Saturday night.

The 13-year-old me would’ve loved the way I spent the day: a weekly brunch of breakfast sandwiches+donut+coffee from Tim Hortons, followed by video games all day long, with a bit of reading, exercise, and Spanish lessons in between. The 34-year-old me is kind of tired of this all, but there aren’t many other options. I’ll try to venture for a long walk around the city tomorrow: it’s cold as hell out there, but weekend is also the only time I can spend more than 30 minuts in the sunlight. (The sunsets are still mighty early here, much earlier than the end of a typical workday.)

I was wrong earlier, by the way. Lockdowns don’t work – at least not in and of themselves. They’re only good if you want to hit the brakes fast (which will really wear down your brakes) while buying time to set up better infrastructure. (More testing sites, isolation facilities, etc.) We’ve got the lockdown part figured out, sort of, but there’s no follow-up from the government in terms of tangible improvements to keep the cases low. Last summer, the case count in Ontario dropped not quite to zero, but pretty close to it. (100-200 or so new cases per day?) And then it got out of control again. Having lockdowns without making improvements is like abstinence-only education: it’ll only work for a little while, if at all.

In covid news, there was a disaster in Boston. A cleaner accidentally unplugged a freezer at a pharmacy and ruined 1,900 doses of the Moderna vaccine. Right now, it looks like a bona fide accident. (Unlike the case with the mad pharmacist that deliberately sabotaged over 500 vaccine doses a few weeks ago.) It’s downright bizarre that the freezer at that pharmacy had such a flimsy plug: from what I understand, the plugs in hospitals are pretty much impossible to unplug by accident. This was probably something that could’ve been anticipated, but how do you fool-proof the universe?.. With luck, every pharmacy out there will post giant signs on all of their freezers to keep something like this from happening again. (And hopefully there won’t be any copycat saboteurs.) But here and now, that’s 1,900 high-risk people whose vaccination will get delayed. Will this single accident result in someone catching covid and dying because they didn’t get their shot in time?.. It’s impossible to say, but the cause-effect (negligent janitor – multiple deaths) is mighty disturbing.

I hope all y’all’s weekend is going fine, eh. (Still working on my fusion Texan-Canadian accent.)