Still Socially Distant

      Yeah, I did it.  I've gone back to wearing a mask at the store.  I'll be wearing a mask to interact with co-workers.  I'm limiting my shopping trips again.

      But why?  After all, I'm vaccinated.  The odds are incredibly good that if the SARS-CoV-2 virus hits me, it will amount to no more than sniffles.  Or I might get it and never notice.  I'm as protected as anyone could be.

      Thing is, a good many other people aren't.  I could infect them without even knowing I was sick.  And while I have no problem with other people deciding to roll those dice, I don't care to roll the dice for them.  If someone wants to skip the vaccine for whatever reason, it's not my job to argue them out of it.  I'm not the boss of them.  Nevertheless, I don't care to be their disease vector -- and that is under my control.  Nope, it's not noble or selfless and I'm not smugly congratulating myself over it: I don't want the guilt.  It's like not sweeping someone with the muzzle of a firearm, even one I just checked and found to be unloaded: why risk it?

      It's a small thing, and yet -- I don't want to kill someone because I was lazy.  I don't want someone to fall ill because I didn't care to breathe through a filter for half an hour.  (I have worked weeks of eight-hour days in a full-face APR -- that's a gas mask, close as it matters -- and a taped-up hazmat "moonsuit" with hood, gloves and overboots.  A dopey little paper/cloth mask is nothing.)

      YMMV.  Make your own choices.  I'm not the boss of you, either.  I am the boss of me, and this is what I have decided to do until we get this damn bug under better control.  We can still stomp it flatter than smallpox, but the clock is ticking.