Consecutive bicycle work commute number 1419:
Today was my first commute since last Wed. The morning was nice at 51°F and there was hardly any wind. I took the road bike. But today's commute wasn't as interesting as the commute that didn't happen last Thursday.
A week ago I started feeling off. I thought it was allergies and our recent change in weather, but I slowly got worse. By Wednesday night I was feeling pretty bad so I took my temperature and discovered it was 102°F. Well, that's definitely not allergies and/or a weather change. Thursday morning I woke up feeling poor and still had the fever, so I didn't go into work.
Deciding I should be proactive, I took a Covid test. Positive. Nuts. I made it over two years without getting Covid and finally succumbed to the virus. No idea where I picked it up at. So I informed work about my results and told them I wouldn't be back in for the rest of the week. I'm vaccinated so I only had to wait until at least 5 days had passed since my symptoms first started, and I no longer was running a fever. That cleared me to be back to work today.
Late Thursday afternoon I looked out the window to see an interesting sight. There was a giant wall of dust barreling towards the city. Apparently it's called a "haboob." When the wall of dust hit, it darkened the skies and made it look like night. Driving this wall of dust was a derecho which is essentially a straight-line tornado. The storm hit, and trees, roofs and other debris joined the dust in the air.
Right when all this happened I glanced at the clock and saw it was 5:10 PM. The storm lasted about 20 minutes and left a ton of destruction in its wake. A good chunk of the city lost power for several days (thankfully I never did.) Had I not been sick I would have been coming home from work on my bicycle when this storm hit. My wife is convinced I wouldn't have survived. I replied that I think I would likely have lived, but definitely would have had a story to tell.
So I guess if there's an up-side to getting Covid, that was it.
Here's a time-lapse video of some of the storm: