I Did a Trip – Came Home with a Prize

I spent the last week in Florida for a veterinary convention. I flew down with some work people and the husband drove down to visit family.

The husband and I did a day at Universal.

January is absolutely the only time to do Florida theme parks. The weather is tolerable. There aren’t many lines at all to speak of. I would never even try this in June.

The rest of the week was for the conference.

I did not ride the carousel. This is the largest veterinary conference in North America. There are thousands of people here. There are so many lectures to go to at any given time. Trying to decide what to do can be challenging.

They also have random famous people come talk for reasons that aren’t clear. Last year was Kevin Bacon. This year was Dan Levy.

I tried to watch Schitt’s Creek but I was bored. I like the memes though. He seemed really nice.

I wandered around for a few days wearing light up bunny ears like the professional that I am. You can see them in the photo below along with all kinds of other stuff from the expo. Companies were pretty free with their stuff this year.

Florida does not agree with me. I had runny eyes from the time I got down there. On Monday I started to get a runny nose. On Tuesday, I woke up thinking, “This is a cold, not allergies.” I stayed in the hotel and watched lectures online. I stayed in on Wednesday too. I ran out to pick up some food but that made me way too tired. See where this is going? I masked up good for the flight home and of course I have COVID. What have I learned? Going around people is bad. I actually stayed away from most people at the conference. I didn’t go in the lecture halls. I watched lectures on my phone in the hallways.

So far Tuesday was the worst day. I never had a fever but I was chugging Dayquil for the “cold”. I’m starting to cough a little today. I was a little tired and had some upper respiratory signs. Hopefully, that is it because I got my vaccine again this year. Now I have to watch the husband to see if he is going to get it. He’s starting to get a runny nose but is still testing negative. One other person who went down is sick. Another person who went had COVID the week before we went. She had the same symptoms. Sniffly for a few days and then, “Oh, hey, so, this is actually COVID.” This is why I still wear masks at work.

Of course as soon as we got home, Nemo wanted to go and do all the stuff. He had cabin fever. He’s used to a daily trail walk. His pet sitter didn’t do that with him so he was stir crazy. There is no explaining COVID to a dog. After about 18 hours of watching him vibrate and bark, I bundled up in the middle of a snow storm and took him to the dog park figuring it was safe because we’d be the only fools out there. Look how happy he was!

He kept wanting me to chase him. It was so cute that I decided to film it. I ran towards him, he charged me, I turned to keep the camera on him as he ran past, and then….. I fell. I think I spun around a few times on the way down. All I know is that I felt my phone frisbee out of my hand on the way. Because I was spinning, I had no idea what way it went. When I got up, I could not find it.

It was just me, Nemo, and our foot prints in 2-3 inches of snow. This should not have been hard. I should have been able to see where it landed easily. I could not. I had to scrape the snow away with a shovel in concentric rings from where I fell until I found it. It took just over 6 minutes. I know because it was still filming. That’s a good phone there.

Here’s a test video I made afterwards to make sure it was still working. I was standing still. I can’t be trusted. But, he’s so freaking cute!