Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
How weird is it for
(a) Gorsuch to be the swing vote and
(b) Gorsuch and Jackson to co-sign a dissenting opinion?
(Basically, whether you think you need to summarily kick people out at the border or not, you can’t justify it as keeping covid out of the country.)
No surprise, the rest of the “conservative” majority voted to force the government to keep doing it, while the liberal judges agreed that the policy should be allowed to expire.
Updated shelf life and expiration dates for at-home #covid tests, now that there’s been time to collect real-world data.
If you have an “expired” test lying around, check the list – it might still be usable.
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/covid-19-at-home-tests-expiration-date-science
Just scheduled my flu shot & updated Covid booster!
Walgreens is accepting appointments now for next week, at least in the LA area.
I just found out that someone I went to high school with lost both her brother and father to COVID last fall because her cousin convinced them not to go to the hospital and only take quack remedies for things that definitely weren’t COVID, all while she and her brother’s friend tried unsuccessfully to get them to seek *real* medical treatment.
Well, whatever it is, the fever seems to have broken yesterday and now I only feel exhausted. So that’s another sign pointing to not-covid.
Still, so much for getting out this weekend.
I figured the sore legs were probably from biking up & down 6 miles of hills yesterday
The neck pain from sitting propped up in a posture that i know gives me neck pain
The fatigue from not sleeping well
Light headedness could be migraine related
But then the chills started. And the fever hit.
Home COVID test came out negative, going to take a pcr tomorrow. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gotten sick with COVID like symptoms but a negative test.
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No one else in the kid’s class has come down with COVID, so that’s good. Also means I’m not likely to have caught it from him, since he hasn’t shown any sign of it since the exposure alert
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I don’t remember what I wanted to do this weekend, but it’s cancelled now
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When your head feels hot and the rest of you feels cold, you know something’s not right
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I’m really annoyed trying to figure out where I could’ve gotten it.
If it’s stealth COVID, it may have been from sitting outside Starbucks on Monday. But again, I was outside most of the time and wore an N95 to walk inside to order.
If it’s the flu, it might be the restaurant I got takeout from last night. I had to wait longer than anticipated. But again, masked while inside.
I could’ve just been unlucky and hit the 5% chance.
Still not ready to go back to cons yet (and I might want to start with something smaller when I do) but at least WonderCon is taking things seriously.
https://www.comic-con.org/wca/covid-19-faq
They even have a COVID refund policy: if you can’t attend because you catch COVID before the event, they’ll issue a full refund if you show them the positive test.
I’m morbidly amused by “Please do not bring your proof onsite.”
I mean, it *should* go without saying, but you just know someone would do it and expose everyone in the check-in line otherwise. 😬
Fake COVID testing sites (at least one chain, anyway) appear to be a multilevel marketing fraud, not a data harvesting fraud. (As Schneier points out, there are much easier ways to harvest data.)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/are-fake-covid-testing-sites-harvesting-data.html
It turns out the person I caught it from also tested negative for Covid during their illness…and then came down with actual Covid after they recovered. Fortunately they seem to be on the mend from that now too.
That means (a) whatever I caught from them wasn’t Covid and (b) we haven’t been around them in long enough that we don’t have to worry about it having been a Covid exposure too.
All three of our tests came back negative. So I don’t know what I have, but apparently it’s not COVID.
(One false negative, sure, but 3? Not likely.)
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And now the kid’s mad that he has to go back to school on Monday because we haven’t tripped the COVID isolation protocol after all.
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I’m kind of disappointed, weirdly enough. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for almost 2 years and thought it finally had, and dropped in a way that would do minimal damage to the 3 of us.
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On the plus side, if it really isn’t COVID, I probably won’t need to isolate for the full 10 days, just until my symptoms clear up.
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I probably should isolate as if it was covid, just to be sure.
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Possibilities:
1. It’s not COVID, it’s something else. Even though the symptoms match and it’s massively surging in this area
2. I’m the only one who caught it and mine was a false negative.
3. They both caught it and have already cleared it out to the point of testing negative, and mine was a false negative.
4. All 3 tests are false negatives.
I’m really not sure which is most likely.
