December: Jessica (and presumably Danielle) get theirs. Jealous.
January: There are rumors we'll get it through work and that it all blew up at the last minute.
February: I become caregiver to both an infant and a discharged patient.
March: Pretty much everyone I know starts getting their vaccines due to a BMI over 25 or high blood pressure. I'm BMI 24 and my blood pressure is just under what would be considered the bottom of 'high'.
The county eligibility mandate for pre-April 15 jabs.
Dilemma
Even my company sent a broadcast email highlighting that medical eligibility was self-policed. It was an ethical quandary: do I just fudge it since I grazed eligibility in a handful of different ways? As always, I turned to 4chan for guidance.
anon
The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing.
To return a shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.
A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.
The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad memeber of society.
The Parable of the Shopping Cart pretty clearly instructed me to not fake my way into a vaccine, even if I'm not one of those Tier 2 plebs. Side note, I think I'm going to start posting my favorite greentexts.
Plot twist
Late March roles around and Jes goes to get an all-clear from her physician. She returned with a signed note that as her caregiver, I should get a vaccine. Almost two months after delivery.
After some more consideration, I decided if I wasn't going to second guess the county thresholds for qualification, I'd remain consistent with a not-particularly-prompt doctor's note.
Actually scheduling the thing was another story. The site linked by the county and everwhere else was something like myturn.org, which typically reported no appointments available. Friends had links to sites like vaccinateca.net and cavaccines.gov that listed vaccine supply at individual superstations and pharmacies. So you could click through to CVS, Walgreens, Vons, Ralphs (individually) and typically be presented with an annoying text chat interface that would query your eligibility criteria. Once you got to the end of the q&a, it'd tell you there are no appointments available at that location, but you could start the chat/data entry process again with a different store selected.
Just some amazing user experience.
And let's remember that my eligibility was not one of the dropdowns, so they'd all tell me to kindly exit their site. My healthcare provider concierge service (honestly the best thing ever) was able to call the county, explain the situation, and get them to say - basically - "just lie on eligibility form" knowing that I had the documentation to bring to the vaccination center.
Jes to the rescue. Or maybe the qualifying criteria she chose put me on a priority list vs the selection I made.
Semi-relatedly, Avenida de la Playa is temporarily closed to vehicle traffic and it should absolutely stay that way. Shore Rider was great for a burger and a rice lager.
Site content
Need mo' baby pics on there!
Connie
Chris
Hmmm, hate to make it look like insta.
Reading your March posts now. I've got NOK too. Bullish again for the hold. =P
I'm skipping the gaming stuff. Too much gaming.
Dunno if NOK will ever leave the 4s.
Hey... you have a new truck... and a kayak?
Connie is now caught up on everything (whew). That's good for her because I'm super interesting and it's good for me because she had a hot tip on NNOX that could have yielded 60% gains in a day. Unfortunately someone else had the hot tip and that 60% all happened in the opening seconds of premarket. So really, all positive reinforcement on this blog thing.
Just for CS
Easter. She didn't like the bunny hat.
Jes has been doing the play gym thing regularly (thanks Kevin and Cheryl!) and I mostly take her on walks where the most interesting thing is leaves. The high-contrast vision/brain development thing feels a bit like neural network training... which I suppose is exactly what it is. So I'm not sure if pushing her around the 'baby nascar' track in the living room while holding up a mirror (that she stares at) is good for cognitive development or sending her to baby bat country.
This is maybe why people have a second child.
Just for CS
There hasn't been a ton of gaming, but when we blast, there's a lot of C4. Got a full (three-man) squad C4 kill in a house outside of Villa, I put a second one around back to catch them escaping but the first was enough.
Then there was the perfect run, i.e. it included Shelter, sick jumps/shenanigans, C4 squad kill, and a dinner:
I also refined my office setup. Monitor stands for multiscreen/multisystem with my main/gaming monitor on a swivel arm to position in cascade mode or front-and-center. I turned the spare nursery shelving into a rack for tower, amp, woofer, stick/throttle, docking station, scanner, and usb accessories. It's a lot cleaner.
On the heels of my millennial memepost there's been a flurry of millennialisms smacking me in the face with confirmation bias. Well, let's start with my oldest friends appreciating the informative value of the post:
Connie
Bwahahaha! Still reading, but hilarious. Dude, remember the ice bucket challenge? And cursive!?! I think it's education wanting to teach less!
Oh and this, "Congrats, gen-y, you had a good run, now go raise generation alpha while paying off your historic levels of debt." Haha... good one.
Oh no. No on the "send it". That's totally climbing terminology.
Oooh oooh. I understand the "yeet".
Sebastian's team says YEET!!!
KO
Liam talks to me in acronyms. It's annoying.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, xennials and gen-x simply should not mix with gen-y, it's unnatural:
Rob
Lady keeps staring at her phone instead of watching [The Wire].
I didn't specifically mention dualscreening, but I should tack it on. Then things got creepily on-point from the gaming crew:
kshot
I do it a lot
Unattributed
lol
kshot
Chris
Fixed:
Also, oof, LOL
Unattributed
LOL
kshot
Anyway, this reminds me of what Dumbledore said to Hermione...
Use the force?
Unattributed
Haha who knows??? JKR got canceled for being a TERF.
Yeah lol
Cattle
Llamapost about lol-as-punctuation, oof, a Simpsons reply from the gen-xer that was - of all things - Abe Simpson. Either the dudes are trolling me or the social commentary is very real.
Other clouds to shout at
... There's even a setting to tell ios "Yeah, no I actually meant it. I want [live photo] off. You fucking prick."
Rob
I already had it set. OS doesn't care.
This is the same sort of shit that keeps me buying Nikon over Canon. When the human says do it you fucking do it you silicon piece of trash.
Chris
Car companies should roll with the chip shortage and make analog models.
They keep bringing back these classic roadsters and selling them as $200k one-offs. Just give me a production 2000GT without six-zone climate control and lane assist. Fuel injection is just fine as long as you leave off traction control.
The Lipmorelos crew was looking at VRBOs for Friendsgiving '21 and I got slapped in the face with a very niche pet peeve that has come up before with investment property searches. The really, really bad photoshop jobs to put a blue sky into images... how have we not done better as a society?
If it wasn't obvious, I decided to tie this in to the car bit above. Anyway, more on Friendsgiving:
Hey, a couple of its guys are going to California. Zac got into gambling again and he's going to rehab. We want to show him some support before he goes in.
Sants
Zac
Rehab is the name of the pool party that we will be at in Vegas.
The covid surge that everyone expected after Thanksgiving has hit. Jes is busy at work. I can get by with games, streaming, jogging, and taking the dog out.
Covid eases. Less PUBG, more Payday. Some lockdown pastimes.
Related / external
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The first vaccine candidate entered human trials five days after the pandemic was declared. Behind the scenes at Moderna and an unprecedented global sprint.