Seems to have been a short week. Of course, some of that was due to my having gotten my second COVID-19 (Moderna) booster Wednesday morning, with the result that I spent Wednesday evening and all day Thursday with chills and muscle aches, doing very little except being somewhat miserable. I expect that my reaction to the real virus would be considerably worse, so I'm not complaining.

Despite that, I actually got a few things done. The big one was writing and publishing a post on GoingSideways.blog, titled St/rolling, about life with Colleen and her scooter. So naturally I failed to signal boost it here Friday after I wrote it. This will have to do.

I sense a curmudgeon post approaching.

I also got one of my 1099R's entered yesterday. (Two more to go, then the other 1099s, the Schedule C, and the deductions. Blarg.) It's starting to look like 2021 might have been a bad year. I'll find out soon enough.

I've been learning about, and experimenting a little with, WordPress "block themes". Which are supposed to be a lot easier to customize, but complicate things in other ways, and don't come very close to solving my current problem, which is theme lock-in. Or if they do, I don't see how.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Today the CDC released updated recommendations for what you can do When You’ve Been Fully Vaccinated.

First, what does it mean to be fully vaccinated?

People are considered fully vaccinated:

• 2 weeks after their second dose in a 2-dose series, like the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or
• 2 weeks after a single-dose vaccine, like Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine

Now the good stuff: if you’ve been fully vaccinated:

• You can gather indoors with fully vaccinated people without wearing a mask.
• You can gather indoors with unvaccinated people from one other household (for example, visiting with relatives who all live together) without masks, unless any of those people or anyone they live with has an increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19.
• If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms.
  • However, if you live in a group setting (like a correctional or detention facility or group home) and are around someone who has COVID-19, you should still stay away from others for 14 days and get tested, even if you don’t have symptoms.

Everything else stays the same. Except when you're with at most one unvaccinated person, continue wearing a mask, staying 6' away from other people, avoiding medium-to-large sized gatherings, and so on.

...And continue watching for symptoms, because the protection you get from being vaccinated is not 100%.

( Links )

From David Mar: Irregular Webcomic! #2142

There are quite a lot of professions that are stereotyped as characters in fiction. [...] Scientists come in two types: the Mad, and the Highly Reasonable but unable to convince authorities that disaster is imminent. Authorities such as Mayors and Governors are always more interested in keeping business running than listening to scientists. If you put all these stock character stereotypes together... you have an ensemble disaster film.

No wonder 2020 seemed so familiar! (c.f. Contagion (2011 film) - Wikipedia)

The film has been praised by scientists for its accurate portrayal of the difficulties of dealing with pandemics. Its all-star cast may help distract you from the impending breakdown of society. The film has everything, from politicians trying to downplay the seriousness of the epidemic, to charlatans trying to make a quick buck selling homeopathic cures, and heroic scientists who work round the clock to try to develop a vaccine.
-- #5 in Top 10 Movies About Plague, Pestilence, And Deadly Disease - Listverse

(I should get a coronavirus icon, shouldn't I?)

So yesterday evening I got my first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. I'd signed up with WhidbeyHealth, who said they were using Pfizer, but when I got there I found that they were saving the Pfizer, which they were short on, for people getting second doses, and giving Moderna to people in for their first dose. *shrug*

They're using the same tiny needles they use for flu vaccine, so I could barely feel it. So far I have had no side-effect symptoms, not even a sore arm. Of course it's been only 14 hours, and in any case it's the second dose that they say has more severe side-effects. I'm not worried.

I rescheduled my second dose during the 15-minute waiting period, so I'll be getting that on February 17th. (The window is 28±4 days; the 17th is the short end of that.)

Colleen's shot had been scheduled for last Friday, but they ran out and cancelled everything through Saturday. So we're waiting to hear from them for a reschedule. (For all I know they might have called; Colleen's email and phone messages are a nightmare.)

It seems that the last nummbered episode of the COVID-19 saga was mdlbear | COVID-19: Episode 13: randomness, planning, accountability, back on May 22nd. It, in turn, referred back to my New Year's Day post. So in the interest of accountability...

Of the New Years' goals, #2 (Mom's 100th birthday party) has of course been cancelled by her death last month. #4 (FAWM) and #6 (extra income) were a total bust. (Okay, technically I can't say #6 was a bust until the end of the year.) I'm working on #3 (NaBloPoMo). I'm going to give myself credit for #5 (concert) because of my slot next Saturday at OR-eCon. #7 (yard) has seen infinitesimal progress. A little more progress has been made on #8 (organizing the garage -- see below and maybe in another post).

As for the goals in Episode 13... not so good. I'm going to give myself partial credit for #1 (paperwork) because I actually got my income taxes filed, and I think we can get Colleen's passport renewal in the mail in a day or two. I think I'm a little ahead of last year on music and writing, but haven't checked, and I certainly haven't written any songs but practicing for a concert counts. #5 (organizing and getting rid of stuff) is still out there looming. There's been some progress on organizing in the last couple of weeks thanks to the space cleared out by L's move, and some trash has been taken out of the garage. That's about it.

I think my big problem is that in the absence of an obvious place to start, I don't get started. I sit down with my guitar and look through my songbookst, and I don't see anything that appeals to me. But last night I started with a tentative set list, and sang for over an hour. Having an audience helps -- S was sitting nearby making suggestions and asking about songs on my list that she hadn't heard. Many of my most successful curmudgeon posts started with somebody asking me a question; most others get started and then neglected. And so on.

Organizing (#5) is similar, but different. The only reason I'm making any progress on it at all is that I do have a place to start: the shelves vacated when L moved out. It's something. I'll take it.

The bigger problem is that every time I go into the garage and look at the shelves and stacks of boxes, they remind me of the places I don't live anymore: Grand Central Starport and Rainbow's End. I miss them. I second-guess my decisions to move, even though I know (I think?) that they were the right decisions. I look at the workbench, which is a clutter of things I haven't put away and mostly don't have a place for, and it hasn't changed much since we moved in. I look at things that are parts of woodworking projects I never finished, and in many cases never started, and they remind me of just how long it's been since I did any woodworking except for putting up a few bookshelves. I look at the boxes full of artwork we bought at conventions, and haven't put up despite having wall space. I wonder what I've been doing for the last three years.

I think I need to revive my 15min tag.

... And I'll skip making a new set of goals; the ones I have will do.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   4540 words in 10 posts this month (average 454/post)
    582 words in 1 post today

It's been a long month so far this week, and last week, starting from Monday when Mom died, might have been even longer, but my memory doesn't go back that far at the moment.

Let's not even mention the impending electoral trainwreck; my blood pressure and sleep won't stand it. The thing that told me just how close to the edge I was getting was the way I fell apart yesterday when I couldn't get audio working for Colleen's video appointment with her nephrologist. (That, at least, went well, after they eventually resorted to calling her phone; her kidney function is up a little from her last appointment. She's seen a little improvement in her other medical issues as well.) But my mental state while trying to get the damned thing working was, actually, rather alarming.

Then after that, the water went out. Turned out, after calling the water company, that something has been leaking a lot, and running down to our down-hill neighbor's where it was noticed by a contractor. It's on our side of the meter, so I spent the next hour or so finding a plumber. Then poured myself a double shot of gin. Figure I earned it.

Internet and phone went out this morning. for an hour or so. Which I could handle, but it was just One More Thing, and I'm tired. The plumber came out this morning about an hour later, and went away again to fetch an excavator. The leak is underground, of course, flowing into our gravel-filled drainage ditch, around the house, and out down the hill somewhere. Maybe it'll get fixed today, but I'm not counting on it.

Apart from that, I haven't been getting much of anything done. I think I mentioned that in my last State-of-the-Bear. My mental state has definitely deteriorated since then; some of that no doubt was having to cancel singing lessons, and some is just not being able get out of the house or be with people. Which is kind of odd, because it's not all that different from the way things were in the Before Times.

Plus c'est la même chose? Not a whole lot of ça change this time.

On the remote chance that anyone reading this and living in the state of Washington hasn't noticed: Effective June 26, a statewide order requires individuals to wear a face covering in indoor public spaces such as stores, offices and restaurants. The order also requires face coverings outdoors when you can't stay 6 feet apart from others. There are other links there, including step-by-step instructions from the Hearing, Speech & Deaf Center for making a mask with a window so that people who are deaf or hard of hearing can read your lips.

Here's an article in the Seattle Times: Gov. Inslee orders masks to be worn in public to help stem spread of coronavirus.

Here's Mary Robinette Kowal's no-pattern, one-piece mask: MRK's no-pattern Simple Mask tutorial | Mary Robinette Kowal on Patreon. It only requires a few straight seams, which makes it simple enough for even a clumsy bear to make if they had to. (I don't, fortunately.)

(Note: this post was started Sunday the 3rd, and planned as Episode 11, but it got pre-empted Monday morning and again on Tuesday. It then got dropped on the floor while wrote Singing in the time of COVID-19.)

