Monday evening. I’m not entirely sure how one is supposed to celebrate Civic Day, so I did my best impression of a civil Canadian just in case. (Eh.)

Back to the mundane routine: a few hours of work and catching up on my emails, a load of laundry, etc. One of the many benefits of my comfy and adventurous vacation is all the different ideas popping into my head: I might have found a new hobby. If I succeed at it, it’ll make my life a whole lot more interesting. Just to keep from jinxing myself, I’m not going to describe what exactly it is – suffice to say, it’s creative.

Folks online have come up with an interesting term for what I’ve been doing in regards to covid: doom-scrolling. There’s always this idea that staying informed is a virtue, that being curious about the world around you is a fine and admirable trait. With hundreds of thousands of death, there’s no shortage of doom-and-gloom stories, and scrolling through all of them, if only just headlines… Yeesh. And yet, I want to keep track of what’s going on, if only so I don’t lose the thread of continuity. (Can you imagine explaining the world around us to someone who just got out of a seven-month coma? Yeah, good luck with that.)

So, here’s just a minor covid update: a bigwig from the Federal Reserve, one Neel Kashkari, claims that without one more long shutdown (four weeks, or ideally six), the US economy doesn’t stand a chance. The math checks out: if everyone tried really hard and stayed inside (again) for a month or so, the virus would be severely hobbled, if not defeated outright. The alternative – stretching out the current misery – seems easier on the surface, but it’ll cost a lot more lives and money in the long run. (Or even just the medium run.)

Of course, doing that would require the full cooperation of all fifty states and, most importantly, the White House… If Trump loses the election, and if he steps down peacefully, then maybe, just maybe, the Biden administration pulls the trigger and enacts the second lockdown in February 2021, six months from now. (Hopefully, I’ll become a permanent resident of Canada by then.) It just doesn’t seem likely that something on that scale would happen in 2020. Then again, I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll gladly be wrong on this as well.

To end on a positive note, here’s a mildly out-of-focus picture of an amethyst I found on my vacation. (I’ve brought back hundreds of little treasures like this one!)