Stopping this year, looking forward to next year
It's December 30, 2021, and I obviously stopped working on this 9 months ago. For whatever reason, I was not inspired by the topics or found that I was going to be writing the same things over again, but I really wish that I had bothered to keep up the journaling aspect. It's been an interesting year from a pandemic perspective, and from a personal perspective as well. First, we have not achieved herd immunity. After an initial spurt of vaccinations, resistance set in. I will not reflect on how I feel about that (though since I was born immediately after the polio vaccine was released you can probably guess. The shadow of the polio epidemic with its death and disabling effects still loomed large while I was a very young child). But, more than that, the coronavirus itself proved very, very adaptable, leaving us with a large range of ever more contagious variants though this most recent, Omicron, seems to at least be a little less lethal (especially if ...