Side effects from the 2nd dose of the Covid vaccine.

I didn't get any side effects from the first dose of the Covid vaccine - the (younger) (gay) (Filipino) nurse at the resthome said that the people who had them seemed to be the people who had actually had Covid before in the past - but the 2nd dose was something else entirely, for me.

I was fine at work except for a bit of a sore arm at the injection site like I had had with the 1st dose, but that night at like 4am, I woke up with chills and shivering, even though I had on the same amount of blankets I'd had on all winter, and it wasn't a particularly cold night, either.

And, I seemed to be decently exhausted and my joints a bit sore.

So, I get up and check the temperature on my thermostat, and it's like 62 degrees, even though most nights I leave it at like 60 and it gets down to there pretty quick, and sometimes it even gets down to 58, depending on how the dial is positioned, since it's not super sensitive and the temperature that comes out of it is like 1-2 degrees ballpark from what you set it on, and I always keep the temperature lower at night since I sleep better that way, with a colder room and a warmer bed of blankets, which is how I had set it up that night for the night, even though the ambient heat in the room from when I had been up hadn't entirely disappeared yet.

Then, I get back into bed knowing that I shouldn't be cold and I start shivering again, and I decide I should get a sweatshirt on or something, but I'm too tired to get up for a while, and then I finally do get up and get it on, but even then I'm still cold when I get back into bed, and every once in a while even then on top of all that I kind of half get up in my sleep a few times and even then I'm always still cold.

And, sometimes my legs are cold, too, and I draw them up to my chest and put them under my sweatshirt, so I'm like this little ball of warmth.

Then, the next morning I get up, and I'm just so tired, although I feel too hot with my sweatshirt on.

I wasn't sure if I would feel good enough to go to work that day at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, but luckily after lying in bed for like an hour and then a leisurely breakfast of brownies and cookies with some coffee, I finally was able to feel normal enough again to go head out for work.

Like I told her later that day, though, better like forty five minutes of chills and a shitty night's sleep, than Covid.

Overall, though, I do wonder if I had Covid back in early February 2020, when I got super tired and I had that same chills/exhaustion thing and I called off work for a few days, and I chalked it up to some bug that was going around, which is what my Telehealth doctor told me when I called up and described what I had in order to get an excuse for missing a few days of work.

If that's the case, though, why didn't I get more of a reaction with the first dose of the vaccine?

I wish I had had a Covid antibody test a while ago, right now I don't think I'll ever know if I had Covid back then, before it was "a thing."

On the (Tibetan) language.

After my one (Nepalese-born) (Tibetan) coworker gave me that homemade chicken soup of hers, I said "thank you" in (Tibetan) since that's one of my memorized phrases, and then I asked her if it was possible in (Tibetan) to say "thank you" for something, like "Thank you for the soup."

And, she said some larger phrase that ended in the "thank you" phrase that I knew, and I repeated it and asked her if that meant "Thank you for the soup," and she said it was like "Thank you for giving noodles," and I found it interesting that what I had perceived as soup, she perceived as noodles.

She categorized the food differently.

Resthome secrets, and a gift.

At the resthome, this one resident who's a (retired psychoanalyst) moved in a few months ago, and though we talked a little bit on her move-in day, she's been largely introverted since then, and so I've never really talked to her, until she got very chatty one evening a few weeks ago.

She said that for years now she has been interested in the major drives and lately she's been especially interested in aggression, since it's always with us and there's the question of what exactly it is, since we can't eliminate it but can only hope to control it, and she still hopes to finish her third book, on why people kill.

And, she said that Covid completely derailed her project, since she had been hoping to interview people in prison, but now you can't do that, and who knows when you'll be able to do that again.

Later that night, my one (Nepalese-born) (Tibetan) coworker asked me if I wanted to take some chicken soup of hers home that had homemade noodles in it, since she had brought it in for dinner but the staff meals that day had all been good and so she ate that at work instead, and also because she has more than enough soup at home, so there's no sense to take it home again or leave it at work for another time.

I said yes of course, and she asked me if I had any soy sauce, since I should use soy sauce instead of salt if I wanted to add some salt to the soup.

Addendum.

That day was a particularly rich day at the resthome, but when you list out every notable thing that happened like that, it sure makes you realize how often I end up seeing and chatting with different nice people over the course of a single day, which is something that I like and that really fits me, since it's like a never-ending cocktail reception where I can just bop around all the time and chat all the time with whoever I run into, in these brief and fun and unpredictable never-ending little bits of chit-chat that I just really enjoy and that I just really relish.

A day at the resthome in mid-January.

When I go to go change into my uniform and begin my shift at the resthome, I bump into a (cheery) (Mexican) facilities worker and I ask her if she'll be celebrating Inauguration Day, but I can see that she probably doesn't know the word right after I say it, so I ask her if she'll be celebrating Biden and "no more Trump," at which she lights up and is all like, "Maybe!"

Later, when I see my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker, I ask her about the Inauguration, but she seems uninterested, and then I follow up a few minutes later and she just shakes her head and says she doesn't know what's going to happen, that she heard that maybe Trump will flee to Mexico because the President there guaranteed his safety, and I ask her where she heard this, and she says that she saw a report on the news about a woman who predicts the future and is never wrong, and she said that.

