Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
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.)
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
I probably should isolate as if it was covid, just to be sure.
—
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.
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.
—
And yes, I have considered experimenting with the spice cabinet…
In response to a post about “chill games”
I really liked Outer Wilds. A space exploration game that starts in a forest, where you can toast marshmallows on multiple planets, the whole system is in a time loop, environments change drastically between the early and later parts of the loop, and you find other astronauts by listening for the music they’re playing.
Waiting at home for a video link is in some ways better than waiting at the doctor’s office, because you’re *home*, but there’s always that nagging suspicion that the email with the conference link has been lost and they’ve been waiting for you to connect for the last 10 minutes and will just move onto the next patient.
It has now been an hour since the front office called to do check in over the phone. No message has arrived with the link to video chat with the actual doctor.
*yawn*
So it turns out the zoom link was buried in a message from way back when I scheduled the appointment, and they marked me as a no show. Rescheduled with another doctor at the practice who has an open slot this afternoon.
The appointment info in their portal said that directions would be sent in a message…but not that they already had been.
Seeing a lot of these signs in front of restaurants when I go walking in the neighborhood.
Most people have been really good at maintaining social distancing while out. The group in the distance seemed to all be one family.
Except for runners. Runners passing me from behind (where I can’t see them to move out of the way myself) have a 50/50 track record of dodging around vs. just zooming past at a distance of a foot.
Went out for a walk this morning. Found a note from one of the neighbor kids for the 9YO, written in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the house: “Hi ___! From ___”
Saw several more as I walked around the block. Apparently he wanted to say hi to all the kids he knows.
Finally recovered enough from the flu to get out for a walk in the neighborhood (while that’s still an option).
I think this first bird (possibly a goldfinch?) was trying to practice social distancing, though the crow in the third photo seems to be doing a better job. The house finch was such a bright red that I thought it had to be another kind of bird until I looked at the photos.
#photo #birds #nature #finch #HouseFinch #goldfinch #crow
So, California has issued a statewide stay-at-home-unless-absofuckinglutely-necessary order.
https://covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-except-for-essential-needs/
The 9YO is already climbing the walls.
And I’m still recovering from the damn flu, so I’ve basically missed the window for any trips outside except for groceries (and maybe a chest xray if this very non-covid-like cough doesn’t clear up)
LA County order earlier today specifically said neighborhood walks were OK as long as you kept your distance. The statewide one doesn’t.
I find myself thinking about Sam’s speech a lot. About how in the stories that really matter, people faced overwhelming darkness, and had a lot of chances to stop, but they kept going.
A Reminder About Story Middles
Reply to @dansup’s link to Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
@dansup Gotta squeeze every last drop of “monetization” outta those profiles!
@dansup Seriously, though, I’ve been slowly moving away from Instagram all year. The more control FB exerts on it, the less it feels like a place I want to be.
I’m not at the point of deleting my account yet, but I’m not posting there anymore & I’m seriously considering dropping all the accounts I follow except for people I actually know, and paring down my archive.
Usually #iNaturalist’s AI is pretty good at narrowing down to a genus, but sometimes it can get confused. Like this #pigeon sitting on a silk floss tree branch. It was “pretty sure” it was a *hawk*.
Um, nope!
I can sort of see that with the first image, but the second one makes it blindingly obvious!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30408488
@KelsonV I just realized it’s literally confusing hawks and doves.
Took the new camera to #WonderCon for #cosplay #photography.
1. I finally have a camera that can really handle inside lighting at a convention center!
2. I’ve gotten too used to just capturing costumes, instead of composing interesting shots.
2a. My 8YO took 1 photo all weekend (#InsideOut) & it ended up being the best that day. I took the lesson & improved my shots the next day, including the other 3 here.
#HarryPotter #BeautyAndTheBeast #LittleShopOfHorrors
There was a lot of #HarryPotter #cosplay at #WonderCon this past weekend! Here are some of my photos. There are a lot more that I missed – people dressed as the Malfoys, students of course, other professors and so on.
My full gallery for the convention is on Flickr at
#Voldemort #BellatrixLestrange #Hagrid #ProfessorTrelawney #Dumbledore #ArthurWeasley #RitaSkeeter #ProfessorUmbridge #GilderoyLockhart
I took this with my phone to use as a reference for a photo I took with another camera. I wasn’t intending to do anything with it, but I find it *fascinating* that the phone’s digital zoom function makes it look like it’s made up of brushstrokes instead of pixels.
(Though personally, I’ve never understood why digital zoom is implemented as a resize instead of just cropping to a lower resolution.)
Tonight’s waxing crescent moon. It’s passing in front of the Hyades star cluster right now, which I’d love to get a photo of, but the moon’s just waaay too bright to capture the background stars!
#photography #moon #night #stargazing
When Yahoo realized they’d missed the smartphone shift, they tried to make Flickr something it wasn’t suited for (Instagram! Look, filters!) & couldn’t sustain (cloud storage for ALL your photos, just like FB!) Maybe chasing FB kept them alive for a while, but it put them in a bind down the road.
It sucks that SmugMug is deleting pics, but taking it back to basics might make it more viable long-term.
Maybe they can become a 1st-rate Flickr instead of a 3rd-rate Instagram or FB.
Expanded on my blog:
