Grigory Lukin.com

Saturday morning. Is this the first time I’ve ever updated this thing before noon? Sure feels that way.

Typing this up over a breakfast of coffee, fried eggs, and toast. An hour from now, I’ll be sitting in my new rental car. Soon after, I’ll have it packed up and ready to go. (Got all the essential hiking supplies: sunscreen, portable GPS unit, bear bell, Geiger counter, UV light, and snacks, obviously.) In every journey, there comes a great moment when you officially depart: drive outside the city limits, have your plane take off, or maybe just walk beyond your customary boundaries. The point at which you’re officially no longer here. I love that sensation.

Obligatory correction: a few days ago, I wrote that the Trump administration got shamed into giving the covid data back to the CDC. That was incorrect. I misread their announcement: they said the CDC may access the data once the HHS is done with it, and that it must post that data on their online tracker. (For a few days, their tracker was frozen, saying it won’t be updated past July 14th.) There’s no good reason for the HHS to have taken over, so the official reporting will be even sketchier than before. I’m really curious whether we’ll ever learn about the root cause of testing delays: are they just overwhelmed, or has there actually been central guidance to slow things down as much as possible? A grad student in Arizona said it took 26 days for his results to arrive. At that point, it doesn’t really matter. Embarrassing, considering other countries have much faster testing.

On top of all that, the White House is blocking the CDC from testifying in front of a House panel next week on whether it’s safe to reopen schools. Nice democracy you got there.

John Lewis died. He was 80 and had cancer and was a living legend. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said her cancer has returned. She’s 87: if anything happens to her before Biden (assuming he wins) officially takes over on January 20th, she’ll be replaced by a conservative judge in a heartbeat. The fate of the country’s future (at least for the next few decades) depends on an 87-year-old woman staying alive for another six months and two days. …that is not a stable system. Critics point out that RBG should’ve retired years ago, and allowed Obama to appoint her replacement. The critics’ critics rightfully remind them that RBG, just like everyone else, had assumed Trump would lose in 2016.

It’s a hot mess, all of it… Nothing at all a single individual can do to stop the march of the events. An empire crumbles from within, so I’m taking the only logical choice – driving as far away from it as possible. Heh. I’ll write more tomorrow evening, once I’m in Thunder Bay. Enjoy your weekend, y’all.

Friday evening – wooooo, vacation at last! Can’t really believe it’s finally here. I’ll finally get to catch up on sleep and explore a new little part of the world… The plan is to hop into a rental car at noon (I’m not putting all that extra mileage on mine; besides, the rental is a 4WD), load it up with supplies, then drive north and north and west… Thunder Bay is 15 hours away from here, so I’ll spend the night at a rest stop.

I won’t lie – I gave some thought to packing up my entire desktop rather than saying goodbye to ESO for two whole weeks, but fortunately I’ve decided against that. It’ll be strange to abandon that little virtual world in favour of the bigger and more real one. How much will our world change by the time I return? How much will I have changed?

As I’m doing my one-man celebration, my old country is going to hell in a handbasket even faster than before. The nameless camouflaged thugs I wrote about last night have shocked the rest of the country too. There’s noise. There’s table-pounding. There are congresscritters from Oregon demanding to know who the hell those thugs were. (The best bad guess right now is that they were with customs enforcement.) This is a direct continuation of the nameless thugs with guns in Washington. That got away with it that time. If there’s insufficient action and outrage this time, they’ll escalate again in a few weeks. This is scary totalitarian stuff, not the sort of thing you’d see in an alleged democracy. (I am so very, very glad I moved.)

That mess has overshadowed covid, at least for today. The South is still overburdened. Miami is still the epicenter, with its mayor waffling and not taking any action. The White House press secretary said something truly remarkable: “Science should not stand in the way” of reopening schools. If someone, somewhere, someday makes a documentary about the history of this pandemic, I hope that soundbite gets used: it embodies so much of the current weaponized stupidity.

