pameladean | Entries tagged with covid-19

This 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.

Minicon 55, twice postponed and long anticipated, is being held in person this weekend.

I am not attending most of it, having decided that doing so is a bit too risky for me personally.

At the moment, I'm planning to ride in to the hotel with David on Friday, to attend the panel "Archiving SF," which runs from four to five p.m. and in which he'll be showing some of the photos he's been working on by various fannish photographers including himself. I might put my head into the art show to see his handful of prints hanging up. I'm hoping to have a chat with Jo, and wave or yell behind my mask to a few more people, but then I am going home and sadly staying there. It looks like a really good program; I would attend many panels, ordinarily, out of this batch; I would plant myself in the music room and just listen to every single musician's concert. I would have meals with good friends and acquaintances and a few new people, with luck.

But for me, with my comorbidities and diabetes, I think it's too risky. Minicon requires vaccination and a booster and masking in public spaces except for those designated for eating and drinking. I think these precautions are sensible, but maybe not for me. So David cancelled one of our hotel rooms, and I have not had to do a lot of laundry.

I hope everyone who goes has a lovely safe time.

Pamela

It's November. All over the screen behind a storm window that has been closed for months because the screen has a hole through which once entered a hapless mouse and later a hapless sparrow, the ivy I should not have let grow so high is turning delicate shades of pink and lemon and gold. The inner shaded leaves are still the palest green. Beyond the ivy, the volunteer Norway maple that grew stealthily through the neighbors' peabush hedge is also turning gold. On the boulevard, its probable parent is half gold, half green.

We went to a delightful outdoor MinnStf Halloween party at Dreampark last weekend, and on the house, which is gold with red trim, the same ivy was turning the same colors, like living Halloween decorations. That was in back. In front, there were more than a hundred pumpkins and a host of ghosts and a very large mechanical black cat that turned its head and made you jump. But in the back, the ivy was a very good decoration all on its own. Also I toasted marshmallows for the first time in decades, and talked with many people I miss and value.

I am mired in tax stuff. So much stuff. So very much so very late stuff. If I do not hear back from the accountants via email very soon I will have to pick up the telephone. I loathe and abominate the telephone. Ursula Le Guin once said, "For me the telephone is for making appointments with the doctor with and cancelling appointments with the dentist with. It is not a medium of human communication." Now for me, it is a medium of human communication, but only with people I am intimate with. I do not want to make and cancel appointments on the telephone, nor describe the precise morass I am in with the taxes. Email is ten thousand times better for that.

I quite successfully emailed our excellent handyman, Jake, about the hand-sized holes the squirrels chewed in a different office window. He came out to look at the window, prepared to cover the tempting wooden trim of it with aluminum at once. However, it's in a very awkward place, a basically unintelligible niche between the front porch and the side of my office, which is a sunroom that sticks out from the rest of the house for the better provision of windows to earn its name. The ladder he has won't fit in there, largely because of the porch roof; and also he forgot we have brown trim on the house and bought white aluminum. We didn't actually care about the color of the aluminum, but obviously the inadequacy of the ladder was an issue. In the end he came upstairs and helped David take the air conditioner out of the window, and then hung out of it measuring everything. He will return on Thursday, when it will helpfully be ten degrees warmer outside, with a mysterious structure composed of scaffolding and an A-frame, which he says will permit him to reach the window; and also with brown aluminum.

I will just add that the fascia board than runs just below the roof along the entire front of the house is also covered with brown aluminum from the first assault the squirrels made on the house.

In any case, all these arrangements were made either in email or in person. The telephone was not required.

In other news, I have finally read Caroline Stevermer's The Glass Magician, which was published in 2020 and which I bought then because Caroline, and also because pandemic. But I didn't read it until this week. I loved it a lot. I was quite puzzled by the very pared-down prose and affect at first, but soon saw that this was a reflection of the face that the protagonist, Thalia, shows the world. There is more to Thalia, a lot more, but the spare language made a very effective frame for a story of shapeshifting, stage and actual magic, family secrets, and more. I've never read a book quite like it, so obviously I am going to have to read it again when I want that wry, astringent, slowly accumulating flavor, so rich and layered by the end.

