[Photos taken 24 – 31 January 2022, posted online 02 Jule 2022. Two weeks until summer vacation begins. I can hardly wait.]
It had to happen eventually: covid-19 gave us a personal visit. At the time, anybody who spent extended time with Bjarki the Friday before the onset of his symptoms on Saturday, was required to quarantine for 5 days, and then exit quarantine via a negative PCR test. To make life a little easier, authorities did allow adults that were fully vaccinated and boosted to be infection-“cautious” instead of fully quarantining, which meant that I was allowed to go to the grocery store etc, but not into the office. Masks were still in general use and required in stores.
As it happened, Bjarki spent almost no time with Emma or Finnur on the Friday (they’d gone to house #2 early), so keeping in mind that Emma was only a week away from her second covid vaccination shot, we decided to split up: I would stay at home with Bjarki and Anna, while Finnur and Emma would move in with Finnur’s parents – yes, into the apartment on their first floor where we’d lived for five years a lifetime ago! They had their bags from house #2, and I packed an additional bag and Emma’s school stuff and left it outside for them to pick up.
On the Sunday evening following Bjarki’s positive test result, I had to navigate a flood of official emails and questionnaires, from the tracing team, and the health monitoring service, as well as a call from the school principal. She asked Bjarki which kids he’d mostly hung out with on Friday, and so 2-3 of his buddies got sent into quarantine.
But, as omicron was turning out to be relatively ‘mild’ in our highly vaccinated population (read: not a lot of people ended up in hospital), the rules began relaxing quickly in late January. This led to an explosion in case numbers, and by the end of the week, schools were ordered stop tracking exposures.
Bjarki’s brush with covid wasn’t too terrible, he was knocked out for about 24 hours, and then spent the rest of the week slowly getting his energy back. I somehow convinced him to attend a remote music theory class on Wednesday, but when I went to check in on how it was going, I felt a little guilty as he was clearly still low on energy.
Anna was the one who was physically closest when Bjarki’s symptoms were blooming, so it wasn’t very surprising when she too got covid a few days later. She got quite winded, but didn’t quite get knocked out. I tried to control my exposure to both of them, as I kind of wanted to get mildly infected, but not overwhelmed by viruses. Thus I ventured into their rooms occasionally, and we sometimes all ate dinner together.
On the Thursday I was certain I was falling ill, got really tired, napped for a couple of hours midday, but no: According to the PCR tests I took Thursday and Friday and Sunday (!) covid didn’t get a foothold. Outside of those tired hours, I ran on adrenaline, not sure how things would turn out. This I channeled into finishing a list of odd jobs, some of which I’d tried to pawn off on Finnur for months, but he hadn’t taken the bait. Sensible man.
Be warned, there will be dust! (50-ish images total)
Monday 24 January 2022
So, this may look like a no-brainer, but both Finnur and I had looked at that hole in center of the drain and thought it was perfectly circular, and thus not removable. Unfortunately, the sink had been emitting a seriously stinky smell for quite some time, bad enough for me to muse out loud if we could just chuck the sink out, and install a fresh one. Finnur had gone to town cleaning the pipes, but we both thought that drain was stuck in place. Well, as I peered at it once more, I was like… wait a minute… and lo and behold, it opened as by magic.
Like, how the hell did that get in there? It was, to put it mildly, dirty on the inside.
Going all out on the sink-insides shortly before 7 pm. I may have been a little nuts. It certainly set the tone for the remainder of the covid-time.
Trying to reach the far ends of the insides of the sink… can you tell I’m an engineer? Also, who designs a sink to have hard-to-reach open cavities on the inside?!?
Since I was jacked up on success, next I tackled the towel hanger which had begun rattling on the wall, threatening to either fall apart or fall off.
All the pieces. I don’t like socks.
Victory! Firmly screwed together, and very stuck to the wall! Sadly, I’m not in love with how it looks, but going to the trouble of finding another one that works has never made it very high on my priority list…
Thus ende-th my attack on the little restroom. It’s still very high on my total-renovation-needed list because I don’t love the way it looks in general, but I no longer wanted to smash it all with a large tool.
Tuesday 25 January 2022
Another item on the terrible-horrible-no-good-list-of-things-to-fix was the ever-unstable-and-quite-terrible wifi connection upstairs. With Bjarki playing intense games over the internet with his friends, he’d taken to stringing a long blue LAN cable from the main router downstairs up the stairwell, where it would string across to this room at hip-height to the LAN port on his laptop. As this was just asking for the laptop getting yanked onto the floor, something needed to to be done. I went and acquired an access point at a local computer store, and in a fit of adrenaline ACTUALLY MOUNTED IT ON THE WALL with a fancy plastic cable shield, and sort of did a not quite half-assed job of securing the cable with zip-ties.
There’s still a LAN cable going down to the ground floor, but it’s white, and it’s sneaking along the stairs, so it’s not in my immediate field of view.
One day I’ll muster up the courage to call an electrician to actually hook up the upper floor with the lower floor…
The remainder of a lemon bread/cake that Anna made. Scrumptious!
