Welp, our numbers came up this week, after 240 weeks of successfully dodging it. Tuesday morning, I woke up with a slight sore throat and sniffles and opted out of going for that morning's planned run; H felt fine and did his five miles of hill running, part of a planned taper for the Monterey Half in just under three weeks. I thought it might be allergies, E had just been complaining to me about allergies on our walk Monday evening, but by the evening when my symptoms hadn't gone away even after popping the usual allergy pill, I got nervous. I tested; negative. H tested; positive. We promptly isolated from each other, turned up the air filters and opened all the windows, but no dice; 12 hours later, I, too, would get that second bright pink line on my test dongle.
H continues to be completely asymptomatic; my symptoms are relatively mild, and I'm doing my best to stay that way. We'd both just gotten freshly vaxxed as well for both covid and flu (the weekend before last), so hoping that bodes well for our fighting it off. Neither of us qualified for Paxlovid, but we are being good about rest and sufficient sleep. My mom dropped off soup from Noodles Fresh; our veggie box arrived on schedule and we will let the stove make soups for us; neighbors and friends have offered to do CVS runs as needed. We are aware of and following the COVID antihistamine protocol![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
synecdochic posted about (and amused and delighted by how many of our friends from different corners of the internet pointed us back to that source). It helps that cetirizine was already a daily thing for H, and that famotidine, loratadine, and Flonase are all things I keep on hand for my body's continued functioning.
So I've spent most of the past 24 hours asleep, and when I've been awake, ugh, the 300 pages of election-related reading the state of California has sent us so that we can cast our votes in an informed manner is more than I can handle right now.
Instead, it's been all romance novels all the time. (Really, it's been that way all year long since I ate up Sarah J. Maas' ACOTAR series and the available books of Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series - both of them suddenly everywhere in my fantasy recs.) Ali Hazelwood's Bride for the romance book club I recently joined; Kate Stayman-London's Fang Fiction, acquired at the airport before my early flight out to JFK last week; the latest Casey McQuiston (a food tour of Italy *with* a love story!). I've devoured the entire Emily Henry canon; Ashley Poston's The Seven-Year Slip (am I a sucker for time travel, yes/yes); Hannah Grace's Icebreaker series (I guess I'm falling down the hockey romance rabbit hole, at least as long as it stays away from the Russian mafia tropes?); and lordy, Abby Jiminez (break a love curse, lure me in with curiosity about the secondary characters, oh, and you run a bakery too?)
I think at least part of this is feeling like I don't know where to find good fanfic anymore (I know, it's not like AO3 has gone away) and also not feeling particularly inspired to read *in* fandom right now? Like, even with all of these new-to-me universes from what I've been reading lately, not wanting other peoples' takes on them just yet? Heck, with stuff I've been watching, like all the new Trek, and Dragon Prince, and fifty bajillion cooking shows, the finding process feels like too much? And feeling like I want something new in old dependable fandoms but at this point people have mostly petered off of writing for them? But maybe I'll know it when I see it, I just don't know what it is?
I dunno, what else should I read? Things I feel like reading these days: magical realism, fantasy, sci-fi, contemporary romance is okay but I'd prefer it to have at least ~something~ special beyond yet another New York writer finding heartbreak and their OTP in the city and then retiring to the suburbs to start their family - like, Sarah Chamberlain's The Slowest Burn (which I read on my flight last week) is at least about a writer and chef in the Bay Area, and the MMC doesn't drive because fuck parking in SF, that level of realism and trueness to the city it's set in, versus so many plot points in other books where of course you can get from Prospect Park to the Upper West Side in 15 minutes). More than okay with spice but not seeking too much in the way of kink (is there an overall scale for that? is it even possible to come to a common agreement about what kinks are (inherently?) more intense subject matter than others?)
(I mean, ostensibly in under three weeks we're singing about all the springtime sexing-up, just in Latin and Mittelhochdeutsch so it's classy, lulz, maybe that's contributing to my choices of reading?)
H continues to be completely asymptomatic; my symptoms are relatively mild, and I'm doing my best to stay that way. We'd both just gotten freshly vaxxed as well for both covid and flu (the weekend before last), so hoping that bodes well for our fighting it off. Neither of us qualified for Paxlovid, but we are being good about rest and sufficient sleep. My mom dropped off soup from Noodles Fresh; our veggie box arrived on schedule and we will let the stove make soups for us; neighbors and friends have offered to do CVS runs as needed. We are aware of and following the COVID antihistamine protocol
synecdochic posted about (and amused and delighted by how many of our friends from different corners of the internet pointed us back to that source). It helps that cetirizine was already a daily thing for H, and that famotidine, loratadine, and Flonase are all things I keep on hand for my body's continued functioning. So I've spent most of the past 24 hours asleep, and when I've been awake, ugh, the 300 pages of election-related reading the state of California has sent us so that we can cast our votes in an informed manner is more than I can handle right now.
Instead, it's been all romance novels all the time. (Really, it's been that way all year long since I ate up Sarah J. Maas' ACOTAR series and the available books of Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series - both of them suddenly everywhere in my fantasy recs.) Ali Hazelwood's Bride for the romance book club I recently joined; Kate Stayman-London's Fang Fiction, acquired at the airport before my early flight out to JFK last week; the latest Casey McQuiston (a food tour of Italy *with* a love story!). I've devoured the entire Emily Henry canon; Ashley Poston's The Seven-Year Slip (am I a sucker for time travel, yes/yes); Hannah Grace's Icebreaker series (I guess I'm falling down the hockey romance rabbit hole, at least as long as it stays away from the Russian mafia tropes?); and lordy, Abby Jiminez (break a love curse, lure me in with curiosity about the secondary characters, oh, and you run a bakery too?)
I think at least part of this is feeling like I don't know where to find good fanfic anymore (I know, it's not like AO3 has gone away) and also not feeling particularly inspired to read *in* fandom right now? Like, even with all of these new-to-me universes from what I've been reading lately, not wanting other peoples' takes on them just yet? Heck, with stuff I've been watching, like all the new Trek, and Dragon Prince, and fifty bajillion cooking shows, the finding process feels like too much? And feeling like I want something new in old dependable fandoms but at this point people have mostly petered off of writing for them? But maybe I'll know it when I see it, I just don't know what it is?
I dunno, what else should I read? Things I feel like reading these days: magical realism, fantasy, sci-fi, contemporary romance is okay but I'd prefer it to have at least ~something~ special beyond yet another New York writer finding heartbreak and their OTP in the city and then retiring to the suburbs to start their family - like, Sarah Chamberlain's The Slowest Burn (which I read on my flight last week) is at least about a writer and chef in the Bay Area, and the MMC doesn't drive because fuck parking in SF, that level of realism and trueness to the city it's set in, versus so many plot points in other books where of course you can get from Prospect Park to the Upper West Side in 15 minutes). More than okay with spice but not seeking too much in the way of kink (is there an overall scale for that? is it even possible to come to a common agreement about what kinks are (inherently?) more intense subject matter than others?)
(I mean, ostensibly in under three weeks we're singing about all the springtime sexing-up, just in Latin and Mittelhochdeutsch so it's classy, lulz, maybe that's contributing to my choices of reading?)
