Okay, it has been over a month since I posted, so I believe that I have some explaining to do.
First off, we were watching the World Cup until the middle of December, and did not miss a single game after the quarter finals. There was a lot of good football in there, and I am glad we took the time as a family to do that.
But there was also a lot of work to do for a special Christmas with my extended family. We had relatives coming to visit from back East to spend a couple of weeks with us, and wanted to make sure their visit was special. Seeing as we do not get to spend as much time with them as we would like, we devoted a lot of time to family from the 15th of December onwards.
Which brings me to the topic of this article. COVID SUCKS! With one of the families that were hanging with reporting that they tested positive for Covid, we were all on edge. As we were working hard to get things ready for Christmas, a lot of us were tired. And since we rented a house for a couple of weeks to be able to accommodate everyone, people were run down as they were not sleeping in their usual beds.
Other than the couple, my wife was the first to get the symptoms, followed a couple of days later by yours truly. It really knocked both of us out, and it forced both of us to take extra time off work to deal with it. And those were just the immediate symptoms. Once those went away, there was over a week of tiredness and mental fog. As someone who needs to picture things in their head to work on them, I was even more tired at the end of the day.
Here is the best way to explain it, the analogy curtesy of a doctor I once talked to about my autism. We all have strengths and things we are good at. Think of our ability to think about those things as the lanes of a highway. While I may have a ten-lane highway when it comes to Python and other programming languages, when it comes to helping my wife with sewing, I am at best a two-lane country road. What is important is just understanding what kind of road you have and what kind of road the others around you have when in a conversation.
Well… to continue the analogy, the after-effects of Covid reduced the lane count of each metaphorical road by at least three to six lanes. Consider having construction workers making repairs to the road. It was humbling, but frustrating at the same time. I tried a couple of times in the last two weeks to work on any of my programming projects, but I was unable to make significant progress. I use my mind to picture what I want the application to be and use the language to manifest it. With the reduced capacity, I just continuously had issues trying to produce a picture in my mind that I could work with. When I did get that picture, it was also more difficult to maintain the picture in my head, even with scribbling notes on paper.
I was able to make decent progress in my professional capacity, but I effectively had to borrow focus from my non-work stuff to complete my work stuff, with interest. I just did not have any capacity, energy, or desire to do anything more than very simple actions at the end of those days.
The good news is that as of Saturday afternoon, I have finally tested negative for Covid. The fog is lifting a lot, and the tiredness is going away slowly. Neither one is going as fast as I would like, but it is still progress. I am honestly hoping to get back to the PyMarkdown project this week, so cross your fingers!
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So what do you think? Did I miss something? Is any part unclear? Leave your comments below.