Monday night. Vacation is off to a pretty good start: catching up on sleep, going on walks with gf. The only hitch was finding out that my car battery died. We hadn’t been going on a lot of car rides, so sometimes we’d go a whole week without turning on the engine. I guess the cold weather, combined with lack of use, killed the battery after all. Well, now is as good a time as any to invest in a CAA membership. (The Canadian version of the AAA.) Give it a couple of days of the probationary period, then request a “roadside” assist to jumpstart the battery… We could ask our neighbours (which are far and few in between), but there’s the question of language barrier, whether they had the right cables, etc. Sometimes, a $120 CAD investment is a better choice.

Amazon is acting funny these days: when I searched for art supplies a week ago, the promised delivery date was reasonable, within a couple of weeks. When we did our shopping on Amazon two nights ago, that all changed: art sets got reclassified as non-essential supplies, with the earliest delivery date a month away. On the other hand, condoms and food supplements got the first priority and a 7-day delivery promise. Gotta love the civilization’s priorities.

Speaking of which, Wall Street seems to think the worst is behind us. Dow went up 5.8% today, though it’s hard to say if that was a dead-cat bounce, a short squeeze, some cynical manipulation before another plunge, or some combination of all three. I do a little swing-trading, so I sold what I’d bought on Friday for a quick profit. Now to wait for it to go red once again… World War Oil is being wild and unpredictable: there are a couple of OPEC meetings scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Meanwhile, after a few days of high gains, oil fell 7% today but went up 2% in the after-hours. Heh. What amazes me the most is that Wall Street really seems to think the worst is behind us.

As of right now, there are exactly 11,000 cumulative deaths in the US; 322 in Canada. New York officials plan to dig trenches in the city’s parks for the allegedly temporary totally-not-mass-graves because the city is overwhelmed and can’t bury the hundreds who die every day. The officials were quick to backtrack and say that they almost certainly won’t use the ditches (which they’re still digging) and that they’re hoping the death toll will decrease. …I don’t know when you’re reading this, but FYI, there was a twitter meme that we were only days away from semantic arguments claiming that mass graves were not mass graves. And here we are now.

In other news, Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, is now in the ICU after his covid19 got worse. This is the same man who had pretended the virus wasn’t serious. He’d deliberately gone to hospitals and spent time around those who had been tested positive. Who knows how many others he himself has infected. (At least the queen appears to be safe.) I hope he recovers. If he doesn’t, though… It’ll be no one’s fault but his own.

Gf and I are still enjoying the solitude and isolation. I’m naming my sourdough starter Clint Yeastwood.