Tag: covid-19

Covid, Part . . . I Don’t Even Know Anymore

It’s back again and better than ever. Well, okay. It’s back again.

I have a coworker who texted us on Sunday saying, “Guess what guys? I’m Covid-positive.” So, since we’re all close together in our pharmacy, I decided to test.

Also, on Sunday, my dad said that he felt lousy and he thought it might be heat exhaustion. Well, the heat has been inhumane and heat exhaustion is cumulative, so I was willing to buy that. When I left for work on Monday, I reminded him that if the electricity goes out, the local library is a cooling center, since he thought it was the heat.

On Monday, I tested for Covid, since it’s loose at work. I asked my dad how he was doing. He said, “well I took nourishment today I didn’t eat all yesterday” and I, like…

So. I suggested the possibility that he could have Covid. He pooh-poohed it, because I was testing negative and where would he have gotten it from? He said it had to be something else. I left him the second test in that box, just in case he wanted to test. When I got up Tuesday, my dad asked how long it takes between exposure to Covid and the start of symptoms. I didn’t know off the top of my head, so he looked at his calendar and said that when he was at the doctor on Thursday, there was a woman in the waiting room who was coughing. He decided that testing might be a good idea.

I pulled out my handy dandy BinaxNow(tm) testing kit and set it up. I timed my dad while he swizzled the swab in his nose, and then we waited. Sure enough. He was positive.

There’s a combination urgent care and emergency room that we use for a lot of our Covid needs at work (Alex also went there for his diagnosis when he got Covid). I set up a profile for him (attaching the pictures of his ID and insurance card took **forever**) and gave him the address of the clinic in case he felt up to going on Tuesday. Needless to say, he did *not* feel like going in.

So I drove him up there on Wednesday and, due to his age, and him being short of breath, they put him in the emergency room half of the building. I’d never been over there, and if I hadn’t been terrified for my dad, I probably would’ve been fascinated. My dad’s hearing isn’t all it used to be, so I helped translate. The workers couldn’t take their masks off so he can read their lips, so I repeated the questions with my mask off just long enough to ask the question. They got symptoms and lists of medications. My dad doesn’t take anything systemic, just eye drops.

Public Service Announcement Time: if you ever deal with bungee cords, **Please** wear eye protection. That’s why my dad uses eye drops. He smacked himself in the eye with a bungee cord back in . . . 2010? 2011? His ophthalmologist says that she gets more patients that way.

The doctor came in soon after that and my dad could understand what the doctor was saying. So when the doctor said that my dad would be there for a couple of hours while they did bloodwork and took xrays, since my dad could hear him, I came home. I swear I stopped somewhere on my way home, but I cannot remember where it was. I read for a while, and two hours after I left the ER, I headed back, and got there just as they were getting his paperwork together to release him.

We stopped for Popeye’s Chicken and his prescriptions on the way home and he’s been taking Paxlovid(tm) and an inhaler.

Now the thing is I spent basically 45 minutes in a midsize sedan with a person who has Covid. I put the air conditioner on vent rather than recirculate so that we were getting fresh air in there, but still, the close quarters greatly increases the chance that I’m going to get it, too. I’m basically planning for it.

This is particularly important considering that another coworker called today and said that she has it. There were four of us scheduled, but we ended up with only three. Ick.

I tested again today and it was negative, so I can go to work tomorrow. Saturday will be 72 hours after I was in the car with my dad, so I will test again on Saturday. I’m stocking up on food I can eat in my bedroom, because when I’m not doing something that requires this computer, I hide in my bedroom now.

I have nuts, and pudding, and vegetables. . . . Cranberries! I bet dried cranberries would be good. Since I’m likely to get this *from* my dad, I can also emerge to cook. I’ve ordered some chicken and things that I can cook and then take to my bedroom to eat.

