#MicroblogMondays: Home for Christmas during covid

We're here!! Against the odds, dh & I have made it home for Christmas with my family. The pandemic news just kept getting worse and worse all last week:  daily new case numbers in Ontario more than doubled in the space of less than a week:  from 1,536 on Monday (Dec. 15th) to 1,429 on Tuesday, 1,808 on Wednesday, 2,421 on Thursday, 3,124 on Friday, 3,301 on Saturday (the day we were travelling), and 4,177 on Sunday (yesterday).  (The record high new daily case count was 4,800+ in mid-April.) An increasing number of those cases are "breakthrough" cases in fully vaccinated people, albeit to date, it seems few of these wind up in the hospital (thank goodness). 

We decided we'd still go, unless our flight was cancelled or new quarantine restrictions on interprovincial travel were put in place. (Fortunately, that hasn't happened -- so far!)  Ours is not a large family -- just my aging parents, my sister, her partner, dh & me (no spring chickens ourselves...!) -- and I did not want to miss another Christmas together unless I really had to. We never go a lot of places or see a lot of people when we're home at Christmastime anyway. The most I'm expecting to be out & about is a couple of trips to the grocery store while we're here, and maybe a trip to the dollar store for stocking stuffers. We will probably see PND & her family while we're here, but that's about it. She & her dh are double-vaxxed, and both Little Princesses have now had their first vaccines. 

We wore the N95 equivalent masks I'd ordered (recommended by Turia in her comments on this post here -- thanks, Turia!) from the moment we left our condo until we got into my sister's car at the airport there -- about 5-6 hours, door to door (2+ hour flight). They were lightweight, breathable and quite comfortable. Two thumbs up! 

One potential last-minute monkey wrench:  I knew we'd have to present our vaccine "passports"/proof of vaccination with QR codes at some point before boarding -- but I thought that we would just show the officials (on paper or on our phones) while going through security or just before boarding. Nope -- while doing our advance check-in online on Friday morning (on my laptop), I was asked to upload our proof of vaccination. A mad scramble ensued -- where DID I file those PDFs on my laptop? I eventually had to go to the provincial government's website, download them (again) and then try to upload them to the airline. 

Mine, no problem. Dh's -- uh oh.  No matter how many times I tried, I got an error message, something to the effect of "not acceptable." It did say something about resolving the issue at the airport. Obviously, this was stress I did NOT need!!  The only thing I could think of that would make dh's record "not acceptable" was that his booking was made in his "real"/official birth name (the one that's on his birth certificate, passport & driver's license), and his health card/vaccine record is under his nickname/short version. 

(This was something I didn't notice until I took a good look at his vaccine record after trying to upload it. We ran into the sane problem a few years ago when he was applying for his Canada Pension Plan payments, using the Social Insurance Number (SIN) he got when he was a teenager, and wound up having to drive half an hour to a Service Canada office to straighten things out. Who knew, when we applied for/were issued these credentials 40-50 years ago, that someday there would be computers cross-checking them all against each other and flagging discrepancies?? My sister works in financial services and says she sees the same thing happen all the time with clients whose ID doesn't match the exact name that's on their account(s).) 

As it turned out, for all my angst over dh's credentials, he only had to show his proof of vaccination once when we got to the airport -- when we were in line to get into the security area for scanning -- and they didn't even scan the QR code (!).  

Anyway -- we're here. And that's all that matters. :)  

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.