David Gillon

Talking to my sister via Alexa video call earlier.

A: "How's your arm?"

Me: "Still mildly sore to the touch, but less so than yesterday, which was less than Tuesday"

A: "Is there any mark?"

Me: "I can't really see, can you?"

(Short comic interlude of trying to get a dyspraxic person to put his finger in the right spot by remote voice control)

A: "Yes, there. Is that it? Can you see now?"

Me: "Yes, there is something there. I'm pretty sure that's the scar from my BCG."

(So it only predates the mark we were looking for by about 45 years)

I slept all Wednesday afternoon, which I clearly needed, and was still somewhat sleepy today. On reflection this is pretty much how my body handles any bug, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise to find it doing the same for a vaccination. But given the last vaccination I had was BCG, and I was about 13 at the time, it's probably not unreasonable that I hadn't predicted it.

Had my first jab this afternoon at my GP's - though technically it was the other surgery that shares the building that was organising everything. Lots of volunteers about, the first one just taking your car number - because they have a number-plate scanning parking enforcement system  and telling scores of people how to use the terminals to log in would be a pain - then one to give you a squirt of hand sanitizer (completely pointless in my case as I immediately put them back on my non-sanitized pushrims). The next one checked your name and fetched a pre-printed medical questionaire for you to fill in - name and address done, but they wanted an emergency contact number in case of issues and the clip-board was extremely flexible, it took me two tries to get a legible version, the other questions were basically do you currently have Covid and do you have anaphylaxis problems. The next person you saw was a nurse, one of three, who checked your responses, told you they'd want you to hang around for 5 minutes after the jab, and recommended that you didn't drive for 15 minutes, then sent you through to where they were doing the jab.

That was a big room - about twice the floorplan of my house - that I've never been in before, which had been divided off into a waiting area and a vaccinating area. In practice you were waiting less than a minute before another volunteer called you through and told you  to take one of the seats spread out around the room, though in my case it went "Take a .... er, find yourself a space". And walking up an down was a nurse with a trolley with a bunch of ready needles: "Left arm okay? Right done." I hung around until I got the nod, picked up a card indicating when I'd been vaccinated and what batch from one final volunteer, then headed home.

I reckon they were doing about one person every couple of minutes, and actually had capacity for about twice that, maybe even three times - there were three nurses in the vaccination room, though I could only see two trolleys.

So I reckon there were at least six nurses, and around a dozen volunteers, which if you extend it across the country is a hell of a lot of people pushing it out.

I heard on Friday night that vaccination bookings had opened up for the 56-60 cohort (which I'm in), checked on Saturday morning, and I could have had an appointment for Saturday 13th at our local shopping centre, which just opened as a mass vaccination centre. But there's no way I'm going into central Chatham on a Saturday, when it's jammed full of people, and it's busy enough the rest of the week that I prefer to avoid it year round - one trip a year is my normal average even without Covid. On top of which parking is a nightmare and I usually end up in a car park that's only wheel-able in one direction due to a steep slope (I have to get out of the chair and waddle back to the car behind it as a rule).

A little extra web-poking confirmed my GP's surgery is also doing vaccinations, and that has a car park and level access, so I think I'll hold off for a week or so to see if I get the call from them.

I didn't expect to be quite this picky about vaccination, but I don't need to go anywhere or see anyone, so I can afford to wait a little.

First short story rejection of the year, bah humbug. But the stats, eeek!

"Please keep in mind that we had nearly 1400 submissions and we accepted 20 stories total"

That's for the Derelict anthology. Presumably they had similar numbers for the other two anthologies they were doing.

My mother's central heating broke down on Thursday, which isn't ideal for an 81yo at this time of year, but kudos to her central heating guy who came out on Friday morning (apologising that he hadn't been able to come on Thursday evening), spent a while working on it, determined it probably needed a new PCB, and then told her it would be cheaper to sign up to the manufacturer's service plan and have them come out and fix it than for him to do it, and refused to take any money (and he'd be losing the annual service, not just the one job). And he was spot on, they came out on Saturday and replaced the PCB and her house is warm again. Thankfully my sister was able to deal with everything without needing me to get involved beyond agreeing what the engineer was saying made sense.

And as well as that being fixed, my clinically extremely vulnerable brother-in-law had his vaccination (AZ) on Sunday, so that's one less worry for both him and my sister. Judging by a graphic in the Guardian on Monday, she and I are likely to get our jabs in the last week of March if progression continues as currently.

Not much of substance happening at this end. Gamewise I've been playing Ark again for the past few weeks, I hadn't played since April-ish due to a corrupted save file, but finally got around to rolling back to the previous save. And I promptly fell off my giant owl in the dark, in the deadliest spot on the Ragnorak map, the Murder Murder Snow* - hypothermia actually killed me before I hit the ground. As my character had all my good gear on it, I needed to recover the body.  Unfortunately all my good gear included my best set of insulating fur armour. So recovery had to be dash in wearing my second-best set, grab the stuff, and dash out again before hypothermia killed me, and before the body and its gear faded in a couple of gameplay hours. To make things even worse, it had landed right on the spawn-spot for a pack of direwolves, so I didn't even dare hop off to get it. Trying to take the direwolves out cost me three good flyers and more sets of gear - I lost count of the number of times I died. I finally decided the only way to do it was to build a base on top of my body, block by block, by flying in and placing them from the air. Initially I'd planned just a raised platform where I could land, a couple of campfires to keep the hypothermia at bay, and a ladder dropping down to the body, but I ended up building first a shack on the platform and then a wall around the body for safety's sake. And so now I have my gear back, and a base in the middle of the Murder Murder Snow. I'm not sure that I can do anything practical with it, but it's a fantastic spot for watching the daily war between the direwolves and the mammoths.

* So-called because at -60C it's even worse than the -40C Murder Snow.

But I have spoken to two separate people face to face in the same day (receptionist and nurse) for the first time since the 25th (and the time before that would be the pub quiz on the 3rd November.

I'm not normally old enough to get the flu jab free from the NHS, but this year they're doing everyone over 50, so I got a text inviting me to arrange an appointment last week. I was going to leave that until today, but they rang me on Saturday to arrange one, offering a choice of three different clinics on Monday, which I suspect means they didn't have many takers (a lot of people probably already paid to get one at their chemists). I picked 'mid-afternoon', on the assumption that was when the surgery would be least busy, and was promptly given the 1:05PM slot - which I wouldn't have called 'mid afternoon'. OTOH I appeared to be the only patient in the building and was called straight through by the nurse, and was back at my car by 1:06PM.

That was also the first time I've been out in the chair since the start of the first lockdown, so I had to pump the tires up last night - sooo soft. But it's as well I did plan for that as when I popped out at 12:30PM to put the chair in the car I found the front windscreen was still thick with ice as it's still in shadow. Fortunately that came off relatively easily, but it would have been a definite recipe for panic if I hadn't discovered it until 12:50PM, the time I planned to leave.

I think that's the first vaccination jab I've had since BCG at 14.

Totally unconnectedly, last night was either the first time I ever managed to lucid dream, or I was thinking about the scene I was plotting so close to sleep that it got misfiled as a dream. No variation on the plotting, so I suspect the latter, but still interesting.