Saturday night.

Take a wild guess what I did all day today. If you guessed “gaming, some reading, some Tim Hortons, and social media” – congrats, you guessed correctly! Ye gods, the boredom… I think it’s a lot worse because the people I used to know in real life are getting their vaccine shots in the US – their ticket to freedom. Knowing that something is just there, almost within reach, and that I’ll still have to wait who knows how long… Argh. I might have been happier if I were just sealed in a shipping container (with all the same amenities) but without any Internet access or news, right until a masked medic gave me my shots months later.

It’s a bit like the aftermath of my spontaneous 600-mile roadtrip in October when I delivered a customer’s treadmill from Ottawa to Toronto. I’d been just fine staying solo, but that single day-long adventure, meeting new people, driving for 10 hours – all of that made me stir-crazy in the aftermath. (Right up to the point of almost enrolling in the University of Toronto for fall 2021 because I heard a particularly amazing podcast on CRISPR and the advances in gene editing. Heh.) This is quite similar, only much, much worse.

One minor upside: my first intro call with the local search and rescue group (OVERT) will be in less than 48 hours. Finally, some minor sign of progress: it’ll take a while for the orientation courses to start, but it’ll be something to look forward to. Something to differentiate all these monotone weeks.

Warren Buffett has released his annual letter to Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders earlier today. He’s 90 years old, and his right-hand man, Charlie Munger, is 97. A lot of their Berkshire investments are being managed by their apprentices these days (Buffett never would’ve invested in Apple on his own), but the two still have a wealth of experience. Should be a fun read: if anyone can provide optimistic commentary on the dumpster-fire that was 2020, it’ll be Buffett.

In covid news, the US has set a new daily record for mass vaccinations: 2.4 million Americans got their vaccines in one day. Woooo, go US! On this side of the border, a pub trivia night on February 2nd in British Columbia led to a cluster of 24 cases among the attendees. They ended up infecting those around them (daycare, school, families, work, etc), and now there are 300 cases linked to that single pub night. A game to die for, eh?.. There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on between the province (which allowed bars to reopen), the pub’s owners, those who are outraged at the selfish trivia enthusiasts… There are no good guys here. As always, I hope everyone makes a full and speedy recovery. But if this super-cluster causes even a single death, I hope the pub’s owners and the trivia fans who should have known the risk will live with that guilt. Then again, there’s always the chance that they’re so self-absorbed and arrogant that they’ll just brush it off.

We’re in a strange twilight zone where vaccines are almost here, so tantalizingly close, yet people are still making dumb life choices which create new covid clusters, causing entirely preventable and avoidable misery in their communities. Every covid death is tragic, but those that happened with the vaccines just around the corner somehow feel even more tragic than the rest.

And just to end this on a good note, the FDA has officially approved the Johnson&Johnson vaccine, though it was only a matter of time after their announcement earlier this week. The US government plans to distribute 4 million doses across the country next week, with more to come. I’m blown away by the sheer scale of this rollout. The sooner our yankee neighbours recover, the sooner Canada will be able to piggyback, eh.

Enjoy the second half of your weekend, y’all.