Grigory Lukin.com

Sunday night. I’ve just booked my summer vacation – the first uninterrupted stretch of time off, all by myself, in 3.5 years…

One odd thing about a pandemic is that it shuts down everything, up to and including the normally secluded attractions. I was looking forward to sleeping in a tent at one of Ontario’s rural campgrounds, but every single one I checked is closed due to covid.

In Thunder Bay, a city of 100,000 about 15 hours north of Toronto, there are some mines where you can dig around for amethysts for a very small fee. One of them is shut down due to the pandemic as well – I just hope at least one of them will remain open (or re-open) by the time I visit in late July. If not, I can always find a mineral occurrence in public access and do a little digging. Worst-case scenario, I’ll have some peace and quiet, a lot of nature, and all the sleep I can handle. Even with the rental four-wheel-drive car (mine won’t be good enough for offroad driving) and the two AirBnBs (Thunder Bay and Bancroft), this vacation will cost less than $1,000 CAD. That’s quite a steal, and will help me keep my mind off the pandemic. (Things get worse every day…) Just seven weeks of work, and I’ll be able to have my very own rural Ontario adventure.

The world news is mostly subdued by more political insanity from the US. The death toll in Brazil is climbing, though the real numbers are almost definitely higher than the official ones they’ve been putting out. I wonder what this coming week will bring…

Thursday night. It really is alarming how much the old routine is reasserting itself… This doesn’t feel like four whole workdays have passed: the routine is back, and it’s gobbling up my time, with every evening more or less the same.

The world was mad, and now it’s getting madder: several days ago, four white cops in Minnesota killed George Floyd, a black man, with impunity and knowing they were being filmed. They got fired, but that wasn’t nearly enough. Now the city of Minneapolis is on fire: a Target store was looted, a McDonald’s was set on fire, there are bricks flying through police department windows… The brazen nature of this particular extrajudicial execution is far worse than any of the ones that had come before: Freddie Gray, Michael Brown Jr., Philando Castile, and far too many others.

Earlier today on Twitter, some were musing out loud that since all the wealthy folks have fled major cities, their houses are just sitting there, filled with goodies… Even using the official unemployment metric (which typically excludes freelancers, gig workers, etc), there are now over 40 million unemployed Americans. There will be much more looting, and riots, and unrest. I’ll be glad to be wrong on this particular prediction.

One thing I didn’t see coming at all is the permanent closure of museums. The Living Computer Museum in Seattle, founded by Paul Allen, said they’ll be shutting down until further notice. Others will follow, I’m sure. It’s a bit sad: I’d spent 3.5 years of my life in Seattle, and I never once visited that place. Here is hoping that they (and others) will reopen: as billionaires go, Paul Allen was almost as benign as one can get, and that particular museum was mighty unique.

Wednesday night. I’m an idiot: I completely forgot that you can deposit a check just by taking its picture with the bank app. On the upside, I got a lot of anti-covid vitamin D during my 2-hour walk yesterday, so it’s not all bad. …I guess I never got used to the concept of doing stuff with apps, being an elder Millennial and all. (I didn’t see my first iPhone till I was 21.) I’m officially old. Heh. I wonder, if anybody is reading this in the post-plague future, will anyone come up with a better term than “videotaping” to describe recording a video? It’s quite an anachronistic term (just like depositing checks in ATMs), but nobody can come up with a better one.

Strange day at work today: on the one hand, I definitely aced the high-level presentation I’ve been working on for the last three months. On the other hand, 90 minutes later I learned about a major reorg on my team. My job is safe, but that’s one weird rollercoaster.

Xgf is doing fine in her self-imposed basement isolation: today she baked brownies for her neighbours from upstairs. She and I still talk on the phone, and might hang out in a socially-isolated manner on Saturday. She mentioned that I sound much different now that I’m alone and with just my work to keep my company. The social “yes man” mask stays on even after the workday is over. It takes quite an effort to take it off…

In covid news, Nevada’s governor said casinos and other public places can reopen next Thursday, eight days from now. I suppose that’s one way to see who the most desperate gamblers are. There’ll be some wild pictures from casinos that try (and fail) to implement anti-covid measures like plexiglass barriers and gloves for players. Not sure how they aim to do that with card games and dice: literally burn the deck after each use and dunk the dice in ammonia after each player, I suppose. I miss Vegas dearly (having spent 10 years of my life in Nevada), but I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere until the vaccine is out. (Every country seems to be developing their own; it’ll be interesting to see who gets it done first.)

