Saturday night. This has been a long day. I got up at 6am, force-fed myself some black coffee with cereal (the only way a self-respecting adult should eat it), finished packing the car, and set off toward Toronto.

Either the farmer’s market got cancelled or my information was mildly inaccurate, but I didn’t find the notorious donut lady. Alas. Maybe next time. I did, however, end up taking what I think my best picture ever. That’s Madawaska river in Combermere, Ontario, at 7am on a quiet Saturday morning. Ontario’s nature is beautiful, but sometimes it simply takes your breath away… I simply had to pull over and capture that eye candy. The shot turned out great, considering I was leaning over the passenger seat and not really aiming. It’s so beautiful here. I noticed all too late, on my last night, that the starry sky in Palmer Rapids is unblemished by the town’s lights. (Bancroft, a town of 3,500 people, is about an hour west.) The AirBnB host said they’d planned to build an observatory there at some point.

The drive to Toronto, or rather the last 30 minutes of it, was as horrifying as usual: if suicidal drivers going 20% above the speed limit are any indication, Toronto is fully back to its pre-pandemic self. There was a very long eastward-bound traffic jam as everyone and their dog tried to escape the city for the long three-day weekend. (Civic Day is on Monday.) I ended up dropping off my rental car with two minutes to spare, and spent the rest of the day decompressing and playing with my precious gems. …I might have to invest in an actual display shelf now. Like I said, I have the strangest problems.

In covid news: this is not particularly significant, but I think it’s the same way around the world now: service industry workers just don’t seem to care about masks all that much anymore. At the car rental place, and at two stores I visited afterwards, employees wore their masks under the chin, or with the nose uncovered, or not at all. Some were righteously horrified by the vision of me wearing my mask, glasses, and face shield. Heh.

A couple of days ago, Vanity Fair published their inside scoop about the original covid plan that had been prepared by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The plan his group had come up with was actually surprisingly good, considering. Nonetheless, it got shut down in April, partly because Dr. Deborah Birx convinced Trump the covid numbers would improve shortly. The other, scarier part was the White House’s alleged belief that since the virus was hitting only the Democratic states (Washington, New York, etc), that would be a political benefit to the Republican party. That’s horrifying, but not outside the realm of possibility. There will be some mighty interesting tell-all memoirs years later…

I haven’t written much (or anything, really) about Dr.Birx on this blog. I try to avoid the topics I know little about, and I know next to nothing about her. I do know that she was a colonel in the US Army, and worked her way up in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health. Her path was different than that of the career CDC epidemiologists. (She joined the CDC only in 2005, when she was 49.) This is pure speculation, but it’s possible that the key difference between Fauci and Birx (the former stood up to Trump, the latter appeased him) is due to their background. Fauci also worked at the NIH, but he was never in the military. This is getting into pure armchair psychology, I admit, but I’m guessing his independent streak has been developed over the decades, while Birx (maybe, just maybe) got broken in by the military’s rigid command structure. I just don’t see any other good explanation for her unfounded hypotheses and predictions four months ago…

Social media reports should always be taken with a giant grain of salt, but folks in Miami are posting that it’s possible to buy a fake document stating you tested negative for covid. Horrifying if true. Likewise on social media, people are calling out some interesting inconsistencies in the official US covid data now that it no longer goes through the CDC. Some write that their local newspapers are filled with obituaries, even though the official covid numbers are showing a small decline. I remain on the fence: I wouldn’t put anything past this administration, but I also don’t want to spread what might not be true reports.

One of the first cruise ships that set off in Europe ended up becoming a covid hotspot. I’m genuinely curious how cruise companies plan to mitigate covid risks, and not just because I have some money riding on that. (I’ve invested in companies that got hit the hardest by the pandemic. In about a year or so, the return on investment should be impressive.)

I pity the future historians who will try to make sense of this gods-forsaken year…