The Fluffbucket Diaries

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.

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.

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.

It’s been a few years since I’ve been to an Easter vigil Mass, and my only experience has been at an Episcopal parish. This America piece reminds me of the sheer length of the liturgy at Roman churches like ours.

I’ll be fortifying myself with caffeine later this afternoon.

Finally able to watch live White Sox baseball after cutting the cable cord, except it’s on Apple TV+ without our great local broadcasters.

Appreciate hearing women handle play-by-play and some analysis, but the hi-res “Megalodon” shots are weirding me out.

Lent ended on Holy Thursday. And on Good Friday, we made our first attempt at hot cross buns. Not pretty, but we’ll settle for fluffy and tasty.

At a pep rally with incredibly loud marching band music for incoming freshmen at the high school. Having major flashbacks to my own south suburban San Diego high school experience. Except with way, WAY more white people.

Am I wrong to be creeped out by MLB umpires wearing the logo of “the official cryptocurrency exchange of Major League Baseball”?

Several YouTube instructional video replays later — as well as at least two attempts to swat a playful cat away — I finally succeeded at making a palm cross.

Pleasantly surprised to see three or four Padres fans on this Spin list of 108 musicians predicting the 2022 baseball season. Still too many Dodger followers, though. And it’s sorely lacking Geddy Lee talking about his Blue Jays.

Theologian Greg Hillis tells MLB: “Quit Trying to ‘Fix’ Baseball” (Commonweal).

Don’t run from baseball’s leisurely pace. Embrace it. Teach about it. Market it. … No matter how distracted we are, we know intuitively that there are deep patterns within us and without us, and that happiness is in some way connected to our discovery and contemplation of them.

Hillis’s essay is prompting me to give Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture another spin.

Random finding: “Rare footage discovered of Prince, 11, at 1970 Minneapolis teachers’ strike” (Guardian)

Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic:

I’ve noticed a new island of work at the end of the day. Sometime around 9 p.m., I’ll open my computer and see that I have about a dozen urgent-ish emails and Slack messages. So, while in front of the television or with a podcast playing in the background, I’ll spend a late-night hour or more replying to these messages, typing the same intro over and over: ‘Sorry for the delay …’ ‘Oops, I missed this …’ ‘Hey, just seeing that you …’

I can relate. In fact, I’ll probably be online like this tonight after F and C go to bed to catch up on work; I have an appointment this afternoon, so I’ll play catchup if needed later.

Most meetings, I believe, are useless time sucks spawned directly from Satan’s Outlook calendar. Fortunately, I am less prone to meetings than some of my colleagues, though I am stuck with my share. Others, unfortunately, aren’t so lucky:

‘People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic,’ says Mary Czerwinski, the research manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft. ‘That means everything else—like coding and email and writing—is being pushed later.’ Workday creep and meeting creep aren’t two separate trends; they’re the same trend.

(In other news, there’s a “Human Understanding and Empathy” group at Microsoft. Who knew?)

I’m grateful to have a job with this kind of flexibility. But I can’t help but feel somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of being “at work” around the clock.

Thank God I work late less than I used to, and only if it means I’m able to take care of important errands or spend time with family. But it requires a lot of restraint of my workaholic tendencies, which fortunately have dissipated with age and a growing sense of knowing better.

Nothing says “the Midwest” like monthly tornado siren testing.

Back to work today. Wish F and I were still in St. Louis, strung out on frozen custard and Provel cheese.