Category: personal

I probably still have COVID

I got sick with COVID two weeks ago. I took the whole week off from work, started Paxlovid, and got better. This week, I worked from home the whole week. I was feeling better Monday through Thursday, but was still testing positive as of Thursday. Then, on Friday, I got sick again. And I’m still feeling sick today. I haven’t taken another test yet, so I’m not sure if it’s a rebound COVID infection, a cold, or something else.

Here’s a good article on the Paxlovid rebound thing. The article says that a rebound usually lasts two or three days, but can last as long as ten. I’m really hoping for the two or three days, so I’ll be better by Monday. I’m not sure I can hack another week of being sick. And I’d kind of like to show my face in the office next week, if I can. (Not that I like being in the office, just that I don’t want people to think I’m slacking off…) I really wish we had, as a society, normalized the idea that erring on the side of caution is fine, and good, and pushing yourself to get back into the office as soon as possible isn’t good for anyone.

My Paxlovid was free, surprisingly. I’d assumed that, with the public health emergency over, there’d at least be a co-pay. But I guess the government program that pays for Paxlovid is still going. I did just see some articles about the coming price hike for Paxlovid though. Yikes. I hope my insurance will cover that, if I ever need it again.

With all the testing I’ve been doing, I almost ran out of COVID tests. I ordered a new batch from the free government program, but they haven’t shown up yet, so I ordered a couple of kits from Amazon. The retail price for a 2-pack seems to be $24, but Amazon had them on sale for about $16. So that’s not too bad, and of course they showed up the next day. (I also checked to see if my insurance would pay for them, but apparently that’s not a thing anymore, since the official “public health emergency” ended.)

Not that I would wish COVID on anyone, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one getting COVID recently. Stephen Colbert caught it too, and did one show from home, then skipped the rest of the week. So, if he can take some time off, I can too, right?

 

I got COVID

I got my COVID and flu shots on Saturday, as planned. On Sunday, I had a fair bit of pain in the arm where I’d gotten the COVID shot. But no other obvious side-effects. Then, on Monday, I woke up with my usual set of cold/flu-like symptoms: headache, slight fever, runny nose, etc. I assumed it was just side-effects of the COVID and/or flu shots.

It was still pretty bad on Tuesday, so I did a tele-medicine thing through CVS. The doctor there told me that, yes, it was probably just side-effects from the vaccines, but that I should do a COVID test. So I did that, and it came back positive. I really should have gone back and done a second call with CVS, but I didn’t. I can’t tell you why, except that I was pretty sick and just wanted to sleep. And I was hoping maybe it was a false positive.

I  was still sick on Thursday, so I did a second COVID test and that came back positive too. This time, I decided to call my regular doctor and see what she said. She wasn’t in the office that day, but her receptionist acted as a go-between, and she prescribed Paxlovid for me. In retrospect, I really should have reported the positive COVID test on Tuesday and gotten started with the Paxlovid then. Better late than never, I guess.

So now it’s Friday, and I’m feeling a little better. I probably could have gone back to work today (remotely of course), but I decided to just take a full week off. Better to get one more day of rest. The Paxlovid has a couple of side-effects. The worst is the metallic taste it leaves in my mouth. It’s quite unpleasant, and it doesn’t go away. (It’s not just the aftertaste of the pills, so you can’t just wash it out.)

So the plan now is to isolate through the weekend and start back at work on Monday, working remotely all week. Our company doesn’t have a firm policy about that, but I’m pretty sure it’s OK for me to do that. I’d like to be in the office for at least one day next week, if I could, since we’re supposed to have a meeting with the guy who (I think) will be my new boss, and it would be good to meet him in person. (My current boss is retiring at the end of the year.) But hopefully I can participate in that meeting via Teams.

Meanwhile, NYCC started yesterday. I guess I’m glad that I didn’t make plans for that, since I would have had to cancel them. I haven’t kept up with any news coming out of the con, since I’ve been pretty out of it, prior to today. This whole thing has made me even more reticent to go out and re-enter the world (as it were). And it’s made me realize that I’ve gotten a bit too lax about masking up. Lately, I’ve been skipping the mask sometimes, in environments where I should probably be wearing one (even though no one else is…).

 

Jury duty and a rough week

This has turned out to be one of those weeks where I feel like I’ve barely made it through in one piece. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it was still kinda rough. I had jury duty this week. I thought that might be kinda fun and interesting, but now I’m regretting not just finding a way to dodge it. In and of itself, it was perfectly fine, but I picked up a cold or something there, and I’m still getting over it.

