I'm back to work today for the first time since a week ago Friday, and back in the office working for the first time since three weeks ago today—Monday, April 18. That was the day after Easter, the day Shobhit tested positive for covid.

I'm beginning to wonder how many times I'll have to run through this with people who come by to talk about where I've been. Should I send out an all-office memo?

Let's review:

Sunday, April 17: Easter Sunday and also Sherri's 70th birthday, for which there was a large holiday/birthday family gathering—a rather special one, too, with my brother's presence meaning all four of us kids were together for the first time in 19 years. But, like a couple of total idiots, neither Shobhit nor I did a home covid test before going (to be fair, nor did anyone else who went, and I'm not calling any of them idiots, so maybe I should be more fair to myself, I don’t know), and only in retrospect do we know that Shobhit almost certainly caught covid at work sometime the week prior. Lynn has since told me that we both may very well have tested negative even if we did test—I tested negative the first day Shobhit tested positive, after all—but, I still find that small comfort. If we either of us had tested positive, we'd have known not to go, disappointing as it may have been, and not spread it.

Monday, April 18: Shobhit called out sick from work because he didn't feel well. He texted me that afternoon that he was running a fever. A unique sort of "oh, fuck" feeling came over me, and I knew we would both need to run a home test when I got home. Shobhit tested positive so quickly, with a stark, solid second line on the test strip within about a minute, it was kind of astonishing. I tested negative but knew that I still needed to go back to the office that evening, grab my laptop, and work from home for at least the rest of that week.

Tuesday, April 19: I worked from home, feeling fine most of the day, but noticing subtle indications of something coming on over the course of the day. I tested again at the end of that work day, and the second line came up—faint for me, but still visible quickly, and indicating a positive test regardless. I had to email key people at work that I had tested positive, and although I had already removed myself from the office based on being in the same household as someone with covid, I had no idea how sick I might get and they had to prepare for the possibility that I would indeed be out of commission. I also had to email everyone I had confirmed plans with every day of a Birth Week originally scheduled for April 22 through May 1 that we were going to have to reschedule for the following week, April 29 through May 8.

Wednesday-Friday, April 20-22: I did indeed get sick, although I logged into work emails several times each of these days, due to having significant deadlines that week and a lot of work I'd have done myself under normal circumstances but which Eric had to do instead, but I had to answer several emails of questions about how certain tasks were done. I did do some other work based on what I had the bandwidth for, which lessened over these three days, Friday being bad enough that I said "fuck it" and did not get out of bed for a while in the morning or log in until I felt up to the task. Still, with those erratic exceptions, I spent most of these three days resting and/or in bed.

Wednesday, April 20: both Shobhit and I had virtual appointments with a doctor, not the new one we just got as our PCP as he was unavailable but some rando doctor who seemed overly pragmatic, telling me I should just expect to get infected with covid again in another few months. Like, ...what?

Thursday, April 21: Shobhit and I both went to get a PCR test, that being apparently required to get "quarantine pay" at PCC. This continues to irritate me to this day, as it was the one time I left the condo during the five-day isolation period of covid infection, thereby breaking quarantine just so I could prove to my employer with an official document that I was . . . supposed to be in quarantine. I got the official positive PCR test result on Friday and emailed it to Sara in HR; it seems people in HR are the ones who add "Quarantine Pay" to my Dayforce timesheet calendar, and onto the pay statement I got the same day as my 4/29 paycheck deposit. Eric, who fills out my calendar as my supervisor, was unclear on this until he logged into the calendar and saw that Quarantine Pay was already added.

Sunday, April 24: I felt progressively, if somewhat slowly, better over the weekend. Shobhit called out sick from all six of the shifts he previously had scheduled between Monday the 18th and Monday the 25th, having no sick time due to not being full-time and thus just losing all of those earnings. By Sunday, I finally watched the last of the virtual SIFF movies I had to watch, having only missed one of the six films I had tickets for—one of the only-two in-theater tickets I'd had, for a movie on Monday the 18th. I didn't want to lose out on yet another movie, though, and by the Sunday after I first tested positive (five days later) I felt barely well enough again to watch a movie and review it.

Monday-Friday, April 25-29: Back to work, but this entire week I still worked from home. The protocol was isolation for five days after the day of symptom onset, with the choice of returning to the office but wearing a mask for at least five days after that. With a choice of either working masked all day at the office or unmasked at home, I'll always choose the latter, so I just worked from home, during the week that was originally supposed to be my Birth Week vacation.

