How are you dealing with life now with the Covid-19 virus situation? (1 Viewer)

[The Obsolete Man]

Local doctors are very cautious, and I applaud that.

I was due in this week for a usual 6 month followup for prescription renewals. Well, I've had what may be the most minor cold I've ever had for about a week (since the day after I got a flu shot). Some nasal congestion and drainage, occasional cough feelings, fatigue, nothing huge. Hell, if this is what a post-smoking cold is , maybe I should've quit years ago. But I remembered to mention this while making an appointment, so COVID testing became the priority. And I'm okay with that. Better safe than sorry.

Thankfully, they didn't puncture my brain. Wasn't as bad as I was expecting. They told me to isolate until the results come back, but I was going to be doing that since I had no plans to do anything anyway. So that's not a problem. I'll just stay at home with my hoarded toilet paper.

 

[Mark Booth]

On Nov 14 I awoke to find I was having noticeable sinus drainage down the back of my throat. The next day I started feeling pressure and an itchy feeling deep in my ears. The following day I started noticing the faint aroma of cigarette smoke, in my own home, with all the windows closed and we don't smoke. The cigarette smoke smell is a classic sign of a sinus infection. I emailed my doctor and he put me on an antibiotic. Within days, that took care of the odor and the pressure/itchiness in the ears. But the sinus drainage remained and actually got worse. My doctor decided he wanted me to have a COVID test.

I went to a drive-through testing site for my HMO. On the Monday before Thanksgiving. Everybody and their brother decided they needed a COVID test that day, apparently. I waited in line for 1 hour and 20 minutes to get tested. The nurse swabbed both the back of my throat and clear to the back of one nostril. The up the nose didn't hurt, but it sure did tickle. I can see how the test might cause someone to sneeze or cough.

It took until late Wednesday afternoon to get the results. Negative.

The two days between the test and getting the results weren't exactly my favorite two days of the year.

But yesterday's turkey seemed to taste exceptionally good.

Mark

 

[TJPC]

This may seem sad, but we’ve decided not to put up lights or a tree this year. For the first time my wife and I will be spending Christmas alone. My daughter and son in law have jobs where they are meeting the public, and they are afraid of bringing Covid to the house. All large family gatherings are canceled, and we we will be making Christmas dinner for 2.
Lugging decorations up and down stairs seems pointless, although we may put a few small things out.

 

[TonyD]

It’s just my wife and I at home and We put our decorations up every year regardless of who is able to be here.

It’s still fun.

 

[HawksFord]

It may just be the two of us for Christmas, but we took the opposite approach and put up our Christmas tree earlier than ever before. We typically do that a week or two into December, but the (artificial) tree went up this weekend. It's 2020 and we needed some Christmas cheer early.

It was just the two of us for Thanksgiving. Our oldest son and his fiancee live locally, but they work with the public and the numbers are going up locally. Our younger son lives a couple of hours away and opted to stay within his pod. We're all keeping a close watch on the infection rates and our personal health while we consider our Christmas options.

 

[Clinton McClure]

My wife keeps waffling about putting up a tree because the two of us will be the only ones to see it. I don’t care one way or the other. I have a ton of lights to put up outside today (not my idea). If it were up to me, I wouldn’t bother with a tree, lights, or decorations as I don’t care about it and never have. For the 10 years I lived alone before getting married, I never put up a tree or anything. Christmas, Thanksgiving, my birthday, et al haven’t been a big thing to me since I was a little kid and I only celebrate them now because of my wife and my parents.

 

[DaveF]

Thanksgiving was emotinally easy for me. My tradition has been not having a set tradition. Family, friends, travel, stay home, at a restaurant. Since graduating college, it’s different year to year. I didn’t imagine a pandemic, but I’ll take it as part of my “tradition”. So we stayed home, the two of us. I did a smaller cook. It was good. And we did zoom with friends yesterday, which was nice to catch up a bit. (The weekend was interrupted a bit by having to go into the office Friday and Saturday evenings, which affected up my plans for ultimate chillatude, but it's that stage in my project, and I'm glad to be working, so no real complaints about that.)


As for Christmas: My wife wanted to do early decorations -- legally allowed under a pandemic, she tells me -- so we did outside lights last weekend. We did the tree yesterday.

This is the first year in my life I've not spent Christmas with my family on Christmas Day. The first year since getting married that I've not been to my in-laws for their Christmas get together.

So Christmas is going to be chill and odd. But it will be enjoyable.

 

[jayembee]

It'll be just the two of us for Christmas (well, and Wonder Woman too ), just as it was for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure what plans there will be for gift-exchanges, but it terms of get-togethers, the households will remain separated.

(A good part of my wife's family is within 30-40 minutes of us, so we could, theoretically, drop off gifts on each others' porches. The remaining question is whether we want to do that.)

I'm not a big Christmas decorations kind of person in the best of times, but my wife is. She wants to put up the usual candle-bridges in the windows, and wants to set up the (artificial) tree. To do the latter, though, we have to figure out where to make space in the living room. On the other hand, without having a lot of company over, we can relocate some of the furniture to the sun room.

Just today, my wife also thought that she'd like to put some lights in the topiary we have in the front yard.

 

[Malcolm R]

My wife keeps waffling about putting up a tree because the two of us will be the only ones to see it. I don’t care one way or the other. I have a ton of lights to put up outside today (not my idea). If it were up to me, I wouldn’t bother with a tree, lights, or decorations as I don’t care about it and never have. For the 10 years I lived alone before getting married, I never put up a tree or anything. Christmas, Thanksgiving, my birthday, et al haven’t been a big thing to me since I was a little kid and I only celebrate them now because of my wife and my parents.