I have not been getting much done. I'd originally meant this to be a mix of planning, accountability (i.e. writing out those plans so everyone can see how little I'm accomplishing), and random wibbling. I have moved the random part into another post so you don't have to look at it. TL;DR: see mood.

Actually, looking at my patheticmodest set of goals from my New Year's Day post, I see that I can count at least partial success for #1 (mainly because I did get to the dentist once, but I'm going to count staying home during the lockdown under self-care), #5 total failure for #4, and infinitesimal but non-zero progress on #7 and #8.

(There will be a brief pause while the bear claws his way up out of an infinitesimally deep mathematical hole. This is complicated by the fact that any sum of infinitessimals is still less than any given positive real number...)

(If he were a real bear as opposed to a surreal bear, this would not be a problem, since the real numbers do not include infinitessimals.) Anyway...

There some obvious categories of things I can work on:

1. Paperwork. First my income tax; the deadline has been extended, but it still needs to be done. Then, the stuff aimed at the other certainty: advance directives, powers of attorney, a will for Colleen, and a comprehensive list of important documents, account numbers, and so on.
2. The electronic equivalent of the above probably deserves a separate category. If I don't leave some pointers, some important things will become inaccessible.
3. Music. I need to sing more often, and longer.
4. Writing. Not merely DW -- I need more computer-related (curmudgeon) posts.
5. Organizing and getting rid of STUFF. I'd say that this is a mammoth task, except that the STUFF almost certainly outweighs a mammoth and possibly even a medium-sized whale.

In the interest of making some kind of progress, I'm going to post this even though it feels incomplete. I could work on it for another month, add a sentence or two, and it would still feel incomplete. So...

My originally planned Episode 11 has gotten postponed again. At this rate... Anyway. I saw a report earlier today about a mutant form of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that appears to be more contagious than the original. A few hours later I made a connection between that and another mutant coronavirus: the mutant form of Feline coronavirus (FCoV) that causes Feline infectious peritonitis (FIP). If you've been following my DW for a while you'll remember that as the disease that killed poor Curio -- the cat in the userpic -- with symptoms alarmingly like those of severe COVID-19. So I duck-duck-went with it, as one does.

Sure enough, there it was: the connection between FIP and Covid19. A few years back (but too late for Curio), a drug was found that promised to be practically a miracle cure for FIP, called GS-441524. And wouldn't you know, it's closely related to Remdesivir. In fact, it's one of the intermediate steps in synthesizing Remdesivir, and it's also what Remdesivir metabolizes into once it gets into a cell, before being phosphorylated into the active triphosphate form. Turns out Gilead Sciences owns the patents for both of them.

I'd been wondering why GS-441524 didn't become available -- veterinary drugs don't need nearly as arduous an approval process as human drugs. It turns out that Gilead was afraid that getting GS-441524 approved for cats might interfere with their attempt to get Remdesivir approved for humans. Why would that be? Maybe because GS-441524 is much less expensive to make? (A less cynical person might also point out that Remdesivir has superior ability to transport the active compound into cells. One wonders, however, which is the more cost-effective.)

I note in passing that GS-441524 is available from China on the black market; cat owners can easily find it these days. It may become harder to come by if Remdesivir production ramps up.

( Notes & links )

It's been a month since anyone but the three residents have been in the house -- Colleen's caregiver, V, was the last "outsider". I've done a couple of curb-side pickups, Colleen has had two MAC clinic appointments, and a few people have come to the door with deliveries. But we're as safe as anyone can be in this pandemic.

Meanwhile our daughter E is on the front lines -- she started work as a checker at Safeway around the beginning of March.

All the links under the cut will be repeated in Sunday's "Done Since" post, but I want to highlight this one in particular:

Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. [...]

And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal.

We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature. [...]

Patients compensate for the low oxygen in their blood by breathing faster and deeper — and this happens without their realizing it. This silent hypoxia, and the patient’s physiological response to it, causes even more inflammation and more air sacs to collapse, and the pneumonia worsens until oxygen levels plummet. In effect, patients are injuring their own lungs by breathing harder and harder.

In other words, by the time you notice that you're out of breath, you've already damaged your lungs and are low enough on oxygen that you'll probably need to go on a ventilator immediately. With predictably bad consequences.

The reason I'm telling you this is to convince you to go out and get a pulse oximeter now and check your blood oxygen level every damned day whether you feel sick or not. If it starts going down, call your doctor no matter what other symptoms you don't have.

In one of my last trips into Rite Aid before we isolated, I bought myself a pulse oximeter and have used it almost every day, feeling somewhat silly about it. Turns out it isn't silly at all.

( Notes & links )