Tuesday night. Some people say you shouldn’t shop when you’re hungry. I say they should mind their own goddamn business.

Taco Tuesdays got rescued when I found a “make your own taco” kit at a local grocery store. (Maybe I’m just not looking hard enough, but there’s a distinct shortage of hard tacos in Canadian stores.) This is an actual kit with a little bag of spice and a little bag of sauce, and it may well be the whitest thing I’ve ever bought. Nonetheless, it was pretty damn delicious. I needed it after today…

Unfortunately, I’m too professional to go into detail, but today at work it was, as kids say, a clusterfuck. (Do kids still say that? I hope kids still say that.) It was sufficiently bad that I’m taking most of tomorrow off just out of general principle. Alas, I still need to log on for a quick call in the middle of the day, but aside from that – woot! Partial freedom. I can’t help but wonder if I would’ve reacted as strongly had I received 72 hours of uninterrupted rest but nah, most likely not.

Nonetheless, I munched on some tacos and I’m pretty close to draining my strategic cider supply, so life is good, sort of. Not the best stress relief mechanism, I know, I know, but I’m working with what I’ve got. Oy vey.

In covid news: there was an unusual development in the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine phase-3 study. One of the volunteers in the UK suffered a serious adverse reaction. The testing has been put on hold. There’s no news on what exactly happened or how bad that was, but good on them for choosing safety over speed.

Allegedly – and it’s unclear how true that report was – large pharmaceutical companies aren’t too keen on Trump’s plan to just fast-track a random vaccine right before the election, phase-3 studies be damned. Looks like some lawyers and perhaps even some common sense took precedence over the prospect of profits. Of course, if that’s true, that just means some smaller, scrappier, less ethically challenged company will provide something that may or may not be a vaccine. After all, it’s pretty clear now that the White House has an answer in need of a question: all that matters to them is getting something – anything at all – to package and roll out as an easy win, as an October surprise, as a miracle cure that might do nothing at all, or might do terrible harm, none of which will matter as long as it provides that much-needed jump in the polls.

Not for the first time, nor the tenth, I really, really hope I’m wrong…