Wednesday 26 January 2022
Lunch of champions.
Anna was feeling poorly, so to the Covid test-site we went…
Bjarki valiantly trying to make it through an online music theory class…
Anna confirmed with Covid-19. Thankfully she didn’t get that sick, having gotten a booster in Nov/Dec, but she was definitely winded, and she was winded for a few weeks afterwards. This extended my semi-quarantine by a few days, and delayed Finnur’s and Emma’s return home as well.
Next up on my agenda of adrenaline-fueled lets-just-fix-all-the-things rampage: I swapped the old erratic media center tuner out for the new one I’d gotten on the sale the previous Saturday.
Having discovered the cable shields at the hardware store, I went about threading the brand new speaker wires through them. They barely fit, so it was a total pain in the fingers to finish. Thankfully, Anna could give me a bit of a helping hand.
Sooo close. The damn speaker wires have alternated between lying on the floor, collecting All The Dust, or being taped under the windowsill with duct-tape, which always ended up melting off in the heat from the radiator.
There we goooo!
Not a bad evening’s work! But my fingers were done for…
Thursday 27 January 2022
This was the day I was certain I was succumbing to Covid… but then I rallied. The big thing stopping me from calling an electrician, is that we need to choose new fronts, as the dimmer switches are now broken, and are way too old to get identical replacements. (The photo is not of the dimmer, just a regular switch). But, as this is written, in July, no action has happened on the front-front.
At least I had been Covid-free that morning.
Looking sludgy and dark outside at 8 pm.
Friday 28 January 2022
Just to be on the safe side, after my droopy Thursday, I went in for a check AGAIN and still no detectable covid.
Having gotten over the I-probably-almost-got-covid event, I went to item number 4 on the I-hate-this-to-do list: hemming the curtains in our bedroom.
I’ve learnt that using the hemming glue on heavy curtains is a recipe for disappointment, so I hand-hem them now. It takes the better part of forever, but is made slightly better by listening to podcasts. The blog tells me the curtains were installed in September 2020, so it only took me a year and a half to muster up the energy for hemming… It really seems to lighten my mental load when 40% of the people are out of the house for an extended period of time.
All done with one side at a quarter past midnight.
Saturday 29 January 2022
The best time to visit the automated no-touch car-washing-station down the street is at 9 am in the mornings, when there is no line.
I’m guessing that this photo is from me re-arranging the living room AGAIN after watching a movie with the sofa along the right wall, sitting by the small windows, and not liking it because the sofa didn’t support turning the right way. Also, I decided the Christmas ornament photos would be on the wall until I got a new sofa, as some of the supports in these 10+ year old ones were broken. (There were pillows under the seat-cushions to hold them up.) Just yesterday (July 1) I threw out the old sofas and acquired a new one and the yule-photos came down.
Hemming the other side.
The iron even came out!
By 6 pm the curtains looked pretty good.
Uhmmm… Where did all that dust come from?
Yay! I got to move a to-do ticket to the DONE side! And yes, we’re so forking lazy that the paper around the tickets has had time to dis-color…
Dinner of champions!
Sunday 30 January 2022
Health was iffy again, so to the test-site I went.
Due to overwhelming demand, they’d had to open up a second test room. The way to the where the testers sat weaved in and out of the rooms along the corridor to accommodate a long line in bad weather. Thankfully it was almost empty when I arrived, and this is on the way out.
I decided to try and get shots of the birds in the yard against the fresh snow.
It didn’t go very well. My camera and I are not really friends these days.
Eating the fatty-food in the cage.
I ended up putting the majority of the bird feed under the plants to shelter it from snow.
Finally noticing the amount of dust in our bedroom (we usually don’t spend a lot of time there during daylight-dust-revealing-hours) I decided it was time to tackle the underside of the bed.
Yeah, this happens.
There we go, all clean! Until next year! 🙂
All the stuff that I’d extracted from under the bed. How’d it get there??
I also finally just fetched a screwdriver and fastened the window latch that was wiggling and not closing very tightly any more. I don’t want to think about how many months it took to finish that task…
Anna and Bjarki eating the sushi delivery. I made good use of the available home-delivery, as I was too busy swatting to-do list items to want to spend energy on cooking a cleaning.
Monday 31 January 2022
The view from my home office. Yeah, I’d worked from home that entire covid-time.
Digging the bird-feed out of the newest snow-pile. We were about to get a lot of snow in the coming weeks.
That evening’s to-do-list swatting was going over the jigsaw-and-game-cupboard, and removing the stuff that was no longer used. Some went to house #2, some went to the recycling center. It freed up enough space that some boxes that had been hiding under the unit could be put inside of it. Victory!
As my energy was fading after running on adrenaline for a week straight, I was not really in the mood for the washing machine to flash a drainage-problem error… I did get it cleared, but there may have been some gnashing of teeth. Thus end-eth the month of January 2022! (Oh, and Finnur took Emma to get shot #2, success!)