Wednesday, April 27: starting a return to normalcy, Tracy joined me to go see The Northman, which I really liked. The next day, Thursday April 28, Shobhit, Ivan, Alexia and I all went out to dinner at The Marrakesh, originally scheduled for the week before but pushed out a week.

Friday, April 29 - Sunday, May 1: first weekend of my Birth Week, originally scheduled as the ending weekend of my Birth Week, so those three days I was actually able to keep the activities I had planned all along.

Friday, April 29 - Sunday, May 8: official Birth Week 2022, thereby keeping me out of the office yet another week, that being now why I was out of the office for nearly three weeks—first four days due to covid; the next week due to working from home so I didn't have to mask up all day every day at the office; the next day for my Birth Week.

Even after the disappointment of having to postpone a week and reschedule seven out of ten days, I'm going to declare my Trains and Railroads theme a smashing success. I truly had a blast, all week. Just last night I posted "Birth Week 2022, by the numbers"—

Trains ridden: 8
Trains boarded: 9
Trains visited: 13
Trains seen: 14
Railroads either ridden on or seen: 11
Railroads either ridden or seen if you count a bike path that used to be a railroad: 12
Monorails ridden: 1

The reason I have one more train boarded than ridden is because of our tour of the train cars at Lake Whatcom Railway on my birthday (Saturday, April 30) which did not move. Then, there are four more trains "visited" than boarded because of trains we could neither ride nor even get on: the train that passed right in front of Melrose Grill in Renton with Danielle and the girls on Monday; the Interurban Trolley Car 55 on display at Heritage Park in Lynnwood that we met with Shauna at on Tuesday; the model train exhibit on the fifth floor of the Washington State History Museum that Shobhit and I went to Wednesday afternoon; and the "trolley" seating area of The Old Spaghetti Factory in Lynnwood where we had dinner with Lynn and Zephyr on Wednesday.

Given how many outings I did that could not involve actually riding a train (nearly half: 7 out of 15), I think it's still a fantastic track record to have been able to literally ride eight trains over the course of my ten-day Birth Week: the Sounder Commuter Train with Tracy on Friday 4/29; the Northwest Railway Museum scenic train ride with Valerie on Sunday 5/1; the Seattle Streetcar with Shobhit on Tuesday 5/3; the Amtrak Cascades, the MAX Light Rail in Portland, and the Amtrak Coast Starlight on Thursday, 5/5; Link Light Rail with Alexia on Friday, 5/6; and finally, on Sunday, 5/8 . . .

. . . The Seattle Monorail, which I went ahead and just went to ride myself yesterday while Shobhit was working, just to be a completist, and thus have ridden all four of the mass transit rail systems available in Seattle (five if you count Amtrak; the others being the Sounder, the Streetcar, and Link Light Rail).

Since the Space Needle is a big part of many people's rides on the Monorail, I decided, fuck it, I'm going to splurge and buy myself a ticket up to the observation deck—thus making eighteen visits for which I have photo albums, and those don't even account for every time I've gone up, although it comes relatively close. I was able to buy an annual pass in both 1998 and 2009, for which I easily got my money's worth both times; I really wish they would do an annual pass again. This particular visit was different, though, in that it was still very much focused on the Monorail as part of my Birth Week trains theme; I wanted to get photos of the Monorail specifically from about 500 feet further up in the air, through the glass floors that I have now visited three times, since the renovated Space Needle reopened in 2018. (I previously went with Ivan in 2018, and with Shobhit's brother Puneet in 2019.) As such, I also have this 28-shot photo album added to my "Public Transit" collection. That's relatively in line with the size of other albums focused on public transit, but much smaller than most other photo albums of Space Needle visits.

I would argue, though, that the average quality of the individual shots in this album is better, because I spent a lot of time standing and waiting for the monorail trains to pass each way, so I could get good shots of it timed just right. I spent a lot of time standing on the revolving glass floor, slowly walking against the direction of its spin so I remained in just the right spot to get a nice overhead shot of the train passing below. After spending ten minutes waiting in a line packed enough with unmasked people to trigger a lot of people these days (in a scenario like that, I am always masked), I spent about forty minutes on one or the other of the two observation decks—I spent about $37 on my ticket, so I guess that works out to about 93¢ a minute. That seems very steep, maybe I should have stayed longer just to get more of my money's worth. Well, except I also got some great shots, so that made it worth it too.

