Tag: covid

Let’s try this again

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I am caught up on my grading, and lesson plans are done through Tuesday. This is actually pretty good; any time I’m planned more than a day out is a feat. My goal is to go to work every day this week and to keep my fucking mask on all day tomorrow when I’m around people. I’m bad at this; even after all these years masks can make me panicky, which I recognize as a me problem so I try to power through it anyway, but I do hate the damned things so very much.

That said, in terms of the number of people I actually know who either have the ‘vid right now or are recovering from it, it’s literally the worst it’s been since all of this started. And that’s people who know they have it, because a world where I didn’t bother to take a test is really easy to imagine– as I said, this felt like every beginning-of-the-school-year cold I’ve ever gotten, and my son’s never progressed past a rough throat. But yeah. I’m caught up, and I’m ready for this week, and we’re going to pretend last week never happened, and it’ll all be fine.

You can tell I’m alive from the whining

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, video gamesLeave a comment

I am, with one more day of forced quarantine before finally being allowed to go back to work, at 95% healthy 95% of the time, and I mean that math fairly precisely, because literally for about three minutes out of every hour I will have a quick coughing fit because of a dry spot in the back of my throat or (this happened yesterday, and it was fun) convince myself I can’t swallow for a minute or some other bit of nonsense, but most of the time I am completely fine. I feel like I’ve been sick; I no longer feel like I am sick. My son, unfortunately, tested positive too, but I’m convinced that he got it through some other pathway than from me, because he has a completely different set of symptoms. Mine is nearly all a head cold, despite those previous complaints; his is in his lungs and throat, and he’s got a really mild case, to the point where I think if we hadn’t tested him he wouldn’t even be missing school.

Oh, and my sense of taste and smell has gone wonky against that’s par for the course with Covid at this point.

So the good thing about being home from work– and this is where the real whining is going to begin, so brace yourself– is that I’ve had tons of time to play video games in between monitoring my email for replies from students and staring off into space. The problem is that every fucking game in the universe came out in the last two weeks, and I cannot decide what the fuck I want to actually play. Just in the last couple of weeks, Armored Core VI, Blasphemous II, Starfield, and Baldur’s Gate III came out. Sometime next week I get Lies of P. I haven’t even downloaded Blasphemous yet. Starfield and Baldur’s Gate III are both hundred-hour-plus games. I enjoyed having a YouTube channel, but I shut it down precisely because of shit like this; I’d be going absolutely batshit trying to come up with episodic content worth watching right now.

Anyway, I spent yesterday playing BGIII and today playing Starfield and the idea I had was I was going to pick one and stick to it, then go back to the other later … only right now I think when I finish this I’m going to play Armored Core, which … wasn’t the plan. I’m not good at bouncing back and forth between games so this is maybe weirder for me than it sounds, and I’m annoyed that out of all this shit nothing has jumped out and made the choice obvious yet. Like, I’m mad at myself that none of these games have grabbed me by the beard and demanded my attention yet. None of them are bad, they’re just not doing it for me right now for some damn reason.

Point is: blech.

I’m going to get to that book review tomorrow, I swear.

In which I’m glad you’re safe

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

…you don’t know this, but you almost died just now. If you recall– this will not require a high level of recollective prowess, don’t worry– I had Covid, or at least I thought I did, earlier this week and last weekend. I never once tested positive. I actually spent some time at work this week and generally enjoyed myself; I still really like my kids, which isn’t rare, necessarily, but it’s rare that I’m even just this far into the school year and haven’t yet identified the kids who are going to be a huge pain in my ass all year. I’m sure there will be some, but I genuinely don’t know who they are yet.

Earlier today we were taking the pool down for the day and my wife made a comment about how terrible the ground under the pool smelled. I commented that I couldn’t smell it. Two minutes later, I had my nose in a jar of minced garlic and, while I could tell there was garlic in the jar, I had used the jar the previous day to make some grits and I knew good and Goddamn well that I couldn’t smell it nearly as clearly as I’d been able the day before.

One Covid test later, I was somehow negative again, which is why you’re still alive, because I would surely have ended all life on Earth had I received a positive test five days after being symptom-free and returning to work. Why I’m getting new symptoms today when I’ve been fine since, like, Sunday night or Monday afternoon is an open question.

I have spent most of my leisure time in the last couple of days building Lego sets. I have never reviewed a Lego set on this site, but it might be time to do so, because the Horizon Forbidden West Tallneck set is amazing, and the set I’m working on now, the moon lander, is pretty fucking sweet in its own right.

In which this is bullshit

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

My son has Covid, and he’s in the living room feeling completely fine and screaming at the friend who gave him Covid over his iPad, so nothing abnormal there at all. I do not have Covid, or at least these tests I keep taking keep coming up negative, but I’ve probably been asleep for at least 35 of the last 48 hours and I still feel like hell. My goal this year for school was to show up; I want to finish the year with at least half of my sick days still available, and I’ve missed two of the first three days of school already.

This is bullshit.