The thing is, that two more of my coworkers had Covid at the same time I did, so I suspect that they will get caught in this current round of Covid, as well. This looks like it’s going to be fun.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is for the final book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series: The Last Olympian. I was worried about this book, largely because as far as I’m concerned, the Harry Potter series sort of fell apart at the end, and so I was worried that Riordan would also bobble on the dismount. I needn’t’ve worried. He nailed it.

Covid Diary Part 1 (of Probably 3)

I’m writing three posts regarding my COVID journey. My three posts will be “I have COVID” and how I found out (which I haven’t even written yet), “My living and quarantine situations,” and “Entertainment,” which will include what I’m doing/going to do with this laptop.

Now, how did I find that I have COVID? As I may have mentioned before, I have asthma. My two biggest triggers are allergies and illness, and one of the biggest allergic triggers I have is “mountain cedar,” which is technically Ashe juniper. Mountain cedar levels have been pretty high lately, but I’ve also been pretty good about my Flonase, which usually helps a lot. I was coughing on Thursday and mostly wrote it off as a little bit of mountain cedar, but it was in the back of my head that it might be COVID, since that happened about five years ago. I had a cough in January that year that I was sure was mountain cedar and it turned out I was actually sick.

Then late on Friday, my knees started to really hurt, and when I sat down to check it out, I realized that it was actually the lower part of my thighs, like, my biceps femoris, maybe? At any rate, it was muscular pain, and even when it’s an illness that doesn’t cause muscle pain, my legs will hurt when I’m sick. And COVID does cause muscle pain.

I knew I should have tested Friday night, but I cheated and did it Saturday afternoon. Pikmin Bloom Community Day was Saturday and I knew I could get my 10,000 steps in in my neighborhood without having close contact with anyone, so that’s what I did. I knocked that out between 11 and 12:30, then I did the at-home test. Five minutes into the 15-minute wait, I could see the line indicating infection forming.

So I ordered some food, bottled water, and rubber gloves from Walmart for curbside pickup and began to gather my food and entertainment options and filled out the registration form for the urgent care we go to for testing. By 2:30 pm, I had an official diagnosis.

Normally, I’d’ve sent Alex on the errand to pick up the food and my prescriptions, but Alex also has COVID. He moved out over a year ago, so neither of us could have caught it from the other, but boy what lousy timing!

I took some things to him on Friday night and told him that there was a good chance I had it, too, and if I was sure I’d’ve given him a hug, but didn’t want to take the chance just in case. And now I know that I could’ve given him a hug and I’m chagrined, to say the least.

So after I returned from picking up my food and my medications, I grabbed another couple of things (maybe this is where I found the laptop that I wrote this on?) and was sequestered by 6:30 pm. I had a bunch of jackets piled on my bed and one of those stairstepper thingies on my floor, but after I’d locked all of that in my closet, the room was much less claustrophobic.

And now I’m living in a world that’s mostly without time. My only form of time is my Medrol dosepak. I have to eat four times daily, to ensure that I have food in my stomach when I take the pills, so that I don’t feel nauseated. Well, that was for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, at least. Wednesday I go down to three times daily.

Hopefully I’ll develop a sense of time by then.

Alex Has a Fever

November 23, 2020 1 of 8

Alex felt better yesterday. He came home from work and went to bed.

Then, when I came home from work, I thought he’d be at work, but when I came home, he was (still?) in bed. I asked him if he missed work today and apparently he had the day off.

After I woke him up, he said that he was going to go to a friend’s house and so he got up to get ready and took his temperature. It was, like, 101. He tried again and got more 100+ temperatures.

The Texas MedClinic chain has a 15-minute test, so we checked out the closest 24-hour clinic and found that the walk-in wait was only 30 minutes. We attempted to make an appointment for him to get tested, but every time we tried, it told us to try a different time, but never let us choose anything but 7:30, which was the time that it said there were no openings.

