology, that plan survived until Friday morning, when her father started sneezing and sniffling. To his credit, he quickly tested, and sure enough -- a strong positive line.

(Mind, I don't particularly fault them: they've been decently responsible and careful. But they've been traveling a lot, and that's always a bit dangerous nowadays.)

There was a brief consideration of us jumping over to her brother's house instead, since we'd only been briefly exposed, but reality put the kibosh on that idea: his partner is currently on immunosuppressants (due to a recent flareup of an occasional problem), so even a brief exposure was too high-risk to be worth taking.

I explained Paxlovid to her parents; on Saturday they went and got him a prescription. I was distressed that this required them sitting in Urgent Care for two hours, but Christmas Eve is pretty much the worst case scenario.

---

So it was mostly a quiet week at her folks' condo, although we did manage to salvage some bits and pieces of the plan. Kate and I had been planning on going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture while the rest of the family went to Wicked. (We had seen it on stage before, and didn't care so much.) Since it was just the second day of exposure, we figured that we probably weren't a risk to others yet, so we tested (negative as expected), masked up, and drove into the city.

The museum was more educational than I'd like to admit: there was a lot of the bad early history that I didn't know. But learning is kind of the point of the exercise, and we spent a solid three hours walking through the History floors. (The museum has three subterranean floors that are more or less a tour of the history, starting in the Renaissance and ending with Barack Obama, and two above-ground ones dedicated to culture.)

I recommend the experience. It's very detailed, and pulls no punches. The only downside is traffic management: some of the sections get pretty jammed. Now being now, that felt a little uncomfortable, even on a relatively low-crowd day. (Not so many families at the museum on Christmas Eve.)

---

Sunday, Kate's brother came over briefly, and we did an exchange of hostages, passing along presents and the dinner components that each household had cooked. After he got home, we did a family Zoom call to open the presents together, so it wasn't too different from normal.

We weren't able to eat exactly the same dinner, but we managed to get surprisingly close -- duck on both sides, in our case duck breasts seared on the grill, with a really marvelous smoked port wine sauce made by her brother's partner. It was pretty lovely.

---

By Monday, Kate and I were still feeling okay, but it being Day Four, going to anything indoor and public seemed like a bad idea. So we instead wound up going to a park near her folks' place, with a nice four-mile path through the forests around it.

We noted the gazebo at the entrance, which appears to be dormant; after that, we began observing the lower pavilions scattered throughout.

The walk gradually turned into a biological discussion of the pavilions -- what they eat (animals? people? stuff that falls off the picnic tables?), the observation of the larger, older pavilion in the middle (clearly the silverback), the speciation of the examples we observed (two had chimneys, obviously to better attract prey), speculation about further evolution (Kate argued that, if you hybridized the species, you would wind up with one that had a hibachi in the middle).

Eventual conclusion was that the gazebo is clearly the lone apex predator -- best to pass by while it hibernates in the winter. (The other safe time of year being summer, when you have Sousa bands to fend it off.)

It was a lovely time -- getting to stretch our legs, enjoy a cool (but no longer crazy-cold) day, and generally be silly together was a definite mood-lifter.

---

Today was returning home; continuing the Applied Murphyology theme, of course my throat has started to feel a little scratchy. So there was nothing for it but to do what I was starting to consider anyway: I shaved both cheeks clean, so I can finally get a proper fit on an N95. That was maybe-worthwhile for protecting myself from other people at the various big upcoming events (Arisia, Birka, Intercon, etc); now, it's a strict necessity for protecting others from me.

Mind -- I literally haven't seen my cheeks in 40 years, so this took some nerving myself for. But the conclusion was that I can leave the mustache and some beard on my chin, without compromising the seal, so the visual difference is subtler than I had feared. It's the first time since this all started that I've felt like a mask is truly fitted properly.

I put on the mask when we left the house in Annapolis, and didn't put it back on until we got home. In the plane we managed to grab the only two-seat row in the plane, so as not to be sitting next to anybody. So I didn't feel like a complete slimeball flying home, but it's definitely one of the most uncomfortable things I've done recently.

(Waiting for the flight was an adventure unto itself, which deserves its own blog post. Suffice it to say, I do not recommend flying Southwest at the moment -- the flight staff were lovely, but the airline's execs have screwed up the airline's systems to a truly epic degree.)

---

Home now, and with the stress of flying passed, the scratchiness is getting worse. Tomorrow I retest; assuming it's finally positive (which I think is likely), then I get to try to score some Paxlovid myself. Yay -- hopefully that will be less hassle than it was for Kate's father.

Hopefully it'll be a mild case. Kate's father still sounds pretty decent -- just mild cold symptoms -- but there's no way to know how it'll hit me.

The one bright spot is that we didn't have any concrete plans for this week, so nothing is actually being foiled for us. But I'm a bit distressed about the fact that spontaneous shenanigans with friends are now probably out of the question -- I suspect that I'm going to be largely quarantined until at least a week from today, and even that is only if things go quite quickly.

