She knows her human is a bit on the stressed side and has spent the last two nights smashed up against me in bed.

My brother was out last night*, so I decided to expand my Indian food dishes and picked up Chicken Tikka Kebab & Chicken Curry. (And of course, the bread basket with ALL THE NAANS!) The Chicken Tikka Kebab seemed super safe – can’t really go wrong with marinated grilled chicken, and it was really good. I was a little worried about the curry, cause it is known to be melt your face off spicy – but this restaurant knows they have a lot of white people in the neighborhood, LOL. It was mild, but had tons of flavor and a really low, slow building heat to it. My nose was running for a good 20 minutes after eating it, but damn it was good.

Question – is it considered uncouth to dunk the naan into the curry sauce? Cause I was definitely dunking the naan into the curry sauce. I also may have picked up some chicken nuggets from the Wendy’s in the same shopping center as a “well, if the curry is too much, I still have food, and if not, snacks later” and I may have also been dunking some of the nuggets into the curry sauce…

To any Indian cooks out there shuddering… Americans love chicken nuggets, and really, using the curry sauce for dunking – it’s a compliment, I swear.

I’m looking yet again at the CDC’s new guidelines – taking hospitalizations into account is not a bad things at all, but it’s still a mess. During the Omicron surge, our hospitalization rates were thankfully very low – we got SO lucky on that front when you consider how many cases we had. With these new metrics, even when we hit 3700 cases A DAY in the county – we never would have gone over “Medium” status – which only really recommends masking for high risk individuals and those around them. I shudder to think how many more cases there would have been with these guidelines in place. As it is, we don’t know how many of those folks now have long covid.

Maybe it will work out fine, but I am ready for the next surge as a result of this – some of us just have no interest in getting covid in the first place. It’s a shame that the CDC has forgotten that Prevention is actually part of their name.

And the cherry on the shit sundae is Putin basically responding to sanctions with the threat of nukes. For a while I had thought to myself that he wouldn’t nuke Ukraine because it’s right next to Russia and you don’t necessarily want to drop a nuke right in your backyard. And then I thought about the fact that Gov Abbott in Texas would nuke Matamoros without a second thought.

I don’t know about you, but this timeline kinda sucks.

* Mr. Adventurous. He has done more social stuff over the course of the pandemic than I have – and by that I mean he has spent time with one or two friends who have been on their best pandemic behavior in private settings maybe a half dozen times. I’ve probably taken on more risk with all my trips to the grocery store, LOL.