Sunday night. The beginning of yet another week, not too different from others, except that it’ll bring me another week closer to becoming a Canadian; to meeting my big goal; to getting vaccinated. (Whenever that may be.)

My body is very confused about the spike in physical activity yesterday: legs are sore and fine, but my left shoulder feels off. I guess 100 pushups out of nowhere will do that. (Normally, I’d do maybe 25 per day – assuming I remembered or felt like it.) Looks like I’ll have to set up leg/arms/whatever days.

My new (well, new to me) zoom lens will arrive soon, according to the FedEx tracker. It made it all the way from Japan to the US earlier this weekend. Then it spent a few hours in the state of quantum uncertainty, fluctuating between Memphis and Indianapolis, and finally made it to my Toronto suburb, Mississauga. Here is hoping nobody breathed/sneezed/coughed at it during the process. With luck, it’ll get delivered fairly soon.

Funny story about that shipment. That was the first time in years that I’ve used Fedex. Earlier today, some scammer called me at the very early hour of 10:30am (rude!) and woke me up with a pre-recorded message saying the delivery fee was $30 short, and I should enter my credit card info over the phone. Now, even when I’m rudely awakened at an unbelievably early hour such as that, I know a scam when I hear one, so I hung up. Here’s the question, though: is there a mole at Fedex who sold my shipment info to scammers? Or are the tracking cookies on my laptop becoming so intelligent that they send my shopping data to random scammers? Or was it both? How strange, this modern world…

In covid news: there was a stampede at a night club in Lima, Peru after the police raided an illegal party. There were about 120 people at the party. During the rush for the exit, 13 of them died. There’s no word on how many were injured but survived. By doing something this tactically stupid, Peru ensured a 10.8% mortality, worse than covid’s fatality rate by a huge margin. I suspect that won’t be the last incident of this sort.

In Massachusetts, there’s a large man who gives hugs to shoppers at Walmart and then tells them, “Just giving you a covid hug. You now have covid.” It’s unclear whether he actually has covid. The police are looking for him, though with a mask on, camera footage isn’t very useful.

And there are reports that Trump is planning to roll out the Oxford vaccine before the stage three trial ends, and before it secures the FDA approval – as long as it happens before the election. This could well turn out to be just another terribly shortsighted decision from the government that turned a medical crisis into a political blame game. The vaccine may or may not work, and that’s why there are testing procedures in place. If Trump forces it through, and if that gives him the popularity bump in the polls just before the election… Well, life in Canada will get mighty interesting in the first week of November, what with tens of millions of Americans googling how to claim refugee status. We’ll know for sure how this gambit (and the election) plays out in less than three months. The world will be so much more different by then…