We headed out to just go ahead and wait, but when we got in, the lady at the reception desk said that they weren’t taking any more walk-in COVID tests tonight because the wait was 5 hours. Then she told us to make an appointment online. And we told her that it hadn’t worked.

We also told her that the website said that the wait was only 30 minutes, and she said that she couldn’t do anything about that. So Alex made an appointment for 6:45 in the morning (which has a $100 fee for after-hours services) and we got some decongestant at the supermarket across the street. After we got home, he went for a jog and I had dinner (I offered to heat something up for both of us, but he said that he doesn’t have much of an appetite).

So, if he comes out positive for COVID (we’re pretty sure he won’t; it’s probably just a cold or the flu), then I will call in late and go get a test myself at around 8 am. Then we’ll see how it goes from there.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we’ve reached the point where I was going back and forth between Discworld and Nancy Drew books. So, today is Book 5 of the Nancy Drew series, The Secret of Shadow Ranch.

I’ve Been Up Since 6 am

November 24, 2020 1 of 8

I know. Lots of people get up at 6 am. However, my day job starts, at the earliest, at 8:30 am (and 11 am at the latest right now, though that may change after COVID ends). Since it takes me 1.5 hours to get ready for work and get to work, that means that I’m used to getting up at maybe 7 am (and frequently later).

I was awakened by Alex, who was working on his intake paperwork for the COVID test. Turns out he needed information on the guarantor (that’s me) that he didn’t know, like my social security number. Then, since he figured he’d go to work it it wasn’t COVID, he asked me to take my shower then, too, so that he could take his shower when he got home.

I did try to go back to bed after that, but with my hair wet, it was hard to relax. Plus, by the time I got out of the shower, it was nearly 7 and I had to be up at 7:30.

Alex came home just about 7:30, and it turns out that he does not have COVID, but he is sick. It’s probably a cold or something. The common cold is actually way more transmissible than COVID. It’s just seems less dangerous since our ancestors who weren’t able to fight off the common cold died out millennia ago. With COVID, we’re basically watching what happened when the first common cold virus hit the first human population, only they didn’t have the medical technology to increase the possibility that they would survive the virus.

Not that I’m saying that dying from COVID is positive or inevitable, or good for our DNA, or anything. Who knows who we would be today if it weren’t for that first cold virus. Maybe one of the people who died had an aptitude for math or science and would have given us a cure for cancer by now. Imagine your biggest bully. It could be a classmate, a member of your church, or even a relative. Maybe that bully’s great-great-great . . . grandparent was considering reproducing with someone who would have given that bully a sense of empathy? Maybe everyone would ultimately have carried that empathy gene and we’d live in a kinder, more just, world.

Or maybe the people who died were just people, with the hopes and dreams that anyone had back then — food, shelter, creativity, music, spirituality — and, much like in For Whom the Bell Tolls, their deaths diminished their community.

Anyway, back to something like the point. Since Alex works with the public, the doctor said that he should stay home from work for a couple of days. He’s feeling better, but he doesn’t know if he’s still contagious, so he’ll be home again tomorrow. He’s off Thanksgiving as well. He’ll be eating two Thanksgiving meals: breakfast with us and dinner with the group he’s getting a house with after that.

It seems that a non-gratuitous Amazon Link would be a poetry book that has For Whom the Bell Tolls in it, but I haven’t read any books like that. So, I guess it’s gratuitous again. We’re still careening madly between Discworld and Nancy Drew. Let’s see what we get today. We have Wyrd Sisters, the second book featuring the witches — Granny Ogg, Granny Weatherwax, and Magrat Garlick.

My Back Feels Better

November 18, 2020 1 of 8

I know that this blog isn’t sequential in any way, but I’m going to go ahead and post a sequel to yesterday’s post. Yesterday, my back hurt not-quite-badly-enough-to-hurt-when-I-breathed. Today, it’s still a little twingy, but it’s way better than yesterday.

