Vaccinated

My second shot of Pfizer vaccine was yesterday, April 30. Done. No serious side effects -- just a sore arm and it's no longer sore this evening. Of course, for the full effect, I have to wait two weeks. That is not a big burden. 

I think I mentioned that some of my Girls High classmates have written a book. It all started in our mini reunions on Zoom a year ago as we started dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. We talked: what we were doing or no longer able to do; politics, as we got ready for the 2020 elections; George Floyd and Black Lives Matter; our families; and anecdotes. As the lockdowns loosened after the first wave, we then hunkered down again in the fall with new lockdowns. We kept talking and, from memories of who we were 50 some years ago, what we felt then, who we are today, and what this pandemic with Zoom meetings has meant to us, forty-three of us contributed to this book "Unmute Yourself, Girlfriend". It's not yet ready for the pre-publishing hoopla-la. I'll give the link when it's ready.

I'm in France and these periods of restrictions are called confinements, here. We are now entering the de-confinement, which is in stages from Monday, May 3, to mid-June. It's gone much faster in the U.K. and in U.S. We looked at the calendar and determined we might get on the road after May 19. Since we'll stay at a hotel, we need to have the possibility to have dinner at the hotel. We have some appointments and will have to wait a few days past the 19th. Before the end of the month, though, we should be off! It's exciting!

Getting ready to go somewhere, anywhere!

 Am I getting ready, really? No. Until we know what the schedule for deconfinement is, it is hard to get ready. Mentally, I am ready. We think that the weekend in mid-May will be free, but that is going to be a '-day weekend anyway from Ascension Thursday. We fear there just may be too many people on the road. I don't really care. We could leave a day or two before that and or come back a day or two after. I would simply like to go down to see E and G. The car needs to go on a trip!

Over the past few months, a bunch of my classmates wrote some essays that we have compiled into a book. That book will be coming out, soon. Our editing team is expecting the second version from the publisher. We hope there will be no more changes, that they get the cover right this time. If so, publication will follow! This is what comes from our now regular Zoom reunions!

Paul and I have been having even more frequent Zoom reunions with our Pierwige friends. We are a group of 5 couples. We've travelled together to Malta (and some more), to Portugal , to Valencia, Spain, the Camargue, France, and Andalusia, Spain. We're talking about a possible trip to Germany towards the end of summer. 

Meanwhile, here, in the Paris region, the weather is fine. I bet they'll start talking about a drought before too long. We had a cold snap a couple of weeks ago and that has guaranteed us higher fruit prices, again, this year. Every year, there is something that means production will be low and prices high. That's not always true. This is asparagus season and the news reports a couple of weeks ago were about the glut in the asparagus market. At our market, though, a bunch of 11 spears cost €13! That's outrageously expensive. You'd think that if there is a glut, the prices would be lower.

This confinement period meant that the kids, who had been in school with regular vacation breaks since the start of the school year in September, had a short week (Easter Monday is a holiday, here) of online school, then their 2-week Spring vacation. We had them for a few days, so their parents could work calmly from home, then the parents took a few days off and delivered them to their other grandparents. Normally, the Paris region's Spring break would have been a few weeks later, but the confinement, in all logic, had all the zones on the same schedule. This week, the primary school kids all went back to class. They've got saliva tests and at the first sign of Covid-19, the class goes back to online sessions. Middle school kids go back to class next week and high school kids, in mid-May in split in person and online classes. Our grandkids are still in primary. 

Baseball practice has continued. With the nice weather, I can walk over to watch. In fact, L had practice last Sunday and his family sat by the bleachers for a picnic. A hopped on a bus to the Bois and joined them and I walked over after our lunch at home. Next Sunday, the N°1 and N°2 teams will warm up together and play a practice game. I hope the weather holds up. I also hope that I do not have a severe reaction to the second Pfizer shot. I had my first dose on April 2 and the second one is this coming Friday. My arm was a little sore after the first shot, but no worse than after any other vaccination.

I need to go into Paris to return some books to the library. Maybe I'll pick up a lunch at Breakfast in America and walk home from there. It's a long walk but I need motivation to get out and walk. A destination, a purpose. A and I went to the arboretum a few weeks ago. We should go back now that all the trees have leaves out. I walked there. We also have a walk planned in the Bois de Vincennes to discover parts we are less familiar with. Maybe next Monday afternoon. 

Another month has gone by

There are many reasons for winter to be a slow time. for retired people: cold, clouds, rain, snow. Really, though, none of that has been the case for the last month. We had a stretch of fine weather. It's been above freezing, mostly clear skies, but I simply haven't felt like going out for walks. 

I haven't been knitting. I was trying to make a yoke for a yoke-neck sweater but I kept making mistakes due to lack of concentration. I'd restart, remember what went wrong, and make a different mistake. That has been frustrating, to say the least. 

