 |
| Chair Car by Edward Hopper, 1965 |
"You want to do lunch?" "Sorry, Covid"
"How's the deadline coming along?" "Sorry, Covid"
"Have you mowed the lawn recently?" "Sorry, Covid"
"Did you know your shed was on fi-" "Sorry, Covid."
I picked up this lovely strain at GenCon, and until I tested positive thought it was a bad cold (Protip: It is NEVER just a bad cold). GenCon was a textbook spreader event - 71,000 people, a minimum of masks, and a huge, packed exhibit hall. The resulting debacle swept through the creative community, taking out a lot of the professional class (and those that evaded it came back with some other form of con crud). One of the booths blamed a particular creative as "Patient Zero" as they showed up from the earlier San Diego con already infected, and had to bail, but I think there was more than enough opportunity from everyone else who was slowly shuffling through the show floor.
Despite that, it was a very pleasant convention. I saw a lot of friends (and to my knowledge infected none of them), and overcommitted to helping out on a number of panels (Saturday I had five panels and book signing, so that when I felt the first symptoms on the flight back Sunday, I was kinda expecting some bad news). I was on the waning side of my latest vaccination, though, and while I kept masked in crowded, public areas, there was more than enough opportunities outside of the exhibit hall to pick up something nasty.
The culprit was likely the new hotnesses in the Covid family - FliRT, an Omicron variant, or LB.1, which was a related variant (We're still giving them cute names). Those are the two big contenders right now. And just so you know, there's a spike right now in the virus from checking wastewater (though not from hospital admissions or deaths). It seems milder but still miserable. I rolled through a cascade of cold symptoms (head, throat, chest, doubling back to the sinuses), stuffiness, lack of appetite, headaches, and exhaustion. And that last one was the worst - a continual mental fuzziness (brainfog) that still has not fully dissipated. I've tested negative after about a week of the worst of it, but symptoms can persist for about two weeks afterwards. Lovely.
So for the time being, I'm doing a lot of Ricola and rest. Working from home, I've been able to take naps and then return to the task. I consider myself fortunate, but send out the warnings to others who have been dealing with this. In about a week I head off to Grand Rapids for another (smaller) convention. And I'm working on making sure I don't bring anything back from that on.
More later,
