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With Thanksgiving past, Winter is now upon us. Let these coming, colder days and nights bring us closer in the gloom. May we find solace in each other, and thanks for the company and bounty we share.

Jen and I traveled up to visit her parents for the holiday, along with Aunt Joyce. Everyone else had to bow out due to one or more members of the family being sick, so it was a small affair this year. Due to the downscaled events, the meal of the day was actually Meatloaf; a choice I certainly support. It’s too bad I’m gluten free to avoid feeling like I’ve been repeatedly stabbed in the stomach, but there was plenty of other food to go around. Heck, they even made a bowl of ground beef for me, which is great for someone on Keto; just add butter and enjoy!

Ever since I stopped taking Lexapro, I’ve had chronic sleep maintenance insomnia. Nothing I’ve done over the years has helped alleviate the problem, from medications, to meditation, to CBT-I administered by a sleep psychologist. I have a veritable pharmacy of sleep meds in my closet from past attempts.

I took a week off of work for my birthday, and as can probably be expected, I spent much of that playing games.

Stray

Being in a cat-like mood, I started with Stray.

It’s a relatively short 7-10 hour game where you control a cat on a quest to rejoin its friends after being separated from them. Like any cat, you can’t talk and must interact with objects using only your mouth and claws. And of course there’s an achievement for meowing at least 100 times. Meow.

The man stared weary ‘cross the valley
o’er all that he had wrought,
what he had yet still to do,
and felt a yawning despair overtake him.

Forty-five years, eh? Malformed though I am, I somehow surpassed my expectations to reach this point, and it’s certainly been an interesting life thus far. College, marriage, a few books, and perhaps even the pinnacle of my career, and then what? Who can say.

Well, it finally happened. A caught Covid a couple weeks ago starting Monday July 25th. Despite being in Italy in early 2020, I somehow dodged the initial outbreak and then remained Covid free for the next two years. I was even beginning to believe I’d already caught it asymptomatically some time in the past and was actually immune now. Like that time I had a random two-week long dry cough in 2020. But no, and there’s no ambiguity this time around either since I have a very positive test to prove it.