turning the wrong corner
The most exciting thing I have to tell you today is . . . last night Shobhit and I went shopping. Fun!
Actually first we drove to my office. He waited in the car while I went up to the fifth floor of our building, swapped out paperwork, grabbed my requisite cup of vanilla and lavender flavoring syrup (for use in my Friday London Fog Tea Latte), and came back. Then: down to Costco, where we bought way too much and I spent too much money but whatever. Then: to the Asian grocery store he likes, in the International District, which turned out to have just closed so we couldn't shop there after all. Then: to the Central District PCC, to pick up a few extra things still on sale through today. By the time we got home, it was nearly 7:30.
Shobhit had considered finding some other restaurant we could use somehow to give him another Social Review point, like we did on Sunday, but that didn't work out. We did go across the street from PCC to both Tacos Chukis and to a place one block away called Adey Abeba, which is an Ethiopian restaurant Shobhit has been wanting to try for a long time. I didn't particularly feel like Ethiopian food so my dinner was just from the taco place. But! Waiting in the empty dining room of Adey Adeba, with all the chairs upside-down and on top of the tables, I saw interesting writing on the TV screen where an apparent newscast was paused. I looked it up and discovered it to be Ethiopia's primary official language, Amharic. I just thought the appearance of that script kind of cool.
Shobhit had to unload the truck at work at Big 5 this morning, meaning he had to be at work at 5:00, so he was in bed shortly after 9:00. Once I finished eating dinner, it wasn’t long before that happened, although I did manage finally to finish the first episode of the documentary series Can't Get You Outta My Head on YouTube, its conclusion giving me a little better sense of how the rest of the series might go. I then spent some time out in the living room watching TikTok videos while Shobhit fell asleep.
In other news, COVID-19 cases are rising again—including in Washington State and yes even within my own lauded King County (though numbers here remain better than in most areas)—and it is very, very annoying.
It makes a massive difference to be one of the people vaccinated, or in the process of getting vaccinated, but that's no reason to start getting lax. I got a call from Dad yesterday, and when I noted that although Shobhit and I will both be coming down for Easter on Sunday, we won't be spending much time in the house, he said his understanding is that even just having had the first shot makes a big difference. It turns out he's right about that, but I still said to him, "That may be, but, you still can't be too careful." And, he agreed with that. My primary concern with Easter, really, is that although there will be several people there who have been fully vaccinated, there will also be several who haven't, and guaranteed they will all be intermingling, mask-less, inside the house. I don't want to be part of multiple households interacting indoors when it is still not recommended.
(I will be cutting it a little close when I stay the night with Jennifer on the 24th of April, but! That will still be very different: I'll be a week and a half past my second shot, and more importantly, I'll be a vaccinated person visiting a single household. It's not going to be a party. Aside from the technicality of my still being three days from the recommended two weeks past the second shot, I will still be within CDC guidelines.)
The real problem, quite clearly, is a mixture of two unfortunate things: state and local authorities lifting restrictions prematurely, and general populations acting as though the pandemic is over, even if they still haven't been vaccinated. As a result, even as we get millions of people vaccinated each day, the spread amongst the unvaccinated is also increasing. My hope right now is that sometime over the next several weeks, vaccination numbers increase enough to make the spread turn around again. The risk with the carelessness among the unvaccinated is that the more they allow the virus to spread, the more the more infectious variants have a chance to spread.
Sometimes I get these dark visions of our hopeful trends getting trounced at the last second, until this virus gradually takes hold to such an extent that it just wipes most of us out after all. It's thoughts like that that really give me the creeps. I don't think it will come to that, but damn are people in this country short sighted.
[posted 12:29 pm]