The winter, that is. I definitely need to blog more, although it does feel like we’ve been stuck in a mire. Lots of cold weather keeping us indoors.

Then, a couple of weekends ago, I came down with ‘a cold’. I’d been out Monday night the 31st with friends, also had at least one other meal in a crowded restaurant. (vaccinated, boosted, masked, all that) Wednesday started having a little cough, uh-oh. I had a doctor’s appointment in town on Thursday morning, so took a COVID test – negative. Went to the doctor’s, spent the rest of the day at the office (alone except for one three-minute conversation). Friday felt worse and would have called in, but was at home anyway and had meetings.

Friday night both C and I had awful insomnia, so Saturday we both just crashed (me in the recliner in the office, him in the living room on the sofa). Another COVID test, also negative. But Sunday! great sleep, felt great, got up all perky, started doing laundry. An online friend suggested I do one more test… and it was positive. Not a faint line either, but solid red. ARRGH. Well, that explained that.

So I told C, had him test (negative), and then we spent the next week mostly at opposite ends of the apartment and I moved into the guest room. We did have dinner together and watched TV from different sides of the room and me masked. By this point I felt fine, but he was coming down with something as well, argh. (spoiler alert: he has continued to test negative, so his thing may have just been a cold). We got through the week like that, I had a couple more positive tests, though. I missed the first ‘back to orchestra’ rehearsal, grr.

But I tested negative on Saturday and I’m good to go, and C is feeling better and has his first physical therapy appointment today (so maybe we can finally get some traction on addressing his mobility problems) and it’s Valentine’s Day! We’d cancelled our planned dinner out for Sunday night, we’ll do that some other time.

So yeah, that sucked. But thank you, vaccines, the actual sick part was no worse than (or different than) getting a cold.

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Other than that, we’ve been watching Olympic figure skating (streaming on Peacock, so we’ve been doing it on ‘replay’, at our leisure) and Oscar movies. I’ll do an Oscar post later, I think. And I’ve been doing the winter cleaning thing. Oo, I got the fancy and very expensive French horn case I’d ordered a couple of months ago, which means I now have to return my friend Steven’s case which he lent me unasked-for, and store my old case. My winter-cleaning task yesterday was the storage shelf in the front hall closet, which is mostly musical instruments I never get to play. I took them all out, wiped down the shelf, wiped down the cases, and opened all the instruments just to make sure there was nothing weird or growing in the cases.

I also put a couple of them together to honk on them. I was a clarinetist before I was a hornist, and someday I’d like the chance to play clarinet again. I own two, both bought on ebay at some point. The Bundy plastic one I actually had a shop put in shape, and that plays fine for what it is. Except for the super-high notes, the fingerings came right back to me and I even attempted a bit of Mozart concerto and Finzi Five Bagatelles, it’s all still in there. I also have a wooden one, but it needs an overhaul to be playable.

(for the record, the other instruments are:

• strings: violin, soundless viola, guitar plus a random bass bow
• woodwinds: assorted recorders, flute, clarinets, bassoon and a bagpipe practice chanter
• brass: cornet, alto horn, valve trombone, rescue baritone
• percussion: a bag of random stuff like tambourines which I’m going to get rid of)

So… I think we’re back to ‘normal’ this week, let’s hope.

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This post is part of a larger project, #MOC19. Read more about the Mass Observation COVID-19 project here.