David and I have had our booster shots and Lydy should follow soon. I'm still not going to restaurants, nor going indoors without a mask and only out of dire necessity, say for example because my doctor wouldn't renew a couple of prescriptions without seeing some new lab work. The lab work was unexpectedly good: my A1c has not changed since April and it's in quite a good place. Everything else that was checked was fine. It is apparently not yet time to look at the B12 levels, but I can still feel improvement in the areas I think the deficiency affected, so I'll be content until the next time. I hope when I next need to come under a roof that is not my own, all the numbers will be less dreadful. I've had many conversations with friends about what Minnesota did wrong; the most popular answer is, "Chose our neighboring states unwisely." But there are so many variables, I don't even know.

We're thinking of hosting a small Thanksgiving, with liberal application of rapid antigen tests beforehand. I hope the numbers are better by then.

I haven't planted the species tulips yet, but it will be warmer at the end of the week. Ideally I'd spend one warmish day clearing space for the tulips in the amazing jungle that the yard and garden beds have turned into, and another actually planting them. I'm also tempted to go through my ridiculous hoard of old seeds and fling onto the ground any that say they can be planted in the fall. We'll see.

I've put my book aside for all the tedious paperwork of the taxes, and the only good thing I can say is that I'm starting to see the faintest stirrings of a desire to get back to it. Thus are we spurred to the work that should be our delight, in these parlous times.

I continue to value all of you exceedingly.

Pamela

Hello, you all. I am in that exasperating (to me, at any rate) state where I write entries in my head all the time but I never post them.

This requires posting, however.

I've often mentioned my long-time partner Raphael in this space. Some of you have met Raphael. If I manage to start posting again, you will not see that name any more. I'll be talking about Cameron. Her last name is Reed, though I don't usually use any partner's last name here. She is the same partner and the same person, but she has transitioned. Her pronouns are she or they. I guess, if you know her from long ago and have taken pleasure in Hellsparking the pronouns, you could still do that.

This is a profoundly joyous and very welcome development, though I'm sorry she ended up going through most of it during an ongoing and mishandled pandemic.

It's National Coming Out Day, so I guess I'll mention that I'm bisexual.

In other news, the upstairs furnace doesn't want to start up, the friend who has been nursing it along for us is laid up with both the flu and an injury, and I am worried about getting actual repair people in because I fear that they will reflexively red-tag the furnace even though it probably just needs a minor adjustment. It is as old as the house, which was built in 1916. It's no longer powered by coal, and was retrofitted with a pressure tank a decade or so ago after the replacement expansion tank in the upstairs bathroom began leaking after only a few years of use. The previous one also had leaked, but only after about 90 years.

I have the names of a bunch of companies that will definitely red-tag it and am trying to run down one that won't.

Other news, other news. The year 2020 has apparently done a real number on my executive function. It's somewhat better after several months of taking Vitamin B12 to address a deficiency. After I get my COVID-19 booster next week, I'll have lab work done and we'll see where my levels are and whether more improvement can be expected.

I had some weeks of very good productive work on the perpetual revisions of the novel currently called Going North. I'm stalled out again now, partly because I'm working on other long-overdue necessary matters like taxes. I've had to clear all or part of my desk twice in the past year and a half, once to address a hole in the screen of one window and again to make space to replace the air conditioner. I eventually accomplished these necessary clearances by shoving everything into a series of paper bags. Sorting would still be going on (as in fact it is) and I would have had no air conditioner through several more very nasty heat waves and would still not have one now, if I had insisted on things' being sorted as a preliminary. The paperback fiction aisle containing K through just-barely-W is still packed with stuff from my office.

The yard is a jungle and I have 48 species tulip bulbs arriving sometime this week.

