Saturday evening.

Bad news: I will not be joining the local search&rescue group after all. One of their requirements is a police background check. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, it looks like Ontario police is the only place in Canada that doesn’t accept a health card (with a picture and all) as a second form of ID. Aside from that and the Canadian driver license, I’ve got nothing that they’d recognize. Ipso facto, no background check, and no application for search&rescue, and no fighting the good fight, at least not this year.

Bah, humbug. I keep telling myself that this search&rescue crew was too tiny (only 10-12 missions a year for an area of 6,000,000 people?), that their requirements were too weird… (Like their request for a birth certificate: do they really get a lot of Kryptonians stealing valuable earthling rescuer positions?) Their loss, eh. At least I renewed my first aid and CPR certification. That’s an overall net positive, that is.

It took me a long while, but I’m finally done reading “Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life” by Lulu Miller. I highly, highly recommend it if you like pop science book with a personal touch. I won’t lie – the beginning is a little dry. At first, I thought it would be just a regurgitation of the two-volume biography of David Starr Jordan. (You know, the taxonomist.) I’m glad I didn’t stop reading because after a little while it really picked up. This book features a murder mystery, a ton of fun and funky fish factoids, an awful lot of information about the author’s personal life (trigger warning: domestic abuse and suicide), and an interesting crash course into the dark side of the US history that’s still with us now. The book is edumacational, fun (there are several genuine LOL moments), beautifully written, and as a bonus, toward the very end you’ll learn why fish don’t exist. Go check it out, eh.

Next up on ye olde reading list: “A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)” by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. (I don’t know what it is about the recent trend of long old-timey book titles, but I kinda love it.)

In covid news, a diner in one of Toronto’s suburbs might have exposed over 200 people to a dangerous covid variant over the course of five days. They’re tracking down everyone who might have been affected, but the exposure might have happened as early as March 8th, meaning it might have spread far below the diners’ social circles by now. That right there is a pretty perfect counterargument to all the people claiming indoor dining can be made perfectly safe… Even so, parts of Ontario are rushing to reopen, by allowing more outdoor and a bit more indoor dining. The Greater Toronto Area (I’ll never get used to living in a place called GTA) is a patchwork of towns and townships. Some of them have already transitioned from the grey status (the harshest restrictions) to the red one (still harsh, but not as bad), which means folks from grey areas can just take a short drive, enjoy an indoor dinner, etc, all the while possibly bringing their viral cooties with them. It’s a hot mess. I’ve lost count of the number of waves and spikes we’ve all had now, but the official terminology is that the coming increase will be the third wave. Vaccinating the oldest and most vulnerable will help prevent the worst of it, but that won’t stop it all.

I know things will get much better in about three months, hopefully, but till then? No one knows.

Enjoy your weekend, y’all – and maybe check out that fish book. It really is that good.