9:10am on Day Eight

I want to test again but I know it will still be positive. It would be nice to know for sure, but wasteful given how certain I am of the results. We only have a few more tests in the house so I will wait until tomorrow.

Most of my Covid symptoms are gone. I still have a bit of a stuffy nose, but I am not blowing my nose every five seconds and I am not coughing every four seconds. I’m still tired but not nearly as bad as I was a few days ago. I am working this morning and I fully intend to make it through the full day.

I’m still not 100% but I am better than I was yesterday.

I have to say that I am really tired of all of this crap. I want to go out again, even if it’s something silly like grocery shopping. I just want to leave the house. Of course it’s been raining for three days straight so even if I could go out, the weather is crap and I wouldn’t want to go out. What I really want is to get our four days in Disney World back again. That would be nice.

Also, while I absolutely do not want anyone else to catch Covid ever again, I would like to see another wordpress.com user use the tag “live blogging covid”. As of last check (a couple of days ago) I am literally the only user adding it to their posts. Oh well.

Does This Count as Advice?

Daily writing prompt
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
View all responses

The best advice I’ve ever received… I’m not sure. Does it count as advice if it was something you were 100% going to do anyway?

Uncle Johnny was my father’s brother and my godfather. While the godfather part is technically meaningless to an atheist, it still has meaning from a family perspective. He was an alcoholic who lived a very hard life before getting sober and straightening himself out. He was an inspiration, and very likely the reason I have never really touched alcohol. He was a type two diabetic in his later years and his health went down the crapper in a major way at the end. He died in a horrible yet thankfully quick fashion and I miss him a lot.

When I first started dating Jen back in 2007 his diabetes was out of control and it cost him his lower leg. He was in and out of the hospital and various rehab and half way houses as he needed more and more surgeries and more and more physical therapy to deal with his new reality. Jen used to go with me to visit him.

In the short time that Uncle Johnny knew Jen, he was really taken with her. He was a huge fan of hers, and of our relationship. Sadly he never met the kids. Bellana was six and Harry was four and Jen and the kids’ father had an arrangement that said new relationships should last for six months before the kids become involved. We were still under that six month mark when this particular conversation happened.

Johnny was in a bed in a rehab place. I think Jen was with me for this particular visit but she was out of the room for some reason. He asked about the kids and I told him I still had not been introduced to them but the big day was coming soon. The advice he gave me was simple and while it is clearly the best advice I can remember receiving, I was absolutely going to do it anyway so does it still count? I don’t know. I don’t recall the exact words but the gist of it was, you make sure you do right by those kids, Rob.

By the time he said that to me it was already becoming a primary life goal. Still, I hope I’ve made my uncle proud.

On a lighter note, there was another, earlier piece of sage advice that Uncle Johnny gave me. I was a teenager at the time. He told me, again paraphrasing because I don’t recall the exact words, put off shaving as long as you can because once you start you can never stop. I wanted to follow that advice, but I looked really awful with a spotty, patchy beard and I just had to shave off what little there was as soon as it became visible. Here we are almost 40 years later and I still look terrible with facial hair. He was right though. As soon as I started shaving it became a regularly scheduled pain in the ass.

Thanks for the advice, Uncle Johnny.

What Comes Next

I was really hoping that Covid would be behind me by today. Nope. I’m still dealing with it. I do feel a lot better though. I feel well enough that I can start thinking of what comes next.

I haven’t exercised in over a week. I haven’t closed my calorie ring on the activity app once in over a week. Do I start tomorrow? I am planning to work a full day so maybe I should skip the exercising in the morning for a few more days. I don’t want to wear myself out before the work day even starts. That’s not ideal, but it is safe.

What about music? There are six days left in the 50 songs in 90 days challenge. There is no way I will finish 50 songs, but I could get myself a whole lot closer than I am. I was looking at my Trello board and I think I could get into the low 40s without killing myself. Do I want to record some guitar parts in the morning? I could probably manage that. I don’t want to do a car vocals until I test negative. I know I wouldn’t run into any human creatures, but why risk it? I will stay home until I test negative and then after that I will mask up if I do anything out of the house. That also means no photography fun outside of the house for at least a few more days.

As for tonight, my water goal is done, my vitamins are done, my protein goal is… almost done. Five grams or so still to go. I can get that easily. I am a bit full now but in 30 minutes or so I’ll be ready to finish that off. I am hoping I will catch the new episode of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon tonight before I go to sleep. If I can sneak in a little more Doctor Who before I sleep that would be nice too. I think I’ve blown through more than three seasons (or was it four?) during my quarantine. So very much Who.

Next weekend the plan is to clean the house from top to bottom. I want the house to be covid-residue free before we invite anyone over. Safety first, right? After that I want to push to travel again. Maybe just a road trip, or possibly an overnight somewhere. I don’t want us to lose our covid nerve. We’ve fallen off the horse and I want to make sure we get back on as soon as possible. Does that make sense? We locked down so hard that feeling up to leaving the house took a lot of effort. Then to have us catch the plague for the first time during a vacation? I don’t want us to be afraid to travel again. I want us to go somewhere as soon as possible. It’s Fall now, so maybe in a few weeks it will be time for leaf peeping. Maybe an overnight to Manhattan would be a good destination too. I also want us to rebook our long weekend in Disney World. The trip that went bust on us was an experiment to see if it was worth it to fly all the way there for a 3-4 day visit. The answer to that question is still up in the air and we definitely have to do the research. The question is, when? Maybe around Christmas? We’ll have to look into the options.

So there are a few things I am thinking about for the near future. The real question is, do I set my alarm clock for 5:00am tomorrow, or 6:00am. I won’t have an answer until I actually lay down to sleep. Until then…

4:37pm on Day Seven

I had a weird moment earlier. I mentioned it briefly in the post with the new music. I had a moment, just as I was getting ready to get up and make lunch, where I was hit with a wave of light headedness. It made me think I had a migraine coming, but it never arrived. The spell lasted for five minutes or so but once it passed it left me feeling completely exhausted.

After lunch I had to lie down and sleep a little. I was out for about an hour. I feel a little better now. My head is clearer but I am still pretty worn out. I think I am going to flake in front of the TV until dinner. We’re not going to order out tonight but we’re on our own. Jen is thinking of making herself a sandwich. I’m thinking of a protein bar with some peanuts as a chaser. We’ll see. My last bite of lunch was at 2:03. I want to wait until at least 6:03 before dinner. I think I can do that.

I am working tomorrow. A full day. You heard it here first.

Three New Mixes

I have mixed three songs today. I’m hoping to do a couple more but I think I am out of energy thanks to Covid and possibly because a migraine is coming. Not sure on the migraine yet, but I think it might be happening. I am going to try and make some lunch and see how it goes.

The first of the three songs I’ve finished would have been one of the album in a day things if not for the aforementioned Covid. The song isn’t very good but I don’t care.

The second song was started earlier in September and also isn’t very good.

The third song was started in August and finished in September and also isn’t very good.

Energy

Daily writing prompt
What things give you energy?
View all responses

Another vague and kinda pointless daily prompt. Oh well. They can’t all be bangers.

The literal answer is food and water, right? Biochemistry and all that? When you feed your cells they produce energy and you get to keep running without issue for a few hours or so. I took a biology class in high school. I took a chemistry class in high school too. I never took a biochem class. What I’ve learned in that regard comes from either learning about my step son’s type one diabetes, or just listening to my step daughter talk about her job.

The figurative energy sources are more interesting, but also pretty obvious and straight forward. What gives me energy? Being with my wife. Being with my step kids. Being with my niece and nephews, though that doesn’t happen often because I am a terrible uncle and likely just a terrible person all around.

Being creative gives me energy. For me that means music, both making music and just listening to music, or playing with the cameras and photos as if I knew what I was doing. Sometimes a good movie or TV show can be a source of energy on some weird level. A good book can do the same.

Traveling can do it. Driving on a road trip, visiting a new place, exploring something or somewhere. What does not give me energy, quite the opposite, is spending time with crowds of new people. That just sucks the life right out of me. I think that is the textbook definition of an introvert. Maybe?

Okay, there are a few vague thoughts on this vague question. I guess it got the job done in that it did prompt me to write more than a few words worth of a post. Success.

6:55am on Day Seven

I wanted to sleep a lot more this morning than I did, but my stomach had other ideas. I went to bed at a little after 10:00pm last night. My alarm was set for 8:00 but my stomach woke me up at 5:00. It’s a thing I’ve dealt with since the surgery started to heal. If I go too long without eating my stomach, or what’s left of it, gets empty enough that it starts to hurt in complaint. When I told my doctor about it her response was basically, “duh, you’re hungry.” If I have something to eat I start to feel better within a few minutes.

That was the case today. It had been eight hours or so since I ate anything and my stomach was just empty. I like to start my day with some water and my morning vitamins so I delayed food for a bit and had eight ounces of lemonade mix and my three pills. Oddly, one of those pills made me a little nauseous but it passed quickly. I waited the required 15 minutes and then had breakfast and now my tiny little redesigned stomach is full and happy again.

As far as Covid, I’m not feeling 100% well, but I would say I’m about 75-80% well. My nose is still a little stuffy but I can breath through it, and I haven’t coughed a single time in the last two hours. Fatigue is still an issue, but not nearly as bad as it was 3-4 days ago. As soon as I tested positive on Tuesday I started planning on my next Covid test happening on Sunday (today), regardless of how I was feeling. I will stick to that and test about an hour from now. All of my testing through this process has happened at around 8:00am. Don’t ask why, that just seems like a nice time to me.

I fully expect a positive test today, I just hope that it’s not as emphatic a positive as it was on Tuesday. Last time the test line turned bright red before the solution had even reached the control line. I’m hoping it at least has the decency to be a faint line this time. Fingers crossed, eh?

Wish me and my immune system luck. Happy day seven, everyone!