Life in the Age of Corona

A Daily Diary

Monday, January 11th, 2021

Happy Cat

I think Maxi is truly happy to have us back. He is well fed and in excellent shape. The teenagers have done a great job looking after him while we were gone. Still I think he might have felt a little lonely, despite Anna coming to work from here from time to time (not sure how she did that in a freezing cold house, mostly lying on the upstairs bathroom floor whose underfloor heating seems to have been the only heat source which did not conk out) as evidenced by the fact that he did not leave the perimeter of the house.

Max spend the night cuddled up in the nook of my knees and at the first sign of his human coming to life plonked himself next to me to spoon and have his head scratched. Normally he will tolerate that for about ten minutes. Not so today, he stayed sleeping next to me for three hours (yeah, I briefly woke at 3:00, but went back to sleep until 6:39, when I got up to make myself a coffee which I enjoyed reading the news in bed).

I spent the day unpacking, doing laundry, tidying away all the Christmas decorations, cooking, cleaning the garden, restacking the remnants of our half cord of wood and cutting up the Christmas tree. All the while Max kept me company indicating that he is happy to have us back.

We are quickly falling back into our routine – minus the swimming for now - though I have tried to book a slot for next Monday and it is the same shitshow as last year. One has to book on the second the clock changes or has no chance! I shall need to schedule making a booking, what a pain.

At least there is still practice in the park which I think I shall join tomorrow though. With Plank Sensei in Wyoming we will be practicing a very different routine I suspect.

While it is cold outside it is dry, so our social endeavors will need to be brunches had around the fire pit, I fear. With that and the outdoor heating though we at least have the option to see people in a COVID compliant manner.

My major achievement of the day has been to get mum vaccinated. I have been trying to sign her up for a shot for four days and it has been a very frustrating experience as the website is the most user-unfriendly thing I have encountered in a very long time. I have no idea how they expect 80-yearold’s to navigate it.

When first I tried, I at least managed to get mum an eligibility code. However, all my attempts to book an actual appointment were frustrated as all I received was a notification that no appointment had been booked yet. Here I am thinking "You don’t say, that is why I am this site"!  Last night the response was the code is invalid. This morning it seemed to be valid again and I got as far as “search for an appointment”. When I called the hotline in frustration, I was informed that appointments could only be booked the following day as of 8 am as there was so much demand. When returning to the site to close it however, I saw several slots, clicked on one emphatically just to receive the message the appointment was booked. So, I tried the following week, and nothing happened. When I tried to book the same time for today again, the website informed me that an appointment for the verification code had already been booked, but it did not inform me for when the actual booking was. Why did the site not show a message when first I clicked announcing “you have successfully reserved a spot”? It was very confusing. One way or another, mum ended up with an appointment for tonight, went and lo and behold was vaccinated! Now I just need to successfully book an appointment for her second shot.

EM I can tell is ecstatic to be back in her time zone. Now she all she wants is to meet her friends, but that shall have to wait for a few days until we can test ourselves out of quarantine.

The past 24 hours "only" saw an increase in infections by 208k to bring the US total to 23 million out of 90.3 million cases reported globally. The news is still focused on last weeks events, with discussions revolving around the Instigator in chief’s impeachment. I firmly believe they should go ahead, but with articles which are an offense beyond a shadow of a doubt to make it hard for the GoP to not vote for impeachment. Expose all of his enablers. I am heartened to read that big businesses have announced they will not sponsor any campaigns for those who objected to the certification of electoral college votes.

It is a little sad, that only money seems to impress these people though.