Thursday night, and damn, what a day. The stock market decided to fall off a cliff: Dow dropped by 6.9%, and my portfolio took a beating (still up from where I’d started, though.) On the bright side, I’ve received an official application to apply for permanent residence in Canada! The company’s lawyers will start working on the final application soon, and I should become a permanent Canadian by New Year’s.

I wish I had equally good news about the world at large: it’s becoming more and more clear that the second wave is underway in the US. There are more reports from various states saying they’re getting overwhelmed. The director of the Harvard Global Health Institute said the US may reach 200,000 deaths by September. In the past, all those dark prophecies came true well before their due date.

The riots in the US caused an interesting side effect: Capitol Hill in Seattle (a neighbourhood where I once lived) got a bit carried away. When protesters found an abandoned police station (some say the police left it as bait to be burned down), they occupied it instead. Then they fenced off a few blocks and proclaimed themselves CHAZ – the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. It’s just 200 or so people without any specific agenda, but they’ve made a splash around the world. So far they’re doing okay, but I wonder how long that experiment will be allowed to go on.

Now it’s the waiting game again… Waiting for my PR to come through. Waiting for the stock market to maybe hopefully stop crashing – it’ll go up again eventually. (Remember what I said about optimists having more fun?) There are multiple human vaccine trials nearing their final stages: with luck, something viable will come of it within a few months. Once there’s an actual vaccine… It’ll take a while to mass-produce and distribute it around the world, but a) that should cut down on the ~1,000 Americans dying every day, and b) pretty sure the stock market will go up by at least 10% the day the news comes out. (Hey, a man needs a hobby.)

And now back to my PR celebrations…