Friday night.

Well, I went and did it. There’s a 67% chance that the thing circulating inside me is the real experimental vaccine and not the placebo. I haven’t developed any superpowers so far, though the urge to take over the world (for its own good!) is stronger than usual. It’s hard to tell if the mild headache was caused by the vaccine or caused by skipping breakfast this morning. (Gotta love those caffeine headaches, eh.) Also, I’m a proud owner of a shiny new thermometer (to measure my temperature daily for the next week) as well as a 12″ ruler to measure the diameter of the injection site. (It almost certainly won’t grow to be 12″ wide. Heh.) It’ll be about a year before I find out whether I got the placebo or the real deal, but still, I like that there’s 67% chance I have some sort of protection now. Definitely better than the 100% chance of 0% protection I had 24 hours ago.

Meanwhile, my vaccine quest continues. The US rollout featured vaccine scavengers who would line up outside pharmacies to get leftover shots from punctured vials that had to be used up within hours. Canada is (allegedly) doing something different: if there are punctured vials at the end of the day, they’d go to the front-line workers on site. If there’s any left, the pharmacy in question would start texting folks who signed up online and said they can arrive within an hour. Soooo, I went ahead and signed up for the “yes, please, gimme” contact list at the 19 nearest pharmacies in the four-mile radius. I doubt they’ll text me: I answered the questionnaire honestly, and admitted that I’m not a front-line worker, not chronically sick, not indigenous, not homeless, not under the same roof with a vulnerable person, etc. (I mean, I am a fairly recent migrant, but I’m not sure that’s what they meant, so that one was a “No” as well.) I could’ve cheated with my answers, and I suspect at least a few people would cheat (who would bother checking their story 10 minutes before the closing time?), but it’s important to me to do this right. I’m at the very back of the line, and I’m okay with that, as long as no vaccines are wasted. This is a low-probability/high-payoff scenario. At some point starting today, I might get a text message around 6-7pm asking me to skedaddle to a certain pharmacy and get a leftover shot, and that’d make my life much easier. Yet another piece of bureaucratic communication to wait on… Toes and fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, a bit more boredom-induced online shopping with the end goal of alleviating said boredom, if only for a bit.

In covid news, Biden’s promise of 100 million covid shots within his first 100 days came true way ahead of schedule. It’s estimated that the US will deliver its 100,000,000th dose (under Biden’s administration, not overall) sometime today. That is huge. I know I criticize the US more often than I praise it, but kudos on a huge logistical accomplishment. Even bigger kudos if y’all start delivering our Pfizer orders we placed in 2020, please and thank you. Meanwhile, Canada set its own little record today by delivering almost 162,000 doses in one day. That’s tiny in comparison, but that number of daily doses grows with every passing day. It’s tantalizingly slow but progress is progress, eh.

Have yourself a fun and safe weekend, y’all.