Aaron Parecki

Thank you @British_Airways for having staff in the lounge who can actually get real answers to questions about why flights are delayed.

My next flight is delayed because they can't get people thru checkin fast enough, which at least means this probably won't get cancelled.

oh no are you kidding me... British Airways just straight up cancelled the LHR-SFO flight I booked for today. Now it's 2:45am and I am stuck on hold waiting to change my flight.

Good news! The Sunday night and Monday morning PCR tests both came back negative! That makes me confident enough that I will continue to get negative results for when I need the PCR test for the flight.

However, the antigen test this morning still is positive. The covid officer says that one might continue to give positive results for a week or longer.

So that means I need to use the PCR test result to get the flight home. The trouble is it takes 12-24 hours to get those results back and I need a test from the previous day in order to get on the flight. If I drop the test off before 9am it *usually* comes back around 9-10pm the same day, so that essentially means I'll book the flight and then not know if I'll be actually able to get on it until the night before.

I'm currently planning on coming back on Thursday. I also still don't feel *great* right now, so I'm hoping an extra couple days will leave some room for improvement too.

But in other good news, my sense of smell has come back this evening and I can taste food again!

oh hey, I can actually kind of taste this Gouda cheese. Not sure if that's because my smell is recovering or because Gouda is a super strong flavor tho 🤷‍♂️

Bad news, the rapid antigen test is still positive. But I am apparently still allowed to go outside because I have the negative PCR test and finished the quarantine period.

Looks like the theory is it's most contagious from a few days before symptoms develop to a few days after, so I'm significantly less contagious now. Plus of course still masking. Anyway, will probably spend the rest of the day inside the hotel room anyway.

So I guess that means it's too early to book a flight out of here still. I need a negative test to get the boarding pass for the flight, and the PCR tests take ~12-24 hours to come back, so it will have to be an antigen test. At least now I can go outside to do the rapid antigen test every day now.

Good news! Yesterday morning's test came back negative! I'm definitely still feeling a little bit sick though, but the covid officer says I can go outside with a mask on now!

Since today is Sunday and things are closed, my morning test probably won't come back until late Monday night. Time to go do a rapid antigen test to double check the negative result now.

Not being able to taste anything sure puts a damper on my interest in eating. I'm sure that avocado toast was delicious though.

on second thought, uploading this 20gb video to youtube on hotel wifi may not be the best plan

I'm sitting in my hotel room eating this müsli with yogurt and strawberries thinking "wow these strawberries sure don't have much flavor" ...and then it hit me...

I opened up Thursday's leftovers of extremely pungent lentil salad with blue cheese and it doesn't smell like anything either.

The only thing I can smell is the hand sanitizer which frankly was way too smelly before, that and a hint of coffee.