Fifteen Years and Covid

Hey everybody.

This weekend marks me and Kris' 15th Anniversary, and we had planned on heading down to Frankenmuth and staying at the festive Bavarian Inn for the weekend.  Hit up Bronners before the crowds get too insane, stroll about downtown doing wine-tasting and ducking in and out of shops, and otherwise not parenting for a few days.  

That was the plan, at any rate.  But 2021 - 2020's not-quite-as-douchey-but-still-pretty-crappy little brother - had other plans.

Yours Truly woke up last Saturday morning with a pretty sore throat, sinus pressure, runny nose, cough - the whole shebang.  This was definitely weird, because the night before I had felt just fine having a few beers with the guys on Mitch's back patio.  I shrugged it off as being just a slight cold (I had definitely suffered through worse) and carried about my day as normal.  Kris was convinced I should head out to an urgent care and get a Covid test, but I chalked this up to her being overly-paranoid what with local case numbers continuing to climb.

Well, as Sunday morning dawned I still felt bad, and eventually I started developing the tell-tale signs of the dreaded Coronavirus:  the aforementioned symptoms listed previously, as well as body aches, fever, and - most of all - the loss of taste and smell.  That last one was super frickin' weird - I opened up a can of coffee and couldn't smell it at all, and I couldn't taste food in the slightest (really bizarre feeling, like having your taste buds stuffed up.)  

Expecting the inevitable, Kris drove me up to the Pro Health Urgent Care down on Wackerly and, after waiting about a half an hour or so, some nurse chick came out and skewered the insides of my skull with a 2-foot q-tip.  They did a Rapid Test as well as the more accurate test that takes a few days to get results, and told me that if I ended up testing Positive for Covid that they would call me within a half an hour.

Well, 20 minutes later I got the great news.

What has two thumbs and Covid-19?  This guy.

Stocking up on the essentials around here.

This basically destroyed our weekend prospects, which was definitely disappointing because we had both been looking forward to a weekend away for quite some time.  Fortunately, we were able to contact the hotel and just push our reservations back two weeks without having to pay anything extra, which was awesome.  Now we get to take our 15th anniversary in early November. . . which I guess is better than nothing.

The Johnsons dropped off some beverages to help us along. 

Yours Truly was now looking at ten days in quarantine; the start of my official quarantine being the day I started exhibiting symptoms (Saturday morning), and lasting until next Tuesday.  After contacting my principal to let her know that I had the pandemic, the school had to go into full-on scramble mode in order to identify those students who I had been in close-contact with.

Long story short, 68 out of my 115 students had to go into quarantine.  All because of me.

For our anniversary dinner this evening we decided to place a take-out order from Maru sushi.  They're pricey, but pretty good.

So I generally drop some money on a decent gift for the 'big' anniversaries (the 5th, 10th, and now, 15th anniversaries.)  Usually this means diamonds, and this year I had to put some serious research time into selecting a quality diamond pendant for the ol' ball and chain.  Took months of shopping around, studying cut, clarity, carat, color, etc., and then dealing with our insurance agent behind Kris' back in order to have the diamond put on our policy in case she loses it or it gets stolen.  Fortunately I was able to pull all this off without her knowing of it, and even though I wasn't able to give it to her at a nice restaurant somewhere in Frankenmuth, it still went over well.

Ended up going with a half-carat, VS1, E-colored round cut.   Thank Jesus this is only one of those every-five-years sorta things. . .

Abby notifies the family of her self-imposed banishment to her quarters.

And so here we are, half-way through my Covid quarantine.  Not celebrating our wedding anniversary the way we wanted to, and no longer feeling sick at all.  My taste and smell have more or less come back, and besides being constantly short of breath, I'm feeling pretty good.  Spending my time creating video-lectures for my sub to show my remaining students in the classroom, hosting Zoom help sessions for my students stuck at home, binge-watching Hulu's Wu Tang: An American Saga (sooooo good), and logging in hours and hours of time on Elder Scrolls Online.

I've had it far shittier, folks. 

- Brian