So, anyways, on a lighter note, one of the girls in my cohort for grad school, she sent a message yesterday morning to everybody in the chat, like our little group chat, and she had mentioned that she was having issues getting on Zoom because of -- she's basically doing all of her online school from an iPad. She had no laptop she was borrowing a friend's laptop, or her brother's laptop, if she had to take an exam, and other than that, she just didn't have one. Given that things are all online right now I was like "that is brutal." So I sent her a text message. I got a new laptop for Christmas, I was so lucky to get that. So, I had just purchased one that was capable of doing all the things that my older, like, couple years old Chromebook, what I was using before, like was capable, cause I couldn't use like the lockdown browser and stuff like that. Anyways so I, y'know, sent her a message and I said "listen, I have this laptop laying around. It's relatively new. It was like a refurbished Acer whatever. It's got this little touch screen. It's nothing super fancy, but I'm willing to -- y'know, I can give it to you for super cheap." And, y'know, I wasn't going to get much from Best Buy or anything for it, obviously. It's not anything super nice. So I told her like, "yeah, like fifty bucks maximum. You get it, it's all yours." And she told me that she actually didn't even have money to buy that at the moment, but she said that she would love to eventually, she just has to get her funds together. After buying textbooks and stuff she said she just didn't have any free funds and I -- at that point, I was like, y'know what? Like this girl, I'm gonna be working with her for the next two years. She's gonna be my peer, you know for the foreseeable future so I don't want to -- I dunno. I just wanted to help her, so I told her I would just drop it off for her and she could just have it, and she offered to make me some stickers and she apparently has a candle for me and some other goodies, so, really sweet of her to do that. Um,…

There's one thing this week I'm grateful for above all else, and that would be the COVID vaccine. My dad is in the 65 and over category and he was able to secure his first vaccine shot on Thursday. And it gives me a small degree of hope that, uh, maybe I'll be able to see my dad again, um, in person, in his house for an extended period of time. Um, I don't think I've really -- I think I've seen him once over the past four months or so, and that was in a Kmart parking lot in Marshall, Michigan, where we found out that there's still, in fact, Kmarts that are open out there. So I know the vaccine, um, has been a complicated unveiling and it has felt kind of distant. I haven't really known many people who've gotten the vaccine aside from my friends in the medical profession. Um, so knowing my dad got the first go-around, the first shot, kind of makes it feel real and you can see a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere. It might be a faint light, but it's there. Um, so I'm thankful for that.