Category: covid-19

Positive COVID-19 Milestone Correction

Okay so I said it was the first time Massachusetts was COVID death free since March of last year and that my record had three days in between that had zeros but were based on changes to the counting rules.

Apparently I was wrong about one of the three days. According to whichever local news broadcast my mother watched this evening, one of the zero days was a legitimate zero day. That was in June.

So it’s not the first COVID death free day in Massachusetts since March 2020, it’s the first since June 2020. I stand corrected, though I stand by my statements that it’s friggin awesome sauce.

Positive Covid-19 Milestone

Holy shit, folks! Massachusetts hit a magical milestone in the saga of Covid-19!

According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Covid-19 Dashboard, the number of Confirmed Covid-19 deaths yesterday was exactly zero. The number of deaths due to probable Covid-19 cases was also zero.

In other words, NO ONE IN MASSACHUSETTS DIED FROM COVID-19 YESTERDAY!

None
Zero
Zilch
Nada

How awesome is that?? According to my spreadsheet there were three dates since March 2020 where there were no deaths. All of those dates correspond to points where the state changed their reporting/counting/whatever method/definition/whatever and two of those dates actually had negative numbers for the daily count. At least according to my spreadsheet, that is. The last date that had a zero death count without any reporting shenanigans involved was March 20, 2020.

Happy nobody died in Massachusetts day!

WOOHOO!

Visit Time

I’m a smidge early for my allotted visit time at the hospital. I am fully vaccinated and yet here I am, nervous as all hell. Will this ever end? Sure I’ve only been in the clear for a few weeks, but I’m so tired of it.

Oh well. Time to mask up and go in. Remember to wash your hands, okay?

Sunday Morning Thoughts

I’m up and showered and ready to face the day and all that. I went to sleep at about quarter to one am. I woke up a couple of times before waking up for good at about quarter to five am. My AppleWatch tells me I failed to reach four hours of sleep. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t do it. Early to bed tonight, I guess.

Two WordPress.com items of note:

  1. I have recently gained a handful of new followers here. That’s nice, right? They all have the same profile image. Well… that’s not good. It doesn’t appear to be porn spam, which is nice, but it does appear to be spam of some kind, which isn’t good.
  2. What’s up with stats? WordPress.com has a stats page that keeps all sorts of information, including page view counts and unique visitors, sorted by days, weeks, months, and years. There is also a page called insights which is supposed to be like a summary page. I noticed last month that the view counts on the insight page were off. Not just for that month, but for a whole bunch of random months over the life of this account. I found this off putting because the analyst side of my programmer/analyst brain likes digging through the stats. I was hoping it was just a bug in the calculation and WordPress.com would fix it. Nope. It seems to have gotten worse. Yesterday I checked the stats just before midnight. I had a healthy number of views for the day (thank, folks!) and given that it was the first of the month the day and month counts matched. I went to insight, which defaults to monthly counts, and it gave me a big goose egg of a zero. Huh? Sometimes it takes a few seconds to update, but it never did. I checked the stats again just before starting to write this post and I had one view for the day. I checked insight and it showed one view for the month. It basically skipped yesterday. What the hell, bro?

What else is going on? The Bruins won yesterday, They are a point away from clinching a playoff spot (I think) with five or six games left to go (I think). Color me cautiously optimistic. The Red Sox lost last night. They play in Texas again this afternoon. I thought the Rangers avoided day games at home, but I guess it’s still early enough in the spring that they won’t bake the players and the fans in the afternoon heat. Speaking of fans, the stadium was full for last night’s game. I guess Covid’s over, right? Texas says so. I hope they have contact tracing available for the thousands of folks who went to the game as an outbreak is pretty much inevitable.

Dad called a few minutes ago. He’s hooked up to an IV. Antibiotics, I’m sure. He said he thought he was going to have physical therapy this morning, but how can he do that when they have him plugged in? The hospital has limited visiting hours and you have to make an appointment ahead of time and you can only make one appointment per week. I’m going Wednesday. I haven’t seen him since January. I’m looking forward to a visit. Once again let me put my vaccination to work.

Happy Sunday, everyone. Can’t wait to go home and see Jen and Harry. Until then, I’m trying to make the best of it by writing really long, boring, uninformative blog posts. Cheerio, all.

Stressing Out a Little

After six straight business days working at my parents’ house I am back at my desk at home. Well, for today. Tomorrow I’ll be back at Mom and Dad’s, but just for one day. I had this weird moment when I was hooking up my laptops (plural, I had my MacBook and my work machine with me at their house yesterday) and I was sure everything was going to fail and nothing was going to work and I was going to be screwed. Nope. Both machines are up and all the peripherals are running smooth.

I hope at some point the Covid freakouts are going to calm down. We have a team coming today to remove the last of the cellar cleanup junk*. They are outside right now. I was just outside with them. Everyone was masked, everyone was distant, everyone was outside. Still… I’m freaked a little. The HVAC folks I wrote about last week are coming back tomorrow to relieve us of the last of our life savings (exaggeration… or is it?) and I am pre-freaked out about that.

I really need to change my mindset. Everyone in the house is fully vaxxed (I just invented that spelling. You’re welcome). Bellana’s still at school but she’ll be fully vaxxed by the time she gets home. Covid-wise, our house is about as safe as you can get right now. Still… here I am freaking out about the masked up, outdoor, two man work team loading up the last of our ruined cellar into a truck.

