Ryan's COVID-19 Chronicles

This will probably be my last post on this blog, unless something surprising and dramatic happens in the future—and hey, if this last year and a half has taught us anything, it's that surprising and dramatic things happen. Here's all the big, good news I have: ❤️      I, my partner, and all of our immediate family members are fully vaccinated and have been since late April. We officially all survived to get the vaccine, including most notably my lovely 87-years-young grandmother. ❤️      My partner gave birth to our second child, a beautiful baby girl, who unfortunately spent three days in the NICU as a very small, very-nearly-premature baby with low blood sugars, but is now healthy and growing strong. ❤️    The spread of the virus is lower than ever in the US (if I'm reading the data right), and in my area, the government's mask mandate has been lifted for vaccinated people. ❤️    My partner and I got to hang out with a friend from outside our pandemic bub

I stopped updating this blog on a regular basis because, after months of hoping for the best,  nothing was really changing . Fortunately, that's not exactly the case several months later. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of COVID-19 cases, deaths, pandemic-deniers, and people just not taking things as seriously as they should. But hey, we've just had more vaccinations than cases in the US , which is such a freaking relief to see. Oh yeah, there are a few vaccines available since I last posted any pandemic updates and more on the way, and we now have a president who seems to take the pandemic seriously, and the last one instigated a failed coup d'état attempt, and in retrospect I really picked a bad time to stop blogging about these things. That said, I'll leave all of that stuff for the history books to explain, and keep this blog focused on my own experiences during the pandemic that has now overflowed into 2021. Through some combination of bein