Later, when I go to escort this one morose resident with a good sense of humor down in a wheelchair for a window visit with his daughter, I wait with him till she comes up with her husband who had ended up coming for the visit, too, and I speak loudly so they can hear and I'm like, "If your father's a problem, just signal, and I'll strangle him for you," and I make this big theatrical strangling gesture towards the one morose resident with a good sense of humor who's in his wheelchair next to me, and through the window the daughter is like, "Thanks, I will!"

Later, when I see the one (very kind) (Togolese) kitchen worker setting stuff up in the lounge-y type area on the first floor, I ask her if she's going to do anything for Biden being President, and she's like, "No, I wait one week, and then I celebrate."

Later, when I see my one (Chinese Filipina) coworker and my one (blocky) (older) (Tibetan) coworker, I ask them if they're glad to see Trump go, and my one (blocky) (older) (Tibetan) coworker is like, "He need go to hospital, correct his head," and she laughs at what she just said.

Later, when I see the one (quieter) (Mexican) maintenance guy, I ask him how he's going to celebrate Trump being gone, and he's like, "By working," and I'm like, "It's going to be so nice to wake up on Thursday on the first whole day with a new president," and he's like, "It's the truth."

Later, when I pop in to the room of the one retired school nurse to check on her, she's watching some livestreamed Yiddish concert, and she invites me to come sit and watch, and so I watch a few subtitled songs and try to understand Yiddish phrases, since Yiddish is a lot like German and I've been studying German vocabulary lately.

Later, when I pop in to check on the one resident who's always perky and plainspoken and who used to work as a cosmetics saleswoman, she's watching cable news and is like, "This president, we got to get rid of him, I say we string him up by his penis," which is something that she says every few shifts that I'm working and I come in on her watching cable news.

Later, I pop in to check on the one resident who moves very slowly, and after I get her set up for the evening, she asks me to get her a new book from a stack of library books that had gotten brought into her and were sitting on her couch, and I see a Danielle Steele book in there and since I know that she had just devoured another Danielle Steele book like a week ago, I pull that one out and I'm like, "Hey, there's a new Danielle Steele book here for you," and then she mentions that an activities office worker got her those, and then we both talk about what a good job that worker did. 

Then, when at the very end of my shift and all of my work is done and I'm back in my street clothes and I'm sitting and waiting to clock out and I'm studying my hieroglyphics flashcards that I keep around with me in a very nice ziploc bag with a slide-lock, my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor notices me and says that I never waste time and she asks me what I'm doing and I say that I'm studying Egyptian, and she seems surprised and I tell her that I've been doing that for like over a year now, and then she puts on that mocking tone of voice that she uses whenever she's joking with people and she's like, "[my first name], tell me what I should do with my long-term future," and I pause and think, and then I'm honestly like, "I don't know, the world is really f*cked up right now," and she was just about to take a sip from a paper cup of tea that she had just gotten, and I can see her in profile start to genuinely laugh when the cup is like an inch away from her mouth, and I can tell that she doesn't know what to say since I had genuinely gotten her and caught her off guard and she thought that what I said was funny, as well as being the truth.

Broken smartphone.

When my smartphone was breaking down back in December and January, it's like the bottom of the screen stopped being sensitive to touch and then that gradually crept upward.

Initially I googled it, and it turns out that it's a common problem and there's these apps that reproduce the crucial buttons that appear at the bottom of your smartphone, only on a new bar that you can move around and put elsewhere on the screen so that after you do that you can go and use your smartphone again.

So, I did that for a while, and then I could barely use the space bar and I could barely use the erase button, and then those not at all, and then the letters on the bottom of the keyboard started going, too.

And, after that, my workarounds that I began using started being really whack...

For example, I could start typing a word and then use predictive texting to finish off the message, but I could never put punctuation on anything, since that was firmly on the bottom part of the keyboard that was increasingly beyond my reach.

And, eventually, I couldn't even hit the "reply" button to reply to texts, but if just one friend texted me, I could press the "reply" notice on the notification that'd pop up at the top of my screen, and I could finish a message that way from there.

(If two or more friends texted, the "reply" shortcut wouldn't pop up, and so I couldn't reply to anyone.)

But, my phone eventually got so fucked up that I had to replace it, and I did, on the same day that I finally went to the grocery store after 9 weeks of not going there at all.

I had been waiting to do errands till after my immunity was finally likely to be up significantly after at least 2 weeks after my getting the first dose of the Covid vaccine, and so I did all of that stuff at once, after holding out for quite the while, with both my food supplies and my breaking-down smartphone.

New grocery victory, and game.

From November into December into January, I spent exactly 9 weeks without going to the grocery store.

Yes, I get staff meals when I work at the resthome, and yes, I was drawing down stuff in my pantry, but still, that's pretty impressive.

Also, when I finally did go, I was surprised that my bill was like $170, since I had guessed that it'd come out to around $160, and then when I went through my receipt I noticed that my 2 loaves of cinnamon raisin bread had been rung up at $4 each instead of the $2 that had been advertised.

But, I play a game where I try to remember how much I'm up and how much I'm down when groceries are rung up wrong, to see if it evens out over time.

Last time this happened I had begun at around zero and the lentils I was buying had been mislabeled and so I had saved like $3 more than I should have, so now with my paying $4 more I'm down like $1 in the hole, where the store owes me money...

For now.