I Flowers and bees, not the buzzing kind!
It was to be my day of social delight. A tale of two Bee's -- a breakfast with my New Mexico friend Barbara, then a Zoom call with my Polish friend, Bee. In between? Fun in the yard!
Well, I got one out of three (of those delightful options), so there's that!
My day began in the night. Ed called from the sheep shed. A runny nose, a sore throat. I could hear him croaking. Damn. I left him a Covid test kit and went back to bed and waited. We discussed how quickly he should take Paxlovid. I waited some more. He calls back with the surprising news: I'm negative! -- he tells me.
Sure, you can have a false negative, but he woke up with an all clear on his cold symptoms too. Either he had some passing other irritant or he had an extremely light case of Covid. (An afternoon second test confirmed the negative result.)
Me, I'm still sniffling away, but not too bad. Yet. I was up cleaning the garden at the usual time, fighting not so much my cold symptoms, but the mosquitoes. After yet another heavy rainfall overnight, they're just having a field day out there! Fun in the yard? Not so much.
The garden looks okay, but in my opinion, it's modest in its display. What a surprise -- places that are increasingly shaded are not producing a heavy flower display. That and the constant rain... Still, it's deeply satisfying to be immersed in a lily field. July is truly their month.
Back at the farmhouse, I have breakfast. Alone. Well, with Dance, but that hardly counts. She doesn't talk.
(Ed and I communicate by phone or this way: )
Bee bails me out with a nice, extended Zoom session. And my friend Barbara? She texts -- guess what, we could have had breakfast after all! Turns out I tested positive for Covid this morning as well!
Travel these days comes with hazards.
II A tale of another B, the British kind
Having just spent a week in Scotland where I kept myself happy by listening to the radio while driving down roads that don't deserve that label, I got a lot of pre-election British chatter and opinion hurtling. I have to say, I like the way Britain (and France and a bunch of other countries) run their elections: campaign periods are limited! Five weeks in Britain and two weeks in France! Can you imagine?? None of this prolonged agony we experience here in the US. [Take note, you skeptics who say that four months is not enough time to present an alternative to Mr. Biden before the public. What are we, dunces, worse at processing info than the Brits or French voters? Personally, four months is a bit too long for me. Let's go for two. Hey, yesterday I cast an absentee vote in my state primaries for state representative and I knew NOTHING about any of the names of the ticket. What is Google for? I got informed in less than ten minutes.]
A Labour win was predicted in Britain. Many people were saying that they would be voting strategically at the local level, so that Labor would have a strong support in pushing through reform. Now that's what I call community minded! Farmers, who in Britain are pretty split between the conservatives and Labour were wanting change so badly that most gave their vote to the one party who could accomplish something.
[Here's another "this could never happen in America" moment: the British victorious PM, Stamer, is a professed atheist.]
This morning I listening to this piece by Jonathan Pie (from the NYTimes). It's both factually strong and very funny! (You know how the French take pride n their cuisine and their cheeses? Well, the British take pride in being funny! It's their thing! You can find more of Pie's take on British politics on YouTube: it helps to laugh when you've just been, as they have been, through a fourteen year period of calamitous political ruin and an economic slide to hell.) Whether you follow British politics at all or don't know a Tory from a potato (listen to the video link and you'll get the reference to a potato!) -- this piece will make you laugh.
III And then there is F for Fatigue
The one thing you can count on with Covid is a high level of fatigue. The conventional wisdom is that the second and third days will be your worst Covid days (unless you are at high risk for some extraordinary health failure) and I am hitting this period right now. Welcome to the coughing sniffling tired wonderland of Covid. Just like the last time, except this time I passed (for now) on Paxlovid, which does offer quicker relief. I'll let you know tomorrow if that was the right call!
Well, I'm glad I have a pot of chili in the fridge. The lesson here is, if you get Covid, do a lot to prepare for being sick the first day, because the second one will be worse. The storm will come, before things improve.
F is for Friday, too, and this one has been a weird one -- snuck in between a major holiday and the weekend. I did go out (I know you're not supposed to but I avoided all people types) to pick up (curbside!) more Covid tests (we have finally run out!) and to put something in the mail (drive up!). It's like back in the days of the pandemic when isolation was your go-to state of affairs and when getting close to humans was off the charts scary.
I expect to zonk out early, so in anticipation of the inevitable, I'll post this now. And turn on the TV and drift off to some irrelevant movie, easily forgettable, easily dismissed.
Tomorrow will be day three of this. Let's see how that goes!
with love...
