8:55am on Day Two

I’m not just sure, I’m Covid-19 positive.

With sincere apologies to South Park for paraphrasing one of their most brutally offensive, yet absolutely brilliant jokes.

Dig what I just did:

19/365
19/365

Also, dig what else I just did (sorry it’s a little blurry):

I think I will call my doctor and the weight loss clinic and just ask for advice on what to do. Maybe I’ll ask for a Paxlovid prescription, I don’t know. I should send a message to my boss too and tell him not to expect me back tomorrow.

Shit. Three and a half years I successfully avoided this Covid-19 ass munch and now here I am with a positive test.

Calling it a positive test makes it sound good, doesn’t it? It makes it sound like it’s a positive thing and not a negative thing. I think we need to tweak the terminology and come up with something new. Call it a blurble test or a non-blurble test. Something like that. We’ll see if I can make that happen. I’ll let you know.

Epic Fail

Daily writing prompt
Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.
View all responses

I haven’t thought about this in a long time and some of the details are hazy in my memory, but there is one epic cooking fail that jumps to mind, partly because it was a sort of public event.

I can’t remember if we were still living in the Duplex on Ashland Ave, or if we had already bought the house. Was it before or after Fall of 2010? I don’t know. I think it was in the old place. We invited our friends Larry and Nawal over for a cookout. The plan was for me to try to cook chicken breasts on the grill for the first time ever. Jen and I found a recipe online for a marinade that sounded really good so we went for it.

We whipped up the marinade and let the chicken breasts soak it in for however long the website said. Then, with our friends already on their way over to us, I popped them onto the grill in the back yard and followed the grilling instructions to the letter. I may have the timing off, and I may be over dramatizing the events, but I seem to remember needing to open up the top of the grill to flip the chicken for the first time coinciding with our guests pulling into the driveway. I could be wrong about that.

There was a healthy amount of smoke billowing out from under the closed grill’s cover, but nothing that seemed unusual. When I opened the top though… the entire interior of the grill was engulfed in a conflagration the likes of which I had never seen before. There was so much fire and so much crushing heat that I expected the very universe itself to start melting. The four gloriously marinated chicken breasts were burned to black cinders, though I do recall they still smelled really good. Our friends came into the back yard and saw me staring blankly at the inferno, unable to process what was happening.

I believe we ended up ordering pizza that night.

3:30am on Day Two

My music projects are on hold. I might just mark them as fails but I also might just extend the deadlines. They are all goofy B.S. anyway so I can really do whatever I want with them, right? I was going to go out shooting photos today but I was self quarantined even before I started feeling sick, so that was basically off the table too.

Nope, as of right now (4:09am on Tuesday September 19, 2023) my only creative outlet is… you guessed it… Live Blogging Whatever the Hell this Bug I Caught Is! Yes! Bring on the blog posts! Bring on the photos of trash barrels full of used tissues and bottles of Tylenol! This is going to be so much fun! Just Ace reporting/personal blogging at it’s most dramatic! I bet you can’t wait, oh my readers and only friends*!

I have declared that 9/18/23 is officially Day One of this illness, though I really should have declared it day zero. I am a computer science nerd, and we start counting at zero, not one. I figured I’d make it all make sense for non computer science geeks though and started counting at one. That makes today Day Two, hence the title of the post. Can you dig it? I knew that you could.

I went to bed a few minutes before 11:00pm last night. Jen is in our bed and I am on the couch. We both need to spread out so even though it absolutely blows chunks that we’re not in bed together, it will probably help us both sleep more. I was freezing cold. I had two heavy-ish blankets on and I was thinking of turning on the heat, even though my father would have been offended by that happening in September. I took some Tylenol just before bed because I was thinking I will likely develop a fever at some point, assuming this is Covid, of course. I thought I’d be preemptive. I woke up at 3:30 to go to the bathroom. I got back onto the couch and bundled up but within a couple of minutes I was roasting hot. I kicked off the blankets but couldn’t get myself to fall asleep.

I need to get up early this morning to bring the trash out to the street. I would have done it last night but it poured rain all day and I couldn’t bring myself to go outside and get hosed down. I feel like it’s too early to go outside and do it now so I have an alarm set for 6:00am. Will I sleep again between now and then? Who knows. I did sort of start my daily routine. I’ve had eight ounces of water and my morning vitamins, along with another dose of Tylenol. I’m starting to feel chilly again. I think I am going to post this and then lay down.

I can tell by the looks on all of your faces that you are utterly fascinated by all of this. I’m sure you can’t freakin’ stand the anticipation building up for today’s Covid-19 home test #2. You can cut the tension with a knife around here!

Okay, folks. That’s it for now. It’s 4:20am (he he he) and I am hitting the publish button. Talk to you all later today.

*To borrow a phrase from Anthony Burgess’ novel, “A Clockwork Orange”, of course.

Yup, I’m Sick

We all knew it was coming but now it’s here.

I’m sick.

I tested negative for Covid-19 this morning but tonight I have a stuffy head and a cough and some general aches and pains. I am guessing I will test negative again tomorrow, but soon enough I am going to have a positive Covid test all of my own.

I avoided it for three and a half years, but now here we are staring the 21st century plague in the face. Time to put all of those vaccination and booster shots to work. Let’s get it done, bro’s.

Happy Rob-Probably-Has-Covid-19-Day, kids. Let’s celebrate by coughing a lot and sleeping off the fever.

Shit.

