Not Dead Yet

Somebody asked me if I’m dead, given the lack of posts here for 4 months. It’s not prima facie an unreasonable question.

Nope

Not dead yet.

That’s going to be our new motto, here at Château Weekend: not dead yet, or “nondum mortua” for those wanting to blazon a Weekend Escutcheon.

Though, to be fair, there are times the notion has been thought through. It’s been a bit of a rough time:

• Long COVID, now officially diagnosed, continues to plague me with brain fog. Honestly, it’s how I imagine it would be if I suddenly lost 20-30 IQ points and all ability to focus or concentrate. I have an attention span comparable to my cats.

  (As you can see from the picture, showing the Weekend Publisher, and his apprentice the Assistant Weekend Publisher, ensconced in their executive chair, the cats greet this with complete aplomb.)

• The Weekend Editrix acquired her 2nd case of COVID-19, due to a packed return flight from Japan with people coughing. Yes, she was carefully masked, but in a confined space for that long with dubious air quality handling… it was more or less inevitable.

  For another time, I’ll tell the tale of the flaming hoops through which one must now jump to get paxlovid, the stone-stupid prejudices against it being what they are.

• I’ve managed to injure myself. While walking on some ice, the muscles in my left thigh decided to be sprained, and I mean really sprained. I went down & couldn’t get back up. Docs say no fracture, but wait for swelling to go down to assess tendon damage.

  In the meantime, I walk at best porly and have acquired an Old Man Cane and a stoic attitude about pain management. (Though that’s not so bad. If this is a permanent thing, I’m gonna get an oak cane made with some equations from my papers carved into it, and a replaceable handle with, say, a laser pointer.)

• We changed health insurance from the Medicare Advantage forced upon us by my former employer to an Original Medicare + Medigap Supplement + Part D plan to remove one layer of officious and unwanted insurance supervision. About the same cost, but then I tend to want gold-plated health insurance becaues I like risk avoidance.

  That has caused no end of problems switching over, getting all the auto-payments set up, getting hospitals and doctors to pay attention, and so on. More about the travails of the American health insurance system later. (Soon, with venom.)

The Weekend Conclusion

So, we’re working through some stuff here.

The good news is that the “working through” part is working, or so it seems.

Valentine’s Day will be a dinner at home (though a nice one with some lobster and fondue).

In the meantime, I’ve got a backlog of proposed articles I want to write, and about a bajillion open browser tabs pointing at provocative subjects about which I may have a thing or two to say. Brain fog permitting, I’ll try to get to those.

Heartfelt advice: COVID-19 really did a number on me; don’t get COVID-19. Get as vaccinated as you can and avoid crowded indoor situations of questionable ventilation.

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Notes & References

Nope.