The pandemic just won't stop. After the second wave hit and peaked in November, numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths went down, but then hit a plateau that was still on the high level. For this past month, they slowly swelled up, but I guess they are now forming into a wave. The UK variant has become the dominant strain and its highly contagious. In Europe, and in France, particularly, vaccinations are still slowly coming. In France, communication from the government has been terrible. First, only those over 75 or with underlying conditions could be vaccinated and the only vaccines were the Pfizer and Moderna ones. When the Astra-Zeneca vaccine was finally approved, we were told that it would not be given to people over 65 because it hadn't been fully tested on that group. That left people between 65 and 75 in the lurch as the first priority group was not done, yet. After protest, that policy was reversed to allow people over 65 to get the Astra-Zeneca vaccine. Then, two weeks ago, throughout Europe, there were fears that some side effects of  the Astra-Zeneca were so dangerous as to require suspending its use. On Thursday, this week, the European agency said it was ok, so yesterday, France reinstated Astra-Zeneca and the Prime Minister got his shot. However, the official French recommendation is that people under 55 not get that one. It's so confusing that many people who had appointments for the Astra-Zeneca vaccine in pharmacies and doctors' office, even if they are in the "qualified" age group, are not showing up. I have stayed out of the fray. Back in February, my appointment for March 2 was postponed to April 2 at the Nogent vaccination center and I have not attempted to change it or get a vaccination elsewhere. I'll take whatever vaccination they have. 

In any case, if you follow the charts and maps on www.covidtracker.fr, you can see how Covid has been spreading. In France, we've had a curfew since November, first from 8p.m. to 6a.m., then tightened from 6 to 6. Restaurants have been shut for any service other than take-out or delivery. Movie and all theaters and museums are shut. It hasn't been enough. Starting this weekend, the Paris region, the northern departments all the way west into Normandy, and the Côte d'Azur are on a moderate lockdown. Essential businesses are open -- and this time, hair salons are essential. The curfew has been enlarged to 7p.m. to 6a.m. We can go out for sports and other physical activity without the 1-hour limit we had last Spring and we have a 10-km radius rather than the 1-km of a year ago. 

I can go to the ballpark! And yes, there is baseball because, for Parisians, the ballpark in the Bois de Vincennes is within the 10k limit and sport is allowed. For me, the field is close enough to walk to. They've been holding practice for several weeks, now. It's still up in the air whether they'll have actual games. L's been coaching the little kids for a few years and finally decided he wanted to play again, after an 8 or 9-year break. I don't think sitting in the bleachers to watch will be allowed, but it's a nice walk over there and back home -- 5k round trip -- and I like having a reason for a walk. I think that not having any purpose other than just "going for a walk" is why I've been so lazy. 

What a week!

Last week was the awful. We woke up on Friday morning to no heat and no hot water. Paul called the company that sold us the furnace and with which we still have a maintenance contract at a little after 6. He expected to get the answering machine but woke up the wife. He was told to call at 9, which he did, giving the error message showing on the furnace (a sensor on the air intake) and was told a technician would call him back. So we waited. At lunch time, Paul called, again, and the guy hung up after saying he was eating. Half an hour later, Paul called, again and was told the technician would call…. This went on all afternoon. At a little past 7 p.m. he called once more and got a young guy who is new and not a technician but who took our plight to heart and came over. Via WhatsApp, he consulted with the technician, but was unable to solve the problem. There is no service over the weekend, so we froze until Monday. The house, on Sunday, was down to 7ºC. 

Friends lent us a couple of space heaters to supplement the one we already had in the bedroom. The bathroom became quite toasty, but without hot water, we didn't spend much time, there. On Saturday, we went to our friend's for lunch. Of course, it was nice to have a warm meal in a warm dining room. But even nicer was spending almost 4 hours with friends. They invited us to spend the night, but we went home.

Monday morning, the phoning started again and the technician finally showed up by the end of the afternoon and turned out to be unfamiliar with our furnace. He told us the other technician would come by, but that didn't happen. On Tuesday, Paul called, again, first thing, and told the boss to give the technician the part. He was told that we had to call the manufacturer to order the part; he didn't have it and he didn't order them. That was a surprise, so Paul called the manufacturer, whose staff was just as surprised to hear the that. He gave us the name of a couple of approved repairers not far from us (and our supplier was not among them). Tuesday afternoon, the furnace was repaired, with the new part.

This adventure of ours was nothing compared to the catastrophic cold and snow that caused the power outages in Texas and the mid-West.

This week, it's Springlike! Today is Sunday and it was sunny and warm so we went for a long walk. There's an app called VisioRando. It's based on IGN maps. That's the Institut géographique national and they are the best maps for hiking. The app keeps reminding you to subscribe, but I'm not ready to do that, yet. We didn't follow the hike exactly, today, because we were starting from home and bypassed the RER station. I then retraced our steps in Map My Walk to figure out our actual distance. There is a slight problem with Map My Walk, though, because it did not allow me to trace our walk through the parks. In the 40+ years we've lived on the border between Nogent and Fontenay, I'd never gone for a casual walk in Fontenay. The red dot on that map is home. On that map, the Fontenay RER station is northwest of us. The road to the center of Fontenay is north. Today, though, instead of following the straight Rue de Joinville, we meandered and then cut westward through the park behind the city hall. We'd never stopped to go through this park before. This brought us to the back of the church and to more familiar paths. We went up the Rue du Cheval Rû, but instead of following the curve, we continued on the Rue des Belles Vues, which took us through a park. There's work going on and it was fenced off on the right so there was no view. All of a sudden we found ourselves at the back of one of our doctor's buildings. We then continued through the old quarry, which is a beautiful ecopark that we never knew existed. There, the views are splendid. It was slightly overcast so we couldn't see all the way to the other side of Paris, but it was still an impressive view. From there, it was all downhill, along the lower border of the quarry and back into the center of Fontenay, to our familiar route home.