Excellent girls’ day out with F: splurged on new manga and a new D&D book; had breakfast and lunch out with lots of good talks; and binge-watched a lot of anime. Grateful.

Hope this bodes well for a summer of recalibrating after a rough end to middle school.

My kid is learning the hard way how much teenage girls can really suck toward one another.

Starting to experience PTSD all over again from my junior high and high school years. My goal is to make sure my kid has more support through these years than I ever did.

I just saw a Uvalde shooting victim’s First Communion photo, and I am officially broken. Retiring from news and social media for a while.

F’s cooking class made alfajores, a shortbread-like sandwich cookie filled with dulce de leche and popular in South America, but a field trip for another class kept her from sampling them. So, we made them at home.

I thought I’d be bored by today’s morning ballgame on Peacock. But Jason Benetti and his rapport with the local baseball analysts du jour make the game eminently watchable. ⚾️

Can’t think of a better way to end the week than listening to the Atlanta Braves organist play “Always Look on the Bright SIde of Life” while the home team is down 11-6 to the Padres.

After a minor vent session this week with a manager at work, I took her up on her offer to cover for me today. I put in an hour this morning and called it a day.

As challenging as things have been lately, I’m grateful for the generosity of colleagues when things get tough.

“There is dignity in Dementia if we say there is. There is wisdom and humor and radiance if only we can see it. I make the effort because my mother does and because it is what she deserves after a long life well lived, harming no one.”

Found on our front yard this morning.

Can’t decide whether my sense of taste is off because of COVID or because of plain old sinus congestion. Either way, I’m not used to nacho cheese Doritos tasting like corn flakes.

Whether you like baseball or not, here's the kind of viral stuff we all need

I really needed a good kind of viral moment lately, and two baseball fans in Toronto gave me that.

And it led to this moment earlier today.

The Toronto Star spoke with the guy who caught the ball, who seems to be as cool as you hope he’d be. Also a great back story about the kid, who emigrated to Canada from Venezuela with his family and was named after Derek Jeter.

I just really hate that a Yankee made me cry in a good way.

(Also, the Blue Jays' George Springer gave the ball guy two signed jerseys for his kindness. Lots to love about this whole thing.)

Not at 100 percent. But I’m okay enough to be useful, and the office workload is exploding, so I’m back working from home.

If I had my druthers, I’d be offline sucking down hot tea and watching “Aggretsuko.” Never has a workaholic, metal-loving red panda meant so much to me.

Are vents bad for this disease?

Now that the kid is recovering nicely and I’m much less worried about her, my thoughts are drifting to the fact that HOLY CRAP I ENDED UP WITH THIS STUPID COVID THING.

Sick of this illness already, especially when I probably was too optimistic yesterday about being on the upswing. It’s more like being at a standstill—a phlegmmy standstill that exhausts me ands burns deep into my sinuses.

I hoped to be back tomorrow to work (from home, as I have the past 2 years now), but now I don’t really see that happening.

Been so tired and hangry all afternoon, and running on barely 3 hours of restless sleep from last night. Probably not a good idea when you’re dealing with a disease with a zillion different outcomes.

Oh well. Vent over. Kinda needed to unleash, I guess. And I just blew the carb count on chili dogs and a chocolate cake shake. Time for Advil and bed.

Ask not for whom COVID-19 tolls

So, the Evil Virus finally showed up for us over the past week. And it’s all the fun it’s been cracked up to be.

In our case, it’s actually been less, compared with what others have experienced. At least F and I are still alive, for one thing. (I had two cousins die from COVID over the past year or so.) Our experience has been more like The Worst Flu Ever, with persistent fever, body aches and headaches, and a sore throat that feels like needles in the voicebox. I’ve never seen F quite this sick, and I haven’t been this ill in a long time.

But as I’ve mentioned to friends and colleagues – and on this here website – I highly suspect that things would be a lot worse if we weren’t vaxxed.

(C was smart enough to get a fresh booster shot a week or two ago, and I’m convinced that that is what kept the virus from taking him down with us.)

