Tuesday night. Time doesn’t fly so much as it slurs. This is incredibly corny, but I’ve devised a way to mix things up a little, if only to keep things from blurring together, with one workday being virtually indistinguishable from the one before it, or the one after:

• Sundae Sunday
• Margarita Monday
• Taco Tuesday
• Waffle Wednesday
• Thirsty Thursday
• French Friday
• Salmon Saturday

And before you ask, French Friday will probably involve overdosing on French lessons, not on French fries, though who knows. This also means I’ll have to learn how to make waffles and margaritas, but that’s a challenge I’m more than willing to face. Let’s see if this works.

One of the folks I follow on Twitter bought himself an entry-level DLSR camera with a fancy zoom (a Nikon D3500) and posted some astonishing pictures he took right off the bat. That made me think of the old Nikon D5100 I bought seven years ago and mostly used to snap pretentious pictures on an occasional vacation. (Though there was that one time, during my year in rural Texas, that I got so bored that I learned to take artsy self-portraits by hooking it up to a flat-screen TV… Fun times. That also led to me crashing an art show in Seattle as a featured artist.) I’d have to make sure it still works first, but then… A cursory search on Amazon shows there are some fine 300mm auto-focus lenses that cost only ~$200-$300 CAD. Considering how much I save by not going out, this miiiight be worth it.

And yeah, I know, this comes after my earlier writing about an art kit I never even opened (in my defense, I’m a completionist, and I never did find the ink the book recommended), or the wood-carving kit I got before I realized how hard it is to find suitable wood. All of this may very well be just lockdown-boredom-induced glorified shopping therapy, but hey, what else is there to do that’s not self-destructive? (The latter is the reason I wisely decided not to start a home bar, even though I have this lovely book of cocktail recipes.)

Oh well.

In covid news, Russia has decided to troll the entire world by registering the first-ever covid vaccine. In the true spirit of the cold war (which never really ended, did it?), they named the vaccine “Sputnik V.” The craziest part about this is that the vaccine still hasn’t passed a stage-3 trial. Unless I’m very wrong, they tested it on fewer than 100 people. That’s one hell of a gamble. If it works, Russia will get major kudos, respect, glory, etc, etc. If it doesn’t work, it’ll be a) yet another hit to their reputation, b) possibly dangerous if there are undiscovered side effects, and c) definitely dangerous if it doesn’t actually provide any protection against covid and instills a false sense of security. It looks like Russia aims to vaccinate as many of their own as it can, as fast as it can, so we’ll find out soon enough.

Inspired by that news, hotel and cruise stocks had a pretty good day today. Ye olde portfolio recovered a bit, and I imagine it’ll do more than just that as actual news about actual vaccines comes out.

In non-covid news, Joe Biden has picked Kamala Harris to be his VP. Good for her, eh.

And now, off to finish binge-watching the recent season of Better Call Saul and dream of shiny lenses…