Cats: Monday Day Off Edition

Celebrating my Monday day off from work by trying to get the cats to pose for pictures. Robin is always up for it, Lily… not so much, though she did sit on my lap for 0.68 seconds today.

Robin
Lily, on my grandmother’s blanket, on my lap for a nano second

Caution: This Post is Going to be Ultra Nerdy

Spoiler alert: This post is about to be as nerdy as I can possibly get. Ultra nerdy. Uber nerdy. The zenith of nerdy.

I started my Doctor Who journey with the current series because that’s the one my step kids have watched. I didn’t know it at the time but they actually both skipped the three most resent season due to reviews that state the quality of the writing took quite a dip after season 10. The reviews were accurate, but I still really enjoyed the last three seasons.

My decision to start watching the original show too was based on a laugh. I thought it would be funny if I watched the old show and the kids watched the new show and then we could debate which was better. That was before I knew that the old show was 26 seasons and a TV movie, and that the first bunch of seasons were 40+ episodes each. There are so many seasons and so very many episodes. Suddenly the idea of watching the whole show felt very intimidating.

When I was a kid, the PBS network used to air Doctor Who reruns. Every now and then, when there was nothing else on, I would try to watch an episode. I never got terribly far. I just didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t care to do the background work to figure it out. There was no internet then so I couldn’t go to wikipedia and get the info. I’d just have to piece it together an episode at a time. No, that was too much work for me. My friend Mike was a fan and he encouraged me to try, but I never did.

The actor who played The Doctor on those PBS reruns was Tom Baker. I didn’t know it then, but he was the 4th Doctor. From my point of view he was the only Doctor. None of the other actors were known to me. It was Tom Baker or nothing. When I started my original series binge watch I thought about only watching his episodes and just skipping everyone else. In the end I decided against that, partially because I am a completist, but also because I am an idiot. No, I started with season one, episode one and just put my head down and powered through.

Last night I watched the last episode of season 11. At the very end of that one, Doctor #3, Jon Pertwee, dies and is regenerated into Doctor #4, Tom Baker. At last, I have arrived. I have now seen every episode (that still exists) with Doctors #1 through 3, and 9 through 13. I have now watched the first eight episodes (two four episode serials) of season 12. The first two serials with the 4th Doctor. Maybe it’s a weird sense of misplaced nostalgia talking, but in those few episodes Tom Baker has catapulted to the top of the list of my favorite Doctors. There’s something about the attitude he brought to the roll. It’s the way he faces the end of universe with a smile and a laugh. He seems like he’s having a blast trying to keep everything around him from falling into chaos. It’s just fun to watch the guy having fun.

So if I had to rank the doctors I’ve seen so far from favorite to least favorite, the list would look something like this:

  • #4 Tom Baker
  • #10 David Tennant
  • #11 Matt Smith
    • Note, second and third place are a dead heat. They could easily be swapped. I enjoyed both of them equally
  • #2 Patrick Troughton
  • #12 Peter Capaldi
  • #3 Jon Pertwee
  • #13 Jodie Whittaker
  • #9 Christopher Eccleston
  • #1 William Hartnell

This doesn’t imply that I did not enjoy the performances of the actors at the bottom of the list. It just means I enjoyed the other folks a little more. If you like your science fiction on the cheesier, campier, budgetarily-challenged side then I would recommend each and every one of these Doctors. They are all worth a try.

Just for completeness sake, I still have the following Doctors left to see. #5 Peter Davison, #6 Colin Baker (no relation), #7 Sylvester McCoy, #8 Paul McGann, #14 David Tennant (again), and #15 Ncuti Gatwa. Doctors #14 and 15 haven’t aired yet so I will have to wait for them. 14 will get three episodes starting in November and 15 will get season 14 starting sometime next year.

So there you have it, the nerdiest post in wordpress.com history. May Tom Baker continue to be the best Doctor for the next 6+ seasons, and may the Doctors I haven’t seen yet live up to the expectations. Nerd.

I’m Guessing That’s a Bad Sign

So the Covid journey of the last few days. I haven’t said which of us tested positive, but I need to now. It was my wife, the love of my life, Jen. She woke up feeling shitty on Friday and we started driving home from Florida. She was worse on Saturday and worse still on Sunday. She also had her first positive Covid test on Sunday. Today she’s feeling really sick. She’s clearly in for a few rotten days.

Me? Even though I spent all of that time sitting next to her in the car I have been feelin’ fine. Today I’ve been freezing cold all day, but that’s been the norm over the last year or so. My nose has been a little runny. I chalked that up to being so cold, but it has been a smidgen on the concerning side. I tested negative for Covid this morning so that’s cool. I also just ripped off two very emphatic sneezes… well… shit. That seems like it might be a bad sign, right?

Here’s hoping that Jen starts to feel better before I start to feel super bad. That way I can take care of her at the worst and she can take care of me at the worst. That would be helpful for both of us.

Musical Morning

I think I have zero chance of pulling off an album in a day today. I might be able to pull off an album in two days, or maybe even an album in a day and a half. I have two songs finished apart from a mix down and two songs that will be finished this afternoon. I don’t know the full running time but I think it’s about 16-17 minutes.

I wrote three songs last night including MIDI guide tracks and melodies and lyrics. I did a car music this morning and recorded the vocals for all four. Since then I have put lead and rhythm guitars onto two of them and came up with a chord change for a fifth song.

Obligatory Hipstamatic pictures……

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