Ukraine & Plateau

Obviously this is my COVID diary but I have documented a couple times other major world/political events, so I feel I should mention that at 10 PM tonight, after weeks of threatening, Russia has invaded Ukraine. Are we witnessing the beginning of WWIII? (There were some military things happening at the beginning of 2020 that I know people were saying might spark another world war, but clearly that didn't pan out...) The US seems to have taken more of a hands-off, non-military position, instead imposing sanctions on certain people in Russian government, but I heard there is more that could be done that would be very bad for Russia's economy. But also Russia has been doing cyber attacks and other online/societal meddling for years, could they just shut down US infrastructure or something? They also provide a lot of gas, mostly to Europe, so this will probably cause already high gas prices to go up, right? And, if it gets to this point, who all has the nuclear weapons these days..?

Anyway, besides current political events, my husband got his first real haircut in two years tonight. I've been begging him to do it probably since last summer. He was going to have to do something for work tomorrow and wanted a trim before then, but then that project was postponed for a couple weeks because one of his colleagues got COVID.

I've otherwise been feeling pretty good about going out and interacting and such lately - masked of course, but maybe just a surgical mask, not KN95. We had been joking that we weren't planning on going anywhere until March and for a while that looked like a pretty good estimate, but it seems like mid-February was actually the timeframe. We ate at a restaurant (outdoors) last week, I've gone back to doing my own grocery shopping and a lot of other errands, I visited a family member (both masked), and we have another family event coming up this weekend (where we'll probably be the only people in masks). I had seen headlines that COVID cases globally dropped ~20%, and in the US there's been a very sharp drop to levels like what we were seeing late last summer, but I'm already seeing that curve is starting to plateau...