I thought it might be fun to write up a few notes on how jury duty worked out. The process was kind of interesting. It started with a Zoom orientation session last Friday. That lasted about two hours. There were about 300 people in the session. It mostly consisted of watching this video. So that wasn’t too bad, though there’s no reason why they couldn’t have just emailed us a link to the video and a few notes and skipped the whole Zoom thing.

Then, I had to show up at the courthouse on Monday, at 8 AM. That’s not a big deal for me, since I live just a few blocks from the courthouse. And I was actually looking forward to seeing the inside of that building, since I’ve lived here for so long and never had a reason to go inside.

The jury assembly room is inside an old church that was built in 1898. It’s pretty cool. We spent an hour or two sitting around in that room. They showed us another video there, this time on bias. I think that’s something they started doing about a year ago. And I think there were about 75 people called to come in that day. (And, of course, I can’t stop wondering why they showed us one video over Zoom and the other video in person. Why not both on Zoom? Or both in-person? Or just email us the links and let us watch at home?)

Some time between 9 and 10, they starting taking people up to the courtroom, which was on the fifth floor of the courthouse. (This is the newer, modern, courthouse, and not the nifty historic courthouse that was built in 1907. So I still haven’t been inside that building.) They took us up in groups of ten, and I think they took up maybe 40 or 50 of us, total.

In the courtroom, they had us fill out a questionnaire while they went through some preliminaries. I was a bit surprised to find out that this was a murder trial. I had assumed it would just be something fairly ordinary, like a civil suit, or a low-level criminal thing.

Then, they picked 14 people to move into the jury box. And they questioned them one by one about any “yes” answers on their questionnaire, which would all be reasons why they might not be able to serve on the jury, or things that might prevent them from being impartial. There were some conversational questions too, like “what do you like to watch on TV?” and “where do you get your news?”. It was interesting to sit through that, and listen to what everyone said.

The judge dismissed a number of people fairly quickly. Those were mostly folks with prior commitments, or where being away from work would cause a hardship for them. And there were a few folks who knew some of the police officers involved, and one who knew the prosecutor personally. Then, a bunch of people were dismissed by the prosecutor and the defense lawyer. I guess they don’t have to state their reasons aloud for those, but I think they’re supposed to have reasons for most of them. I’ll admit to wondering about why some of them were dismissed. A few were kind of obvious, but most weren’t, to me. The whole process of going through the questions, dismissing people, bringing more people up, questioning them, dismissing some of them, and then bringing up more people took quite a while. It was long enough that we had to take a lunch break and come back. They finally had a full jury at 2:30 PM, and dismissed the rest of us.

Overall, initially, I was glad I got called in, and glad I got called up to the courtroom to see how the process worked. It was all pretty interesting, and everyone involved was professional and courteous.

Later, though, I kind of wish I’d found a way out of it. I got pretty sick on Wednesday, and it’s obvious that I must have picked it up at the courthouse on Monday. I’m a bit mad at myself for that, since I didn’t wear a mask. I’d brought one with me, and intended on putting it on at some point, but nobody else was wearing one, and I got lulled into a false sense of security, I guess. So I had to use up two sick days this week, on Wednesday and Thursday. I worked from home yesterday, and was feeling a bit better, but I’m still not back to 100%. I guess this is only a cold, since I took two COVID tests and they both came back negative, so that’s good.

So now, I’ve missed a half a day of work last Friday, most of the day Monday, and all day Wednesday and Thursday. And I wasn’t really 100% on Friday, and didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped to. Now I’m hoping I can shake the remnants of this cold over the weekend and be ready to work a full week next week. It’s a little annoying to me how easily I can get thrown off track by something like this, but I guess it’s part of getting older. And I guess I should appreciate that I have some flexibility at work, with regard to time off and working from home. But I don’t want to push things too far there. Oh well. I guess this weekend will be spend mostly watching TV and napping.

first week back

Well, it’s the end of my first week back in the office on the new schedule. Short version: I survived working in the office for three days in a row. Longer version: I don’t like the “everyone is in the office at the same time” deal. It’s too crowded and too loud. If you go back to before the pandemic, the norm was to have meetings in person, in meeting rooms. Now, they’re all on Teams. So everyone is at their desk all day, and a lot of people are in a lot of meetings. So it makes it hard for a programmer to concentrate when I’m hearing bits and pieces of other people’s meetings all day. My AirPods Pro are a necessary tool at this point. I’ve been listening to The Pretenders a lot this week.

Going back to the football part of my previous post: Ugh. The Giants lost to the Cowboys, 40-0. That’s about the worst start they’ve ever had, at least in my memory. The Jets won, but Aaron Rodgers is done for the season. The Eagles won last night, and are now 2-0, so maybe I switch my allegiance to Philly!