I did really well until just before 6 pm, when I finally had to sit down in a chair with a back. Fortunately, we have just such a chair in the vaccination booth. So, I put on a glove, grabbed an anti-viral wipe, and sat down for a few minutes, letting my back really relax and tilting my head back in a way I hadn’t done since I got up this morning. Then, after a couple of minutes, I stood up, wiped the chair down, and got back to work.

I wonder if there’s some kind of scuttlebutt that they might be closing the city down again. At one point the line at our pharmacy went oh, maybe a quarter of the way to the back of the store. And our store is pretty big. We had to stay a few minutes late to take care of everyone in line and then I did some shopping on my way out.

I basically bought some Apple Cinnamon Cheerios (love Apple Cinnamon Cheerios!) and soup for dinner some night (which will get a short “What’s For Dinner Tonight post, probably). The cereal, soup, and pasta aisles were all pretty picked-over. Not like they were by April this year, but kind of where they were in maybe late February or early March.

I’m trying to do a Gratuitous Amazon Link and my computer’s being a total butt. I think I need to reboot tonight. I keep clicking on the link I want, or at least think I’m clicking on the link I want. But my computer is dragging. And after all that, the next book up should have been easy to remember, because I remembered noticing that this was coming up before. We’re finally to the beginning of the Nancy Drew series, The Secret of the Old Clock, by Carolyn Keene. And this time the Kindle link works (and may be a special edition. I’m not real clear on what “a limited number of copies” means in the context of an Amazon link.

Two Months Later . . . (COVID-19, part . . . I don’t know, five?)

Wow. Time really got away from me.

The most pressing thing is that they’ve opened the city back up and we’re still getting gobs of positive COVID-19 tests. The number for June 6, 2020? 147. Why are we opening up? No good will come of this.

I met with Evelyn for a while today, afraid that there’d be lots of people all spreading COVID. It was 12 million degrees out, so there was basically no one out there to get COVID from. And even if there had been lots of people on the greenways, it’s very hard to get an infectious dose of COVID-19 outdoors anyhow.

And, since it was 12 million degrees, and Evelyn had just come off an 8-day workweek, *and* since one of my warning lights was on and I was afraid that I might be looking at multiple thousands of dollars to repair my car (spoiler alert: I don’t know for sure, but the computer at AutoZone thinks I’m going to get off fairly cheaply), we didn’t stay out long enough to catch anything from anybody, I don’t think.

Speaking of COVID-19, Alex and I had to self-quarantine for almost a week at the beginning of May.

Well, let’s start at the beginning. On April 21, I came home to find one of my two remaining cats was acting like he’d had a stroke. We took him to the emergency vet, who transferred him to their critical care team, one of whom said that it was probably time.

I brought him home for a week, and we gave him antibiotics and nausea medication, and subcutaneous fluids, and I needed to take him back for more bloodwork, so I planned to do that on May 2.

On May 1, Alex woke up with a fever and we scheduled COVID-19 tests for ourselves. While I was getting ready to self-quarantine for a few days, the cat began to have seizures. My own vet and the other critical care vet all agreed that it was time.

And so, I had to watch my baby be put down on Skype rather than being there with him at the end. Damn virus.

It took five days to get my results back. Five. Days. Alex and I were both clear, of course. Otherwise this story would’ve started saying that Alex and I had to quarantine for at least two weeks when we had the virus.

And now we’re opening the city back up.

June 6th’s 147 positive tests would’ve been administered on or around June 2. And those 147 people would’ve gotten it somewhere between May 19 and May 26. May 26 was Memorial Day, and lots of people have parties, so maybe this is an isolated event just because of Memorial Day.

I really do think it’s too early to open up. I’m afraid that things are going to get sharply worse and we’ll be seeing numbers much higher than 147 in the next two weeks. And then the cases from people being crowded together at the protests will start rolling in.

We’ve had over 3,000 cases in San Antonio so far, but I’m scared that soon we’ll be finding out just how lucky we’ve been.

