Getting the car washed this morning as it threatened to rain… But, gotta get that salt and sand off the undercarriage and all that.

I seem to be totally back into NoVa not-on-vacation mode, as I slept for shit last night and wasn’t up before the alarm this morning. Boooo. Lily is having her own re-entry issues in the form of a slightly touchy tummy this morning. Maybe another sign a petsitter is the way to go next year – they take very good care of all the animals at the kennel, but it’s just a lot for her. It is a shame she doesn’t like the kennel as much as Snoopy & Target did – they loved exploring the cattery and Target was known as the helper when it was time to get meals together for everyone.

Though I can tell she’s not feeling *too* bad, cause she’s still talkative (she gets quiet when she feels particularly icky) and I just went to pet her and she tried to pull my glasses off my face. I also have some rotisserie chicken that I got yesterday for salads, so a bit of that will make its way to her plate today.

In “bigger than my home” garbage, the radio was talking about Covid BA.5 this morning and it sounds like it’s gonna be as fucked up as the first Omicron wave. Sounds like it’s going North to South like so many of these variants – we’ve been a weird plateau of ~400 cases a day here in the county for the last month. We’ll see how long that lasts.

I’d like to someday get to a point where I’m not questioning every damn thing my body is doing. Sore throat or just a dry throat? Is my nose running because of Covid or because I went from AC indoors to humid outdoors? Headache or hangover? Is having dinner out for the first time in A YEAR a small, moderate, or incredibly stupid risk? And every time I want to do something even slightly normal or enjoyable – most of the enjoyment is sucked out of it because I just wonder if I’m being stupid and reckless. Honestly, I think 99% of the reason those damn beach tacos were so good was cause I could eat them outside, away from people, and with a lovely breeze. Not much of that around here.

And now we’re staring down the barrel of BA.5 – since all we’ve done since the vaccines became available is give variants all the room they want to run because no one wants to tell anyone what they need to do to help.

I will never understand why transmission prevention wasn’t part of the vaccine development and testing. Prevention of hospitalization and death is incredibly important – but when all structural transmission mitigation is dropped in favor of vaccines that don’t prevent transmission – well, it just doesn’t work, as we’ve seen with Delta, Omicron and all its bastard sub-variants. Our case counts now are higher than they were in 2020 when we had no vaccines, but we actually had structural support.

Pandemic management and prevention is completely on an ever shrinking portion of the population. It’s not right and it’s not fair. I wish people wouldn’t give up they way they are, but I also understand it – and absolutely hate it. Because it’s just never going to fucking end. 862 days of this and no end in sight, because for reasons I will never, ever understand – we lost the political will to care.

I’m going to try to go focus on more positive things. You hang in there.