At work, we have been tentatively allowed to remain home if we feel like it. Theoretically, this means we’ll be able to work from home through early January. In reality… We’ll see. I’m really curious what the world will look like by then. Hell, I’m curious what I will look like by then: my last haircut was about two months ago. (It’s not like I actually go out and meet people these days.) I haven’t shaved in 54 days. When talking on Skype yesterday, xgf said I look like a werewolf – I’m curious to see if I can get all the way to yeti six months from now.

I hope y’all have a nice safe weekend free of any jackbooted thug interference. Stay safe out there, folks.

Thursday evening, and my vacation is sooooooo close. It’s not exactly going to be like my last real getaway (my second visit to Costa Rica in early 2017) but it’ll still be fun and fine. A change of scenery, some shiny shiny minerals, a loooong road trip… Can’t wait. I really need this.

Had a long fun Skype call with xgf: we looked at the pics each of us had taken during the 72-day-long AirBnB odyssey. Some of them turned out quite great. A couple of adorable short videos. Such lovely memories, forever digitized. (Note to self: self, make more backups.)

Xgf is feeling better, though it might be the virus taking two days off. I won’t fully relax till she goes 4-5 days in a row without any weird symptoms.

In the covid news, some Canadians are vocally and righteously angry: a new government report said there were ~21,000 complaints about American tourists hanging out in Canada, not quarantining, and definitely not driving straight to Alaska like they promised they would. The favourite idea I’ve read so far was to attach an ankle bracelet to each American crossing the border, then monitor their movements. Heh. It’s grotesquely and darkly ironic that the worst stereotypes and accusations Americans (well, some Americans) threw at Latino immigrants are now being hurled right back at them: keep that diseased vermin from crossing our border! Build a wall! (Hey, I’m just repeating what other Canadians said on social media.) Yesterday, on the way to drop off medical gadgets at xgf’s place, I saw a cart with a Floridian vanity licence plate…

In Florida, Disney World has fully reopened for business for the first time in four months. Florida’s official numbers (which are of iffy quality and verisimilitude) keep growing, with their governor’s official position best summarized as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Georgia governor Brian Kemp issued an executive order banning all the local municipalities from enforcing mandatory mask laws. That’s a whole new kind of crazy, especially given that the CDC is headquartered in Atlanta. What a juxtaposition of brainiacs and cavemen. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt tested positive for covid. Earlier, someone saw him shopping at Walmart without a mask. What is it about the South?

Oh, and in positive news, the White House has decided they won’t take away the CDC’s covid data after all. Either the public backlash proved particularly strong or they had no way to enforce this in any case. In less stellar news, there are videos of random masked men in quasi-official uniforms detaining people in Portland and dumping them into unmarked vans. They have no badges or identification. Some sort of federal employees, perhaps, but this is still disturbing as all hell. This is precisely what happened earlier in Washington DC: there wasn’t a loud enough outcry, so I guess someone local decided to try that now. The big difference here is that someone in Oregon must have authorized this. I have this rotten feeling that this is only a preview of things to come…

I try to be an optimist, I really do, but… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tuesday night. Xgf might have covid. Five days ago, she went to a “celebration of life” ceremony: a friend of hers had died of cancer. There were multiple people present. She said they were mostly socially distancing, but she didn’t mention whether she wore a mask, and there were long Buddhist chants involved… It might end up being like the choir cluster months ago, where almost everyone got infected…

Xgf says she developed most of the typical symptoms today, though maybe it’s just food poisoning caused by bad beef after her refrigerator issues two days ago. Regardless, I’ll swing by after work tomorrow to drop off my personal thermometer and oximeter. (Already ordering replacements for myself.) She may need them, and the oximeter in particular is a damn good way to determine when it’s time to hurry to the nearest hospital.

Here is hoping she doesn’t have it. If she does…

In covid news, which is basically just the US news these days: they caught two elderly Floridians who drove to northern Ontario (allegedly to check up on their property) and failed to self-quarantine for two weeks. That was folloed by fines of $1,000, close monitoring, and major scorn of everyone on social media. (Which, as we know, is the worst punishment there is.) One of my favourite authors, Joseph Fink, wrote that the covid-testing process in New York is insanely long, confusing, and costs $40 rather than being free. He suggested that may be deliberate in order to keep reporting fewer new cases… Maybe he’s onto something, or maybe it’s just plain old bureaucratic stupidity.

