With the first test, I wasn’t sure how precise I needed to be. She worked the swab up her nasal passage, then dipped it – placed it really – into the reagent tube and squeezed it and swirled it around. (I learned “re-agent” when I bought a house with a swimming pool 30 years ago and the pool service guy was too expensive and charged me for visits he didn’t make so I bought and read a book about how to care for your own in-ground pool, but I skipped the chapter on winterizing because Southern California.) I installed the dropper into the tube, then opened the test strip and tried to drop exactly four drops into the test reservoir.
It’s kind of a neat engineering trick, these free test kits that come 8 to a house via USPS. We got ours delivered to the AirBNB we are renting for a month so we can be close to our grandchildren, and we have 8 more kits waiting for us back in California. You drop liquid onto one spot on the test strip where it says “4 drops here,” and in 20 minutes lines form on the other section labeled “C” for control (the test is valid if the line is visible) and “T” for test (the test is positive if line is visible.)
But I was not sure how big the drops should be, and I felt as if I had put too much of the nostril suspension onto the reagent magic pad because the first test came up positive, so I told her, “I think I messed up; let’s do it again,” and we did – swab, dip, squeeze, swirl, drip – just like real scientists, then set my phone’s timer for 20 minutes.
No change.
We notified daughter and SIL and loaded up the CDC web site on our phones to learn what we should do. (Hint Isolate or Quarantine). Daughter emphasized the importance of being up-to-date on vaccines, so we made an appointment for COVID booster #2 at CVS. SIL weighed in on the importance of getting an official PCR test so the insurance would cover the Paxlovid, so we made an appointment at a different CVS. Both emphasized the importance of clean air, so daughter brought us a homemade HEPA air filter, and I set the HVAC fan to “On” and opened the windows. We turned on the ionic air purifier in the main bedroom. I readied the bed in the spare room, which had been intended, in a more innocent time, for granddaughters who would spend Friday night with Oma and DeeDaw, for adult single occupancy.
We counted days from onset of symptoms through last close contact to wheels-up to assess whether we needed to change our travel plans.
We had brief discussions with our Millenials whether the CDC web site could be stipulated as the gold standard of COVID advice. (Briefly, QAnon was suggested as a competing alternative, but no legs.) We never settled on a source for truth, but we implicitly agreed that close contact with immune-compromised SIL on chemo was to be avoided, not to mention contact with unvaccinated 2yo granddaughter. Effectively we were alone and isolated in our AirBNB with 10 days to go until our return flight.
We theorized wildly on the possibilities over the next 10 days; we agreed that I must be tested, that test results in the coming 5 days would bear great import on our immediate future.
I was very careful with drops, ensuring there were at least 4 and at most 4, all the same size. The result was clearly negative, and I felt a brief relief.
But there is no ignoring how different an isolate/quarantine situation is from normal.
For one thing, the isolator and the quarantiner should stay in different parts of the house whenever possible, but with only 1 bathroom, it’s impossible not to become more cognizant of your partner’s schedule.
For another, the isolator should not touch cooking implements, so the quarantiner is responsible for all meals and clean-up.
For another, the paxlovid leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth, suppressing appetite, so some meals are not on a regular schedule, meaning the quarantiner needs to be prepared to scramble an egg or grill a cheese sandwich or fry a quesadilla at 11:00 PM.
The quarantiner needs to limit public activity, so take-out meals should come from restaurants with drive-up lanes or curbside delivery. They don’t have In-’n’-Out here, so that limits the viable options.
And you can’t watch Jeopardy on the DVR together in the same room, so you wait and try not to see the Tweets giving away the results of tonight’s game.
You can’t catch up on the shows you are bingeing together.
Sometimes you watch softball or ice hockey.
The softball I watched was called “College Softball” on ESPN – not “Women’s College Softball”, just “College Softball,” for there is no “Men’s College Softball” to necessitate the adjectival distinction. UCLA was playing Duke in the regionals. UCLA with a victory would reach the College World Series, called WCWS for “Women’s College World Series.” It was a must-win game for Duke. I rooted for UCLA, my hometown team, against Duke, my soon-to-be home state team. Next year, I might root differently.
Strategies are very similar between College Softball and MLB. Pitch in, pitch out, pitch up, pitch down, change speeds. A walk’s as good as a hit. Move the runner over. Never make the last out at third base. (Or is it the first out?) Don’t walk the #9 hitter. “No doubles” outfield positioning. Guard the line at first and third. Run the player back to the base they came from in a rundown.
But there are differences.
The field is smaller in College Softball; the pitcher’s mound is 40-45 feet away instead of 60, and the bases are 60 feet apart instead of 90. The outfield fences are 250 feet from home plate. Curiously these dimensions render the pace of individual plays similar between College Softball and Major League Baseball. There is about the same frequency of extra-base hits, and a bouncing ground ball to short results in a close play at first in both.
Almost none of the players in Major League Baseball wear their school logo face-painted on their cheeks. Most of the players in College Softball do not wear a ball cap. College Softball players wear braids and ribbons and more subdued jewelry during the game that do the players in MLB. I didn’t see a single College Softball player spit on the ground or tug at their groin.
In the game I watched, every player in the field had one of those vinyl arm cheat sheets on the forearm of their glove hand, like the NFL quarterbacks wear. One of the coaches was calling out number codes like “5-3-4” which had something to do with the pitch coming up. Everybody heard it, and each player in the field looked at the cheat sheet before each pitch. On one of the teams, the pitcher even repeated the code with finger signs to the catcher.
There’s a lot more rhythmic choral chatter from the benches in College Softball.
There’s a lot more bunting in College Softball, and not as much base-stealing, and I never saw a College Softball batter flip the bat insouciantly after launching a big fly.
There is free substitution of designated baserunners in College Softball. In MLB, a player can be announced as a pinch hitter then be replaced by another pinch hitter when the opposition changes the pitcher, and the first pinch hitter cannot be brought into the game later, even though they never actually got into the game!
Most of the players in College Softball have a face mask attached to their batting helmet. Some retain it while running the bases; others change their helmet when they get on base. Few players in MLB wear facemasks to bat, but criminy do they take a long time to change out of one set of protective gear and into another when they get on base.
The pitcher’s mound is elevated from the rest of the field in MLB; not so in College Softball. Flat. In slow motion replays, the College Softball pitchers and the MLB pitchers all separate their back foot from the “rubber” before releasing the ball, so I guess it’s not an illegal pitch after all, despite what the 10-year-old veterans told us in Little League.
They use a yellow ball in College Softball, a white ball in MLB.
In College Softball the players chase foul balls, retrieve them, and return them to play. In MLB, if the ball touches the ground or is struck by the bat, it is removed from play at once.
Other than all that, it’s the same game. Anyway, it killed a whole night of quarantine.
The Billy Pulpit 