the virus is alive

First I read articles that say that all vaccine appointments statewide are now being coordinated through a new website nauseatingly called My Turn. I'm not yet eligible, but I sign up for this and await e-mail and/or text message notification.

Then I read no, no, it has nothing to offer that the county website doesn't. The county website contains links to the appointment pages of each of 7 providers who give the vaccine in this county. You have to try each of them until you find one that gives an appointment, or in my case not, since it still says my tranch is not yet eligible. We're supposed to be in next week, but there's no sign of it yet.

Meanwhile, the state has announced that it's hiring Blue Shield to coordinate vaccine-giving. The counties mostly don't want to be coordinated by Blue Shield, and our county executive has stated that no way will he sign a contract with them; the state's response is to threaten to withhold vaccine from our county, the most populous in this half of the state. Meanwhile B. is waiting for her second dose of Pfizer, which has already been delayed once.

We get an e-mail from our gym. They're re-opening, so that means they're unfreezing memberships (and thus charging the monthly fee again) unless you write them and say to hold off. I do this, and get another e-mail too vague to be clear, but what it seems to say is that they're terribly hurt that you don't want to unfreeze, because it's safe: they're scrubbing down the equipment really hard. So they won't freeze you unless you call them up and say "Pretty please?" So I call them up. Guy doesn't know, but he's very responsive to my concerns. Says I'm listed as frozen, and I should call back on Friday which is the day they're unfreezing this.

The situation is this: I'm not going anywhere until I get the vaccine. And once I do, the concern about gyms isn't about the surfaces of equipment - that's not a principal form of transmission, and you can always wash your hands - but about air circulation. I wonder if I should seek out a CO2 monitor, since CO2 levels in peopled rooms are a pretty good proxy measure for whether the air is circulating.

Meanwhile I'm desperately trying to make progress on the Tolkien bibliography against the closure of libraries. I have a whole bunch of trade books that evidently have something about Tolkien in them, but without looking at them it's hard to say how much or whether it's anything but a rehash. Google Books is of limited help, even if it shows previews. I've ordered as many as I can through ILL on public libraries, and I'm waiting for them to come in. Counting those actually held by one or another library system that I patronize, and splitting my ILL requests up so that I don't hit the limit with any one library, I've now got requests in at four libraries, to which I'll be going for socially-distanced pickup. A few cases where the libraries don't have them, if the book is inexpensive enough I buy it online, some hard copy and some electronically.