Hiking has been a little erratic because of heat waves and thunderstorms, but the hikes we've had have been really beautiful and contained many interesting moments. There's a dearth of meadowhawks this year, it seems, but we did see some autumn ones on the last few hikes, as well as spotted spreadwings at the Carpenter Nature Center. We saw a prince baskettail snatch a moth out of the air and devour it just over our heads, dropping the wings at our feet. At the same spot just before, we had seen an osprey descend with enormous force and speed and snatch a fish out of the water. We saw a beaver swimming the length of a long pond to bring back water-lily leaves, one by one, to its lodge. We saw green herons. We saw a great blue heron, standing in the shallows of the Mississippi River, catch its own fish, spend several geometric moments moving the fish around without dropping it to get it lined up with its gullet, and then gulping it down. We saw many other things that I'm not recalling at the moment. Most of the common skimmers, ebony jewelwings, American rubyspots. Oh, and orange bluets. Montissippi, a regional park in Wright County with a fabulous dragonfly and bird population and the worst portapotties known to us, provided a generous array of darners and bluets mating and ovipositing; also, later in the year, a pileated woodpecker hammering away on a dead cottonwood branch. We've heard it before and since, but that was our only viewing.

All these hikes were with Cameron. I also went with Eric for two nights at St. Croix State Park, where a friend had planned a camping and gaming weekend for people still skittish about ordinary gatherings. I don't game, but Eric does. It's a beautiful park, and we had a fine time exploring it. We did not see the dragonflies I had hoped for, but finally we went down to the canoe landing where the rental canoes are, when it was early enough in the day for the river to be sunny, and saw several dragonhunters, a majestic and alarming kind of clubtail that preys on other dragonflies. Eric had seen one of those before when we went to Wild River together some years ago. But at the canoe rental landing at St. Croix, he also saw his first American rubyspots. We also very much enjoyed hanging out with friends in what at the time was a safe manner.

David and I have been taking rapid antigen tests and then going out to have lunch at my mother's about every other week. The pandemic has been pretty hard on her as well, and she is still going nowhere except her front steps with their little garden or her back deck. I hope she may venture out more after a booster and after Minnesota's horrific community-spread numbers go down, if they ever actually do.

I started reading new fiction again after a lengthy period of being basically unable to do so. As a result I read Katherine Addison's The Witness for the Dead, decided that it was a little too soon to read The Goblin Emperor again, and accordingly reread The Angel of the Crows and then actually took the heavy hardcovers of The Doctrine of Labyrinths from the shelf, to the great annoyance of my cat, who does not want to be a book rest and resents the space the books take up on what she believes to be her pillow. I've just started The Mirador, possibly my favorite volume of the series, and it's very hard to do anything else but read it, which is not helping any of the projects that require attention.

I'm looking forward to getting my booster so I can feel able to see Eric other than outside again. He's acquired a roommate, which he had intended to do for some time, and I am still very paranoid about COVID because my diabetes will make whatever level of infection I get much worse.

Nobody in my house has gotten sick yet.

Minneapolis politics is really wild right now. I have a lot of opinions but lack the energy to argue about them just at the moment.

I value all of you exceedingly and am glad every time any of you post.

Pamela

The pandemic isn't over, but the one-year mark came in with a lot of changes. Now that the first year is done, I regret not keeping a pandemic diary, as so many people did. But I have to say, to a far greater extent than I anticipated, the entire situation did a very bad number on my brain.

Once I was fully vaccinated I went in for lab work for the first time since June of 202, when my doctor begged me to do so before the anticipated surge in cases after the protests of the police murder of George Floyd. There was no surge, mercifully, which has not stopped right-wing bots and trolls from whining in perpetuity about how nobody complains about protests even though they obviously spread the virus.

My doctor had had me send her blood pressure and blood sugar numbers taken at home for a week or so in February, and then told me she would like to increase my metformin dosage. I agreed. This has been more annoying than I anticipated. I need to take metformin with food lest it wreak havoc on my digestion. The extra 500 mg is supposed to be taken with breakfast, while I retain the practice of taking 1000 mg with dinner. Medical directions of this sort always think people eat breakfast at 8 a.m. and dinner at 6 p.m., and they think bedtime is eleven p.m. at the latest. My schedule is nothing like that, and in particular meals tend to be crammed into a smaller percentage of the day than in the idyllic regular dreams of the people who write directions for the ingestion of medications.

