I’m very thankful.
This morning, for the first time in a long time, felt the need for the joy of making music. . .reached over and grabbed a whistle and played The Hunter´s House. Working on The Skylark. Looking for other joyous tunes. . .
Bob
To better days!
Well, I’m still going to be watching cat videos, so…
For your viewing pleasure. . .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd4fe0sdIOM
Bob
Try This, doing the rounds elsewhere
(and FWIW, the butcher’s in the pic above is my local butcher shop, when Frank Healy, the musical butcher on the shop front, was running it. The shop closed some years ago and briefly doubled as an outlet for flutes and fiddles in july 2019)
(David Power selling fidles, 2019)
At the end of the day, a cat’s a cat after all.
Release the flying clichés!
So can I (post-covid), thankfully, but I think my whisky tasting days may have come to a premature end. My sense of smell has not recovered and I would say I have only 60% of my original.
Moral of the story, drink your whisky while you can, and play your bagpipes even when sick - it’ll blast those alveoli back open.
I’m trying to imagine this but can’t. What’s it like?
Not to worry. Smell receptors will regenerate and eventually recover. 
Bob
Hm, maybe. I was listening to interviews with several people yesterday. All of them had long term loss off smell and taste.
This article (in the Guardian today) has some perspective as well.
As the virus has supposedly not been around more than approx. a year, I’m not sure that anything really qualifies as long-term yet, unless organs (such as lungs) or other systems are damaged. I’ve had loss of or altered taste from dental procedures that lasted about as long and did ultimately resolve. Bad luck, and unpleasant, though.
Certainly not helpful when there’s a gas leak. As for losing taste, maybe better than mint toothpaste with orange juice.
Well, imagine that instead of just having a continuous “smell survey” of your surroundings, you get bits and pieces. A waft here, a whiff there, despite that what you’re cooking usually fills the whole house with the smell of garlic and butter. Like, I’ll go “ooh, I smell garlic” and then realize “well, duh, I’m standing over a pan full of it.”
And I just can’t smell certain things. Like bleach - at all. I used to use bleach solutions for sanitizing my homebrew equipment, but I had to switch to one of those fancy sanitizers that breaks down to vinegar because I couldn’t smell when the bottles had been rinsed enough.
The most frustrating thing (aside not being able to quickly assess whether your pets cages are clean) is not being able to detect potentially dodgy food. I can stick my nose into a container, and aside from a vague odor of the contents most basic scent, it’s not really specific enough to tell if it smelled “off” or not.
This varies day to day, and breathing steam helps, but it’s definitely not back yet after almost a year.
Damn.
Yeah. Mask up, people. I got lucky, comparatively speaking. As a woodwind player I am exceptionally lucky I didn’t lose more.
Indeed. I know of someone online who is young-ish (30s?) and fairly healthy-- as in, would ride her bike for long distances daily, etc.-- and got sick… it’s been months and she is still unable to even walk very far, cannot work full-time (and is starting to think about finding out what she will do if she can’t ever return to full-time work).
People talk about this as if either you die or you’re completely fine… that’s not the case, and plenty of people are left with long-term or lifetime health problems. Frankly, the above scenario scares me far more than dying from this thing. If I die, my troubles are over, so who cares. But if I suffer lifelong damage, I will have decades of figuring out how to pay my bills and take care of the basics of life.
We just had a scare. I developed the symptoms of a cold, and we have a family friend who developed cold symptoms, was routinely tested and came up positive. So I went for a test and was banished into quarantine in the basement. Happily, the test came up negative.
I have no idea how much we can count on that test, but we have nothing else really to go on. I’m hoping that a rational federal government can manage this better, but it’s fascinating to look at the variation in how the disease has affected different countries. In the meantime, we are wearing double masks and gong back to ordering groceries online
This pandemic will be the subject of discussion and scrutiny and analysis for decades.
it’s fascinating to look at the variation in how the disease has affected different countries
We’re in our third lockdown since before chirstmas. There was a brief respite before that but the new more virulent strain of the virus from the UK has become the dominant strain and lockdown is to continue for at least another month. If anything, things seem to become harder as time goes on.
I know you have some of the new variants there too but I am not sure to what extend, but be prepared to see things worsen when they become the more prevalent strains. Some of the vaccines appear less effective against some of the new strains, particularly the South African and South American ones.
It’ll be a while before we see the end of all this.