And even though I’m still overweight, I’m nearly 70 pounds lighter than I was a year ago; as obesity is a comorbidity of COVID-19, I’m even more grateful now for the weight loss.

Our illness has been relatively mild enough to be treated with Advil, hot tea with honey (plus lemon for me) and other fluids, and binge-watching anime on Netflix. (I will gush at another time over our discovery of “Aggretsuko.") So, at least we’re fully hydrated and entertained.

Fortunately, F is very much on the upswing after the onset of her symptoms last Wednesday; given her school’s COVID protocols, she may be okay to go back in the next day or so. For now, I can report – with perhaps more optimism than merited, since I tested positive yesterday – that I may not be far behind: My fever has subsided so far, though the body aches linger, and my biggest issue is a scratchy, phlegmmy throat.

F and I let our guard down with the masking over the past month or two (although she still continued to mask at school, even when most kids did not). I regret that now, even though the past few weeks of freedom reminded me of how much I hate wearing masks.

(C said when he called the school nurse’s attendance line this morning to notify the school that F would be absent, the voicemail box was full. F’s friends have confirmed that an awful lot of kids at school have been out sick. So, we can confirm that no, the pandemic isn’t over.)

Grateful that this whole experience has been survivable. Hope this is a cautionary tale for people who hate masking as much as I do. And I pray for those who are dealing with this, especially in far worse manifestations than ours.

I guess the virus hasn’t hurt my Wordle capabilities.

Wordle 317 3/6

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Appreciate the well wishes from all the kind micro.blog folks. Now both F and I are COVID-positive. Been loading up on Advil, tea with honey, and anime on Netflix. It’s like the World’s Worst Flu, and I can’t help but think this would be a lot worse if we hadn’t been vaxxed.

F stayed home from school yesterday with a low-grade fever and sore throat. She tested negative on a home COVID test.

She woke up today with a 102.6-degree temperature, so I made a doctor’s appointment for her this afternoon. And then she took another home test.

Sigh.

"It's time to talk about our billionaire problem"

Kevin Clarke writes in America magazine:

It is perhaps not a shock to discover U.S. oligarchs are generally interested in promoting policies that protect their wealth or allow them to accumulate more of it while countering legislation or social campaigns that promote income-building or wealth-equity efforts, or that protect the environment but add to industrial production costs. Is it time this collective power were restrained by sensible tax policies aimed at reducing the billionaire class’s accumulating economic and political might?

In a word, yeah.

Pope Francis has in recent years regularly dressed down the world’s wealthiest for not only declining to do their part to mitigate ecological and human suffering but for elevating the care and feeding of their personal fortunes as the primary good. In these pandemic times, Francis has talked a lot about building back a better world, one that includes a thorough examination of conscience of the role of finance and wealth in human economic and spiritual development and the protection of creation.

In doing so, he turns not to Marxist or Peronist economic doctrine for inspiration, as his many critics like to allege. His source material is simultaneously deeper and more simple. Despite what America’s prosperity gospelites prefer to believe, Jesus was not shy about his distaste for wealth accumulation and the personal and social imbalances, long before Marx, it seemed to produce.

What’s left of the slightly-sloppy-yet-glorious first batch cream puffs that F and I have ever baked together.

F suggested using leftover cream filling as dip. Genius.

Rather than wallow in my failure, I will instead take pride in having enough restraint to not explode in a burst of obscenities.

Wordle 306 X/6

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The Sesame Street Word of the Day with “Ted Lasso’s” Brett Goldstein starts with “F.” And no, it’s not the one you’re thinking.

I really hated this one. And based on what I saw from folks on Twitter and from C’s experience with it, this was tough all around.

Wordle 304 6/6

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Why I still linger on the evil Meta entity known as Instagram: I can still discover holy posts like Patti Smith’s on Easter. I’ll never hear “Dancing Barefoot” the same way again.

Frannie was received into the Roman Catholic Church and confirmed last night during the Easter Vigil. As we couldn’t find her patron saint, St. Francis of Assisi, among the many parish icons, we settled for a holy selfie with Franciscan saint Padre Pio.

Color these done. Made with a weird Target “color swirl” dye kit.