Exercise and Immunity (COVID-19 series)

I was on a real roll there for a while, wasn’t I? Well, I’m not sure if what I have to say at this point is enough for an entire blog post or not.

San Antonio is, like most of the rest of the country, encouraging people to stay home as much as possible. “As much as possible” gives one quite a bit of wiggle room, however. Acquiring food, for example, is one of the things one can leave one’s home for. That includes both grocery shopping and going to restaurants. Restaurants are allowed to have drive-through and curbside service. Getting one’s car fixed is included, as is medical care, and, of course, one is allowed to go out if one is an essential worker.

Then there is outdoor exercise and recreation. They have closed the places where people have to be close together, like playgrounds and basketball courts, but the walking paths and greenways are open, and if you’ve been on my blog very long at all, you know that I spend a lot of time on the walking paths and greenways. I have *never* seen as many people there as I have in these last couple of weeks. We’re able to keep a proper social distance from one another (I admit that I had to step off the path a couple of times to get six feet from family groups a few times during my most recent walk), so this is wonderful to see. And when I drive to and from work, I see people jogging, riding their bicycles,* walking their dogs, riding skateboards, I’m really impressed. It is, as the man said, an ill wind that blows no one any good. Hopefully and the people of San Antonio will end up healthier than they used to be.

And there are proven links between exercise and immune response. My oncologist told me that I should exercise for at least half an hour at least five days a week in order to benefit from this connection. If all goes as planned. I should be cancer-free for a long time on this plan. While pondering this post, I even found that there is a journal specifically dedicated to the connection between exercise and the immune system — Exercise Immunology Review. I’m tempted to subscribe. And my mom said that I’d find scientific writing to be dry and boring. (I literally rolled my eyes as I typed that.)

Well, I guess I had enough in me to write a short blog post. I’m thinking about branching out into a medical blog and/or a book blog. If I could get my brain together enough to alternate among travel, medical, book, every day, I’d get 10 posts per month. I’m not sure what I’d do for the Gratuitous Amazon Link for each.

Speaking of Gratuitous Amazon Links, where was I? I completely missed the last post. I was starting on Ally Carter, so here’s the first book in her Heist Society series, called um, well, Heist Society. This is Carter’s international art thieves series and it’s awesome. There are three books in the series and I certainly hope she’ll keep going on that series.

*One of my coworkers was riding her bicycle last week and she fell off and broke her foot. She is now having to take a three-week leave of absence.

Pokemon Go and COVID-19

With so many people in isolation, or quarantine, or social distancing due to COVID-19, Niantic has had to change up some of how Pokemon Go plays.

To begin with, they postponed March’s Abra Community Day. This was frustrating for me, personally, because one of my coworkers had asked me to work for her the day that Community Day was originally scheduled. I finally worked out a way I could do both (by eating Granola Bars for my lunch hour while getting at least some Abra caught) and agreed to do it. However, the activity that my coworker wanted to do was cancelled because of the virus, and so she didn’t need to trade after all.

I got to enjoy the idea that I would be able to do Community Day for, like, 12 hours before they announced that they were postponing Community Day indefinitely.

As areas started being locked down, Niantic made changes to gameplay. They sold boxes of 30 incense for 1 coin (I bought one immediately, but haven’t used any — more on that later), increased the number of gifts one can carry to 20, changed it so that every Pokestop or gym you spin gives you a gift, and halved the amount of time it takes to hatch an egg. There’s something else, but I can’t think of it right now.

Oh, along with the postponement of Community Day, they’ve canceled Raid Hour until further notice. Wednesday (the day of Raid Hour) is the only day I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll be out early enough to socialize with my Pokemon Go friends, so that’s a bit of a bummer.