And some notes on some tech stuff I’ve been working on: I started trying to learn Jenkins this week. I haven’t gotten too far yet. I keep getting interrupted. Reading up on installing Jenkins send me down a side trip to also consider installing WSL 2 and maybe Docker Desktop for Windows. I got as far as installing WSL 2 on my work desktop, and on my personal Windows 10 desktop and Windows 11 laptop. (I’d been meaning to do that anyway.) But no further. I got caught up in a support issue this afternoon, and never got back to any of my other work.

Next week could be interesting. In addition to having to go into the office Tuesday through Thursday, I might have jury duty starting Friday. I won’t know for sure on that until Thursday night. I could actually use a break from work, so I wouldn’t mind it if I get put on a jury and can miss a few days of work…

Ten years of losing it

I was taking a break this morning and updating my WordPress install (as one does), and noticed a couple of posts in my “on this day” sidebar: Losing It and Five years of losing it. So, if my math is right, that means it’s been about ten years since I started trying to lose weight.

I started out (in 2013) at around 230 pounds. And, as of five years ago, I had hit 135. Somewhere during 2020, I started going back up again, and I’m now around 155. I’ve been trying to stop going up and maybe course-correct to get myself back down to 150. And then I want to see if I can stay there. I think that would be a nice healthy weight.

But I’ve been having some trouble with discipline. I’ve been snacking a lot, often on stuff that I know has more calories than I want to acknowledge. (For instance, the nice peanut butter cookies from the coffee shop across the street from my apartment…)

I may continue to have trouble with snacking, given that there’s a fancy French bakery opening up on just downstairs from my apartment soon. But maybe being back in the office three days a week will help me out. There’s no good coffee shop or bakery near enough to the office to tempt me, so my afternoon snack when I’m in the office is usually just an office coffee and a granola bar.

Well, either way, here’s my weight graph over the last ten years. If nothing else, I’ve stayed consistent about weighing myself every day and recording all of my meals and snacks.

a graph of my weight over the last ten years
a graph of my weight over the last ten years

back to the office (more often) and other autumn stuff

Next week, we go from two days a week in the office to three days. The old way was that half the employees came in on Mon/Wed and the other half on Tue/Thu. (I was in the Tue/Thu group.) The new plan is for everyone to come in Tue/Wed/Thu, with Monday and Friday being work from home days for everyone.

I’m not looking forward to it. I think I get a lot more work done from home, and I’m a lot more comfortable. In the office, even with only half the folks there, it can get pretty noisy, since almost all of our meetings are on Teams now. I generally need to keep my AirPods in with some music playing to drown out everyone else’s Teams calls and concentrate on my own work. And I’m not a big fan of driving 20 minutes each way just to sit in a cubicle for eight hours. I’ve probably made these complaints on this blog already at some point, but it always makes me feel a little better to vent about it.

I’m also a little worried about my own stamina. I’ve been finding that my in-office days are kinda exhausting, sometimes. Maybe I have some kind of medical problem, or maybe I’m just getting too old for this stuff. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see if I can manage three days in a row or not.

NFL

On a different subject, today is the first Sunday of the NFL season. So that’s cool. The Giants are on the Sunday night game and the Jets are on Monday night, so there are no local afternoon games. I’m pretty sure I’ll turn on whatever games are on, and just let them play in the background today. It’s a rainy day and I don’t have much else to do.

I spent a little time this morning trying to figure out what NFL-related content I can watch on my streaming services this season. I can still watch NFL Matchup on ESPN+, it seems. And NFL Primetime too. Apparently, Inside the NFL has moved from Paramount+ to the CW, which is a bit weird. I guess I can watch that on my TiVo then, if I can figure out when it airs. And I guess I can watch PFT Live on Peacock, if I need more football news.

I’ve been getting into sports enough recently that I’ve been flirting with the idea of signing up for cable again, or one of the cable-like streaming services that includes ESPN. But any of those would cost me way too much money, and the prices are going up on some of them soon too. So I’m trying to stick with just what I have now. That means I can’t watch stuff like the US Open men’s final today, which is only on ESPN, but I guess I can live with that.

Kung Fu, and more water boiling

So, since Friday, we’ve got water service back, but with low pressure, and we still have a boil water advisory. The most recent update from the water company indicates that they’ve replaced the pipe, so that’s good.

