B. and I share our home with, of course, two cats, and I wouldn't have it any other way. They're fascinating and adorable if sometimes exasperating creatures who both give and receive love and are a constant source of conversational topics. I never had a cat when I was single - I was away from home too often for it to be fair to an animal - but B. had one when I met her, which was a strong point in her favor as far as I was concerned, and we've been cat-enabled ever since.

So are most of our friends. If they have pets, it's usually cats. Just an occasional dog here and there.

And that's common in society today. I've seen statistics that there are more pet cats than pet dogs in the US. But it didn't use to be that way, not at all.

In my childhood, it seemed that just about every household in the neighborhood had a dog. And those dogs ran loose, and whenever I rode by on my bicycle, or even walked innocently by on the sidewalk, each and every one of those dogs would run up and viciously bark at me at top volume, threatening my life. This was especially frightening if I hadn't seen the brute coming. That alone should be enough to explain my lifelong aversion to dogs. Being constantly under attack by dogs remained the case for me into early adulthood, but somewhere around 30 or 40 years ago people started keeping their dogs locked up.

If there were any other pets in the neighborhood, maybe there was a caged bird or a bowl of goldfish. Never a cat. I cannot recall ever coming across any - until I went to university and started hanging around with SF fans. They had messy and colorful abodes, which nobody in my childhood did, with books and papers scattered around everywhere, and they had cats. I was quickly smitten with these charming animals that did not bark or unprovokedly bite, and knew I was in the right place.

I recently came across written evidence of the unease and discomfort that past society felt for cats. It was in the autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. When she was a young woman and rather shy, one of her aunts suggested to her "that if I were stuck for conversation I should take the alphabet and start right through it," asking her interlocutor for her opinion on topics beginning with successive letters. For example, C was for cat, and the question was, "Do you have the usual feeling, Mrs. Jellyfish, about cats? Do they give you the creeps even when you do not see them?"

The usual feeling? The creeps? That is a deeply alien world that Eleanor was living in.

Still testing positive and feeling a bit cruddy, so I didn't attend the folk music concert I had a ticket for yesterday and stayed home instead. That enabled me to get a bit more work done, and also to attend two Zoom meetings - the virus can't be transmitted over Zoom, so far as we currently know - one of which fizzled out when the host lost her internet connection (see, B! we're not the only ones that happens to), and the other one of which was largely occupied with listening to an adjunct professor express distress with life at a budget-cutting university. I sympathize, but the detail, and repetition of same, was more than I needed.

Dinner was takeout from our favorite local Mexican place, closest thing to a meal out I've had in over two weeks, and again I couldn't eat more than half of it, something I'd never experienced with their food before. At least this time they gave B. the burrito she ordered, instead of one she didn't.

Next week is the Banff String Quartet Competition, which I'll be watching livestream - attending in-person, which I did twice in the old days, is so not on for me now - and I don't have to go anywhere for a week and a half, and that to a dentist appointment which I can always reschedule, having already done that once. Tickets for the fall season have begun trickling in, but that doesn't start for another two weeks after that, and the first concert doesn't much appeal to me.

And so we sit.

I haven't had anything to post for several days because I've been in isolation mode, on two counts.

First, B. and I have contacted the covid. First time for either of us. We've been highly vigilant so far, but we relaxed enough to go unmasked to a family gathering just when we shouldn't have.

Covid symptoms vary in nature and severity. Mine have been mostly cold/flu-like symptoms, plus the interesting one of loss of appetite. I cannot eat more than half of what I usually do. B. is having it much worse. Due to our age and condition, we're both on paxlovid. Picking that up from the pharmacy was just about my only exit from the house lately. We've got plenty of food and we're isolating.

Simultaneously, my computer was in the shop for a much-needed overhaul, prompted by a catastrophic glitch. This also took several days, so at the same time as I was isolating, I was isolated from the online world. I had access to e-mail, more to read than to write it, but I couldn't do much of anything else. Whole lotta book-reading going on.

But now it's back, and I can start getting ramped back up on work. I'm feeling better - so is B. - but I'm going to stay isolated for at least another couple of days before I take another covid test to see how I'm doing.