Quite a thought! It was in 1999 (September, not August, but see below) that I first sat in a breezy house in Maine, wondering exactly what these “weblog” things were, and in some sense starting my own. The musings on that “News” page shortly became the original hand-tooled artisanal weblog, which a dozen or so years later moved here.
I’ve never come near that pace of weblogging just about every day that I did for awhile back in like the early 2000s, and I frequently wonder how I did it. :)
I am not in Maine this year, but other people are. It’s a story!
We were supposed to head up there on Saturday (the 12th, right?), and I’d booked a vacation day on Friday with the idea that I could spend it leisurely detaching my mind from work, and packing for the trip and all.
I felt sort of odd and congested on Thursday night, though, and on Friday I did a covid test, and it was positive. Positive! Which had been mostly a theoretical thing until then.
M was very nice about staying home from Maine to take care of me (and having been in some sense exposed herself and not wanting to spread it), and other people who had expected to drive up with us made train-related arrangements and things instead, so the big vacation itself wasn’t too impacted.
I spent Friday and Saturday basically sleeping; my body reacts to most illnesses by withdrawing energy from everything but germ-fighting or whatever that is. I’m sure I had a fever for some of it, as there were interesting and irrecallable dreams and hallucinations. I got (ummmm) Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir and ritonavir tablets co-packaged) right away, which was good. But to complain about the health care system:
- The Cue App is the thing that told me about the positive test. It then went into a “Get Treatment” flow, which:
- Refused to admit that my insurance company exists,
- Claimed that every nearby pharmacy was closed until tomorrow (this in the middle of a Friday, and completely wrong),
- Made me painfully enter all the stupid little numbers from my insurance card, then threw away everything I’d entered when it wanted permission to take a picture of the card.
- So I gave up on that.
- M tried to call our local doctor’s office, which has been absorbed by something that was absorbed by something else that was… and I think is now Optum or something, and no one picked up the phone. Gee, thanks, very nice. (They also have a “Patient Portal” online, but it’s so unreliable that they like texted every single patient the other week to apologize for it and say that it would be fixed at some unspecified time in the future.)
- M then did the OneMedical thing, which was (maybe still is!) the outfit that has a clinic in the same building as work so I’ve used them a few times. They “couldn’t find” me “in the system” at first, but after awhile they “found my record”. What, do they not have computers? Do they print out and delete random accounts and toss the printouts down the stairs into the cellar, or what? But they were able to get the antivirals for me, and fortunately (Praise Eris!) that was the only thing I actually needed from our Great American Health Care System.
Okay, so that’s that. :) I then did nothing whatever, including leaving my little room, with M and the little boy bringing me bottles of water and a tray of food now and then, Sunday through Wednesday. I had just a few symptoms after the initial exhaustion and fever (a brief sore throat, mild congestion), and otherwise slept lots, and listened to music, and meditated (nice lying-down meditation for the most part) and eventually read some and listened to YouTubers YouTubing.
And then yesterday (“after Day 5”) I took another test, and it was negative!
So now I’m apparently supposed to mask when around anyone for another five days, and then return to normal, assuming no more symptoms or like that. Woot! It turned out to be in some sense a very lazy and relaxing vacation, and I am, as usual, grateful to the universe for unearned bounty. I do somewhat yearn for the soft sea breezes and newly-discovered bookstores of Maine, but those will come again.
And I think I’ll stop there, really, that’s enough of a story for one day. :) Oh, except maybe to mention that I’m strongly thinking of buying another laptop (due to a tax miscalculation there is a bit more money lying around then I’d expected, so I can afford it). The Framework that I’m typing on here is very nice in its way, but the Intel integrated video is just so bad, at least in conjunction with Windows’ aggressive memory pessimization, that it slows to a crawl at random just too often, and is nearly hopeless at even simple games like WoW or Minecraft if the computer is also doing anything else at all. And even if it’s not! Games will have randomly terribly framerates sometimes even if there’s nothing at all else running on the machine and Task Manager says that memory and CPU and GPU (“GPU”) are all underutilitized. Also it gets really hot even when doing mostly nothing. So darn.
I was thinking of waiting for the dedicated-graphics Framework 16 to come out, but (A) that’s next year, and (B) I think the “16” means that it’s a 16 inch laptop, and that’s just Too Big.
Okay there now I’m done. :)
ceoln 