Health
🤔
My COVID antigen test was negative on Saturday, so I’m ending my isolation. Evidently all my vaccinations plus a breakthrough infection make me possibly super immune now. But I feel more vulnerable, like my immune system has taken a beating and needs to recuperate, or maybe it’s that my trust in my environment has been damaged. And while it’s great that the medical system can prevent serious illness in many more cases now, COVID isn’t an “ignorable” illness yet because it’s not so under control that we can stop disrupting people’s lives with isolation. And obviously it can’t be ignored by people who end up with long COVID or other consequences.
So given that each new variant presents a new opportunity for reinfection, I’m rethinking my rules for myself. I suspect I caught COVID during an indoor dining event, even though it seemed well ventilated, so that’ll be my main change—either avoiding crowded restaurants entirely or staying masked as much as possible when I’m there. I’ll get to experiment this week if I attend our work department lunch.
Productivity
🙂
I narrowed my assessment to a shorter list of topics with a focus on my overall framework for understanding productivity. The framework is like a complicated to-do list, a map that will show me which parts of my productivity system I’ve figured out and which need more work.
Cooking
🙂
I organized my meal rotation. It’s another step in making my food management more streamlined and mindless. The overall idea is I cook one meal to last several days, because I want to minimize my cooking and I don’t mind leftovers. Recently I stumbled into a helpful pattern where I shop for a meal one week, cook it the next week, and eat it the week after that. Each week I’m shopping, cooking, and eating different meals. So to keep it all straight, I codified the cycle in my to-do app with a set of recurring tasks.
I celebrated my negative COVID test with some pumpkin muffins. I had a lot of aquafaba saved from cans of chickpeas, so I substituted that for the egg using instructions from America’s Test Kitchen, and it worked very well.
Fiction
🤔
The Western Canon by Harold Bloom gives me an opinionated and idiosyncratic starting point for exploring classic literature. It did make the authors he covered sound intriguing, and the appendices gave me a big list of works Bloom felt were canonical, so the book achieved my purpose for it. But now I have to narrow down his list. It would also be nice to find a more straightforward introduction to these authors, maybe just Wikipedia. And as usual, I feel compelled to collect more opinions.
