Friday night. Yaaaay….

Thus endeth my first week at the new place. It’s a little scary just how fast it flew by without any real-life human contact. (Aside from the twice-daily voice chat with my coworkers.) Gonna be honest: if it hadn’t been for this daily blogging routine of mine, I would’ve had no way to differentiate one day from another. And this whole daily blogging routine was really just a big accident: back in March, I stumbled on a reddit discussion that said keeping a diary might help pass the time. And here we are, some 300 days later. Heh.

Today’s walk led me to the tiny Taddle Creek Park, which was created to commemorate a creek that flowed across Toronto. In the middle of the park, there’s a gigantic artsy sculpture: a huge pitcher-shaped thing that may or may not be a fountain. It’s well over 10′ high and actually kind of impressive, in that Australian “Big Thing” sort of way. On some level, I always knew that Toronto, being an actual city and not a suburb, had a lo more interesting things than the suburb where I’d spent well over a year of my life, but wow. Actually stumbling on random busts of famous poets or giant pitcher sculptures is pretty amazing. Urban exploration at its finest, eh. Here is to more of the same.

My hair has turned into a mop – or a crown, depending on how charitable you want to be with it. The mousse I put in first thing in the morning keeps it relatively decent for the recurring 9am video call at work, but with all the hair-pulling I do throughout the day, I end up looking like a cliché anime character by noon, all spiky and improbably arranged. I’ve also finally devoured my Christmas candy – it’s more than a little impressive that it lasted me through mid-January. Until I do another grocery run, I’m stuck with honey and strawberry jelly like some kind of peasant.

In covid news, Washington Post released an earth-shattering article: there never was any vaccine reserve in the United States. The federal stockpile of vaccines for the second doses does not – and did not – exist. The doses that should have been allocated for the second-shot stockpile got shipped out as soon as they became available instead. Now all the states, all the municipalities, all the doctors who expected extra shipments will end up emptyhanded. It’ll be impossible to give everyone their second dose, and both Pfizer and Moderna already said they have no idea if giving the second dose months away (instead of three weeks) would be effective at all. This is a disaster…

Best possible explanation: the Trump administration just sucks at math and didn’t do the prerequisite sanity checks. Average explanation: they knew the vaccines they’d actually receive were less than what they’d promised (remember the 100 million dose promise in November?), so they decided to run a Ponzi scheme with millions of people’s health on the line. They might have hoped that more doses would show up just in time to keep this lie afloat. Worst-case explanation: just like with the PPE supplies almost a year ago, the feds sidetracked the vaccine shipments and sold them to the highest bidder. That last one sounds particularly paranoid, I know, but we’re dealing with cartoonish villains who sabotaged their own pandemic response, and later on tried to overthrow their own democracy. Literally nothing is off the table at this point.

Speaking of which… Washington DC is filled with National Guard troops now. There are mindblowing pictures showing hundreds of them napping inside the Capitol, ready to repel the next invasion of domestic terrorists, should there be one. There is an actual “green zone” in the nation’s capital now. It designates which areas are under the government’s control. The official positive spin is that all the National Guard folks are there to help ensure the peaceful transfer of power. But if you need actual troops to have that, then it’s no longer peaceful by definition. I’m sorry, y’all, but the US will have to reset its “world’s oldest democracy, yay!” counter and start from zero all over again. The experiment appears to have failed…

Today was Trump’s last Friday in the White House. He’ll be relieved of his duties on Wednesday. It’s unclear if he’s just in denial or if he’s actually planning another stupid stunt: a very skilled photojournalist took a picture of a document one of Trump’s buddies (My Pillow CEO Michael Lindell) carried out of the White House earlier today. The portion that’s visible said they plan to replace the CIA leadership with a loyalist, and there was something about the martial law… Hopefully, those clowns are just cosplaying and will not actually try to double down on their earlier insane plan. (Gee, sure would’ve been nice if someone had exercised their 25th Amendment power.) I’m extremely curious what will happen over the next five days. Here is hoping this is just a nothing-burger…

Good night, y’all – and have yourselves another covid-free weekend.