More Interesting People

shalmestere and I came home from two weeks in Europe with colds. We didn't pick them up on the plane: we both woke with scratchy throats last Tuesday morning, the day we were supposed to fly home. Anyway, after various misadventures we got on a plane Wednesday morning, we wore masks on the plane to somewhat-reduce the chance of infecting anybody else, and got home Wednesday afternoon, still with scratchy throats but nothing worse. (I had an intermittent, unproductive cough, as I have been since a bout of COVID in July, but that's become "the new normal".)

shalmestere spent most of Wednesday afternoon and much of Thursday and Friday in bed -- partly jet-lag, partly having a familiar, comfortable bed for the first time in two weeks, and partly cold symptoms, which always hit her hard. I still had only a scratchy throat, so I went about the usual post-vacation chores: triaging two weeks of accumulated mail, re-stocking the refrigerator, picking overripe raspberries off the vines in the back yard, paying bills, etc.

Somewhere in the two weeks' worth of work e-mail was an automated complaint from ${EMPLOYER} that I had been physically in the office less than two days a week in Q3, "well below" the three-day-a-week standard they'd issued last year, and they were informing my manager and my grand-manager. Nevertheless, I worked from home Thursday and Friday because I figured I was probably contagious, being only two or three days out from first symptoms.

Saturday I went to a "No Kings" march and rally, on my own because shalmestere was still too sick. Marching and standing outside in the sun for hours are tiring at the best of times, but I had picked the march/rally two miles away rather than the one in Manhattan, so I got home quickly, drank a lot of water, and collapsed. That evening I noticed that I was getting physically tired more quickly than usual, and coughing and sneezing more often than normal, and having some general all-over body aches. (And shalmestere was still alternating between the bed and the living room couch, getting tired out by the slightest exertion.)

Sunday it hit. Walking the dogs around the block tired me out. Re-heating lunch or dinner tired me out. General body aches, nasal congestion, headaches, frequent coughing-and-sneezing spasms, all that. Sunday night both of us woke up every few hours to cough, blow our noses, pee, and drink, usually not at the same time.

I officially called in sick to work Monday, thinking I might get some programming work done in between naps and reheated meals, but not at all confident of that, and not wanting to further exacerbate the hybrid-work-policy issue by working-from-home too much. Again, general body aches, nasal congestion, headaches, getting tired quickly, frequent uncontrollable coughing-and-sneezing. Monday night was the same as Sunday night: we both woke up every few hours to cough, blow our noses, pee, and drink. And I feel about as good this morning as yesterday morning.

To add to the angst, between the 4:30 and 6:30 wake-ups last night, I had a nightmare.

I was walking down the street in a fancy, rich neighborhood and saw a small black boy and a white woman walking together. I asked the boy "And where is your house?", and he proudly stopped in front of one of the grander houses and replied "Right here!" There was a small slab of rock in the front yard, under which were a couple of plants he'd been taking care of, and I helped him plant another one. And I walked on, preparing a standard-issue lecture in my mind about racial prejudice.

But the next block was our own block, and our house wasn't there. I recognized all the houses on the street, but there wasn't even a gap between our neighbor on the left and our neighbor on the right. It seemed that other houses were missing too, although I wasn't sure which ones, because again there was no gap where they should have been. This was now seriously scary.

Conveniently, Pennsic was a short walk away, so I went there, to check on our encampment, and our pavilion wasn't where it should be. I saw Cariadoc in the marketplace and asked him about the phenomenon: he was aware of it, and had identified several people we both knew who seemed to have vanished not only from the site but from the memories of other people we knew. He said he was "going into town" and asked whether there was anything he could pick up for me, and I replied "Well, all our food is in our pavilion, which is missing."

Before I could elaborate on that, I thought I saw (in another market stall in the distance) shalmestere, in modern clothes, so I ran to catch up with her. But it wasn't her, and I realized there was a substantial chance that she too had vanished completely.

I saw Thor (from the Marvel movies -- I guess we're in the middle of "the snap") standing and talking to his girlfriend on a cellphone. She too was worried about all the missing people and houses, and was calling him "Chris", so I guess this is an out-of-universe girlfriend. But at least they could find one another.