Now, as a pharmacy technician, I’m an essential worker. This is good news for me financially, and potentially bad news for me as a living, breathing, human being. You see, my job puts me at elevated risk (not nearly as high as for hospital personnel working with COVID-19 patients, of course, but higher than average). I have mild to moderate asthma, so I’m at ever-so-slightly elevated risk for serious effects from COVID-19 if I do catch it. So maybe someone here is looking for information on me after my unfortunate demise from COVID-19, in which case, “Hi! I washed my hands really excessively and tried really hard not to touch my face and worked really hard to keep at least 6 feet from anyone else and got moderate exercise to stimulate my immune system and apparently that wasn’t enough. Sorry!”

And that’s why I haven’t used any of my incense and why I spend one of every two coins I earn from holding gyms on Poffins. Because I may get this thing and I may have a very bad time with it. If I feel well enough to even mess with my phone, the Poffins will give me six hearts per day (double hearts for feeding my buddy) for five days so that’s 30 hearts right there, and if I can keep from getting it until after . . . Tuesday? that’ll be a sixth Poffin. If I feel well enough to actually play, then that’s 50 hearts with Poffins (six per day for feeding my buddy plus two per day each for playing with and photographing my buddy) plus another 24 for 12 days of play with your buddy and take a picture of your buddy for a total of 74 hearts? and I can burn two incense per day during my confinement. And if I can hold off on getting it until they have a vaccine or a treatment, well, then I have extra supplies.

However, since I don’t know whether I’m going to get it at all, and don’t know how I’ll fare if I do get it, I’m taking full advantage of the fact that I go out into the world and I go to the park to collect my full 20 gifts almost every day (I only got 18 today, however), so that I can make sure that any one of my friends who is not an essential worker or who lives in an area that’s really locked down gets supplies regardless of whether they can get to a Pokestop or gym.

By now, I also can, ironically, work Community Day (whenever it ends up happening) because I’ve kept my Abra as my buddy since March 4 or 5 (I see announcements of Abra Day both days) and I now have over 300 Abra candies. That’ll be enough to evolve my buddy and a shiny (25 candies to evolve an Abra to a Kadabra and another 100 for Kadabra to Alakazam) and I’m getting close to being able to evolve a third Abra, so I don’t need to catch Abra the whole three hours. I mean, it’d be nice to be able to do so, but I don’t have to be able to.

So, in short, three cheers to Niantic for making Pokemon Go easier to play for those in locked down areas. I don’t have COVID-19 yet, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t get it. I may make a kind of political post next complaining about the rates of testing (maybe with a side order of body horror about the testing process?) because that’s the freakiest part of this whole thing. We don’t know who has it. A week ago today, one of my coworkers took a script from someone who told her that he’d had a positive test *after* handing her the script. We had a guy with a bad cough today, too, and ended up disinfecting everything in the area after he left.

But, for now, it’s bedtime. See y’all tomorrow, probably.

ETA: Wow, I really screwed up the math last night. I think it’s correct now, though.

I Had Some New COVID-19 Thoughts

But I can’t remember half of them.

I’m getting better at taking more time to wash my hands. I’ve always been acceptable about washing my hands; I’m not the “splash-and-dash” type. I nearly always use soap (the only times I can think of not using soap is if I’m literally rinsing something I can see from my hands, like if I was making a pasta dish and got sauce on my hand and just need to remove those drops) and even if I didn’t scrub each finger, I at least rubbed my hands together and wrung them a bit. Now, I still wring them, but I also scrub the backs of my hands, and the way I wring my hands together, both sets of fingertips get soaped up, and so does my left thumb, but my right thumb is on the outside during the whole process so I’m taking the time to wash it.