In addition to eating it late, I also don't eat very much breakfast, since I have never since puberty been hungry until several hours after I get up. Now I'm eating twice as much as I want in the morning, which isn't much fun and also involves preparing twice as much. I used to eat a cup of soy yogurt, which was sufficient to cushion the effect of four blood pressure medications, an acid-reflux medication, and a different diabetes medication. Now I have to, horrors, make toast or oatmeal or something. In the morning. Not only am I not hungry when I wake up, my brain also, even when it was working well, did not really come online for an hour or two either. So I'm eating a larger breakfast than I want earlier than I want, which ends up pushing lunch further out. I usually have breakfast around 1 p.m. if I'm lucky, and lunch around five or six. Dinner is very late for a number of reasons having nothing to do with metformin, but it is not late enough to put twelve or usually even ten hours between breakfast and itself. So I'm perpetually flailing about the kitchen at 2 a.m. trying to find something substantial enough that I also actually want to eat in order to take the metformin.

Despite all these complaints, the new dosage is working and my A1c is down to 6.0. (This test measures the percentage of red blood cells that have glucose attached to them. A result of 6.0 is "pre-diabetes" in normal people but very good news in a diabetic; it's quite a bit below the point at which nasty complications tend to show up.)

Other lab work was fine too, except that, since she'd increased my metformin, my doctor ordered a vitamin B12 test, and I turned up borderline deficient. A remarkable number of symptoms that I had put down to pandemic stress, and that I have seen listed as symptoms of pandemic stress in any number of articles, turn out to be possible effects of B12 deficiency.

I've been taking B12 supplements for a couple of weeks and they are starting to have an effect on my energy levels and on the sweetness of my temper. We'll see about the higher cognition, I guess. My doctor thinks the deficiency is caused by the metformin, but I think it may have begun earlier than that, since I just generally eat somewhat weirdly.

Eric came over today for a short masked, distanced visit in the back yard. There might be one more of those, and then we can meet as in the before times. My brother will be fully vaccinated as of May 19th, and then anybody in my household who wishes can go see him and my mother and sit indoors unmasked and not have to yell all the time.

Eric had a complicated hierarchy of errands that had already been slightly derailed, if one can derail a hierarchy; so the visit was even shorter than anticipated. I stayed in the yard, hunting down all the peonies, which I'd been meaning to check on for several days. Raphael and I went for a long walk yesterday and started seeing the red alien shoots of emerging peonies everywhere, bringing ours tardily to mind. I am usually peering at their locations as soon as the sow is gone. Mine are in fact all up, even the unfortunate one that is being shaded out and wants moving. I watered them all. There were also a number of mystery plants that I'd been puzzling over for some days. They look a little but not enough like daylilies, and while daylilies will pop up wherever they can, they don't usually jump long distances; these plants were not that close to any daylilies. One in the front finally offered up a bulb, and I remembered that I'd succumbed to a good deal on mixed giant alliums last fall. So that will be a nice surprise when they bloom. I watered those, too.

We have five flourishing green daffodil plants and one lone, extremely tenacious daffodil flower, which remained unmoved by snow, frost, and comparative drought. I should feed all of them. Most of the rest of the yard is either emerging creeping bellflower (argh), rampant scilla, non-native sedges, a bit of stubborn grass, and volunteer trees, largely box elder, hackberry, mulberry, Siberian (or possibly Chinese) elm, Norway maple, and green ash. There is one lilac bush, a volunteer from seed of the neighbor's ancient, lightning-struck, but still persisting bush. Eric said he was glad we had gotten a scion of that lilac before the neighbors put up a six-foot board fence, and I am of the same mind.

The other thing that Raphael and I saw on our walk was a glorious abundance of species tulips. I ended up ordering three different kinds for next year.

In addition to having energy and regaining such sweetness of temper as I can be said to have possessed, I've begun to be able to work on my Zeno's Novel in a more efficient fashion. I hope I may post here more often, a pandemic aftermath diary, perhaps, though when I think of India, and of all the people I'm worried about because they haven't been able to be vaccinated yet, I don't think we are in any aftermath just yet.

