I haven’t been out of the house since our return from Anaheim on Monday. I’m still feeling the effects of COVID; I’m doing my best to remain distant from everyone else in the family. I would feel awful if they got sick and so far everyone seems to be maintaining their health.
I’m feeling better than I did yesterday but nowhere near 100%. I haven’t had a fever, I’ve just felt run down and very winded climbing the stairs and basically ambulating around the house. I cough and sneeze a lot.
I would say my recovery is headed in the right direction. And that’s all I can hope for right now.
I like watching old sitcoms. I haven’t watched a lot of “Hazel” in my day. “Hazel” ran for five seasons in the early half of the 1960s, was based on a comic strip of the same name, and starred Shirley Booth in title character. I’ve seen episodes here and there and I watched one on YouTube earlier today. Hazel purposely lost a baking contest so the other woman, a widow, could take her son to the World’s Fair (the grand prize of the baking contest). It had all the charm of early 1960s sitcoms and it made me smile.
I got to poking around to see if I could find out a little bit more about Shirley Booth and I came across this interview with Dick Cavett. It took place in 1971, so Shirley was around 73 years old at the time. I found her to be a delight, so pleasant.
As I get older I tend to appreciate these interviews from days gone by more and more.
Yesterday morning, waking up at Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel and readying ourselves for the ride home across the desert, I felt sniffly. I had a little post nasal drip and a bit of a headache. I took a couple Tylenol and we made our way home for the 450+ miles from Anaheim to Tucson. I went to bed rather early last night.
I didn’t get much sleep.
I woke up this morning feeling more of the same except a little more intense. Having just been away from work for four days, and since I work from home anyways, I dragged myself downstairs to my office and got to work. I took a couple more Tylenol. I checked my temperature as well, and it was within normal range (admittedly, slightly high for me at 98.1 DEG F, I usually clock in around 97 DEG F).
The sniffles have continued and I feel dragged out. On a whim I tested myself for COVID.
Yep, I have COVID again. No one else in the family is sick and Earl tested negative for COVID, so I’m staying away from everyone else. Apparently I didn’t mask up enough or the elevators were too crowded or someone breathed the wrong way on the Pirates of the Caribbean or something.
I don’t feel awful. I don’t feel as bad as the last time I had COVID. But I’m kind of bummed that’s I’m going through this again. I’m thankful for my original vaccine shots and two boosters since. It’s probably helping keep things under control.
The pandemic is not over. I know we like to believe it’s over, but it’s not. Be careful out there, act responsibly, and most importantly, get vaccinated. I’m probably not in the hospital tonight because of my vaccinations. I hope I get better soon.
Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols passed away yesterday. She was 89 years old.
She wanted to leave “Star Trek” after the first season, but a conversation with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind. She later volunteered her time to NASA, promoting their programs in the name of diversity to encourage minority and female astronauts.
Thank you, Nichelle, for keeping us your captive audience for so many years.
One of the things that has always fascinated me about Walt Disney World is the way the Disney company hides the vast majority of its critical infrastructure. The Magic Kingdom is built on top of a complex system of corridors to manage the movement of cast members and goods and the like. There’s no power lines. It’s very rare to see a cast member going to or from work.
Disneyland doesn’t work that way.
Because it’s older, and Walt Disney World was built based on the lessons learned of Disneyland, mainly the importance of space, you see elements of Disney’s infrastructure all over Disneyland. This isn’t a bad thing, it just distracts from the ability to “escape the real world” and doesn’t accomplish that task as well as the Orlando property.
For example, there’s two circuits of 220K volt power lines bordering the Disneyland property, right behind many of the rides in Disney’s California Adventure. Disney does their best to hide them, but you can still see them.
I do appreciate that Disney tries to hide them behind some palm trees, though.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of elevators. When people find this out about me they sometimes find it surprising, since I fly airplanes that are much higher than any elevator I’ll ever be in. It’s not the height, it’s not even the fear of the elevator dropping, it’s not being able to see outside or get out of my own free will that bothers me. If I can see outside I’m fine.
The elevators at Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel are very small. Actually, three of the four elevators are small; the fourth elevator is a glass elevator and I find that to be wonderful.
The elevators work a little differently than your average elevators. There are touch pads in the elevator area where you select the floor you’d like to go to. The touch pad then tells you “go to elevator A” and you get in the elevator and it takes you to the floor. There are no buttons to select a floor in the elevator, just a door open, door close, and alarm button. The lack of floor selection buttons surprisingly made my claustrophobia worse. It’s definitely a lack of control thing.
In this sort of situation I usually hike myself up the stairs. I don’t mind walking 12-14 floors if I have to, but Disney doesn’t let you do that. You can go down the stairs, as long as you go all the way down to ground level and depart onto the street, but you can’t leave the staircase to go to another floor nor can you enter the staircase from downstairs. The doors from the stairwell to the various floors of rooms are locked. So, I had to either suck it up and hop on an elevator with other people going to the same floor as me and just ride it out or, and this is what I did, I had to keep hitting my destination until I was told to go to elevator D, which is the glass elevator.
Sometimes it took a few spins of the touchpad lottery, but most of the time I’ve able to get elevator D in a few moments.
Every time I had to head downstairs, I take the stairs. And it is wonderful.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