So the rest of the winter break is looking like a staycation of reading comics, drinking tea, and sniffling a lot...

[ETA as I head towards bed: yep, now have a mild fever. Entirely unsurprising, but sigh...]

[ETA2, next day: yep, faint but definite positive test line. I have a video appointment with a doctor scheduled for tomorrow morning, to get the Paxlovid scrip.]

Comments

[brainwane]

Ugh!! My sympathies, and I am glad you were able to make as many good memories as you were. I perhaps foolishly hope that it'll turn out you just have a cold, not COVID; but if you do test positive then I hope your case is as mild as possible!

[laurion]

Well. At least you were able to remain flexible about it.

And that you feel better soon.

At some point, perhaps because of the politicization of distancing and masking (pre-vaccine), catching COVID became a sign of a moral failing to those who were trying hard to take the appropriate precautions. But with the virulence of it and the asymptomatic window of infectiousness, I've worked hard to maintain that becoming infected is not the moral failing, failing to take reasonable precautions and sensible actions is the failing.

Enjoy as much of your enforced staycation as you can.

[ilaine]

Feel better soon!

[keshwyn]

> Eventual conclusion was that the gazebo is clearly the lone apex predator -- best to pass by while it hibernates in the winter. (The other safe time of year being summer, when you have Sousa bands to fend it off.)

I want to do a comparative study of the Maryland Gazebo with the Massachusetts Gazebo sometime. Probably when it's warmer and you're not sick, though. I hope that your case remains mostly mild.

[danabren]

Considering how Southwest has screwed the pooch this holiday season, you are lucky to have gotten home so easily!

[jducoeur]

Oh, definitely -- 5 out of 7 BWI -> BOS flights were cancelled. Part of what was so boggling about the whole thing was that, even with all those cancellations, it took them over an hour to scare up four flight attendants. (One of whom apparently had to be called in from home on an emergency basis.)

[danabren]

:(

I hope SW doesn't go belly-up, they are the Costumer's Airline with 2 free checked bags and are well beloved by the con and costumer community.

Man, they really Musked it up this holiday season. Oof.

[jducoeur]

The really distressing part is that the holiday season appears to have little to do with the problem. Their systems have apparently been a homebrew disaster-in-waiting for many years, and things finally collapsed. Until and unless they seriously rethink the way they manage their operations, there seems to be nothing preventing it from happening again...

[danabren]

From Reuters The cancellations drew criticism from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for what he termed a "meltdown." He told CNN that the company's union leaders had told him they had been "raising the alarm" about technology issues at Southwest systems for some time.

"Southwest is using outdated technology and processes, really from the '90s, that can't keep up with the network complexity today," Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, told Reuters.

Starting my career in Teh Intarnutz has hammered home how bad websites really are; how government website contracts are affected by internal politics (wasting SO MUCH taxpayer money WOW), and how corporate management dismisses the concerns of the tech team repeatedly until it's either an emergency or suddenly convenient aka internal politics.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I'm mainly angry at SW's upper management here -- this is clearly a massive failure of planning and investment. I've been absolutely boggled, reading into this over the past few days, about how bad their people-tracking systems are. Modern airlines are essentially lean supply chains, tracking and delivering the right people to the right places "just in time", and automatically adjusting for exceptions: there's no excuse at this point for having antiquated systems to manage that.

[danabren]

The excuse is "our shareholders!".

Looking at you, Verizon, Amazon, Verizon, Disney, Verizon.

[cellio]

I'm sorry you finally got hit. I hope it's a mild case.

Thank you for sharing your delightful analysis of the gazebos and pavilions.

[hudebnik]

We finally caught COVID for the first time in mid-November, getting a jump on this year's winter wave in northern states. I had a mild case. shalmestere spent a couple of days in bed and is still suffering unusual fatigue a month later, but doesn't appear to have any other lasting damage.

I shaved off my beard and moustache on New Year's Day, 2010, having not seen my chin since 1983. Which means of course shalmestere had never seen it. She liked it, and friends and neighbors all said I looked at least ten years younger without it (since that's where most of the white hair was), so I've kept it off. But disposable razor cartridges are expensive, and disposable, and although they allegedly last a month I've never gotten more than two weeks' use from one. Considering going to one of those retro e-tailers for a clamshell safety razor and a box of a few hundred flat razor blades. Or, of course, one could go really retro to a straight razor....

[jducoeur]

I've been using the disposable cartridges for many years, but in practice they do last me a fairly long time -- between the fact that I'm only shaving part of my face, and that I've never been one to reliably shave every day (even before I started working from home ten years ago), I usually get well over a month from each. A package from Costco lasts me a couple of years.

So as waste goes, they're a relatively minor sin for me personally -- not nothing, but not one of the things I've actively tried to change my habits over yet.

[andrewducker]

I hope you're now all feeling much better!