And I do feel fine, at least right now! 

The payroll department of my company just called asking about how I feel and asking me if I still have Covid?

I never had Covid, I replied, at least not according to the test I got.  

Look, as much as I despise the thought of getting back into a truck after having 14 days off, my bank account is hollering at me.  "GET BACK TO WORK!!!"

I'm not receiving a dime of any kind of stimulus from the federal government for this off time.  I'm not getting paid by my company, I only have what little comp time I have left.  This week will be a thousand dollar gross paycheck on 25 hours of comp time.

Next week, I just have maybe 20 hours left of comp time and that's the end of it until November.  So at least two months before I get a fresh refill of vacation hours.  

I can definitely say I feel better than I did last night - I was awakened out of deep sleep by incessant coughing that went on so long I eventually got out of bed and spent an hour and a half figuring out what had happened to my phone.

Like an idiot, I clicked on a link a friend had sent me in Facebook messenger, not knowing it's a phishing bug that installs onto your phone.  So I sat here at the computer desk looking this thing up until I found a remedy that didn't include having to restore the phone to factory default. Doing that would mean losing all of my text messages, photos, videos and most importantly, my notes.  I would have had to try and take screen shots of everything and then upload it to my computer to store it there.

I was in the "no thank you" territory with that idea.  What alerted me to the idea that something was amiss was the fact that there were the letters "VPN" next to where it says "Verizon LTE" at the top of the phone.  When I saw that I instantly thought, this thing somehow got into my phone.  I went through the entire settings - there's a lot there - I saw something strange but I didn't know it was the culprit until later on, after I was reading through countless sites trying to find someone that knew what was going on and now to fix it.  

Settings>General>VPN>and on that screen, there it was. It had picked up a ride on an existing app, in this case my Avast anti-virus app.  Even now it's still asking me to reconfigure it, that's easy, delete the damn app. I don't even remember how I even figured out that that was doing anything, somehow I clicked on something and it said the app was busy uploading - to who, what and where completely unknown.  It took quite a while for all of this to unravel, I then started getting notices that my passwords had been compromised on a large number of apps so then I had to start changing passwords on almost everything. 

Now I'm going to have to go through the - apps with money on them, you know, like credit cards, paypal, the bank?  And make sure the password changes went through and also make sure there are no new charges or deductions on any of it.  I hope it didn't happen to anyone else on my friend's list, I did let the person that "sent" me the link know about it. Turns out he knew about it but didn't say anything to anyone, which in turn pissed me off.  Dude, do you know what I just went through trying to get this s*** off of my phone? At least I went through the trouble of telling people on my Facebook page - through someone else since I'm in FB jail another 30 days and I can't post on my wall from my other account either.  

I've started a third, completely unrelated account and going to try to post a post today telling everyone what happened.  That phishing link was sent to every single person on my friend's list.....

The annoyance of my bank requiring a text be sent to my phone and input that text in order to access my account from an "unknown device" becomes a bit less annoying when you think about what they might have possibly been able to do with my money.  You might be able to get your money back if a hacker can somehow steal it, but from what I've read that can take a while. 

Anyway, hopefully that debacle is over with....

And "hopefully" I'm going back to work tomorrow.  I'm a bit surprised this lady from corporate didn't ask about my voice, it ain't right lol.  Crackling, scratchy, hoarse is the real word I suppose.  Especially from coughing for several hours last night.....it's been 14 days, I can't just keep taking time off. I need a good 70 hours worth of work and then get a day off.  

No, I am not going to get a machine to rent today.  I woke up too late this morning. It would be a waste of money not to be able to get a full day's worth of use out of it before having to turn it back in.  It means getting up around 5:45 am, taking a shower, getting dressed, a cuppa, etc, get over to Longview at 7:00 am to get the thing rented and then get over there to spend a full day working. Not, get upat 9:00 am, do all of that and get back to the property at noon or something to get 4 or 5 hours in before getting it back to the rental store.  

I will be doing that in the near future, rest assured, but today just wasn't the day for it. I need to get a bit better before going out and doing manual labor. Yes, it's machinery but there is a certain amount of getting out and moving stuff around that goes with it.  

I probably could go get the materials to build the ramps for my trailer.  James figured it out, 40 feet of angle iron to build it.  I can't use the ramps I have for a skid steer, they aren't heavy duty enough. I bought those for use for getting 4 wheelers up onto the trailer, not a larger piece of earth moving equipment.  

So, what, exactly, did I get done in 14 days off? Not much, I can readily admit.  Besides finally getting the closing done on the property, I didn't do much of anything beyond normal household stuff.  Whether I get that angle iron or not, the rest of today will be spent resting. I have everything I need for a trip to just about anywhere right now, tho a 2 day trip is what I really want, if I get stuck out on the road and find out - gee, this was a really bad idea - I want to be no more than a day's drive back home Brownsville does that for me and gives me decent money...

And I'm not doing Keto right now either.  I don't care about diets when I'm under the weather. 

9/11.  Time to get a certain, very close person their birthday gift.  She only wants flowers. She's spent years - literally - getting her estate to a manageable size and she doesn't want any fluff/extras to start filling spaces back up.  She really likes flowers so that's what she's going to get on her birthday, which coincides with the remembrance of one of the worst days in American history when it comes to a foreign actor enacting chaos and destruction on our own American soil.

Most of us can still remember what we were doing when it happened. Most of us were glued to TV sets watching live footage. We all wondered at first whether this was a terrorist event or somehow a commercial airliner just happened to stray off course and find it's way into the side of a giant building that is visible for many miles away.  We all remember them discussing this, live, on air and then seeing that second jet crash into the second tower. The narrative went straight to "yes, folks, this is a terrorist attack". There was no doubting it at that point and it forever changed the way we look at security in this nation. 

It's 20 year anniversary, "experts" are warning of a potential attempt at a hostile invasion of some sort.  Well, that may be true, but I can't live my life in that fear just like I can't fear an airborne illness that infects you and sits you down for a while, namely Covid.  the mu variant - newest one of concern, went from "gee it's over in Colombia" a few days ago to a headline I read this morning saying that the mu variant is detected in 49 states.  Oh?  In 2 days it came from Colombia and just swept over the nation like a giant storm, falling out of the sky and infecting people in 49 states?

This is the fodder conspiracies are made of.  People are going to look at that and say no, that's not what happened. We don't know what did happen but we don't trust the government to tell us the truth.  And in my case, I sure as heck don't trust an unelected bureaucrat, namely Dr Anthony Fauci, to say anything truthful or less than convoluted about what's going on.  

Well whatever.  I think I'll get some comfort food today and have at it.