Shingled out

One of the weird bonuses of working where I work is that I have access to vaccines that aren’t always automatically given to the rest of the world. No, this isn’t about COVID; when there is a vaccination for that I’ll be standing in line same as anyone, I would guess.  But not every American has had the rabies vaccination and most probably don’t take a typhoid preventative every five years and haven’t had the yellow fever vaccination.

And now that I’ve hit the age for the shingles vaccine, the doctor at work encouraged me to get it. As I’ve heard how bad shingles can be, it seemed like a good idea. It’s a nasty, nasty thing to get and no one in their right might would want any part of it.

The vaccine consists of two shots; I’ve no idea if they’re identical or what, but before the first one, which I got in March, I listened to a lecture of side effects, read about more and signed a piece of paper saying I understood like could get ugly after it. The embassy doctor advised me to do it on a Friday in case I had any ill effects.

Dose one, no issues. Yeah, I had a little soreness in my shoulder but none of the flu-like symptoms I’d been warned about, so last week I really wasn’t worried about getting the second one. I’d planned to do it on Friday, when I was in the office, but I wound up having to go in on Wednesday to do a particular work thing, so I went ahead and lined it up for then because I wasn’t sure if I’d have to go in Friday, too. (We have a health unit at the embassy; I didn’t go into a local medical facility to get it.)

A meeting ran a bit late and I rushed in to the health unit, which thrilled the doctor because he’s pretty much starved for human contact. There is virtually no one in the office all week, and he’s in a location where the few people who are on site don’t run into him, so I was probably the first human being he saw on the job. We chatted, I got the shot, he reminded me that I should take an ibuprofen or two just in case.

That went in one ear and out the other and I pretty much forgot I got the shot, which had been around 4:30 and, when my shoulder started hurting on the walk home an hour later, I didn’t connect that to the shot. My mind went to the fact my shoulder hurt like it did before I’d had shoulder surgery and I had wild thoughts about having three shoulder surgeries in four overseas tours.

At home, I tried to chillax but the pain increased. At some point – maybe when I saw the Garfield BandAid – I remembered the shot and the suggestion to take ibuprofen, so I gulped down two around maybe 6:30 p.m. By around 8 p.m., I was in agony. The left shoulder hurt just as it had post-op.

A couple hours later, I downed two of the knockout PM pills, assuming I would fall asleep and wake up fine, like what normally happens. Nope. The pain was excruciating and just as bad as Day One after surgery. No matter how I arranged the pillows, I could not get comfortable and woke up screaming “Oh God” so many times my neighbors must have thought I found a new man. I took two more painkillers at 4 a.m. but didn’t get any sleep at all. The pain was so bad I was nauseous.

The next day plan had been to meet someone for breakfast and then have the three of us (the person and her pup) come work at my apartment but I felt so miserable I called it off. Feeling hot, I took my temperature and it was over 100, but again, this is not a COVID story.

 Come to find out, I was the poster child for side effects. Here’s what the CDC said about the shingles drug:

Most people got a sore arm with mild or moderate pain after getting Shingrix, and some also had redness and swelling where they got the shot. Some people felt tired, had muscle pain, a headache, shivering, fever, stomach pain, or nausea. About 1 out of 6 people who got Shingrix experienced side effects that prevented them from doing regular activities.  Symptoms went away on their own in about 2 to 3 days. Side effects were more common in younger people.

It's one of the occasions when I would have loved to have been “most people,” but I’m rarely most people. I guess I got lucky because not only was I one of the six who experienced side effects, but I experienced the whole lot of them, all day long. Fortunately, I’m teleworking now, which, that day, meant crashing on the sofa between emails. It was awful.

Our doctor came and checked on me and offered me Benadryl and some other painkiller. Those, combined with a single melatonin, helped me get sleep that night buy boy howdy, that was not a lot of fun.

I went down to the river to pray

Belarus is still open for business, and everything else.  We’re at about 28k cases as I write this but jumping up by about 1k daily. Plus, we had a parade last weekend.

Not another soul in sight

Yep, you read that right. Victory Day parade, not that I was anywhere near it. And although it was sparsely attended compared to years past, there were still thousands of people watching as well as many elderly people in it. Just not smart.

As far as work goes, my office isn’t going to open back up for probably months. It’s rather dejecting. I am getting into the office here and there but mostly working from home, like anyone else. And right now, I have plenty to do; I’ve got a recurring project I’m doing for the third time and then there is Russian – I need every minute.

Already I feel Russian is hopeless. I am OK reading and understanding; it’s very slow but I know what the printed words mean once I figure them out. But I just cannot speak or understand. I had my first lesson with the teacher and it went about like I expected. He probably thinks I am nincompoop but I haven’t landed on how to learn. There’s got to be a way.  I don’t know how people do this. I just don’t have an aptitude for it, but there’s got to be something I can to that will help.

Copyright infringement?

Meanwhile, since there is absolutely no commute involved in working from home, I have what seems like a couple more hours a day and no purpose to go anywhere. And as bad as getting dark so early was, it being light out from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. makes you want to go outside.

Well, when the weather is decent. Oddly, it snowed last week. Not much, but enough to remind me why I don’t like winter. We keep having brilliantly sunny days at or near 60 and then it goes back to cloudy in the low 50s.

But I am trying to get outside anyway, even if it’s chilly. We’re not locked down, and Minsk is blessed with green spaces. The Svislac rives twists through the city, and along both sides in many places people can find paths, parks and trails. Minsk’s version of Gorky Park is a couple kilometers from me and encompasses a pretty big area. There’s an amusement park, ice rink, planetarium and probably lots of other things over a series of long blocks on one side of the river.

In the mornings, I’ve started walking through it now that the weather is OK, or mostly OK. This morning it was 46 and overcast with a little wind; not ideal but if I wait until the afternoon more people come out. One day last week, I went in the morning and in the afternoon and the afternoon had far more joggers, walkers, fishermen, pets on excursion and people on roller blades, bikes and scooters going by. There’s still enough space to feel safe, though, but I prefer the solitude in the morning.

Ferris wheel at Gorky Park

My path this week has taken me on the main road, just past the circus and over the bridge to the park, where I pop off the road and wander through to the end of the park, then I switch sides of the river and go by the opera house and continue to the area with the stadium, which is close to my house. It’s really a nice walk; water just sucks me in. I found a place with a really big rock under a willowy tree and it’s just lovely to sit and pray. Despite the wanna-be fishermen sitting around with poles, the river doesn’t seem to have fish, or at least I haven’t seen evidence of any. But there are ducks, pigeons and occasional geese to watch, so there’s a nice calming effect.

The loop I’ve done this week is about 5-6k, so it’s something in light of our gym being shut down. I need to motivate myself to run outside but it’s just not my thing. I love walking outside; running is a treadmill thing to me. But maybe when it gets warmer in the mornings.

If I make it into the office this week, I plan on walking back by way of the river, which would lengthen the commute from about 2k to probably 8k. I went in two days last week and intended to do that, but bad luck struck and one was the snow day and the other was also gloomy, plus our mail came and my bag was a bit heavy to lug that far.

Our mail comes to Lithuania instead of directly here and someone normally goes to get it. However, we can’t be doing that right now, so last week was our first load in over a month; we had to have a contractor bring it to us. It was so nice to be reunited with stuff we’d all ordered back in February or so. My voting information came for the primary. That’s how far behind we are.

And there’s no end in sight. We’re so far behind everyone has pretty much lapped us.

I *could* spell cat

Like everyone else, I’m working from home. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot I can do from home. The official case number in Belarus is rising steeply. Today, it’s about 16k and going up by about 1k daily. Those cases fall under “being treated” or something like that; there is also a figure of “recovered and discharged” and there’s no a lot of clarity of the honest total of diagnosed cases.

Anyway, point being, whatever number we have is now shooting up, so whereas a couple weeks ago it was fine to go into the office, now it’s riskier. As a result, I am stranded in my lovely apartment doing my best to not waste taxpayer money by doing absolutely nothing.

My days thus far have been filled with taking random online classes offered by our department learning institute. These are fun, interesting and sometimes enlightening, but not directly related to my job. I’ve been working here for over six years and have, this whole time, been taking classes that are related to my day-to-day duties, so I ran out of those long ago. I moved next to things that were interesting that, in a perfect world, I would do or at least benefited from learning about, like how to take more interesting pictures, how the consular section works and about some of the online programs I use.  

Those had value for me, but now I am sort of regulated to taking the most least interesting. Really, we’re taking about 2-10 hours classes with such titillating titles as “fundamentals of contractor-held property” and “centrally billed accounts training.” Some were no-brainers but relevant, like how to use an emergency radio (which I’ve been using for years now), but in all, I’ve been really scraping for the past week or two.

Fortunately, as part of the regular, non-COVID calendar, the summer class schedule included a “mentored” Russian class that’s 14 weeks long. I signed up for this while I has been going into the office daily, but now I am so glad I got accepted.  (I have no idea if they turn anyone down, but I had to fill in a justification of why I should be able to take it.) Technically, it starts on May 11 (Daddy’s birthday), but we got access to the course materials early.