I changed my mindset from normal to Covid really quickly. Now I’m finding that it’s taking a long time to change from Covid to post-Covid. I suppose that was to be expected though, right?

*Have I written about the cellar disaster cleanup yet? I might not have. If not, just know we had a bit of a nightmare in the cellar that was on top of the whole HVAC thing I wrote about last week.

Road Trip

We’re about half a work day away from the weekend. Not just any weekend, but the first weekend where everyone in the house is fully vaccinated. Tonight there’s some new Marvel to watch. Will Sam take up the mantle of Captain America? I think so. If he doesn’t, will Bucky? Will the faux Cap become USAgent or will he end up taking a dirt nap? Part of me expects the latter.

Tomorrow there is a visit on the books as well as time for errands and hopefully a little music. Errands might include an oil change for one of the cars and maybe a stop at Best Buy? More likely I’ll order something from Best Buy. I don’t think I can deal with actually walking into a big box store yet.

Then there is Sunday. What to do about Sunday?

Well… both cars will have been serviced… we’re vaccinated… road trip? The first road trip in over a year? Bellana is just a few hours away in Vermont… might we head up for a visit?

I would not have had a problem with a long drive like that even at the worst of the Covid. I would just fill up the gas tank while wearing a mask and latex gloves, bring along a great big pile of snacks (via instacart), and go. If nature called I would pull off the road, find a tree, and take care of business. Jen, however, would not have had that nature calling luxury and there is no way we would go into a store or a gas station to do what needed to be done. That’s why long drives were off the table.

Now? I think we’d be okay going into a gas station to use a rest room. I don’t think we’d be happy about the situation, but if we’re masked up I think we can handle the weirdness.

Road trip to Vermont?

See Bellana for the first time in months?

There are still details to be worked out but… it could happen.

Am I actually making plans? I forgot what that felt like.

Thinking Ahead

Holy crap, I’m fully vaccinated. Wow!

Now what?

Today is Thursday and I have a rough day at work ahead of me. Tomorrow is Friday and I have a rough day at work ahead of me. After that?

I don’t know.

The weekend… what can I do to dip my toe into the waters of normalcy? One of the cars needs an oil change. I can go to Valvoline and have it done without leaving the car. That’s a good option. The other car needs an inspection. I don’t know about that. That seems a little much for the first few days. Maybe next weekend.

There is one thing that is looming over all other things. One thing that, now that Jen got the hybrid inspected (thank you so much, my love!), needs to be done more than anything else…

A hair cut. Woah boy do I need a hair cut.

I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet. Being in a closed room with another person close enough to touch me? I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet.

Back inside the house there will be music. I want to bring the big Bassbreaker amp down cellar and bring up the Vox AC15 and use that on it’s own for a while. I bought it over the summer and I don’t think I’ve used it without a second amp for more than a couple of minutes. April’s music will be through just that amp. At least for a day or two before I change my mind again. I also want to put the 1×12 speaker cabinet back into the living room so Harry can play the electric piano through it. He’s been 100% headphones for long enough. Once all that stuff is done I have to write and record a song for the RPM site’s Record Every Month challenge. It’s month two and that’s way too soon to drop out.

Okay, so that’s Saturday. What about Sunday.

We haven’t worked out the logistics yet… but I think we’re going to see how we feel about a really long drive.

Woah!

Big Things

Two big things going on in our world today. One I will write about. The other I won’t.

I haven’t written about this before (I don’t share everything with you, oh my readers and only friends*, even if I do share WAY too much) and I don’t think I took any pictures so I can’t remember exactly when it happened. I was down cellar and for whatever reason I needed to look for something in the little closet under our stairs. Harry Potter’s bedroom, if you will. I noticed that the HVAC duct was hanging a little low at that spot. We’ve had issues with the ducts before and at some point we had someone come in and sure** it up a little. It hangs off of the ceiling in the cellar and normally the only problem is that I have to duck when I walk under it.

On this particular day though, it was hanging a little low in front of the closet under the stairs. I couldn’t quite see this before the events unfolded, but it was actually partially resting on the ever so slightly ajar closet door. When I opened the door…

A 15 foot long section of duct fell on my head. As I stood there in a mental state that was 50% shock and 50% utter panic, a second, smaller section that connected to the fallen duct also fell off the ceiling.

I don’t remember exactly when this was, but it was probably around Christmas decorating time. There are actually two ducts. Best I can tell, considering I have no idea what I’m talking about, one duct is heat and the other is air conditioning. We did some testing with the thermostat and determined that the fallen duct was on the air conditioning side. That was lucky, given that there was a pandemic and we likely wouldn’t be needing AC for months to come.

Well, here we are in April and it’s getting close to the time we’ll need air conditioning. Fortunately, the three of us are all vaccinated now, and the forth family member will be fully vaccinated by the time she comes home from college, and we can start taking care of all of the crap that has gone wrong in our house over the last year. The HVAC folks are coming this afternoon. Please please please please please let them be able to put the duct back together and secure the whole works because I can’t have this stuff falling on me again. We need our AC to work so that we don’t melt in the summer, but there are also two college tuitions to pay for and we can’t afford to be replacing the whole duct system in the cellar. That would be a nightmare.

Please please please please please let the HVAC situation be resolved today. Please please please please please.

*Yes, I paraphrase that line from A Clockwork Orange too often. You’re just going to have to deal with it.

**There is no way that “sure” is the correct spelling for this usage of the word. I totally used the wrong homonym, right?