Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@social.cleverlibre.org

Having made it through several years of the COVID pandemic without catching it, I thought I'd got away with it. Wrong! A few months back I started coughing and feeling a bit off colour and the lateral flow test indicated that I had finally caught COVID-19. I tested positive for about 5 days and then the tests went negative. Other than an annoyingly persistent cough for about four days, a bit of a sore throat and a mild general feeling of malaise, it really wasn't that dramatic.
However, I noticed that I was forgetting things more than more than I usually do and that I was suffering from what I thought to be “brain fog”. This was characterized by an inability to bring words to mind when speaking and the general slowing down of my mental processes. For example, if I wanted to create a new Word document, something I do quite frequently, it would take anything up to 30 seconds between me thinking “I need to create a Word document” and my brain remembering how you do that. As I used to be a computer programmer, I found that really scary. This mental fog persisted for several weeks following the infection. Thankfully, several months later, I seem to have regained my mental agility.
Has anyone else experienced similar symptoms?
Does the description above qualify as “brain fog”?

My character counter shows 65535 as a reducing total of number of characters I have left. I read in the help files that the char limit is 500 (so much better than Twatter) so is the instance I joined so much more generous with its char limit than others?
If 'yes', will my hoots display OK on other instances if they exceed the 500 char limit?
(counter now showing 65171 chars remaining)

Who knew butterflies were so damned HAIRY?

If I understand the situation correctly, Mastodon makes no money from advertising or subscriptions; so how does it pay its collective bills. Given the alleged huge influx of new users fleeing Musk, costs must be spiralling out of sight and yet it generates no income so far as I can see - so how?

THIS!

https://twitter.com/i/status/1589925038668795904

Approval of a vaccine against Dengué fever without requiring pre-testing is a dramatic step forward. Dengué fever is, at present, confined to the tropics but with global warming, one of the primary vectors of the disease, the Asian Tiger mozzie, has been found in some areas of Europe. If it can establish itself here, so surely will Dengué fever.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03546-2

I thought I had avoided the dreaded Covid-19 until a month or two back when I developed a hacking cough that lasted for 4 - 5 days and I felt a bit off colour. A Lateral flow test was positive so I kept my head down for a week or so. After 7 days I was testing -ve every day for 3 days so I considered myself safe to venture out (masked of course). I didn't get a proper professional test as to do so would have meant taking a bus into town thus putting a bus full of people at risk!

It was all over comfortably within a week except that I experienced what I believe was the dreaded brain fog quite noticeably. For example: I'd be looking at the computer and thinking "I need to create a Word document". It would then take me anything up to 30 seconds to figure out how to do that. That sort of fogginess!!! (I used to be a computer programmer so creating a Word document is not alien to me at all).

Thankfully, my full faculties seem to have returned to me but it was getting rather scary for a while!

Has anyone experienced similar symptoms?

and another just to brighten up everyone's day in the cold winter weather that has now descended on northern Europe

For no special reason other than that the day seems to me to need brightening up a little.