Nonsequitur Life

January.

2024.

The Bobs are still recovering from A Very Covid Christmas.

Or rather Bob is at about 99% and I’m still lingering around 75%.

We don’t know where we caught it from (considering we barely leave the house), but recent information claims incubation is only two or three days so we can pretty much narrow it down to our routine trips to Target and Costco or the grocery store, or the day Bob went into work. Bob started with a scratchy throat on Friday the 22nd and I started to feel phantom scratching a little later in the day. By Friday night, Bob was sick and I was still feeling something. Saturday he tested positive but I was negative, but our home tests are all technically expired so it could have been an inaccurate result. Either way we knew we weren’t going anywhere for Christmas. I had very minor symptoms aside from some hefty fatigue until Christmas night when everything kicked in hard and I finally tested positive on Tuesday the 26th.

Bob cycled through sore throat, fever, body aches, dizziness, bad headache, mild loss of taste and smell, plugged ears, a lot of sinus drainage, coughing, and fatigue. I had a sore throat, fatigue, fever, body aches, dizziness, mild headache, complete loss of taste and smell, plugged ears, sinus drainage, and a lot of fucking coughing which made my voice sound like I’ve been smoking for forty years. The highest fever I saw was 103 around 4AM on Wednesday and my face got so hot, I had a rash on my cheeks for most of the next day. The pain of the sore throat had me genuinely concerned I was also developing strep throat it hurt so much to swallow. I kept checking for white spots for a few days before it finally eased up.

My taste and smell finally started to come back after six days gone but I’d say it’s still not back 100%. Some things don’t smell quite right and the taste is still a little dulled. It was very weird and frustrating. Not being able to taste or smell anything I ate made the texture of everything that much more noticeable and that is not a pleasant experience when I already have so many obnoxious texture issues with food as it is. Also, everything I consumed was incredibly disappointing without flavor.

We’ve surpassed the two week mark from when this all started. Bob is mostly recovered, but he still has some residual sinus/cough issues. I’m still coughing a lot but my voice has mostly returned to normal. The fatigue still hits hard when I try to do too much.

Neither one of us had been sick since well before the world shut down so it was a bit of a rude awakening to get hit like we did. It has sucked immensely, but it could have been so much worse, and we’ve both felt worse from bad colds in the past. Here’s hoping we can avoid further illness for the rest of Plague Season.

Our annual Christmas vacation was tainted by feeling awful, but at the same time, it kept us from completely borking up our sleep schedule like we usually do on vacation (which causes problems in its own right).

But at least I had my arsenal of Rankin Bass Christmas specials to keep things festive amidst all the misery.

My favorite Misfit is curious to see how much Christmas music showed up in the Last.fm stats for December. (It mostly just looks like the Wicked White soundtrack, but we did listen to Christmas music too.)

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Top 10 Most Played Artists for December 2023…

1.) The Killers … 576 plays

2.) Panic! At the Disco … 134 plays

3.) The Young Veins … 128 plays

4.) Toad the Wet Sprocket … 98 plays

5.) Nine Days … 93 plays

6.) Matt Nathanson … 60 plays

7.) The Fray … 55 plays

8.) Matchbox Twenty … 53 plays

9.) Splender … 52 plays

10.) Avicii & Brandon Flowers … 50 plays

Honorable mention: Brandon Flowers, O.A.R., The Monkees, Tonic, Ingram Hill, Train, Darren Criss, Elton John, Fall Out Boy, Sara Bareilles

Total of 1,729 plays of 390 tracks from 118 albums by 61 artists.

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for a night like this Darren Criss