Instead, it's the Covid Report. After all these years, I finally caught the bug, just a few days before I was scheduled to leave for the con.

I felt feverish and just plain crappy on Tuesday, but tested negative. If this was just a 24 hour cold, I could still go to the convention.

So, I didn't quite change any plans.

On Wed, I tested positive.

In one way, I was relieved. I really didn't want to go to the world-con when I was sick, but I didn't want to miss it if it was just a 2-3 day cold. I'd feel bad if I went to the con and had to be isolated in my room, but I'd feel worse if I'd decided to stay home and then felt fine.

UMich Health gets points. I tested myself about 10:00 AM, and about an hour later, it occurred to my fever addled brain that there are anti-viral drugs to combat Covid, and I might qualify. (One of the joys of being over 65.)

I logged into the medical portal and sent a non-urgent message to my primary care person reporting my positive test, current fever, etc.

I got a phone call back from a nurse within the hour to check details and see if I qualified for paxlovid.

A half hour after that I got a call from Meijer's pharmacy letting me know that my prescription was ready to pick up.

The longest, and most annoying delay, was sitting in line at the Meijer's drive-thru to pick up the prescription. Noon on a Wednesday turns out to be a busy time.

By Thursday, I was feeling "OK." No longer feverish, and not coughing badly. My energy was down, but I started doing things like dishes and emptying cat boxes again.

Caz, however, is suffering greatly through this. I'm willing to take him for walks, but I won't take him next door to visit his friends, since I don't want to share Covid with his friend's pet people.

The World-con this year is "hybrid," with lots of events being broadcast across the net. There are even some small-group items that are interactive, like a zoom conversation.

In an attempt to be impaired-friendly, there's even an automated speech-to-text display. This is a great demonstration of how far this technology is from practical. My favorite so far is that it keeps displaying "slush reader" as "flesh eater."

One of the panels I listened to was on covers (my cover design-sense sucks). One interesting tidbit was that if a book does well, that style of cover becomes popular. The Hunger Games became very popular, and the cover is just an icon on a black background. So, just putting an icon on your cover became popular.

Part of this is the well-known inability of marketing folks to think beyond what worked last year for someone else, but some of it is recognition that the folks who liked Hunger Games (and there's a lot of them) will want another book similar to Hunger Games, and the first thing that will attract them is the similar cover.

On the other hand, a member of the panel who works for a small press publisher spent a convention watching what books people stopped to look at, picked up, or bought. The bulk of these were ones with people on the cover.

It's always been a dictum that covers that sell books have people on the cover. Apparently, even in this post-Hunger Games era, that's true.

The final observation was that authors should never be allowed to design their covers.

In one of the small chat rooms I got a chance to talk with an ethnohistorian in Australia who is also a foodie. I hoped she could help me with what peasants were eating in the middle east, but alas, her specialty is Europe in the renaissance. She did suggest that I look for references to what people were eating a few hundred years before Bard and Sigurd. Anything that was fancy enough to be written down and remembered in 500 was likely to be peasant food by 850. She also suggested I look into Jewish history - they kept all the written notes for what was allowed, forbidden, and how to prepare foods, etc.

So, over all, it wasn't the week or weekend I intended to have, but it's had its moments. I've actually listened to more panels than I'd have seen if I went to the convention, since I'm not being distracted by the art show, huckster room, parties and just running into folks in the halls.