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There are tons of places to cross country ski in the metro area but most of them cost money (a ridiculous amount of money in the case of the Minneapolis Park System) or have no place to park or both. This one is beautiful, free, and has a gigantic parking lot. The downside (for me) is that it is kind of a long drive, but it's convenient for my current skiing buddy so if the weather holds we'll probably be back there again.
It's the Bunker Hills Golf Course. Not to be confused with the adjacent Bunker Hills Regional Park, which is both expensive and much too hilly for wimpy skiers like me. The day was spectacular - 20-something degrees, blue sky, barely breezy. Unfortunately, something about the combination of sun and temperature made the snow not nearly as good for skiing as it looks. For some reason, you just could not glide. It wasn't just us - almost all the other skiers we encountered were having the same problem, even the guy with waxed skis. But as everybody paraphrased, "Well, yeah, the snow IS awfully sticky. But it's so beautiful today!!" So we just tried to pretend that we were on very long snowshoes and enjoyed the opportunity to get out.
Jan. 25th, 2021
A little bit of hope
Jan. 25th, 2021 05:29 pmEven as a person over 70 (and thus high risk) I have no expectation of getting vaccinated before early May under the best of circumstances. There are reasons that I'm not in category 1A, and I'm willing to wait my turn. But I don't mind a little bit of hope to hang onto. That's how I'm looking at today's announcement of the new vaccine lottery.
When most states announced recently that they were "expanding vaccine eligibility" to include everyone over 65 I was baffled and exasperated. What exactly is the point of expanding "eligibility" to a pool of people that exceeds vaccine availability by a couple of orders of magnitude? All that does is leave people confused and angry. Minnesota is only getting 60,000 doses/week, so why suggest to ONE MILLION PEOPLE that it is their turn to be vaccinated right now? I'm certainly not going to spend all day long every Tuesday frantically hitting refresh on my browser trying to get into an overwhelmed website where 100,000 people are frantically vying for 6,000 appointments.
But I like the vaccine lottery idea, and plan to play tomorrow night. You still have to find your way into that overwhelmed website to sign up, but after you get in once you don't have to do it again; you're in the lottery pool. Then (if I understand this correctly) every Tuesday they will pull some number of names out at random, assign them vaccination appointments for the upcoming week, and contact the lucky winners on Wednesday. As it stands, this is not a real solution to the problem of getting everybody over 65 vaccinated. At 6,000/week it will take about 3 years to get through all of us. But it's an exciting game to play while we wait for more vaccine to be made. And who knows - maybe I'll be a winner!
Meanwhile, other mechanisms are working in parallel. Richard and I have both gotten emails from Health Partners promising that they will be scheduling us for vaccinations some day (time frame not specified) but suggesting that if we find a way to get vaccinated before they get back to us we should jump on it. Finding our way into the lottery pool sounds like just what they have in mind there.
For some reason, the lottery registration website is only going to be available for 24 hours each week, starting Tuesdays at 5am. If you live in Minnesota and are over 65, you can read all about it right here.
When most states announced recently that they were "expanding vaccine eligibility" to include everyone over 65 I was baffled and exasperated. What exactly is the point of expanding "eligibility" to a pool of people that exceeds vaccine availability by a couple of orders of magnitude? All that does is leave people confused and angry. Minnesota is only getting 60,000 doses/week, so why suggest to ONE MILLION PEOPLE that it is their turn to be vaccinated right now? I'm certainly not going to spend all day long every Tuesday frantically hitting refresh on my browser trying to get into an overwhelmed website where 100,000 people are frantically vying for 6,000 appointments.
But I like the vaccine lottery idea, and plan to play tomorrow night. You still have to find your way into that overwhelmed website to sign up, but after you get in once you don't have to do it again; you're in the lottery pool. Then (if I understand this correctly) every Tuesday they will pull some number of names out at random, assign them vaccination appointments for the upcoming week, and contact the lucky winners on Wednesday. As it stands, this is not a real solution to the problem of getting everybody over 65 vaccinated. At 6,000/week it will take about 3 years to get through all of us. But it's an exciting game to play while we wait for more vaccine to be made. And who knows - maybe I'll be a winner!
Meanwhile, other mechanisms are working in parallel. Richard and I have both gotten emails from Health Partners promising that they will be scheduling us for vaccinations some day (time frame not specified) but suggesting that if we find a way to get vaccinated before they get back to us we should jump on it. Finding our way into the lottery pool sounds like just what they have in mind there.
For some reason, the lottery registration website is only going to be available for 24 hours each week, starting Tuesdays at 5am. If you live in Minnesota and are over 65, you can read all about it right here.