The class is designed for people who have no knowledge or ability in Russian. I have very little ability, but after six months, I do have some knowledge, so the idea of going through the alphabet again is a bit disheartening. After checking out the materials, it appeared that I needed to go through every little screen to “get credit” for it, so I spent two hours on the first half of the alphabet (again). There are three screens with activities for every letter, and I made no shortcuts and did all of it.

The next day, I went back and discovered a different way to enter the course, which was through the mentor’s “homeroom” link. This time, I went in that way and it too me ALL THE WAY back to the beginning of the alphabet. Heavy sigh. I had to start over. I did, shortcutting (but still completing) the screens I’d gone through and then being thorough when I got to the last half. I ran out of daylight, shut it down and came back the next day.

Well, now, I cannot figure out how to maneuver to that “homeroom” link again. I went back in the browser history to try and then went through all the “practices” for the block letters but they didn’t register as completed in the “objectives” part of the course, so it looks like I haven’t even started. I’ve asked the mentor but it’s a very narrow question and I don’t guess I described it correctly because he sent me a different link (the one for the conference calls once we get going).

Dejected, I pushed forward anyway. The practices were incredibly hard for me; my language problem is not reading but speaking and spoken – I can’t pronounce and I can’t understand people talking. I can know someone is telling me, “I want two cups of black coffee with sugar please,” and understand the “I want” and “please” and possibly, maybe, the “coffee,” but the rest is just noise. Even playing the phrase in slow speed (thank you, Mango Languages) and staring at the words on the screen, I cannot tell what it is. Not good at all. One of the practices was to spell a word that was dictated. I had absolutely no idea what the first one was. The best I could guess was it had two syllables. I was right on that, but utter fail on the rest.

Speaking is not as bad but still brutal. I can sound out words very slowly, one syllable at a time, but I have trouble talking as fast as, say, the Mango Languages voice. I cannot tell you how many times I repeated “I like brown bread” last night and I still couldn’t match the speed.

Some letters complicate it for me, too. Especially vowels. There is a vowel that looks like an English “e” but it has two dots over it. That vowel hates me, as does one that looks like a backwards capital “N” with a squiggle over it. It’s a multi-talented vowel because every word it seems to represent a different sound.

And I need to know how to understand, more so than reading, I think. When I go into the doner place nearby and ask for “one schwarma” – which I can say – they come back with a follow-up question and I am lost. As I have yet to not walk away with a schwarma, it’s not like it’s life or death, but it’s really frustrating. This is so, so hard for me.

But I am plugging along, using several forms of learning. In the department’s class, I finished the block letters (though I still don’t think I’ve been credited for it – I have to find that darn link) and moved on to italics. And at this, I pretty much lost all hope.

As it turns out, Russian – a language that, one colleague told me, the more you study, the less you know --  in some cases,  has letters that look totally, totally different in italics than they do in block print. How do people learn this?

Up until now, I knew how to spell cat. It was C-A-T, and as the kindergarten song relayed, was basically the first word I could spell. (Hippopotamus was a lot harder.) And even now, I can understand that in Russian, there is no hard “c” and it’s represented with a “k.” I can grasp the concept that in other languages, words aren’t always direct cognates to English but are close. I’m OK with knowing that the English word “cat” is spelled “kot” in Russian. Not a problem there.

But oh my, these italics. The “v” sound, which is represented by “B” in Russian (I can grasp that mentally, too), somehow, in lower-case italics, looks sort of like an “e,” if the bottom stretch of the “e” made a loop like the top. I had trouble writing it in a pencil because I kept filling in the loops. That’s just weird. Why should something look vastly different in lower-case italics? The lower-case “g” looks like a very small, very awkward, backwards “2” or maybe “z.” The “d” sound in Russia is represented by a letter that looks kind of like pi, if pi had an additional line near the bottom, but the lower-cased italics letter looks a lot more like an English “d,” but it’s a bit lopsided. I can get used to those, even if it is confusing.

But man, the lower-case “OO” sound, which looks like a “Y” in regular block, turns to “u” in lower-case italics. Now that’s crazy. How did this come about, really? But the worst ones are “M”  and “T.” The lower-case italics “M” looks like a small upper-case “M”—points and all. And it’s important to remember that, even lower-case, it’s pointy because, for a reason I will never, ever understand, the lower-case italics “T” *also* looks like an “M” in lower case – with the rounded humps. It is totally crazy. No wonder Russians drink a lot of vodka.

It boggles my mind, and I have no idea how to grasp this. I could spell cat. It was really simple, a long time ago and for a very long time. Now, though, it’s spelled “k-o-t” as well as “k-a-m.”

I might never recover. Where is the vodka?