bittercon

I just checked the weekly virus case rate in the state, and it's gone down from the peak of the previous two weeks, but not anywhere near far enough. It's still twice as high as it was at the height of the pandemic a year ago. And though I'm vaccinated and boosted, I have those health conditions that fall under the exceptions in "If you catch the virus, you almost certainly won't get seriously ill, except ..."

So, with great reluctance, I'm canceling out on the symphony concert I had a ticket for today. It was the California Symphony, and they're doing a delectable program including Haydn, Dvorak, Sibelius, and Vaughan Williams. But I'll miss it.

This is the third concert I'd been ticketed for that I've skipped in the past two weeks, and I have one each for the first three weeks of February which are probably gone too. If the case rate goes down as fast as it went up, then it should be justifiably safe to go out by the last week in February, for which I have concerts penciled in for five successive days. I'd like to get to some of those, and not just because I paid good money for tickets for some, and I owe a review to the Daily Journal.

I've also been doing all my grocery and other food shopping by pick-up, and I canceled both a medical test and a car servicing until later. So I haven't really been anywhere or done anything since Christmas. Well, I took some useless old unrecyclable and undonatable stuff to the city dump, as we slowly begin to clean out what we have stored in the garage. I backed the car up to the heaping pile of trash inside the huge shed at the dump, carefully walked out on the slippery pavement where trash had previously been, and heaved the stuff out of the trunk on to the edge of the pile. At least that required little close human contact.

At least there's the internet, and my two regular Zoom meetings. And B., and the cats. When I'm up in the middle of the night, as I am now, Tybalt comes onto my desk, alternately 1) squiggling around and knocking papers off the desk; 2) playing with anything he can get his paws on, which includes my fingers on the trackball; 3) walking in front of the computer screen; 4) head-butting my face, which I understand is a form of feline love; 5) licking said face; 6) jumping up and settling in my arms, at which point I'd better be reading something long on the screen, because it's useless to try to type anything. He's not a lap cat, he's an arm cat. Am I getting any work done? Barely.