Same here. I've tried to get my parents to cut back on holidays, or to skip them completely, but that seems to be a no-go. What I'd really like for Christmas is to skip it altogether. Of course, people think I'm joking when I say it out loud. None of us need presents. Decorations are a lot of extra work for nothing, and more extra work after the holiday to take them down and put them away again.

 

[Carlo Medina]

Month 9 into work from home and I’ve learned two things:

1. Broadway Joe wants to make sure I’m getting all of my Medicare coverage
2. Magnum P.I. wants to take my parents home away from them

(This attempt at humor may only make sense to CNN viewers)

 

[TravisR]

Month 9 into work from home and I’ve learned two things:

1. Broadway Joe wants to make sure I’m getting all of my Medicare coverage

No offense to Joe but if I hear that dude one more time, I'm gonna lose my mind.

 

[TJPC]

I find the almost total coverage of every new pill or “medical device” on the 3 news channels with the long list of side effects really really annoying. I also know far far more about “Mesothelioma” than I ever wanted to know — so much more.

 

[The Obsolete Man]

I find the almost total coverage of every new pill or “medical device” on the 3 news channels with the long list of side effects really really annoying. I also know far far more about “Mesothelioma” than I ever wanted to know — so much more.

At least none of them have the side effect of "dick falls off".

...yet.

Though there was one drug that was always advertised during NASCAR races in the 2019 season whose side effects were literally "taint rots off". Seriously. The side effects were "necrotizing fasciitis of the perineum", which, if you translate that into plain English, you come up with... well, taint rots off.

And all I could think was "these were the ones that made it past the trials? What happened to the people who took the ones that didn't make it to market?!?"

Anyway. COVID test was negative. Took nearly a week for the results because of the holidays, though. I apparently just have a weak cold. I wonder if I should get an antibody test to see if I've ever had it, though. Eh, we'll see.

 

[Mark Booth]

Month 9 into work from home and I’ve learned two things:

1. Broadway Joe wants to make sure I’m getting all of my Medicare coverage
2. Magnum P.I. wants to take my parents home away from them

(This attempt at humor may only make sense to CNN viewers)

We've got 4 TVs in our home and we've got Apple TV access in all 4 of those rooms too. My wife may watch standard broadcast TV but if I'm in the room with her the TV is set to an HDMI input and the Apple TV is doing its thing. Every streaming service I subscribe to is the tier without commercials. Hulu and CBS All Access are the two we watch most often. I'd rather watch episodes of Seinfeld for the umpteenth time than watch any of those god-awful commercials that are directly aimed at my age group.

I have grown to DESPISE standard ad-based "free" television. Here.... take my money and save me the misery of those idiotic, designed by nitwits, commercials on broadcast television.

Mark

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Regarding ad-supported viewing and listening, I read an interesting interview with an economics professor about them, and I forgot his exact wording but he basically called them a time tax on the elderly and the poor. Made sense when I thought about it. The elderly and the poor are the least likely to either understand/be able to easily use new technology and the poor can’t afford it, but just about everyone else can either afford more for the ad free versions of services and/or use a DVR to avoid commercials on broadcast and cable TV. Perhaps even more interestingly, this professor explained that it wasn’t a good use of time. He basically had the theory that time is your most valuable commodity in life and ads suck up that time without giving the same value in return, but that most people don’t stop to think about the value of their own time. Every TV or radio commercial you sit through, ever online ad you wait for instead of subscribing to the site, every ad in a streaming service, it adds up, and he said most people could get a couple weeks back per year by spending a few hundred bucks wisely on the right stuff - less than the average vacation costs.

 

[TJPC]

And they don't work! In my media class we watched a show called something like "Workds Greatest Commercials". Students were asked to make a list of what they saw. We discussed how funny some were, how touching, how irritating etc. Then they were asked to tell what product was advertised. Almost always students were not able to remember any.

 

[jcroy]

And they don't work! In my media class we watched a show called something like "Workds Greatest Commercials". Students were asked to make a list of what they saw. We discussed how funny some were, how touching, how irritating etc. Then they were asked to tell what product was advertised. Almost always students were not able to remember any.

My speculation is that advertising is meant more as a way to "rent out" space in someone's unconsicious brain memory recall mechanism. Especially in the brains of young people which are not then-yet "calcified".

Memory recall of brand names, jingles, etc ... whether conscious or unconscious, appears to be everything when it comes to consumer purchasing decisions made on the spot. Especially impulse type purchases.

 

[Carlo Medina]

Talk about small victories. Logitech webcam finally coming back into stock after 9 months. Wonder why they were so hard to come by. Did a pickup at my local target. Went on a whim down the cleaning aisle. Limited Lysol wipes. Which coincidentally I hadn’t seen in 9 months. Since supplies were low I only purchased two canisters. But dang. Christmas came early.

 

[TJPC]

What are people using all these Lysol wipes for? I thought the virus was only spread through aerosol contact. We bought a group of these wipes from Costco, and have used only a couple sheets.

We are retired and only leave the house for groceries, and peek out the front door to get our paper. (It is delivered everyday at 2:00 a.m., and I figure it’s lost any covet microbes by 9:00 a.m. when I get it.). Outside of that we have no contact.

 

[Mark Booth]

I was able to get a 5-pack of Lysol Wipes at Costco during senior shopping hour about 3 weeks ago. We should now have enough wipes to get us through the pandemic (assuming the vaccine is effective).

The city of Los Angeles has implemented a curfew and strict stay-at-home requirements. The same will happen to our area if hospital ICUs reach 86% of capacity. I fear the next 3 months are going to bring a lot of suffering.

Mark