I've read every post in my circle all this time and have really appreciated every one of them, and the persistence of everyone's existence.

Pamela

Edited to correct previously-invisible typos.

That is to say, however much of a cliche it may be, it never rains but it pours.

David was selected by the state lottery and got vaccinated yesterday in a cavernous sports facility in Eagan. He said the National Guard was handing out second masks, repeating, "Blue side out! Blue side out!" and also directing traffic in the parking lot and foot traffic inside.

Also yesterday, I got my notification from HealthPartners that if I was quick like a bunny to make an appointment,I could get vaccinated at one of their locations. They've started on people 65 and older after being stalled out at 70 and older for what seemed like forever.

This morning I woke to a text and an email informing me that I had been selected by the state lottery system to get a vaccine by that route.

I hope this means that a lot of people who have been waiting and waiting will be vaccinated soon. I don't know if it's the addition of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to the mix or the promised huge increase in production of the other two promised by the companies that make them, or both; but it certainly is welcome.

I also got a mysterious claims lettter from HealthPartners from December 11 saying that they were writing to let me know the status of a claim from a provider designated only as IBX. They said the claim needed additional review and would probably be resolved within 21 days.

Once I got past all the Blue Cross stuff when I searched on IBX, I found an outfit that proclaimed, "We are IBX, one of the world’s largest biorepositories. A global leader in biobanking, bioprocessing, and analytics."

The date of the claim was 12/11. I certainly had no medical procedures done that day, but claims are often presented some time after the actual medical service in question. We all ordered saliva tests from the state after Lydy tested positive for COVID, and Raphael and I sent ours in on December 11. The tests are supposed to be free to us, paid for by the state, but maybe they charge your insurance if you have any. In any case, it was a strong reminder of how things are trying to look up.

P.

I seem to have gotten off pretty easily with my first COVID-19 shot. My arm eventually started hurting and reached maximum annoyance when I was making a late dinner. Reaching out or up were Not Approved. But these actions could be performed and elicited only the occasional yelp or groan; they were not excruciating or debilitating. I also took two unplanned naps, aided by Saffron. Whether those had anything to do with the shot directly or were the result of my having had a migraine the day before and then needing to get up early, for me, to make the appointment, I have no idea.

Today I'm still pretty tired, but my arm stopped hurting almost on the dot of four, when yesterday I got the injection. This is slightly eerie to me, but I'll take it.

It's very warm for March in Minnesota. I have the office window open. Just now a couple of people walked by, and a child's voice declaimed, "So then I said, 'RELEASE THE CANNONBALLS' and THEN the -- " at which moment a blodge of traffic went by, released by the traffic light at 36th Street, and distorted the rest of the sentence. Chickens might have been involved? Kittens? Crickets? I have no idea. I glanced out the south-facing window at the retreating walkers, and saw a very Minnesotan sight: a woman and child in puffy jackets, socks and winter boots, and shorts.

David came home from Cleveland on February 17, and will be out of quarantine this Friday. I haven't seen him since December 14. It will be pleasant to catch up.

I feel some lightening of my burden of stress with even the first vaccine shot. I hope the floodgates of vaccine do open soon and everybody else can get vaccinated as well. I did not think that failing to restrict partners and my friends in general to a very narrow age range would result in quite the situation we have at present. My household has an age range, my partner I don't live with is twelve years younger; my long-running much-loved tea group has an age range; my mother, now fully vaccinated, lives with my brother, who's just enough younger than I am that he will have to wait at least another month. There are also just the random vagaries of how a limited supply of vaccine gets handed out. David is just as eligible as I am under Minnesota's current rules, but we are both with HealthPartners, which is being very slow. I was seen at HCMC for many years and they decided to offer me a shot; but he never was, and so must wait for our actual provider or find something at a pharmacy. Those slots are in very short supply and vanish like the snow. Well, as snow is supposed to vanish. Despite the warm temperatures, ours is taking its sweet time to go away, and just as well, really. It's too early to have bare ground. There will be cold again.

Earlier this afternoon cardinals were calling back and forth in the front yard and across the street. I haven't seen a robin yet, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there.

