Quaratine Report, Week 49: The Second Worst Week

I would call this my worst work of the pandemic except I lost a friend, a cohort-mate, last spring to a heart attack.  Since I wrote my previous q post:

• I had a really awful fight with a friend,
  
• my covid long hauling niece got a concussion,
• I got food poisoned, which caused me to ->
  
• get a covid test (negative) which probably exposed me to more risk than anything else (other than the weekly grocery store trip),
• which upset my wife's schedule since she had to self-isolate until the test came back. 
• I had a pretty tough meeting that was productive but not easy. 
• I had to prep for a colonoscopy (for those who don't know, it involves drinking four liters of a potion that gets increasingly hard to drink--Dumbledore understands only too well), then repeat my Sunday night/Monday morning experience as the potion did its job, and the fasting started to get bothersome.  
• The colonoscopy went fine, and then I gorged on too much food, which tends to cause me to have a backache, which, well, it did, so I didn't get much sleep Thursday night/Friday morning. Friday night was my best sleep of the week, thankfully.
  

On the bright side, I am not nor will I ever be Ted Cruz.  And I am not in Texas where the politicians left the state unprepared for the increasingly extreme weather that reminds me we started calling it climate change rather than global warming for a reason (I'd be in the part that still has power as Lubbock is not in the Texan grid).  So, in comparative perspective, it was not that horrific.  It was awful, but nobody in my family or circle of friends died.  And I guess, given the plague and the stuff going on in Texas, we count that as a good week.  

Very much not the winter break I had hoped for.  Last year's winter break involved chaperoning a group of graduate students who did not need a chaperone around a less crowded Tokyo (thanks to the pandemic) and visiting them in their home stays with their sweet elderly Japanese hosts.

10:30 AM, welcomed with sake, and then told
the local tradition is to drink two cups... and then
the host gave me that golden bottle in front of me
to take home.  Time to drink it since I never could
drop it off with my daughter.

That week was terrific, certainly the best week of the past 53.  This time last year, I went from Germany to home to Japan to a great small conference run by sharp young women at Queen's (Women in International Security-Queens) to our capstone event at the Canadian Forces College to ... hearing every sniffle and cough at the smaller airport in downtown Toronto on the day Tom Hanks announced to the world that he had COVID and the NBA shutdown.  For me, that was the start of quarantining.  We are not quite at that anniversary yet, but we can see it from here.

I really can't complain too much despite having a hard week, as my friends with kids at home are facing tougher days every week. The things I dealt with this week happen far less often.  Every five years for some things (poison potion, colonoscopy), first time in my life in another case.  

The survival strategies remain the same--baking, cooking, exercising (less this week thanks to the accidental and then deliberate poisoning), heaps of streaming with Wandavision remaining the highlight of the week.  I have much less patience these days for shows that are too dour (goodbye Black Lightning) or too dumb (stopped watching Greenland, a disaster flick, about 15 minutes in when the hero leaves to go in search of insulin).

I did finish my treadmill re-watch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I will just conclude by stealing Cap's speech: