Taco Tuesday night. Yum yum. (Note to self: buy non-broccoli vegetables to avoid sad tacos again in the future.)

Whelp, the big election day is here. It’s looking like a tossup right now. Definitely not the landslide many people had thought this would be. Florida and Texas have gone for Trump. A burst pipe in Georgia has delayed the ballot counting. (Seriously, Georgia? You had four years and one job.) As always, I’m hoping for the best and preparing for the worst – or, rather, I’m already as prepared as one can be, having already moved to Canada and all.

I just find it so hard to believe that the guy who literally danced in front of crowds as hundreds of thousands of Americans died might end up getting even more votes than he did in 2016…

I’d thought I’d be all cool, suave, and detached about this process, but I’m just not sufficiently emotionally detached from the US yet, I suppose. The first two years in a foreign country are the hardest. I remember trying to find the Russian community in Reno, Nevada when I was 18 and all alone. (That didn’t really work out all that well.) It got better and easier as years went by. I stopped following Russian news or caring about their politics (beyond what you glimpse in headlines) ages ago. Someday, I’ll probably get the same way about the second country I left behind, about the US. Today is not that day.

We might know the end result of the election tonight. Perhaps tomorrow morning.

In covid news, the UK is allegedly preparing to start its vaccination campaign in December. No vaccine has been officially approved yet, but two candidates are about done with their clinical trials. (It takes a while to fully prepare the logistics for something like this.) The first doses will go to frontline healthcare workers and people over 85, as it should be. This is not just a success story but also a monumental scientific breakthrough: the virus itself is less than a year old, and this would be the fastest vaccine development in history. The geek in me is utterly blown away. The rest of me is just as excited: someone, somewhere, will get their vaccines in a matter of weeks. That means, logistical challenges aside, things are getting better and faster than I’d ever hoped. I’m clinging to this good news like a life raft, even as I know the vaccine may be imperfect, might not work at all, and might not make it to Canada as fast as to the UK.

Hope everlasting. Hope never-ending. Hope persevering.