Said I’d do this back in March 2020 if/when I caught COVID.
Normally, walking 1km for a 3-day event would be laughably easy.
But apparently I walked 0.12 km yesterday. 🤷
Tonight’s dinner taste test
Garlic: yes. Roasted potatoes: barely. Roasted radishes: delayed taste. Kale: yes. Carrots: no. Bell peppers & onions: kind of. Soy sauce: yes
And dessert test.
Maple cream cookie: Similar to the chocolate chip cookie yesterday, where it initially didn’t taste sweet at all until after a few seconds of chewing. And fortunately I can still taste maple!
A 60% cocoa Ghirardelli square tastes like a 72%.
A mint-filled square tastes more intensely minty.
A sea salt caramel square tastes like salty chocolate.
So this is interesting. I can smell most of the dried herbs fine – oregano, thyme, dill, cloves. Rosemary is kind of faint, but I can pick it up.
Garlic is intense.
I can smell cinnamon but not nutmeg, which is odd.
And here’s the really weird one: paprika, ancho, black pepper, cayenne and ginger all smell subtly off from normal. Like when you get a chile that’s normally spicy but isn’t, and you can still taste the flavor but it doesn’t have the bite you expect.
I also tried tasting a few sauces.
Ketchup and mustard tasted more sour than usual. Plain yellow mustard was too intensely sour.
Teriyaki tasted a little more like sweet & sour sauce.
Gochujang & caramel were both a little bit off, but I couldn’t quite place how.
Chocolate syrup was interesting, because I could pick up the chocolate taste before the sweetness, so it started out tasting like darker chocolate.
Got what is so far a mild case of what’s almost certainly covid, mostly fatigue & runny nose (yay boosters!).
Weirdest thing is the taste/smell impact. It hasn’t gone out completely, it’s more like taking an audio equalizer and readjusting the sliders so that some frequencies are barely audible while others are still normal. Umami’s solid, sour’s a bit blunted, sweetness is even fainter. At least food still tastes like food so far.
And some of the fainter tastes do kick in after a while. I tried a chocolate chip cookie, and at first it was like eating a cracker or plain biscotti, but after a few seconds of chewing I could taste the chocolate.
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And yes, I have considered experimenting with the spice cabinet…
At the post office. Again. At least the line’s moving today. There’s a shelf of shipping supplies labeled “Land of the free boxes.”
Mildly gross/COVID adjacent:
Inhaled a bit of spit & tried to stifle the resulting cough. Failed. The person behind me in line left.
Considering she was one of only 2 people in line not wearing masks, I can’t feel too bad.
COVID measures:
County has had an indoor mask order for months now. State has just imposed one over rising case rates. Curiously, LA county’s rates are a lot flatter than the state as a whole.
I can spin the PokeStop in the lobby again, but my item bag is full.
USPS/uspol:
“The job got so big, Santa asked the USPS to find volunteers to help!”
Um, seriously. Because a hatchet man appointed by the previous administration gutted their ability to actually pay people.
Oh, NOW I realize I should’ve put a lure on it
Shipped!
Now back onto the road with people who haven’t driven in the rain for a year!
Pfizer (among others) is gearing up to build an omicron-specific booster, but they don’t know if it’ll be needed yet.
What I find most interesting:
They developed vaccines for both beta and delta, but shelved them when beta failed to gain traction and the original vaccine turned out to be able to handle delta.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pfizer-chief-scientist-interview-omicrons-threat-to-vaccines-2021-11
Scheduled booster shots for me and my wife. Between the first and second pass through the scheduler, they dropped the eligibility question.
They must have had the change ready to go as soon as the official open-it-up-to-anyone word came down.
Of course I still had to enter all the same insurance information both times
The insurance company sent the kid a card reminding him it’s important to get the covid-19 vaccine.
Even though they know he’s not old enough.
I figure it’s probably a right hand/left hand thing, where the insurance side gave the outreach side a list without filtering by eligibility, and the outreach side can’t access it for privacy reasons.
