Chicon membership
Aug. 14th, 2022 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanThis is pretty last-minute, but I will not be attending Chicon after all, so I have a membership for sale. We paid $170 for it and I am happy to sell it for that. Or if that's too much, make me an offer. I'm not sure demand for this membership is particularly great.
I have already missed both Minicon and Fourth Street this year because of general fear of COVID coupled with a strong intuition that adhering to good COVID protocols -- which I fervently support -- would take most of the fun out of conventions for me.
I received confirmation of this suspicion recently. Everything is fine; I did not get COVID. But this is what happened:
I had a small grocery order coming from Aldi's, via Instacart. I'd put together an Aldi's cart and a Cub cart with all the vegetables I habitually order and compared the prices; and Aldi's wasn't just a little cheaper for produce, it was a lot cheaper. They don't carry a lot of things I want, but for produce they were definitely a win.
I don't meet the shopper at the door, just have them leave the groceries and go down to collect the groceries a little later. Neither the shopper nor I need any additional risk even of that sort. The shopper duly texted me that she had delivered the groceries, and as is now usual, and much appreciated, included a photo. The house was not my house, but I knew exactly where it was. So I put on a mask, somewhat haphazardly since I expected to swoop my groceries off the steps and leave. The people in that house aren't ordinarily home during the day.
The groceries weren't on the steps. I went up onto the outside stoop and peered into the screened porch. No groceries.
"Hello?" called a voice. "Did you have groceries delivered?"
"I did!" I called back. I moved away from the screen door to the top of the concrete steps, but did not go back down into the yard, which would probably have been a better idea. A young woman and a little dog came out onto the porch, the woman talking very fast about how confused she had been to find groceries on her porch. She'd already put the perishables in the refrigerator while trying to figure out what to do, but she would get them right away. She came back with my two bags. Again, the better move for me would have been to go down into the yard and ask her to just leave the bags on her stoop. I just stood there. As she opened the screen door, she said, "Now I don't want to get too close, because I have COVID right now." She wasn't wearing a mask.
I'd been focusing on whether the little dog would make a break for it. I grabbed my bags, thanked her reflexively, and bolted for home.
This was not an exposure by CDC standards, but those are worth, well, if you pay taxes, much less than you paid for them. I wore my mask into the house and told Cameron, and then emailed David and Lydy. Lydy's response was the very salient, "Grocery delivery is supposed to REDUCE risk!"
I had effortlessly decided to quarantine from the downstairs, but Cameron and I had to decide what to do upstairs. There's only one bathroom for the two of us, and my office doesn't have a door. In the end, we masked up for ten days and didn't eat or watch TV together, and kind of vaguely tried to keep some kind of distance. We have four air cleaners upstairs, mostly acquired for either pollen or smoke mitigation, though I did get the big one with COVID in mind. The weather was cool for the first five or six days, so we had windows wide open and fans deployed as well. I did rapid antigen tests at days 3, 5 and 10. All negative, no symptoms (except that during this time the pollen count went up and I had allergy symptoms, naturally). Before going on a rescheduled visit to my mom's, I did two more tests, as David and I always do, and those were negative as well.
This was probably all unnecessary, aside from the tests and probably the postponement of the visit to my 91-YEAR-OLD mother; but we agreed that it had been good practice.
And it showed me very clearly that I hate wearing a mask, particularly in hot weather, day after day after day. I could complain about it endlessly, but I feel very embarrassed about my reaction, given how many people wear masks for hours and hours just to work and stay safer -- including Lydy! But I will just say that putting on the mask made me feel that my intelligence had contracted and shrunk, and also that I was about a million miles away from anybody I might be conversing with. Many people can't hear me through a mask, either, as I noticed when wearing one to MinnStf events and other outdoor social events in 2021. This was confirmed during these ten days; so I have to bellow, which introduces another unnatural element into the conversation. Since one of the major pleasures of a convention for me is getting together with friends for a meal, and I wouldn't want to do that under current circumstances and with my health issues either, the combination of these factors made me decide that I might as well stay home and help Cameron wrangle the five cats. I also can't take Paxlovid, which is another thing that gives me pause.
Thinking it over even more obsessively, while I enjoy conventions and miss going to them, they are also a source of some considerable stress to me, which has always been worth it for the personal interactions and intellectual stimulation. But when you add the drawbacks of the mask and the lack of communal meals, it's just all stress all the time.
But for people with greater social and organizational skills, lower risk, and/or better mask tolerance, there's the membership available.
