Monday evening, eh.

The local weather can’t make up its mind: snowing, melting, then snowing again. It might actually get below freezing over the next few nights. I’ll have to remember to bring in the emergency jugs of water from my car before they burst. (The downside of being a low-key prepper in the winter.)

There was a small obstacle in my grand plan to learn broken Vietnamese: DuoLingo doesn’t cover it all that well. Most of the vocabulary words don’t come with pronunciation, and that’s a bit of a challenge when learning a multi-tonal language. Ho hum. I might have to cheat with random YouTube videos instead.

…I’ve just licked a bath bomb that looked like a jawbreaker. Damn you, impressively diverse gift basket, you got me this time. (It did not taste like a jawbreaker at all.)

In covid news, both Canada and the US started the covid vaccination campaign with the Pfizer vaccine today. This is huge, and amazing, and remarkable. Normally, I’d say this is the beginning of the endgame, but then I read that Florida governor Ron DeSantis said he’d like to give just one shot of the Pfizer vaccine instead of two. DeSantis is neither an epidemiologist nor a medical professional: he cited a Wall Street Journal editorial written by a neurologist (who has nothing to do with epidemiology) who referred to the second shot as a “booster shot.” Upside: DeSantis would get twice as many people vaccinated. Downside: that’d go against both Pfizer’s and the FDA’s guidance, and could backfire with nothing to show for it.

This is really remarkable in its own way: when literally all you have to do is sit back, shut up, and let professionals do their jobs, some people still find ways to cause as much harm as possible. (Or, if you want to be kind, I guess you could say they unintentionally sabotage things by insisting on getting involved – much like Michael Scott from The Office.)

Elsewhere, Germany is going into a tough lockdown from December 16th through January 10th. Non-essential businesses will be closed: presumably, only grocery stores, banks, and Christmas tree outlets will stay open. There’ll be limits on indoor gatherings: no more than five from two households, with mildly relaxed rules on Christmas. (Up to four relatives can be invited.) A few days ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a passionate speech stating that having hundreds of people die every day is not acceptable, and that the new restrictions are a necessary evil. That right there is what real leadership sounds like. It was refreshing to see it, though it’s too bad it was on a different continent.

So it goes.