These past few weeks have been something of a downer for me. Since at least 8 January, I’ve been battling a upper respiratory virus that has pretty much knocked me for a loop; tired, week, nose running like an open faucet, coughs, chills, etc. I went to an after hours clinic ten minutes away from where I live, and they were able to determine I had neither COVID (again) nor strep. So they gave me a prescription for something to take care of the sinuses and the cough for about ten days, then when that was gone I started using Dayquil/Nyquil to handle things. Yesterday what was left in my sinuses finally broke up and came out, and I’ve been doing physical work without having to take a break every fifteen minutes.

To make things even worse it’s been very cold here in central Florida. How cold? Mid-50s Fahrenheit during the day down to mid-30s at night. This was all part of the cold wave that came rumbling out of Canada and into the mid-West. We got the edge of it all the way down here, and it was cold enough that snow fell with accumulations of 6 or more inches in the Florida Panhandle.

Needless to say all creatures great and small tried to keep warm while all this was happening. That’s what these two photos are about. Zoë was Velcroed to me for a number of days, while Beau kept stealing my seat every time I got up to go do something, like head to the bathroom. While last night went back down to 38°, today was a balmy 63°. While it was still in the mid-50°s yesterday, it was still warm enough, and I was in decent enough shape, to get some tasks of significance done.

Both of these photos were taken with my iPhone 16 Pro Max using the portrait setting. I did some post-processing with the Apple tools, primarily darkening the corners with the vignetting tool. The engineers spend untold sums of money to make sure corner-to-corner exposure is the same, and I go in and basically ignore that with my tweaks.

And yes, we still have our artificial Christmas tree up. Maybe I’ll have it down and stowed by Valentine’s Day.