A day to celebrate

The reason I’m celebrating is presumably obvious to all: today is my daughter Lily’s 8^th birthday! (She had a tiny Star Wars-themed party, dressed in her Rey costume.)

A second reason I’m celebrating yesterday: I began teaching (via Zoom, of course) the latest iteration of my graduate course on Quantum Complexity Theory!

A third reason: I’m now scheduled to get my first covid vaccine shot on Monday! (Texas is working through its “Phase 1b,” which includes both the over-65 and those with underlying conditions—in my case, mild type-2 diabetes.) I’d encourage everyone to do as I did: don’t lie to jump the line, but don’t sacrifice your place either. Just follow the stated rules and get vaccinated the first microsecond you can, and urge all your friends and loved ones to do the same. A crush of demand is actually good if it encourages the providers to expand their hours (they’re taking off weekends! they took off MLK Day!) and not to waste a single dose.

Anyway, people can use this thread to talk about whatever they like, but one thing that would interest me especially is readers’ experiences with vaccination: if you’ve gotten one by now, how hard did you have to look for an appointment, how orderly or chaotic was the process where you live, and what advice can you offer?

Incidentally, to the several commenters on this blog who expressed absolute certainty (as recently as yesterday) that Trump would reverse the election result and be inaugurated instead of Biden, and who confidently accused the rest of us of living in a manufactured media bubble that prevented them from seeing that: I respect that, whatever else is said about you, no one can ever again accuse you of being fair-weather friends!

Congratulations to the new President! There are difficult months ahead, but today the arc of the universe bent slightly toward sanity and goodness.