Just remember that the last laugh is on you

We have Covid.

That overwhelming fatigue that hit me Wednesday, and that prompted me to sleep fifteen hours Friday-to-Saturday? And thirteen hours Saturday-to-Sunday? It was accompanied by aches and sniffles but I thought of that just as a cold, a return of an irritating old companion. Except that bunnyhugger got sick too, her condition getting worse faster --- she decided the morning of not to go to a women's pinball tournament Saturday --- and staying worse.

Sunday she took an at-home test, repeating one she'd taken going to her parents' on Tuesday to pick up Roger; this time, it came out positive. She found a 24-hour pharmacy --- it turns out Lansing has only the one --- and a telehealth doctor who'd write a Paxlovid prescription for her. And then spent something like 16 hours that evening being called by her parents, who're bound up in anxiety over what this means for their health. We're hoping not much; if we trace from the emergence of symptoms she probably wasn't at peak communicability when she visited them? We hope? But also her father kept nagging her to get the Paxlovid prescription she had already gotten, and was waiting to hear had been filled. I drove down to the pharmacy for the pickup, as --- despite this all --- I haven't felt bad at all. If it weren't for that terrible pink line, I would have sworn I had nothing more than a cold.

But this morning I checked, as I had promised I'd call my doctor for a Paxlovid prescription and I had to have the at-home test done to feel justified in making one, and there it was. On the 1,191st day of March 2020, we had the plague.

It's not fair, of course, but if fairness entered into health Henry Kissinger would die a thousand times every day. Based on the timing from when my fatigue hit --- counting that as first symptoms --- probably we were infected at Anthrohio, which is especially unfair given the convention has a vaccination and booster requirement and required masking in all con spaces, and the requirement was pretty well-satisfied that I could see. This is a convention that hasn't held the Fursuit Parade because they can't figure a route that's weather-safe and won't require a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide along the parade route; it's not right that anyone should get anything there. (There's a mild chance we got it at Cedar Point on Monday, but that would be a pretty quick onset of symptoms, and nearly all of the park is unenclosed spaces.) Again, though, fairness.

Still, I mean. We're the people still wearing N95 masks everywhere. We're the people who haven't eaten in a restaurant since February 2020. The people who aren't going to movies or parties or pretending there isn't an uncontrolled disease out there. It is hard not to feel unfairly picked on.

JTK, who by coincidence not yet explained happened to be in Lansing yesterday when bunnyhugger's test came back, snagged some gift popcorn and left us a little care package surprise on the door. And he's been supportive to our morale, that we've been the sort of model he's aspired to. It's nice hearing.

Still, there's that cursed second line on the at-home test.

Trivia: By the end of 1943 United Kingdom food stocks had built up to about 6.7 million tons in warehouses, up from prewar levels of about 2.5 million tons. Warehouses were full enough that sugar and oilseeds had to be kept outside, under tarpaulin. Source: The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, Lizzie Collingham.

Currently Reading: Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969 - 1989, Jay Gallentine. Ok, Gallentine takes a loose, more conversational style than usual for space program histories and that's fine; gives him personality and there's no reason these things need to read like product documentation. It especially serves well when communicating the excitement and terror of being The First People to try landing a rover on another body or doing biological sampling on Mars or such. It's a good way to communicate the feel of a thing. And yet, trying to portray the excitement and energy in a technology young Georgiy Nikolayevich Babakin (who shored up the Soviet space probe project to the point that they started working) grew up with: ``[ Radio ] was otherworldly. Voices from the sky! The fastest method for disseminating news. When fed-up revolutionaries overthrew Czar Nicholas II in 1917, the parents of two-year-old Georgiy would have heard about it over the radio''. And I want to see a citation that there was any news transmitted by radio in Russia in 1917, please. Maybe through a network of hams but I'm skeptical even of that.