I bought cheap 18-packs of washcloths and I’ve opened two of them. I use them to dry my hands after I wash them, so that I don’t get any virus that escaped the soap onto a communal towel. I wash the washcloths every other day or so, so I’m washing my hands 18 times every day, give or take. And that’s just when I’m home. I’m an essential worker, so I wash my hands every time I touch something a patient has touched (cash, an insurance card, a prescription), so that may be another ten or so a day. I’m washing my hands 1.75 times per hour while I’m awake. I realize that it’s probably hopeless to think that my family can avoid this just by washing my hands enough, but everything I’ve read says that hand washing is terribly important in combating COVID-19. If everyone did a good job of washing their hands, the virus would be passing much more slowly than it is. So, if this is correct, and if I can keep from getting infected, then I can go a long way towards preventing my dad from getting this. Alex assures me that he’s washing his hands every time he touches cash or anything as well. So we’ll just plug along the best we can.

Thank God for e-scripts, though. The vast majority of transactions we undertake don’t involve any physical contact from the patient to us. The doctor sends in an electronic prescription, we already have the insurance on file, the patient pays electronically or with a credit card, we hand them the script, and send them on their way.

They’re supposed to be putting sneeze guards in our stores to protect us from, well, the patients sneezing or coughing on us. They started this past Monday, and as I’m writing this, it’s very, very early on Friday. Let’s see what comes first — the sneeze guard, or our first case of COVID-19 among our patients.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Wow. I’ve read so many books, and there are so many that I just love, and I’m drawing a complete blank. I’m checking my Goodreads account for inspiration.

Ooh! Have I done any of Ally Carter’s series yet? Does it matter? No, it doesn’t. So, here we go, with the book that started it all (for me, at least), I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You, the first book of the Gallagher Girls series. There are two more series where those came from and I think there’s at least one crossover story. That should get me to the end of the week.

COVID-19 Update

They keep fooling around with the hours at my pharmacy. They’re currently looking at 9 am to 7 pm. This means that on Friday I’ll be working 10 am to 7 pm. Let’s see how that works out.

I really need to work harder on my target languages so that if it does drag on for at least 18 months I can work on something that might not kill me, or my dad, or my son. I don’t know if I can get good enough at any of them to work as a translator by then, but let’s give it our best shot.

They’re starting new restrictions on the activity of citizens of San Antonio starting at 11:59 pm tonight. We can only leave our houses for essential or exempted activities. This includes both Alex’s and my jobs, so there’s that. Outdoor recreation is only allowed if we stay more than 6 feet from others participating in outdoor recreation. I walk pretty fast, and I’m pretty sure I can legally pass people on the path. The greenway path, where I measured it, is 10 of my shoe lengths wide. My shoe is about 10 inches wide (I just measured one), so that’s, what, 8 feet? So, I guess that if I cross over to the other side of the path when I’m at least 6 feet behind the person I’m passing and don’t go back over until I’m at least 6 feet in front of the person I’m passing, I’ll be okay.

I really want to know if this is going to lessen the number of people on the streets. I had the day off today and when my dad and I drove through for dinner, traffic didn’t seem appreciably lighter.

I’m trying to isolate Alex and me from my dad to the extent possible while living in the same house. We have our own bedrooms, bathroom, and living area. I bought a bunch of cheap washcloths and we’re using those to dry our hands. I was using the dish soap bottle to wash our hands, but yesterday I bought our own pump bottle of liquid soap so that we aren’t getting our COVID-y hands all over the dish soap bottle. I try to remember to wipe down the doorknob, refrigerator door handle, and light switches daily. Is there anything else that we touch that he touches? I’m sure there’s something, but I can’t think of it right now.

And it’s been brought to my attention that I need to put something like ” As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” somewhere on my page. So I just added a widget to the sidebar that says just that, just in case my usual chatty Gratuitous Amazon Link stuff isn’t “substantially similar” to ” As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.”

Speaking of Gratuitous Amazon Links, hmmm. What book series have I posted already? I know I did Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Kane Chronicles. I think I’ve done Young Wizards, too. Have I done Heroes of Olympus yet? Well, just in case I haven’t, here’s the first book: The Lost Hero, by Rick Riordan.