There are some reports that the states that reopened are seeing a huge spike in covid cases. Like the twitter joke goes, you can’t have the second wave if you never really finish the first wave. Being a hermit has its advantages…

Monday evening. The first day back in the GTA (Mississauga, specifically), the first day by myself…

Before we departed on this 10-week AirBnB adventure, I’d lived in this rental room for just six weeks. I lived in three different places since then. It was indescribably bizarre to turn the handle, walk into the room – undisturbed, just as I’d left it – and turn on the light switch to find that nothing at all had changed. My stacks of books, my gaming PC’s screen still blinking in the power-saving mode, my art collection… It’s as if nothing ever happened, as if I merely stepped out and had a remarkably vivid hallucination, as if the world didn’t forever change.

It’s a little bit funny: after three different AirBnB residences and more than 10 weeks away, I can’t recall where I’d kept my things. I’ll have to spend a few hours just to rediscover my own room and see what’s what, and where, and why. On the upside, I’ve discovered that I don’t really need art, or all that many books, or a gaming PC in order to relax, enjoy life, and make the most of it. That knowledge will be useful when I decide to start my lean-FIRE…

Yesterday was crazy but not chaotic. We’d packed on Saturday night. Sunday morning was spent double-checking everything, eating a quick breakfast, and packing the car. We reached xgf’s Toronto at 1pm, dropped off everything at xgf’s new basement apartment (to keep the car empty for moving the rest of her things), and went to her old house. Things have really gone to hell there. On a typical day, the house has between 6-10 roommates. Now it’s twice as many. They chose to disregard every social distancing guidelines and started inviting their partners, their partners’ roommates, random relatives, etc. In the five hours that xgf and I were there, packing and sorting through things, we saw at least a dozen people, and heard many more. The roommates are all genders, mostly in their 20s and 30s, though at least one is in his 40s. If even 20% of Canada’s population acts that way, this pandemic will take a long time to die down.

I bought xgf’s enough groceries to last a few weeks. We finished moving everything around 9pm. Her gal pal, the owner of the basement apartment, joined us for one last dinner in the backyard before I left for good. We ate some very basic thrown-together cuisine (think American cheese slices on toast, with some tomatoes on the side), we talked, we laughed, we talked some more. Afterwards, xgf and I had one last conversation before we parted ways and became very good friends instead of apocalypse survival partners… The conversation was deep, and touching, and lovely. It’s a shame we couldn’t make it work.

And so, back to the apocalypse, but this time by myself.

Sunday night. Much packing, lots of driving, a great deal of talking. It’s over between xgf and I, but it was beautiful while it lasted. More tomorrow…

Saturday night. This was our last full day together… It was eventful: one last drive to a park, a homecooked veggie&steak roast, a lot of packing for tomorrow, a laptop-lit bath (as one does in a cyber-age pandemic). We’re parting on very good terms: I’ve helped xgf improve her dating ad for her eventual return into the dating scene, we talked more about the things that didn’t work out, etc.

Big day tomorrow: driving 90 minutes back to Toronto, moving a lot of things to xgf’s new basement apartment from her old rental room, etc. I probably won’t make it back home to my own old rental till late in the evening. It will be so very strange to see my landlords again after more than 10 weeks away. (I’d only lived with them for six weeks before I departed on this covid odyssey.) It’ll be even stranger to find my room exactly as I found it – books, gaming PC, art-covered walls, and so on.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes…”

World news: the official guesstimate of the US deaths is about 100,000. New York Times published a long list of names, ages, and brief facts about the covid victims on their front page. A lot of people online are wondering why more of their fellow Americans aren’t taking the pandemic (and the incompetence-driven death toll) more seriously. The current consensus is that 100,000 is simply too large a number to visualize. Imagine 33 9/11’s… Not for the first time, I’m so extremely glad I moved to Canada.

Friday night. Ten full weeks since this adventure began. Hard to imagine that two days from now, I’ll be back in my giant rental room, back in the familiar surroundings but without the familiar presence near me…

Got an interesting proposition at work, but the timing was all wrong. My warehouse colleagues are wondering when I’ll return – the answer, of course, is when the official guidance calls for it. So far, the official line is that we can self-isolate through October. It’s been a bit of a reputation race between tech giants: Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been setting farther and farther dates for returning to work. (That process began in March.) Twitter threw down the gauntlet when they said their employees can work from home permanently if they’d like. Then Spotify followed the suit. A few days ago, Facebook said the same thing, but with an important caveat: the salary would be tied to the cost of living in the place where you’d actually reside. (Meaning their California employees wouldn’t keep their high salary if they worked remotely from rural Oregon.)

I’m curious to see what Amazon and Google will do. This whole mess is definitely affecting the way companies operate. My team has just onboarded five new hires, and they aren’t meeting any of us in person – it’s just a lot of remote training, making the process even tougher and stranger than it usually is.

…we spent our last Friday night together watching the sunset at a scenic overview, with the river fading into the darkness as we had yet another conversation about what would have been. Packed and strange day tomorrow as we’ll try to do a bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing.

World news: Brazil’s official death toll has crossed 20,000. The actual death toll won’t be known until much later, I’m sure. More insanity with the US politics, but what else is new?