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.
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…