Friday night. I celebrated today’s French Friday (still doing the alliteration thing, remember?) by pacing in the backyard and taking alternating French and Spanish DuoLingo lessons nonstop for well over an hour. It’s fun to have an intellectual challenge again – and apparently, I remember a lot more Spanish than I thought I did. (I took one class in high school and then switched to Japanese because it seemed far too similar to Russian and thus far too easy.) My brain feels a little swollen, but in a good way. I wonder what I’ll dream of tonight…

Another week flew by, but at least now I’m sticking with my veggie-eating exercise routine, so that’s progress. (Not that I’m going vegetarian, mind you – still got Taco Tuesdays and Salmon Saturdays.) Yay fiber and getting in better shape.

It strikes me that for those of us who are still in lockdown, there are two sets of binary outcomes. You’ll either get more fit or more fat, and you’ll either shave your hair or grow it out. I’m hoping to be in the fit/long-haired camp if and when this mess ends.

The covid news ties somewhat in my personal business. There was a Wall Street report that two vaccine candidates made by VBI Vaccines (namely, VBI-2901 and VBI-2902) can produce neutralizing antibodies to fight covid. Presumably, that could be administered in a single-round vaccine, as opposed to two-round ones. The only downside? This was tested solely on mice, and not on humans. Nonetheless, VBI’s stock jumped 61%, and so did the tourism industry stocks. I’ve managed to sell one of mine for a small profit (I’d spent far too much time averaging down, else the gain would’ve been higher) and parked the proceeds in Wells Fargo (WFC) and Boeing (BA) because they’re just a little bit less risky, and both still trade at more than a 50% discount from their 52-week highs.

(Future Grigory, how long did it take WFC to double from $24.58 to $49.16? How long did it take for BA to double from $175.05 to $350.10? My bet is 16 months or less.)

I fully expect there to be some questionable vaccine to be hyped up and steamrolled into production in the US at some point before the 11/03 election. Now that should be interesting, and even more interesting if it actually works.

And in other, more disturbing news: there have been many anecdotal accounts of covid reinfection, but they’ve mostly been brushed aside by experts. I think that was partly because there was a possibility of the lingering virus, and partly because no one wants to be the party-pooper while everyone’s waiting for the vaccine. Well, now there’s the first officially confirmed reinfection in the US. A 25-year-old man in Nevada got sick again – and worse – after recovering from his first bout of covid a few months ago. The second infection was a different strain of covid. Frankly, that’s pretty horrifying, because that throws aside the experts’ insistence that immunity would last for at least a little while.

Worst-case scenario, that could end up being like the dengue virus, where getting infected again, with a different strain, is much worse than the first due to the antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a remarkably counter-intuitive and bizarre phenomenon.

This century is going to be a very interesting one… Here is hoping we don’t get antibiotic-resistant bubonic plague while we’re at it. Have a fun weekend, y’all.