Grigory Lukin.com

Monday night. Great news on the personal front, or at least one side of it. The University of Toronto has completed my ECA (Education Credential Assessment) and sent me the PDF certificate stating that I do, in fact, have a valid university degree from the US. Normally, the process takes 2-3 months, not 3.5, but given the hand they were dealt, this turnaround time is nothing short of phenomenal. (They switched to online-only processing, with virtual transcripts instead of physical documents.)

I hadn’t expected them to process everything so quickly. Kudos, U of T. Now the last piece of the paperwork mountain is the FBI clearance: I mailed it in three days ago, so hopefully it’ll arrive in their West Virginia office sometime this week. Once they process it (about a week?) and send it back (another week, maybe?), my company’s lawyers will be able to submit my permanent residency at long last.

Given the horrific shitshow happening in the US, I really don’t feel like going back…

I took the third trip to the local Niagara Falls Walmart today to get some more fruit, veggies, cheese, and frozen pizzas – the essential supplies needed to spend the last two weeks here. Maybe it was the cold and gloomy weather (we’ve been hit with the polar vortex), or maybe it was something else, but for once there was no line to get inside the store at 6pm. Another big change is that this time, most shoppers wore masks. One thing that’s still the same is the disappearance of grapefruit juice. Something has gone very, very wrong with that supply chain. Maybe someday I’ll figure out what it was.

Back to the US, though: most states reopened on Sunday, Mother’s Day. Pictures and video footage online all show a disaster in the making: crowded restaurants, overcrowded parks, crowds everywhere. All the voluntary isolation, the disruption of every single activity, all the countless sacrifices of varying degrees – all for nothing. The second wave won’t come in the fall – it’ll start showing up a week from now. Journo twitter is hinting (but unofficially) that someone very high up in the White House tested positive. The White House staff will have to wear face masks, which is a classic example of “do as we say, not as we do.” My quick count of Trump’s yesterday’s tweets was off: he posted or shared over 100 of them. This is the genius who wore goggles (without a mask) during the 3M factory tour…

Like I said, I’m just glad I’m out of there, and it’s even less likely than ever that I’d return. (Even though I miss my Search&Rescue crew from Seattle…) I’d anticipated a colossal screw-up from Trump’s government for years – and I’d started trying to transfer abroad even before he was elected. Back in February 2016 (when he was a pretty clear Republican frontrunner), I applied for a work transfer to the UK. When that fell through, I tried Poland. Then Canada. Then Australia. Then Canada again. Fifth time is the charm, eh?.. I can’t imagine what kind of stressed-out mess I would’ve been by now if I’d stayed there.

More and more journos (and some officials) are pointing out that official death tolls for the pandemic are quite a bit off. There are far more other, apparently related deaths, compared to the baseline period of 2019. Some are undoubtedly because people can’t get their treatment or are too afraid to go to the hospital. Most of the extra deaths, though, are most likely covid-related. We won’t know the true death toll until later on, when everything is accounted for. Knowing what I know about politics and petty tyrants, the US government will most likely start calling the death counts fake, and claiming that even the official death toll (not including the above-baseline deaths) is inflated. They’ve already declared war on science, so why the hell not?

…that was a very long way of saying that I’ll probably stop posting death totals here, unless the official number crosses some particular threshold.

Stay safe out there, y’all.

Sunday afternoon. In a couple of hours, I’ll start the first leg of the three-hour roundtrip to Toronto to pick up xgf from her friend’s empty basement apartment. The three-day trial isn’t nearly the same as living there for good, but maybe there’ll be some useful conclusions to make the long stay easier for her.

Two more weeks till we officially part ways… It’ll be strange to be solo. I suppose that’ll give me unique insight into quarantining alone or as part of a couple, so I’ve got the anthropological angle covered, if nothing else.

World news: Trump spent the entire day retweeting conspiracy theories – more so than usual, that is. By my guesstimate, there were over 30 tweets, likely many more. If any other person did that during their alleged work hours, they would’ve been fired. With his popularity ratings dropping, the unemployment numbers going higher than at any point since the Great Depression, and being unable to golf or hold rallies, he must be feeling mighty frustrated right about now. Here is hoping he doesn’t start bombing random countries just for the hell of it. (Wouldn’t be his first time.) In Israel, Netanyahu proposed microchipping the entire country, starting with kids, to get sound alerts when people get too close to each other. He seemed to be surprised when a lot of people pointed out that might not be he best idea he’s ever had. Heh.

