COVID conspires against us!

I’ll take a RAT test tonight and if that’s negative and I’m feeling okay then the NZ Healthline online portal, which has my up-to-date health record, tells me that I can come out of self-isolation tomorrow. June caught Covid off me and the earliest she can re-emerge is Thursday.

Moderate Covid symptoms kept me from the keyboard till yesterday morning. The distinct impression that an invisible steel band was being tightened around my forehead eventually dissipated, but like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, I couldn’t settle on so much as a topic for this week’s post.

Writing and publishing regularly online so that it can be read by family, friends and anyone else who’s interested, has become a key means, along with more pragmatic evidence, of demonstrating our take on modern-day homesteading. All the essential techy stuff dealt with long ago, our Little Owl Gully website is a good companion to Little Owl Gully, the place. In other words, it’s a good fit for a couple who are reasonably self-sufficient and with a philosophical bent that’s decidedly ‘modern’ when it comes to homesteading.

To provide for ourselves to the extent that we do, means that even when we take a few days off, we’ll do enough in what’s left of the week to ensure we’ll be able to meet our goal of having a year-round supply of food and firewood.

And the blog’s been running long enough now for it to have become an integral part of our self-sufficiency endeavours rather than a thing apart. I like to provide a blog post to be published every week (festive season excepted) in the same way that I like to provide firewood to keep us warm, cook our evening meals and heat the domestic hot water.

Determined to improve the odds of coming right in time to get a post out, I decided to get a subscription for the Paxlovid antiviral medication available to the over 65s. Both fully vaccinated and boosted, my symptoms haven’t been anywhere near as severe or prolonged as young June’s (only 64 years of age), probably thanks to the antivirals.

Observing what June’s going through, if I’d been like that, I wouldn’t have been sufficiently clear-headed to write a blog post. When it comes to headaches and muscle and joint aches and pains, we’ll grin and bear it more than most, but this illness June’s gulped down Paracetamol tablets at regular intervals – an unenviable record for her!

I took six Paracetamol in total, and I haven’t needed sedatives because, despite being a close-run thing, I have met my deadline!