I watched Prey last night, or at least I think I did; I don’t really have the energy to review the thing but it was pretty good and if you’ve been meaning to watch it but haven’t you’ll probably really enjoy it. I may finally watch The Princess tonight; TikTok has been showing me ads for it for what feels like months and I want to watch it. I’ve also got half a season of Sandman left and apparently the first episode of She-Hulk dropped yesterday? So maybe I’ll just spend the next day and a half watching TV and catching up on all this shit.

This is it, though. Once I’m over whatever this is, second bout of Covid or not, I’m not getting sick again in 2022. You fucking hear me, universe? We’re done. I’m going to work every day and it’s going to be a good year and I’m going to enjoy it, and I’ll fight you if I fucking have to. The end.

So far so good

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Got through a day of meetings without any rage-murders, although I may have a teacher to talk off the ledge tomorrow morning, we’ll see. So far no one has tested positive for Covid in my house either, and we all took tests this morning. I just went through the schedules of all my students and reported any inconsistencies or problems I found and I think 7:41 PM is a decent time to be done working for the day, especially since I was expected to be at work before 8.

There was no video posted to my YouTube site today, because first week of school, so I’m going to go see if I can get the next couple of days knocked out before I fall asleep. Tomorrow will be a late night because I have school and then Parent Night, so if I don’t post anything don’t get too het up about it.

Nineteen years. Let’s do this.

Well, shit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Had a great time at the party yesterday— not that that was a surprise, mind you– but we didn’t get home until nearly midnight and pretty much collapsed into bed and died, and as of right now (4:36 PM) I haven’t managed to shower yet. Oh, and we got a text from birthday mom that the birthday girl woke up with mild cold symptoms and promptly tested positive for Covid.

Super.

My son doesn’t start school until Friday, and my wife had already taken the week off, so technically in a world where someone in the house has to have Covid, this would be a pretty good week for one of them to catch it. My wife had it in January; the boy hasn’t caught it yet. Me? School starts Wednesday, and tomorrow I’m expected to be at a meeting with every single other teacher in the district. Plus, despite having done it once before (*) I really don’t know how to write sub plans for the first Goddamn day of school, much less the first few.

So, yeah, I’m going to be testing tonight, and we’ll see how that works out. If I’m negative and unsymptomatic I’ll go ahead and go to the thing tomorrow, but I think I’m gonna mask up all week no matter what happens, just for shits and giggles. We’re all vaccinated to the gills and I should still have some antibodies left over from having it in May, but I really don’t love the school year starting off like this.

(*) The boy’s birthday is August 23rd. I attended parent/teacher night right after he was born and really enjoyed the looks on people’s faces when I told them I wouldn’t be there for the first two days of school (confused, angry) and then how they changed when I told them it was because I’d just become a father. The difference is at that school we had an experienced building sub who knew how the place worked and how I wanted my classroom run. Here we’re going to have teacher coverage, which is not going to be the same thing at all.

Covid Update, Day 5

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Reading2 Comments

This kinda sucks, y’all.

I’m taking at least one more day. The earliest I could go back is tomorrow and I’m not going to; I still have a fever, or maybe have a new fever, and the fatigue over the last couple of days has been intense. I’ve taken three naps today. That’s not a joke. I probably could have spent the whole day asleep today if I’d really wanted to.

Part of me feels like I ought to suck it up and go in, and part of me is like 99.5 is a fucking fever, dude, and you have to stand for eight hours. You can’t even lie down for eight hours right now. The really weird thing is that I genuinely don’t have a hell of a lot right now in terms of other symptoms. I had the one night of nightmare chills, about a day and a half of a rough cough, and today there’s been some digestive stuff, which is weirder than it sounds because I haven’t been eating all that much.

I dunno. I’ve been sicker. I’ve been a lot sicker. But this reminds me of going on to brain drugs right now. All I want is to sleep.

I’ve been promising book reviews for a couple of days now, and I haven’t had the energy for them, so let me do this at least: I’ve just read Hunger of the Gods, the second book in John Gwynne’s Bloodsworn trilogy, and The Rage of Dragons, the first book in Evan Winter’s The Burning. The second book of The Burning is out and on my Unread Shelf; I’ll probably get to it pretty quickly. I’ve already reviewed the first book in the Bloodsworn quartet, and the short version is that the second book absolutely lives up to the promise of the first; right now these two books are my favorite things I’ve read this year and I don’t know how I’m going to make it a year (at least, as there’s no release date yet) for the third book.

Rage of Dragons actually scratches a pretty similar itch to the Bloodsworn books, only with a culture inspired by the Xhosa and the Zulu instead of the Norse. I kind of feel bad discussing it in the same post as the Bloodsworn, because it’s not the achievement that those books are– but it’s important to point out that this is Winter’s debut novel, and John Gwynne has been around for a good while now. This book focuses on a single main character rather than employing rotating POVs, and it’s pretty explicitly a revenge story, to the point where it can feel a little one-note at times. But it’s done well and I’m looking forward to the sequel. Honestly, if you enjoyed Bloodsworn, you’ll like this one too.

I slept all day

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I definitely owe you two book reviews, though, so I’ll try and get those written up tomorrow if I can. In the meantime I’m sort of half-assedly watching Our Flag Means Death and reading. But damn, I’m tired today.