Well I still haven’t caught Covid, as far as I know. Despite spending time sitting next to someone in a pub last week who tested positive the next day, then spending ten minutes talking to someone before the Stowmarket Half on Sunday, who was moaning about his cold that “definitely wasn’t Covid”, which it turned out was just an opinion, which the test he belatedly took when he went home disagreed with.
I went to see New Model Army in Bury St Edmunds (an incongruous combination perhaps) on Tuesday, and wore a mask while I was there, partly just in case the LFT I took that day was a false negative, and partly because statistically there must have been a fair few infected people there. This seemed an unpopular point of view though, as I only saw a couple of other mask wearers there. It kind of feels like everyone’s decided to just give up and catch it anyway, but I’d rather avoid it as long as I can on the basis that even if it’s mild most people I know haven’t enjoyed it, and it would almost certainly mess up my running for a while (especially if I ended up with “long Covid”, which is my main worry).
Anyway, NMA were good, even if the crowd was slightly sparse and a bit less boisterous than usual (I started listening to them in the early 90s, but tales of insane mosh pits had put me off seeing them live until a few years ago, when it turned out to be fine, although possibly because we’ve all got old in the meantime).
On Wednesday morning one of the cats proudly came in through the cat flap with a mouse dangling from his mouth by its tail. He released it, and it immediately ran behind the fridge, where as far as I could tell it stayed until Thursday night, when I was woken up by the sounds of it being chased round the lounge. This time I managed to grab it and put it out of the front door, hoping they wouldn’t figure out where it had gone in time to track it down. I got woken again on Saturday night by one of the other cats growling in the bedroom, with either another mouse or the same very unlucky one. Either way, I caught it and put it outside again, and hopefully it’s either learned its lesson or been quietly finished off outside.
At work, the monitoring system I’ve built and supported pretty much solo over the past three years is apparently on the point of being considered one of EE’s core network management tools. I can’t help thinking they’re getting it pretty cheap for my salary compared to some of the other big ol’ enterprisey systems it’s sitting alongside. We went to the pub on Friday to celebrate yet another person leaving the company for a sizeable pay rise and a mostly-remote job, and amongst the people there from our long-standing Friday Pub crew, those of us still with BT were in the minority. Who knows, after 30 years maybe it’s not too late for me to look elsewhere! Or at least threaten to, and see if they offer me anything to stay.
I decided that the reason I still haven’t managed to ride my unicycle is that I stupidly bought one with a 24″ wheel, not realising that they’re harder to ride. Obviously the solution to that was to buy a cheap 20″ one too, and it arrived on Saturday.
So now I can’t ride two unicycles. Although it feels like I’m a bit closer to getting somewhere with this one.
I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off, so hopefully I’ll escape any of those annoying biannual failing tests after the clock change. Fingers crossed for a similar lack of production issues.