Tuesday night. Weird day at work, dealing with a web-based dashboard interface that was useful but also the single slowest tool I’ve ever had to work with. Time really did fly by, though.

Xgf is exploring her housing options when we return to Toronto in 19 days. She can’t stay in the house with her 6-10 roommates (the number varies), and she has the offer of staying for free at her friend’s empty basement apartment, but then there’s also the option of moving back in with her parents, etc. We’re still very close. It’ll be strange for the both of us to be apart: by the time we get back to Toronto, we will have been living side by side (and dodging the virus) for over 70 days. How weird is that?..

In the world news, Brazil’s president still refuses to acknowledge the virus is real. The UK now has the highest death toll in Europe. The US is about to disband its coronavirus task force and, apparently, plans to do a whole lot of nothing. Some states (mostly in the south) are reopening: in purely cynical terms, that’s a way to deny people unemployment benefits when their governor officially gives them the green light to go back to work. That’d have a pretty bad chain reaction for small businesses (restaurants, etc) that wouldn’t make it without their employees, and bigger businesses would step in to fill the vacuum once the smaller businesses shut down. So it goes.

The virus might have mutated to a less deadly but a more contagious strain. In New York, at least 15 kids got hospitalized with something that may or may not be covid. Oh, and then there’s the giant murder hornets because why the hell not? Assuming we make it through 2020, there’s gonna be an awful lot of personal narratives that would seem downright unbelievable to whomever reads them in the future. (Just like with the Spanish Flu: contemporary accounts of people developing symptoms and dying while still on the subway train have been dismissed as panicky exaggerations…)

Cumulative death toll in the US as of right now: 72,125; in Canada, 4,043.