Freakin' Rona

 Well, this is going to be a relaxing vacation week, possibly a tad quieter than we had anticipated. We are isolating for 5 days. Mark took a side trip to Urgent Care this morning, where they confirmed that his at-home COVID tests were accurate. Blah. Paxlovid is in the house.

I have no symptoms and have not tested. But I will isolate anyway, to make sure that I am not handing out copies of any germs to anybody. I will definitely test prior to returning to work next week, unless I have symptoms that inspire me to test sooner than that. If I test positive at any point prior to next week, I will ask my manager about working from home for however long I need to isolate. Unless I get deathly sick, I see no reason to not work from home. I am sure a ton of electronic documents will be coming in all week. By January 3, I expect that there will be no shortage of emails for me to process, and I can do that remotely.

For what it's worth, Mark didn't test positive, either, until about two days after symptom onset. He tested negative on Christmas Eve, which was when the coughing started. So even if I ran and did a test right now, it might not show anything anyway.

Fug this virus. Seriously. Nobody needs it at any time, but we really could have done without it right now. We had some holiday-week things that we were looking forward to, that are now off the table for safety reasons.

Fortunately, we are both up-to-date with boosters, so I hope that will help keep the symptoms mild. And we do have lots of chicken soup in the house. :) My former boss (who is Jewish himself) used to call chicken soup "Jewish penicillin", lol. We will help keep Campbell's and Progresso in business for the next few days, along with various food delivery services.☺

Kitty Tunnel Follies

I have two black cats. Merlin is petite at 9.5 lbs. Houdini is huge at 15.7 lbs. We have three cloth kitty tunnels, cloth tubes with a wire framework that allows them to stay open all the time, because Houdini is OBSESSED with them. If you wonder where he is, wander around to the kitty tunnels and chances are, there will be a black kitty hiney protruding from the end of one. He goes halfway in, and considers himself hidden. lol. I won't tell him that his stealth leaves something to be desired, if you won't. One of the tunnels lives near the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor, and if I head in that direction, Houdini will come speeding over to hide in it, so he can get his share of tickles and skritches as I walk past.

I was about to walk past a kitty tunnel en route to going upstairs. A black kitty hiney was protruding from the tunnel. Plot twist: Houdini came running to take his place in the tunnel, so it was actually Merlin whose rump was protruding from the tunnel this time!

Houdini, clearly flummoxed that his brother was in his spot, emphatically sniffed Merlin’s rump. Merlin refused to budge. Houdini tried entering the other end of the tunnel. Merlin refused to budge.

Houdini took his massive, chonktastic self and pounced on the half of the tunnel where Merlin was. Merlin came charging out the other end of the tunnel like a furry cannonball.

Houdini promptly installed himself halfway into the tunnel, in the spot Merlin had vacated, with his hiney protruding.As far as he was concerned, all was right with the world.

I have spoiled cats!

That was unexpected!

 To make a very long story short, I wound up subscribing to a background check site for 3 days of unlimited usage. I had to find a person whose name was on a piece of mail that my mom got at her address, and I thought this was the most expedient way to figure out where the mail should go. The person actually lives across the street from my mom, as the person addressing the envelope messed up while writing the house number. So that mystery was solved quickly.

However, here I am with three days of a subscription to this search site.

And I thought about what might have happened to the person who I broke up with in college, whose behavior in the aftermath would qualify as stalking if someone did those things today. Sadly, anti-stalking laws didn't get passed until 3 or 4 years after my graduation, so he wasn't doing anything illegal at the time.  

For obvious reasons, I have made a point of NOT having contact with this guy in the decades since graduation. I have also made a point of trying to minimize identifying info that might crop up in search engines, specifically so it would be less easy for this specific person to drop my name in a search and decide to start his antics again. I was hoping that he was happily married and moved far, far away, where he would not have an reason to start any further trouble here.

But what I found is that he died last year. THAT wasn't what I expected to see. I found the obituary, which contained the memories that his sister wrote, and I saw his birthdate. I am 100% positive that this is the person I knew back then.

I am a bit shocked, as he was only a few years older than I am. I don't know what info I expected to find, but this wasn't it. 

At least I never again have to be concerned about whether something will trigger him to start making trouble again. That has always been in the back of my mind for the past 38 years, more than half my life. When the shock wears off, I suppose I will feel relief.