In sickness and in health

My younger brother and my mother both have Covid. They both have symptoms (mostly coughs and extreme tiredness) but aren’t too sick, so that’s good (yay for vaccinations!), we’re hoping for quick recoveries. I too have been felled by Covid like symptoms but four home tests in the past five days reveal that I don’t seem to have Covid, so I guess it’s just regular flu for me.

My aunt has been dealing with some very rough health issues since this past summer and has now been taken into hospital since yesterday. I’ve been feeling helpless with that, not much I (or my brother and mother) can do while we too are sick. My older brother is away for business, my older sister has just left for Seville for a week long holiday, my two other older brothers live abroad, so it was left to my younger sitster to deal with it all on her own yesterday when everything came to a crisis. I hope light can be found at the end of this long dark tunnel for my aunt. We’re all very worried for her.

In better news, our old cat has been slowly recovering from his little adventure when he went missing. For the past three days he has pretty much only eaten and then crawled into his preferred resting place, the cat carrier, to sleep.

Yesterday I saw a glimmer of his previous energy emerge again, he was walking around a bit more. We have blocked off our back garden, so he can’t wander out of there and today he just sat in our back garden like this for half an hour, looking a little more like his old self:

For now our little old man seems to be here to stay. I hope the rest of my family will also be able to make a slow but steady recovery like that.

This and that

Just a few bits and bobs before I disappear into the world of TV or movie fiction. It’s been a very busy week at work and I need to relax the mind somewhat before I head for bed.

It’s just after 10.30 pm here and dusk has set in but it’s still light outside! I love long Dutch summer evenings. Picture below was taken at 10.20 pm (and yeah, the grass desperately needs mowing)…

We had a hot day today, the weather is supposed to break with rain and thunderstorms tonight and cool off somewhat tomorrow.

In other news: my younger sister was feeling very ill with a high fever. She went in to the hospital this evening where she was diagnosed with (a new variant of) Covid. She’s been vaccinated and boostered and still feeling so ill, poor thing. She is thankfully home again and on extra strong meds to bring the fever down. Let’s hope she gets well soon! They say the next Covid wave is on the rise here. This pandemic remains serious business.

In more cheerful news: Mandy Patinkin and his wife Kathy will star in a new comedy pilot called Seasoned based on the fun videos that their son posted of them on Mandy Patinkin’s Twitter account during this pandemic. The show will be written by their son and his partner. I loved their pandemic videos that gave a light-hearted glimpse into the daily lives of a couple that has been married for a long time. So, now it will be made into a show.

News pic.twitter.com/wHeqGcwdsA

— Mandy Patinkin (@PatinkinMandy) June 23, 2022

I hope the show can hold on to the charm of those videos and won’t be overkill. I’m really curious to see this when it gets made.

Lazy Sunday and Colman in colour

Mr E and mini me were out and about somewhere this afternoon, sitting in the sun at a cafe, sipping ice tea and eating calamari.

Junior played handball today, injured his leg and was resting on the couch, surrounded by cats…

As for me, I was holed up in my room until the end of the afternoon while awaiting the results of my Corona test that I took this morning. Turns out it’s negative and all I have is a bad cold. Such a relief! Now I don’t have to worry about Mr Esther (who has asthma) getting Covid from me.

While lazing away in my bed this Sunday afternoon, I re-watched a little Bridgerton season 2, which I have really enjoyed. Looking at Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) and his lush brown hair and beautiful brown eyes (I LOVE brown eyes) made me think of Ronald Colman (yes, I know, yet again, he’s never far from my thoughts these days…) and I wished so badly that there would be more Ronald Colman in colour pictures and films out there. He had brown eyes and lush brown hair too, although I have never actually seen him with lush brown hair in colour.

Ronald Colman seems to exist almost only in black and white. The few glimpses of him in colour, from late in his career when he was in his fifties and sixties, are already fascinating, but not really clear enough. He only made three colour films and even candids of him are all black and white.

I took some screenshots from his first colour movie, Kismet from 1944, when he was 53 but the quality isn’t great and there’s so much make up messing with the Colman look. However, it is the first glimpse in colour of his warm brown eyes. For most of the movie I don’t really like his look but Colman in that black outfit, salt and pepper hair and with those warm deeply brown eyes is quite something. He should’ve looked like that throughout the whole movie and not just at the end.

His warm brown eyes are also seen in his last two films that he filmed in his mid sixties. His final film from 1957 was called The Story of Mankind (a bit of a weird one where he advocates against the devil at a tribunal to keep humanity alive) and shows some of his brown eyes, but never quite close-up enough…

The sun does shine nicely into his brown eyes in a cameo in the 1956 David Niven version of Around the World in 80 Days but he’s very much in costume there and the moments we see him are over all too soon.

I have searched for other Colman in colour images but there just isn’t much out there. There’s one with his wife Benita, also from the early 1950s, I think.

But mostly I only find colourized pictures of old black and white photos.

Especially the first two photos give a bit of an idea of how heart-stoppingly handsome and charismatic he must have looked in real life / colour. The dark hair and warm brown eyes certainly contributed to that. I wish he’d been able to do far more in colour. A girl can dream on a lazy Sunday afternoon and evening…

Positive

Mini me has been self testing a lot because kids at her school and also in her football team have been testing postive for Covid these past few weeks. Some football matches have even been cancelled. Yesterday she came home from school sneezing and with a bit of a throat ache, so in the afternoon she did an at home test. Sure enough, she tested postive for Covid which was today confirmed by an official PCR test.

We were already feeling that it was only a matter of time before this came to our house and it turns out we were right. Mini me has been keeping her distance, we have self tested here today as well and so far it all remains negative for the rest of us. We are all vaccinated and have had our booster shots so as long as we don’t have any symptoms, we don’t need to quarantine. We are being extra careful, though, with distance keeping (I cancelled my visit to my mother today), hand washing and using our masks. Fingers crossed that mini me is symptom free again soon (she already seems better than yesterday) and that the rest of us don’t get infected. Can this stupid pandemic be over already?

Back into a full lockdown

A new Covid wave (our fifth wave) is hitting The Netherlands now. The fourth (Delta) variant wave is going down but Omicron is radically on the rise, which means a fifth Covid wave has already started. A full lockdown here is now deemed necessary with this newest wave as Omicron is more aggressive than other variants have been. We’re listening to a last minute press conference right now, announcing this. Everything is closing down: all non-essential shops, schools, theatres, museums, restaurants (only take away or delivery will remain possible) etc.

This afternoon we had a nice high tea at a restaurant with my inlaws to already celebrate mini-me’s birthday (which is tomorrow). We did high tea instead of dinner because restaurants already had to close at 5 pm.

We were able to do this little party just in time, as of tomorrow this would be impossible. When will this Covid nightmare end?