…another cup of coffee, then sorting out the dry laundry, then off to Toronto.

Friday night. Today I made sure to thank my manager for helping me move from the US to Canada: I’m fairly certain I’d thanked him before, but I really can’t thank him enough. It’s a hot mess back in the US. I can’t imagine how much more stressful my life would’ve been had I stayed there.

The White House suppressed the CDC’s report on the coronavirus, and then released parts of it after a massive outcry. Two white men (father and son) in Georgia who chased a black jogger in their truck and shot him in the middle of the street in broad daylight finally got arrested – it took two months, a video, and a massive online outcry just to get them arrested… More White House staffers are getting diagnosed: the top one thus far is Katie Miller, VP Mike Pence’s press secretary. Given the utter lack of even the most basic precautions in the White House, I’m surprised it had taken that long for the first cases to show up. If either Trump or Pence get incapacitated – or worse – things will get even more chaotic.

Today was spent fighting the bureaucratic remnants of the 19th and 20th centuries. In order to wire money from my bank account, I had to try to borrow a relative’s US phone number because the bank’s system didn’t recognize my Canadian number. To finalize the FBI background check application, I had to print out an email at a UPS store (potential risk of exposure and all) for 35 cents, and then stand in line at a fairly crowded post office. They charged a bit more than 35 cents to send my precious letter to the FBI through the closed border and all the way to West Virginia. In theory, there’s no reason all of this couldn’t be done online and digitally. My best bad guess is that the process is deliberately cumbersome to discourage folks from spamming the FBI with their background check requests. Then again, maybe the system is still using the 19th century technology (magic signatures and all) simply because that’s how it’s always been done.

My first full day away from xgf in almost two months… She’s doing well by herself in her friend’s basement apartment (a trial run before she moves there for 3 months), so that’s good news. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’ll be as easygoing once she’s there by herself for an extended period of time… Here is hoping it’ll work out. On my end, my introvert battery is trying too hard to recharge itself, to the point where I do a lot of little things and don’t accomplish any of the big ones. I did set up an actual think-tank at work today, though, which isn’t something I’d ever thought I’d do. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “so it goes.”

Cumulative death toll in the US as of right now: 78,318; in Canada, 4,569.

Thursday night. Xgf called a friend with an empty basement apartment and decided to stay there for the next three days as an experiment. (She doesn’t deal well with solitude, but it’s a great place to wait out the pandemic.) I dropped her off there after we drove up to the last open fingerprinting agency and got my FD-258 form filled out for the FBI background check.

…now there’s a paragraph that would’ve confused the hell out of my younger self. Heh.

They’re starting to slowly open up more parts of Canada. Most people are opposed to opening up too early, but I guess the had to placate the extroverts at some point. Businesses that had been deemed non-essential (which is very few businesses, to be honest) are being allowed to reopen. You still can’t walk into any fast-food places, mind you. (I wonder how junk-food addicts who have no cars are dealing with the drive-through-only ordering system.

The fingerprinting agency was extremely safety-oriented. The employees all wore masks and gloves, and I was asked to sanitize my hands at least five times as we exchanged IDs, papers, etc. Tomorrow morning, I’ll try to swing by a UPS store to print out one last piece of paper for the FBI (it’s the third decade of the 21st century and we still treat paper as if it were magic…) and send it off by snail mail. Two possibilities exist: their dossier on me will be either one sad little paragraph or a giant volume filled with redacted sections. I’d be excited (and mildly afraid) to see the latter, but it’s almost certainly the former. Can’t wait to see it either way.

The world news is as depressing as always, only a bit more so. No headlines or death tolls tonight.

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.

Monday evening. This morning, I pulled the trigger on the biggest financial decision of my life. Thus far, anyhow. This isn’t the time or the place to go into details, but it’s one of the main components of my plan to retire early, aka lean-FIRE.

Looks like the US has officially decided that it’s okay with 3,000 Americans dying each day a month from now, in early June – and that’s if things don’t get even worse. The Benghazi hearings lasted for years, over the deaths of four Americans. I doubt there will ever be hearings of even remotely close intensity once this is all over. Just like always, it’ll be empty platitudes about bipartisanship and the need to stick together and forgive. Not a single person will see the consequences of their ineptitude. At best, some minor politician might lose their job…

Cumulative death total in the US as of right now: 69,658; in Canada, 3,854.