Pamela

Edited for homonym failure and then typoes. Yeesh.

By which I mean, the COVID-19 virus. I got my first shot today. HCMC, having sent me an invitation and let me make an appointment, did not blink at the fact that I had to abandon them in 2017 because I couldn't get an insurance plan on the marketplace that counted their clinics as being in-network. They just did the thing.

It was pretty fast and smooth, but there were a lot of people in there. I am not used to that any more.

When we got home and I was walking through the back yard to the door, a cardinal was calling and calling from one of the mulberry trees. I was very glad to hear it.

Pamela

I actually uttered this phrase yesterday, followed by a more mundane, "I can't believe this is happening." I was not in the position of the character originally making the remark, which is to say, I was not being urged to flee because I had just killed my girlfriend's cousin in a stupid duel because he had killed my best friend in an even stupider duel. I was merely trying to take out the trash.

It's really more the occasion for a quotation from Comedy of Errors, but one did not spontaneously come out of my mouth, so here we are.

Raphael shovelled out the back walk and the driveway yesterday, so I, after fulfilling a tedious number of actions of both cat- and Pamela-care, staged six bags, four light, two quite heavy, onto the upstairs back landing. I then grabbed the heaviest bag, which was the organics recycling, went stealthily downstairs, and shut the door to the kitchen before any cats noticed and tried to help me. Nuit rolled all over the bag containing the organics recycling (read: lightly rotting vegetable scraps, tea bags, and coffee grounds) the last time that I took it out, which did not end badly but was disturbing.

I got everything else down to the first floor and then heaved it outside the back door to await its fate. To the upstairs trash I added three bags of cat-box scoopings from downstairs. When I described the downstairs catbox procedures to Eric, he said, "Oh, so you're making catbox scooping sausage with polyetheylene casings", and that is exactly right. Lydy uses an ingenious device called a Litter Genie (three or four of them, actually). You pull down a suitable quantity of strong polyethylene from a long tube of it coiled up in the upper part of the Litter Genie, tie a VERY SECURE knot in the bottom, and scoop cat boxes into the bag inside the bin with abandon until the quantity of bag that fits in the little bin is full. Then you open it up in the middle, pull down enough more polyethylene bagging to make a second knot, cut it off with the convenient razor blade (complete with plastic guard so you can't cut your fingers), tie the second knot, and take the resulting sausage out of the bin for disposal. Because it was icy out back and even with ice cleats I am very skittish about ice since I slipped on some and broke my ankle a couple of years ago, I had let these sausages accumulate.

The last two times I did this, when I pulled down to get enough plastic bag to make a knot, I came to the end of the coil of tube. I managed to make some sort of knot, but felt nervous about them, and eventually put two of the three sausages, the ones with inadequate amounts of extra for knotting, into a regular trash bag. So I had this trash bag and one sausage.

I then went through to the front of the house, took off my shoes, put on my coat, hat, and mask, stuffed my gloves in my pockets, and took my boots, with their floor-destroying ice cleats, through into the back hall, the floor of which is covered with ancient linoleum that can't be further destroyed except with a sharp instrument and a crowbar. I sat on the steps, put my boots on, and went outside.

I always take a light bag in my left hand and a heavy one in my right. I made a couple of trips. It was a lovely winter evening, and the path was not treacherous.

I came back for my next trip and picked up my bedroom trash in my left hand and the lone sausage in my right. The upper knot gave way, which caused me to drop the bag, and it spilled the top third of its contents onto the sidewalk. I don't know if I sequestered the wrong bag or just failed to make a good knot even when presented with adequate amounts of plastic bag. I left the mess where it was while I took everything except the lightest remaining bag out to the carts. Then I bent to untie and open up that lightest bag. My mask, which had been behaving fairly well, promptly fogged up my glasses. I took it off and stuffed it into my pocket, followed it with my gloves, and took off my glasses to wipe them on my shirt. I heard the distinctive tinking click of the left lens falling out of the frames. It does this regularly. I haven't had an eye exam or gotten new glasses because of the pandemic. I had tightened the screw down just the day before, but it's apparently subject to a lot of stressors as I use my glasses.

I had fortunately caught the lens in my hand. I thought of trying to put it back and tightening down the screw with my fingernail, which I do regularly if I am not near the tiny screwdriver. But a very little thought showed that this was not going to work. I put the lens into the pocket of my coat, under a glove. I put my glasses back on. I was able to see well enough to do things, though the entire view was slightly hallucinatory. I have progressive lenses and they did not progress as well with one missing.

I managed to open up the light bag, and then got the snow shovel and used it to put the spilled clumps of used litter and the sausage with its remaining contents into the bag. I tied it up hastily, as if stuff might leap out. I scraped the sidewalk thoroughly, dumped the scrapings onto the snowy lawn, and then cleaned the snow shovel in a convenient pile of clean show. I put the bag into a garbage cart with considerable satisfaction, admired the residue of the sunset, and went inside.

I hope your trash and other mundane details of your lives are behaving better than this.

Pamela

For a long time I did not used to go to bed early. For the last week I have not gotten into bed much before five a.m.

The 24-hour registration period for people over 65 to pre-register for the upcoming week's vaccine lottery runs from 5 a.m. today until five a.m. tomorrow. Fine, I thought, I'll just get on there a bit before 5 and get it done. I was more than ready for bed by four, naturally, but I stuck it out. When I get up in what passes for my morning, there is a whole flurry of things to do; and I didn't know exactly when I would actually be able to start waiting again.

I hit the waiting room at 5:03 a.m. and there were 7200 and some odd people ahead of me in line. Estimated waiting time: more than an hour.

I am waiting, so far. I don't have anything to do right now except to go to bed. No medication left to take or administer, no showering or dressing or making tea and breakfast, no looking through the recipes for dinner, no checking email. Well, I am checking it, but I don't get much at this hour, not being in regular correspondence with people in extremely different time zones.

Aha. Estimated waiting time: 57 minutes. Number of people ahead of me: 4831.

The number goes down in little bursts. I wonder how many people are leaving the line, not having been able to allot a long enough wait.

Sandy Denny is singing "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"

Estimated waiting time: 13 minutes. Number of people ahead of me: 3821. It has not been close to an hour, let alone more than one. I'm starting to feel bad for all the people dropping out. They probably don't have the luxury of staying home, or have to wrangle kids, or both. I'm still here, though.

The moon is not technically down, but I can't see it. I don't know what the Pleiades are doing.

Eight minutes, 2769 people.

Fairport Convention is performing "Sloth."

All right, I'm done. They want you to use the mouse to sign the form. It looked as if I'd done it with a very blunt pencil on a wobbly table, even after several attempts. It will have to do.

Forty-six minutes from start to finish. I am now able to be picked randomly to schedule an appointment for the first of two shots. But it's a start.

Bob Dylan was singing "Shelter from the Storm" while I was filling out the form, and now, in a You-Tube video I am still really excited about, is singing "Love Minus Zero, No Limits" with George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Leon Russell playing backup; this performance is part of the Concert for Bangladesh in August of 1971 and I will cherish for some time my vague thoughts, on first stumbling across it, of, "I don't think that was his usual band at the time if he had one; wow, they are really good; the guy with the tambourine looks really familiar; WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?"

Sleep well, all, and may we all have a way to be vaccinated soon.

Pamela

Hello, all my lovely Dreamwidth readers.

Everybody is fine. Everything turned out all right. I will put the rest behind a cut for people who just don't want to read about the pandemic right now.

( Cut for discussion of pandemic, quarantine, testing ).

I should add that I didn't get much writing done, but I did have a major breakthrough about how to shut my characters up long enough to actually end this book.

Pamela

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pameladean

January 2024

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Chicon membership
Minicon 55
Angels and mortals fight for the right to have a little pleasure
Joy and Transformation amidst the Unwelcome Sameness
The cruellest month is transitioning to the merriest one
Morton salt everywhere
Aftermath
Now stab and end the creature -- to the heft!
Oh, I am Fortune's fool
Everyone is just waiting
A packet ot news and no mistake

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