It won't be a tragedy if I don't sell it, since it provides access to the virtual part of the convention as well as the physical.
P.
I have already missed both Minicon and Fourth Street this year because of general fear of COVID coupled with a strong intuition that adhering to good COVID protocols -- which I fervently support -- would take most of the fun out of conventions for me.
I received confirmation of this suspicion recently. Everything is fine; I did not get COVID. But this is what happened:
I had a small grocery order coming from Aldi's, via Instacart. I'd put together an Aldi's cart and a Cub cart with all the vegetables I habitually order and compared the prices; and Aldi's wasn't just a little cheaper for produce, it was a lot cheaper. They don't carry a lot of things I want, but for produce they were definitely a win.
I don't meet the shopper at the door, just have them leave the groceries and go down to collect the groceries a little later. Neither the shopper nor I need any additional risk even of that sort. The shopper duly texted me that she had delivered the groceries, and as is now usual, and much appreciated, included a photo. The house was not my house, but I knew exactly where it was. So I put on a mask, somewhat haphazardly since I expected to swoop my groceries off the steps and leave. The people in that house aren't ordinarily home during the day.
The groceries weren't on the steps. I went up onto the outside stoop and peered into the screened porch. No groceries.
"Hello?" called a voice. "Did you have groceries delivered?"
"I did!" I called back. I moved away from the screen door to the top of the concrete steps, but did not go back down into the yard, which would probably have been a better idea. A young woman and a little dog came out onto the porch, the woman talking very fast about how confused she had been to find groceries on her porch. She'd already put the perishables in the refrigerator while trying to figure out what to do, but she would get them right away. She came back with my two bags. Again, the better move for me would have been to go down into the yard and ask her to just leave the bags on her stoop. I just stood there. As she opened the screen door, she said, "Now I don't want to get too close, because I have COVID right now." She wasn't wearing a mask.
I'd been focusing on whether the little dog would make a break for it. I grabbed my bags, thanked her reflexively, and bolted for home.
This was not an exposure by CDC standards, but those are worth, well, if you pay taxes, much less than you paid for them. I wore my mask into the house and told Cameron, and then emailed David and Lydy. Lydy's response was the very salient, "Grocery delivery is supposed to REDUCE risk!"
I had effortlessly decided to quarantine from the downstairs, but Cameron and I had to decide what to do upstairs. There's only one bathroom for the two of us, and my office doesn't have a door. In the end, we masked up for ten days and didn't eat or watch TV together, and kind of vaguely tried to keep some kind of distance. We have four air cleaners upstairs, mostly acquired for either pollen or smoke mitigation, though I did get the big one with COVID in mind. The weather was cool for the first five or six days, so we had windows wide open and fans deployed as well. I did rapid antigen tests at days 3, 5 and 10. All negative, no symptoms (except that during this time the pollen count went up and I had allergy symptoms, naturally). Before going on a rescheduled visit to my mom's, I did two more tests, as David and I always do, and those were negative as well.
This was probably all unnecessary, aside from the tests and probably the postponement of the visit to my 91-YEAR-OLD mother; but we agreed that it had been good practice.
And it showed me very clearly that I hate wearing a mask, particularly in hot weather, day after day after day. I could complain about it endlessly, but I feel very embarrassed about my reaction, given how many people wear masks for hours and hours just to work and stay safer -- including Lydy! But I will just say that putting on the mask made me feel that my intelligence had contracted and shrunk, and also that I was about a million miles away from anybody I might be conversing with. Many people can't hear me through a mask, either, as I noticed when wearing one to MinnStf events and other outdoor social events in 2021. This was confirmed during these ten days; so I have to bellow, which introduces another unnatural element into the conversation. Since one of the major pleasures of a convention for me is getting together with friends for a meal, and I wouldn't want to do that under current circumstances and with my health issues either, the combination of these factors made me decide that I might as well stay home and help Cameron wrangle the five cats. I also can't take Paxlovid, which is another thing that gives me pause.
Thinking it over even more obsessively, while I enjoy conventions and miss going to them, they are also a source of some considerable stress to me, which has always been worth it for the personal interactions and intellectual stimulation. But when you add the drawbacks of the mask and the lack of communal meals, it's just all stress all the time.
But for people with greater social and organizational skills, lower risk, and/or better mask tolerance, there's the membership available.
It won't be a tragedy if I don't sell it, since it provides access to the virtual part of the convention as well as the physical.
P.
