Ugh! Despite two vaxxes and a booster, I think a tribe of variants has found its personal petri dish in my body. I say a tribe because it feels like a rolling succession of individual COVID symptoms is trying to breach the walls of my antibody army. Here’s the list: extreme fatigue and multiple naps per day, something I would never have complained about before. Morning congestion and a barrage of sneezes that might likely have blown my head off. Speaking of heads, brain fog. Do I know what day it is? I was reminded on Sunday that it was not Saturday. What could have been the coup de grace was joint pain. First extreme in the left hip, followed by a little in the right, then on to the left shoulder and finally, overall stiffness that made me get up from the sofa very gingerly and walk, very slowly, like an old lady. Well, I am a year older now. “Age has nothing to do with it,� I declared. Caring friends made chicken soup for me (nectar of the gods), gave me an oxygen monitoring thingy and advised that if it goes 90 or below, get thee to the emergency room. Many just said, not in their words but mine: “Hie thee to the hospital. Now!!!�Well, I had a paper to get out, so that was a waste of breath. I would just forbid anyone to visit. That didn’t work either; they came double-masked with gloves. Oh, and a suggestion that the printout of the paper I give to our proofreader could be debugged by UV light. Oh, and also, too, I received my four test kits from the government. Used my teeth to unscrew the cap of the test solution until I realized it just pulled off. Negative. I know I’m not alone in thinking why bother, but I’m glad I ran the vaccine gamut. Maybe I’d be dead by now if I hadn’t. Nobody knows anything for sure about viruses or anything else...except, as they say, death and taxes. COVID is working on the first all too well. We’ll see about the second. My profound apologies to anyone I may have had close contact with prior to becoming a prisoner of the pandemic. Should I admonish our readers to be careful out there and avoid everything and everyone like the plague?� As a dear friend is fond of telling me and perhaps reassuring herself as well as me: “You’re a cockroach. Nothing can kill you.� Dear friends sometimes have weird ways of saying they love you. Happy Belated Valentines Day! Let’s hope that February will be a rolling succession of the LOVE bug, a force that any COVID variant should be sorely afraid of. —Flavia Potenza