Some Things Don’t Seem To End

Jeff Powell
2 min readMar 22, 2024
Over the backyard

You might recall that I was sick last week. In fact, I wrote this:

I have no clue what I am infected with yet. The only symptoms were a headache for 18 hours and a relatively mild (by my standards) sore throat that has been with me for just over 24 hours now. I doubt it is COVID, but it’s too early to test yet. The at home tests aren’t sensitive enough as I understand these things.

Well, it’s been a full week now, and I am still sick.

I’ve tested for COVID four times and come up negative every time.

I spent five hours at a walk in clinic waiting to get a strep throat test (low priority in comparison to everyone else that came in, apparently) only to have that come up negative too.

It seems I have a perfectly normal virus that gives me a sore throat for a week (it’s still going strong), and only started affecting my sinuses and nose after four full days.

It’s not fun, and I am a lousy human while I am sick. I’m sorry, Anne.

And of course, I haven’t gotten much done as a result of my “condition.” I’ve worked on the BCA website and on the April edition of the Bulletin, but very little else has been accomplished.

So I have nothing to share this week. Nothing at all.

Some of you might then be asking what the photo above has to do with anything. And the answer is obviously: nothing at all. But we occasionally get bald eagles flying overhead and this time I got my phone out and took a bunch of pictures. That one — the best of the bunch — is unedited… I simply cropped it a bit. The eagle was circling around, hunting for thermals, I suspect. That made getting a photo a bit of a challenge. If I zoomed in enough to get a reasonable photo it was nearly impossible to keep it in the frame. But that is the nice thing about digital photography. I can take 45 photos and throw away 44 of them without any guilt or expense (other than time).

In any case, that photo is all I have to show for the last week.

My apologies for being boring. I dearly hope this disease lets go of me soon so I can get back to normality.

In the meantime, stay well!

--

--

Jeff Powell

Sculptor/Artist. Former programmer. Former volunteer firefighter. Former fencer. Weirdest resume on the planet, I suspect.