When I came back down to the ground, I also walked across the street and waited several minutes for a train to go by on the monorail track overhead, so I could get the fantastic shot you see above (in the middle of this post), showing the train passing by with the Space Needle itself behind it. I really love that shot. And, it's really my having gone by myself that made shots like that, and the ones I got from the observatory, even possible: I think Shobhit would have run out of patience quickly. And, yesterday was Mother's Day, so literally everyone and their mother, if they weren't working (like Shobhit), had other plans. I wouldn't have had the Mother's Day overlap issue had I not had to postpone my vacation a week, but, I also did not have the monorail as part of my initial schedule for the previous week, as back then I also had both Jennifer and Laney scheduled. Now, though, I'm having to do belated activities with them, with Jennifer on Saturday next weekend, and with Laney the weekend following. Those will still yield photo albums I will add to my "Birth Week 2022" collection.

Speaking of Mother's Day, I actually didn't talk to either Mom or Sherri yesterday, specifically. Odd that I might mention Mom in that context now, of course; she died nearly two years ago. I'll always think of her on Mother's Day though, as you might imagine. As almost an afterthought, I posted two photos of her and me together to social media last night, right before going to sleep: one the earliest photo I have of us together, on my first birthday, in 1977; the second from 2016—not quite the last photo ever taken of just the two of us together (that one, from 2017, is an incredibly unflattering shot of both of us), but the second-to-last. Or at least close to it. Taken the same day as the second-to-last; there are two shots of just the two of us from the same day in 2016 and this one was the better of the two. I even used it for the Mother's Day card I made her in 2019.

And, speaking of Mother's Day cards . . . that brings me to Sherri, the one mother I still have left. I didn't make her a birthday card this year, just never managing to find the time; in the end I decided the custom Easter Egg cake I had made would suffice. Clearly she agrees; she was so impressed with that cake, when I saw her on Saturday, she brought it up yet again: "It was the best cake I ever had, ever." In seventy years? Well, that's pretty impressive!

I did make her a Mother's Day card, however—actually the first year I made one rather than two Mother's Day cards. (I didn't make her a Mother's Day card last year, because I made tribute video to Grandma Rhoda, who was her mom, in lieu of one—and Sherri was very happy with that as well.) The thing is, I brought the paper and colored pens with me on the Amtrak train to Portland Thursday morning, thinking that was the only time during my Birth Week that I would have to spend making one. I got all stuck on needing to get it in the mail once I reached Portland, in the hopes that it would then get to Olympia by Saturday. I was nearly done making the thing on the train when it hit me that, duh, I would be driving to Olympia on Saturday for my bike ride with Dad, and I could have just handed it to her in person! Then, I made my next mistake: I didn't want to waste the stamp I already had on the envelope, so I went ahead and put it in the mail in Portland anyway.

I keep wondering if it would have made it to her by Saturday if I'd had the wherewithal to mail it as soon as I arrived in Portland, but I spaced it, because I was preoccupied with finding the MAX Light Rail stop I needed as soon as I arrived. So instead, although it was nice to find a public mailbox right there at the train station when I returned in the early evening, and I even got the card in there before its latest posted pickup, I suspect being a 5 p.m. pickup is what made the difference. I actually saw Sherri sorting through her just-arrived mail through the window literally as Dad and I were headed to the car for our drive to South Bend, and I wondered if her card was in there. I only learned after Dad and I got back that it wasn't. Dammit!

So, I told her she has one coming on Monday. Presumably she'll get it today. Although I never did speak to her yesterday, I did see her on Saturday, and when I finally left for my next stop in Auburn that day, Sherri said to me, "Happy birthday!" And I replied, "Happy Mother's Day! You'll get a card on Monday!"

I'm unusually pleased with myself for the covid themed card I made, with renderings of covid-19 virus cells, one really large, and two smaller ones noticing it and one saying, "It's the mother!" How's that for a Mother's Day message? When you open it up the card does include an apology, for us giving her covid for her birthday—it was a lucky break for everyone else at the party that no one else got it, but Sherri tested positive on Wednesday that week, the day after I did; Dad finally tested positive at the end of the week, I think on Friday. He clearly didn't get it from us directly, but from Sherri, but, of course, in this group of people Shobhit remains Patient Zero either way. Anyway, I actually have no idea how much Sherri will like it, but I was pleased with my own cleverness, I have to admit.

To be clear, I still feel genuinely terrible that we brought covid to her for her birthday. But, what's done is done, and we might as well still have some level of a sense of humor about it. And I genuinely hope she had a nice day yesterday. I, for one, am immensely grateful I have one mom left who is still alive—and, thankfully due to her having been vaccinated and boosted, her covid sickness wasn't nearly as terrible as it likely would have been otherwise, and for several days now she has been recovered and covid-free. So, at least she got a Mother's Day without covid.

[posted 12:23 pm]