And in a potentially sinister twist, the White House has changed the rules, and now US hospitals will have to report their covid numbers to the HHS (Health and Human Services) rather than the CDC. The consensus is that this change will not result in increased transparency, openness, or accurate covid reporting. It really is amazing that at this point in the game, with refrigerated trucks on their way to overfilled morgues and at least 138,000 deaths, the government still thinks they can sweep this under the rug. When the Chernobyl mini-series came out a year ago, a lot of folks laughed and said that dictatorships always fail when it comes to disasters. And yet… Heh.

Off to get something resembling eight hours of sleep. May tomorrow be marginally better.

Monday night. It’s curious how most of the covid news now comes exclusively from the US. Earlier on during the pandemic, there was no shortage of scary headlines from around the world. Now it’s just Americans doing crazy American things. Yes, there was the case in France where angry bus passengers attacked the driver, who ended up brain-dead, and then had his life support turned off. For that single case, though, there are at least 10 in the US with angry savages brandishing weapons, threatening, or outright attacking service industry employees: servers, cashiers, etc…

There’s a SpongeBob meme going around of the US watching sadly as other countries have fun. Parts of the country are starting to backtrack again: a huge chunk of California, including Los Angeles, just shut down again. No more public spaces. If the US had just shut down for a couple of months in March, all of this could’ve been avoided. It would’ve been cheaper, easier, and would’ve saved countless lives. Instead, there’s a terrifying mess that makes the rest of the world look on in horror.

Maybe it’s the rapidly unfolding epidemiological disaster, maybe it’s too many people sitting at home daytrading, maybe it’s something else – but the stock market has gotten more irrational than it had been in quite a while. Both Amazon and Tesla set all-time-high records with their stock prices, in lieu of absolutely nothing. Both of them have Q2 earning releases scheduled for late July, but there’s no reason to expect them to be phenomenal. Knowing nothing else about this situation, this looks like a pump&dump. Then again, both of those stocks have really bizarre valuations. They could double just as easily as crash by 60%. Time will tell.

As with so many things – the pandemic, the stock market, my permanent residence application – just gotta be patient, and sit still, and not do anything rash. It’s funny how deliberately doing nothing can feel harder than most things I’ve done before. Heh.

Sunday night. I wonder if this blog series will go for 365 days?.. I can just see it now: “day 365; celebrated the anniversary by eating not one but two cans of beans from the hoard we liberated in last week’s warehouse raid. Still no infection.” Heh…

Aside from the ever-present storm cloud of doom and once-in-a-century disaster, today was a good day. Slept in late, played some videogames, started re-reading the most recent book in Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” series… The new installment will come out in a few days; it’s been six years since the last book, so some memory refresher is badly needed. Today’s culinary adventure: a stir-fry with every vegetable I’d bought that hasn’t gone bad or tried to grow despite being stored in the refrigerator. (I’m looking at you, you traitorous carrots.)

Xgf’s day wasn’t quite as good: two repairmen showed up to fix the ceiling crack in the bathroom, disregarded her request to wear masks, and left without explaining if they’ll return. Shortly afterwards, the fridge gave up the ghost, and most of the food delivered by a local non-profit’s volunteer (and paid for by xgf) will likely go bad. She just can’t catch a break…

In covid news, the White House is trying to discredit Dr.Fauci because of his candor regarding the incompetence of – you guessed it – the White House. If and when they replace him, it’ll probably be some bobblehead yes-man that will give Baghdad Bob a run for his money. (I wonder how many folks who aren’t international affairs/political science geeks remember Baghdad Bob. Fun character, that guy.) For the first time in over four months, there were no new covid deaths in New York. Huzzay! Interesting article from New Zealand: after trying just about every explanation, contact tracers concluded that a cluster of 71 cases happened because a woman who returned from the US (and promptly self-quarantined) was a super-spreader. She seems to have infected all of her neighbours simply by using the elevator – solo but leaving behind a large viral load. What a strange, strange virus…

And now, time for some more fantasy world escapism (I love ESO so very, very much) before starting yet another workweek, followed by a hopefully amazing vacation five days later. Keep the hope alive, y’all.