Daily Archives: December 16, 2021

this and that

So, within an hour of writing my last post about how booster side effects hadn’t been so bad, I started feeling worse.  MUCH worse.  In the end, I had fever and chills for about 12 hours, followed by another day of feeling moderately lousy.  I’m not sure whether to believe my immune system is super awesome and will eviscerate any Covid germs that come my way, or that clearly I’m vulnerable to Covid and will have a truly miserable experience when I contract it (it’s inevitable, right?), vaccinated or not.

The apparent ineffectiveness of the vaccine, even with a booster, is disheartening.  The prospect of getting endless boosters every six months is disheartening.  The ongoing “restrictions” at my kids’ school are disheartening.  In general, I am very disheartened by Covid.

Also, no one in my little blog reading club, nor any of hour family members have had it, right?  Given something like 50% of Americans have had it at this point, I find this interesting.  I guess we lead low risk lives.

We found out this morning that a former colleague and friend of Jonathan’s, about his age, committed suicide.  They had been close a couple decades ago when they worked a startup together.  This guy had been telling Jonathan he was having physical health problems.  This turned out not to be true.  They were mental health problems.  It seems very likely the Covid-induced isolation played a role.  He’s an engineer like J and had been working remotely since this started.  He’s unmarried and really just wasn’t seeing people.  Whatever the reason, it’s incredibly sad and depressing.  All I can say is, reach out to your friends who might be hurting.

I have been contemplating perhaps running the Houston marathon, and so I’ve been following the Houston weather.  It is truly, really, not great.  I mean – it is HOT.  80 degrees in January?  Is this normal for Houston?  I had no idea it was so hot there in the winter.