By Dorothy Rosby
Merry Christmas all! I hope 2023 was a good year for you. It didn’t start out well for me. Ever since early 2020, I’ve had the feeling that I’m running from something. And last winter it caught me…COVID. I couldn’t be sure until I took the test, but I knew something was wrong because there was chocolate in the house and I didn’t feel like eating it.
I learned an important lesson from the experience. It isn’t enough that you read the instructions, you have to follow them too. I won’t go into details about where I went wrong with my first test because it involves swabbing my nostrils and you might be eating lunch while you read the paper.
Suffice it to say that when the result was negative I didn’t trust it because of the swabbing mishap. When I took the second test I followed the instructions carefully. Then I spilled the testing solution all over my dining room table. There went my dream of being a lab technician.
With my third test, I made it all the way to the step where you set the timer for 10 minutes. There are times when I feel like the universe is taunting me and this was one of them. I’d set the electric timer on my stove and a mere two minutes had passed when the power went out. I’m not making that up. There was no way to tell when my time was up. But at some point the test read positive so I decided that whether or not I actually had COVID, it was easier to assume I did.
I was vaccinated so my case was mild, but I was worried about my cat. I’d read that pets can catch COVID but that you shouldn’t put masks on them to protect them. I think my cat would agree. Luckily he didn’t show any symptoms so I didn’t have to swab his nostrils.
In other news, we had a minor explosion in our home. One morning there was a boom so loud I jumped. I couldn’t tell where it came from so I wandered around the house expecting to find a mess somewhere. And I did, but not until the next day when I opened the freezer. Everything inside was covered with a frozen, tannish foam. Just as I was telling my husband there was something terribly wrong with our freezer, I noticed a can split in half on the bottom shelf. I’d purchased a soda the day before and put it in the freezer to cool quickly. Then I promptly forgot about it and had tea. When my husband asked what was wrong with the freezer, I said, “Uh…it really needs cleaning.”