My system, for now, is to use boiled water for cleaning my toothbrush and stuff like that, bottled water for drinking, and paper/plastic cups, plates, and forks/spoons/etc, so I don’t have to wash dishes. ShopRite had plenty of bottled water today and yesterday. I bought a gallon of Poland Spring yesterday, and another gallon today. They’re limiting sales to two gallons per customer per visit. If the advisory isn’t lifted, I’ll probably need to go back for another gallon or two at some point.

I did risk making myself eggs and toast this morning, which required washing some dishes afterward. I went ahead and used tap water for that, and I’ll just live with the risk, I guess. And I ate a couple of slices of pizza from the pizzeria across the street last night. I’m going with the theory that pizza is cooked at a high enough temperature to kill anything that might have lingered from using tap water anywhere in the process. That may be wishful thinking, but I guess I’m OK with it.

It’s been interesting to see which businesses on Main St were closed yesterday and today, and which ones weren’t. Both Starbucks and my favorite local coffee shop have been closed, but Dunkin Donuts has been open. There’s a local bakery that was open, but they posted on Facebook that their stuff is actually prepared offsite, in a “ghost kitchen” that’s in an area not covered by the boil water advisory.

Meanwhile, I’ve been on a Kung Fu binge this weekend. I watched Ip Man yesterday, and that reminded me that I’ve had a DVD set of Kung Fu Master sitting on my shelf since 2007 or so, unwatched, so I dusted that off and watched it too. Today, I’m watching the Ric Meyers commentary track for that. It’s bringing back pleasant memories of Meyers’ “Kung Fu Superhero Extravaganza” panels at San Diego cons, back when I was going to SDCC every year. (I’m fairly certain the reason I bought the Kung Fu Master DVD set is because Meyers showed some clips from it at one of those panels.) And some internet searching around Donnie Yen has reminded me that there are a bunch of his movies that I haven’t watched yet. And I have a box set of all of the Once Upon A Time In China movies, so maybe I should hold off on buying any more Kung Fu DVDs or Blu-rays until I’ve watched those…

rough day

Today did not start off well. There was some (presumably) emergency construction going on, right outside my window, from around 9 PM last night until 4 AM this morning. A good bit of jackhammer noise early on, then a whole bunch of back-up beeping throughout the night. (I understand that back-up beepers are well-intentioned, but are they really necessary in the middle of the night, on a street that’s been closed off to all traffic?)

So I was pretty out of it this morning. I was working from home, and it was a fairly quiet day at work, so I got some work done on a big project that I’ve been working on for weeks. So that was good. But lack of sleep, plus some other stuff, made me a little paranoid about some work stuff. It’s always a bit weird when you’re working from home, and you’ve got no meetings with anyone, and you’re not getting much email, and you notice a couple of weird things, and then your imagination starts going… Anyway, I think everything is (mostly) fine, but I guess I’ll find out next week.

And then, around 3:45 PM, I noticed that my water was out. I did some checking, and it looks like there was a big water main break, and most of the town is out. And tonight is “cruise night,” when downtown is overrun with classic cars, and various folks looking at classic cars. So that’s going to be a huge problem, if nobody’s toilet is working…

Meanwhile, it’s been another “air quality alert” day, with the AQI above 150, well into the “unhealthy” range. I guess the plan for tonight is to stay home, with the air conditioning on, drink beer, pee in a bucket, and go to bed early.

well-being day

I’ve had a few things on my mind this week that I wanted to blog about, but I just haven’t had the time and/or energy. I think I’ve finally gotten to a point now where I can sit down and ruminate a bit. It’s Saturday, and my chores are all done, and I’m not so tired that I need a nap yet.

Last Sunday was the Somerville St. Patrick’s Day parade. A lot of people came out for it. I watched parts of it out of my window, but I didn’t really pay too much attention. I spent most of the day reading comics and watching TV.

And Monday was my birthday. It was definitely a low-key birthday. I got a lot of “happy birthday” messages on Facebook, as usual, but I didn’t do anything to celebrate. It was a normal work day. I’ve realized that I’m now closer to 60 than 50, which is a bit alarming, but I guess it’s OK.

Friday was St. Patrick’s Day, and I took that day off as a “well-being” day. That’s a new thing we have at work this year. We can take two days off as well-being days. There’s a whole different workflow for requesting a well-being day, vs a regular vacation or sick day, for some reason. We’re supposed to use these days for “mental health” or charity/volunteering work. And we have to select which one we’re using it for. I put down “mental health.” I had some ideas about stuff I could do with the day, but most of those got tossed out the window. I got up late. I walked to the mall, ordered a new pair of glasses at LensCrafters, and walked back. That pretty much killed the morning. All I did in the afternoon was watch TV and take a nap. I guess that qualifies as useful to my mental health.

