Weeknotes 1518
missives from the plague house
- So last week I finally Got Covid, and a few days after CM did too. Thankfully it was the mild more-like-a-bad-cold-or-mild-flu variety, though my level of bad-feeling has been a bit of a rollercoaster of up-and-downs (very frustrating when my illnesses usually improve linearly). CM's seemed worse initially but appears to have cleared quicker.
- I've had a variety of odd lingering symptoms—the weirdest being the feeling of sunburn without having been outside. Very curious.
- I took Monday off and I think it's the first time in ages I've been off work for illness without stewing on all the work I should be doing on top of feeling crap. I think partly it was that I'd taken a Covid test and I could see the two lines, the confirmation that I was Officially Ill in a way that didn't rely on me to trust my own fleshy judgement about whether I was really feeling bad enough to justify time off to myself. If this thing is bad enough to shut down the planet, it's probably bad enough that I should take a day to recover from it.
- The day off genuinely helped, too; I can't believe all those people who say you shouldn't try to work through illness have been right all this time. Seriously, though—it helped to the extent that it will help me to think back on next time I'm in this situation. A lot of the time I think when I end up distrusting my own judgement it's because I've not had direct experience of a theoretical alternative action so I can't "feel" its rightness, which is something I am trying to work out how to better handle in general, but now I do for this, which is great!
- All this has meant that I've not really been able to leave the house this week, and I've generally been a bit run-down and low energy, which got me a bit sad and anxious for a while :(
- That said, it's also allowed me to relax a little—not just in the day I had off, but taking a break from the non-stop Fringe shows I would've been going to (which I am sad to have missed! but also I think my past self hadn't anticipated the level of energy it would require to keep up for a whole month (and also how busy work would be this month 😅). I'm bad at accounting for the variability of my future energy levels, over-optimistic about how well I can plan, and this 'enforced stillness' was a useful reminder of that.
- Anyway: I'm basically back to normal as of today (barring the rollercoaster dropping me back down again) but I'm still testing positive so no church or MMA or anything for me until I can be sure I'm not infectious.
- In other news—CM got a new bed and we assembled it and it's very nice. If there's one thing that I think would improve a lot of bedrooms, it's beds where the footboard is below the level of the mattress. It opens the whole room up to a surprising degree!
- NB: For those of you who were interested in 12P12M, I'm going to have to jimmy things around a little, as time that I was hoping to spend on TwitLimit has instead been spent "doing work" or "being ill". I suspect the end state here will be making next month's interval a bit shorter and trying to do one of the easier projects.