Friends have expressed concern — and who can blame them? — that no one has heard a peep from me since I posted the good news weeks ago that I didn’t have COVID, and the concomitant news that I did have flu.… I have been in Lima for 6½ weeks, all of which has been delightful. And on a few of those days I have felt 100% myself — and, indeed, those days have been terrific. But for about half of the days I have been plagued by, shall we say, a fairly violent version of a Common Travellers’ Complaint.…
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I’m a bit behind in posting, for which I ask your indulgence. I’ll temporarily skip over my adventures of the weekend, and briefly write that a vague tickle in my throat on Sunday night developed extraordinarily rapidly into a pretty bad illness. This is 2024, however, so the big question was whether or not it was COVID, especially since the symptoms seemed identical to those when I contracted COVID in May of 2020. Dear Peruvian Tolkien Society friends pointed me to a MiFarma web page.…
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Long COVID essentially rendered me useless from June of 2022 through September of 2023, and everything suffered — even the proper care and maintenance of my beloved espresso machine. To launch the new year, I performed a full cleaning and maintenance on my Rocket Cinquantotto. I had religiously cleaned and polished it bi-weekly from its arrival here in August of 2021 through May of 2022, but it — as with so much else in my life — languished over the ensuing months. Since September (and my low-dose Naltrexone prescription) I’ve been slowly catching up on my to-do lists, and today seemed the perfect day to finally give the Cinquantotto its long overdue deep-cleaning.…
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