So back at the beginning of April, my wife and I became eligible to receive our COVID-19 vaccinations here in California; we couldn’t get them sooner than that because neither of us fell into any of the previously-prioritized high-risk age, essential occupation (my wife is a substitute teacher and animal trainer who stopped doing in-person work once the pandemic started picking up steam last March, and I have worked from home for years—not, unfortunately, as a full time fiction writer) or medical categories (“The Event” notwithstanding). Once the window opened for us, we had about two weeks before it opened for every adult in the state, so we figured we needed to get scheduled as soon as we could. But of course, first, there was bureaucracy to navigate―nothing as Kafkaesque as The Saga of the Possibly Rabid Skunk, but still.