Ordering new glasses turned out to be surprisingly difficult. For the frames, I just asked LensCrafters to get me the same ones I have now. I’m not sure if we found the exact same frames, but they’re close enough. But the salesperson couldn’t figure out how to order my prescription in those frames. It kept coming back as impossible. Now, my new prescription isn’t that different from my previous one. But I guess it was different enough to cause a problem. So, after nearly an hour of futzing around, involving both the salesperson and an optician, we settled on plastic lenses that are cheaper than the ones we were trying to order, which were the same material as I have now. I’m honestly not sure if they’ll be better or worse than my current glasses, but there’s a 30-day guarantee, so I guess I can return them if they’re no good.

I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with my vision lately. I guess I’m still not anywhere near the “legally blind” stage, but I’m definitely having some problems. The next thing to tackle is my hearing. I’m overdue for another visit to the audiologist. I last went in March 2021, and should have gone again in March 2022, but never got around to it. So now it’s two years, and I should really get back there, and see about maybe finally getting a hearing aid.

Another topic I wanted to mention in passing is the third anniversary of the start of the pandemic. My company is still letting us work from home three days a week, which is good, but there’s some talk that they might want to get people to come back into the office more often. I’m honestly having some trouble with the current schedule, mostly because I don’t always have enough energy to deal with commuting and working in a cubicle anymore. By the time I get home after a day in the office, I’m often quite exhausted. I’m not sure how I used to commute into the office five days a week. And I’m not sure if something is wrong with me, or if this is just how I’m supposed to feel at 56 years old.

Anyway, at least I appear to have gotten through the last three years without contracting COVID at any point. (Or, if I did, it was post-vaccination and mild enough that I assumed it was a cold.) I’m still masking up at the grocery store. And I still wear a mask at work, but only when I’m moving around the office. I’m one of only a few folks who still do that. I’ve slacked off a lot with regard to masking when I’m going out to pick up take-out food or coffee. I used to wear a mask all the time for that, but now I’ll skip it sometimes, if I know I’m going into a place that won’t be crowded, and where I know I’ll be in and out quickly. I actually haven’t gotten sick in a while, at least by my standards, so that’s good. (I was a bit sick on Presidents Day, so it’s been almost a month. And I wasn’t that sick, then.)

Reading this post back, it sounds a bit bleak. But I didn’t intend it to sound that way, and I’m actually doing pretty good, all things considered. Maybe I should write another post later, talking about all the cool stuff I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching. Oh, and I have another post to write about Microsoft certification, and probably some other tech stuff, so that’ll be more fun than this one.

Ten years at SHI

I happened to notice my five year work anniversary post earlier this week, and thought I should write a ten year anniversary post. I hit my ten year anniversary about a week ago. I guess it’s kind of a big deal, since this is only the second job I’ve had that’s lasted this long. The previous one was NMS, where I worked for around 13 years (1996-2009). I probably would have hit 15 years there, if the company hadn’t got out of business.

A lot has changed at SHI since that five-year mark. A lot of those changes happened in 2022. I switched to a new boss, then back to the old boss. There have been a lot of management changes within IT in 2022. And I got promoted to “IT Solutions Manager,” whatever that means. I now have three direct reports, all CRM developers (which is kind of awkward, since I don’t really know our CRM system).

I’m doing less AX 2012 development, and am gradually moving into more Dynamics 365 development. We’re just in the planning stages of moving off of on-prem AX 2012 to Dynamics 365 F&O. And, since the CRM devs have been moved into our group and now report to me, I’m learning about our Dynamics 365 CRM environment. It’s all going pretty slowly, but we’re a big company and there’s a lot going on. (And yes, I know that F&O apparently isn’t called F&O anymore and CRM isn’t called CRM anymore. I can’t keep up with Microsoft’s crazy product naming shenanigans…)

I think there’s a good chance I’ll still be with SHI in five years. (Though I worry that saying that out loud will jinx it…) There have been a lot of layoffs at tech companies recently, but I don’t think SHI is planning any. And it seems like there’s a lot of opportunity there to do interesting work.

I’m realizing now that I’ll be 60 years old in five years, and 65 in ten years. I don’t know if there’s any point in thinking that far ahead, but it seems to me like there’s a real chance I could finish out my working years at SHI.

There’s a lot more I could say about my job right now, but there wouldn’t be much of a point to it. I’m relatively content where I am. There’s a lot of uncertainty, but there’s uncertainty everywhere. I think I have some good coworkers, and I think I’m in a pretty good situation.