Virus and Earthquakes

Happy New year 2021. 😀 aaaannnd, shit did not start positively, despite our high hopes.

We have arrived to the situation that we have worked so hard to avoid – we got infected, yes with Covid-19. Although, my sinuses got inflamed too, to the point of bleeding, but I am not sure that is one of the symptoms of Covid infections. Now, almost two weeks since the first signs of illness presented themselves, we feel fine by the way, we suffered mild to mid-range symptoms, among which the headache and tiredness took the most out of us. Still does – it seems to be coming in waves, and today seems to be a good day. The most asked question of the past two weeks has been, “Where did you get it!?!?” and the most common reaction to our “news” has been: “You are kidding me right?! This is a joke, no!?” I did not realize that people see me as such a jokester. No, it was not a joke, we got a positive test to show for it. And no, we don´t know where we got it. We took every precaution possible – but there are people that did not, many people in our apartment building do not wear masks and they do not keep the necessary distance, so my best guess would be, that we walked into a hallway or the elevator that an infected person occupied before us and we inhaled the virus (they say this is a possibility, because the masks on our faces do not protect us from aerosols exhaled by other people). But right now it doesn´t really matter, we seem to be out of the danger and just need to fully recover. In our hour-of-need we realized that we have many good friends that offered and gave us help during these two weeks. I am sure that not worrying what we are going to eat or how to get provisions and medicine, helped us to mend quicker. We really are lucky to be in the position to be able to rely on so many good people.

But the first few days my pessimism fueled by my vivid-imagination got the better of me, as I imagined all the worst scenarios possible. Mostly I worried for my son (my daughter usually sails through any disease with little more than a day of sleep and cranky behavior), who is also an asthmatic as I am, and the thought of him having serious respiratory problems scared the shit out of me. But fortunately he seemed to get the least harmful version of all of us and recovered after only a couple of days of headache and runny nose. Therefore, instead of having a fun-filled new-year holiday, we spent our time in our beds, watching every possible film that would interest us.

Slika nas v postelji

And as if the disease itself was not bad enough, we have experienced several earthquakes these past two weeks. One was so bad that it woke us in the middle of the night. The feeling of waking to a rocking bed, half dazed due to the illness, realizing that it is not your wife making a pass at you, instead trying to think what the proper reaction in an earthquake really is, is something that I could have lived without experiencing it. Therefore, I cannot imagine how the people from Croatian town of Petrinja felt, when their town was demolished by this earthquake: Petrinja was the epicenter of the earthquake that shoot their town with the force of 6.3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Petrinja_earthquake

With all of this shit piled up on an already huge amount of shit from the year that is 2020, we were eager to move to the 2021. And we did, but the shit still seems to pile up into a bigger shit-pile, with USA leading in the shit-pile-making contributions. The attack on the capitol at the confirmation of electoral votes showed me just how fragile democracy really is. It took only one man, one crazy president to rally enough people to seriously threaten an important democratic procedure. Watching this transpire I realized that hundred years ago another madman did the same thing (more successfully though, as Trump is just too dumb to comprehend the width of his influence, so I hope he will not continue down this dark path), and we hate him almost universally. The attack on Capitol just showed us that we have not come far in the last 100 years and that we do not learn from our history.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/election-us-2020-55558355

Anyway, just before 2020 year-end really went to shit in a royal way, we had a couple really nice days. We had fun in the snow, while we looked forward to a week of holidays filled with more snow and fun and good food. Ignorance really is bliss and not knowing what awaits us in the future is a blessing.