Sunday night. Ages ago, when I was just a warehouse grunt, I worked 4×10 and had 3-day weekends. I remember being young and naive and stupid, and being too bored with my long weekends. Heh. I had no idea how good I had it. Here comes another week, same as the week before it, and not too different from the week that will follow, with only two days in between. Huzzay.

I don’t go out much these days: once a week for groceries, usually less often than that. During today’s cider run, I saw that the fancy organic grocery store across the street had a closeout sale. Looks like it’s been in progress for quite a while: it was odd to see empty shelves for the first time since April. The only remaining bargain I could find was frozen lean ground beef patties. The entire frozen goods section was 40% off, and the only thing left in the freezer was gluten-free dairy-free pizza that was too expensive and unpopular for its own good.

Incidentally, quite a few cashiers at local stores don’t give a damn about masks anymore, wearing them under their nose. When I gesticulated wildly at the cider store cashier, she wasn’t too happy about masking all the way up. Mask fatigue? I feel like someday, someone will come up with fancy terminology for all this.

In covid news… I’m getting tempted to resume normal life again. Yesterday, Canada had 315 new cases of covid. On the same day, the US had 44,269 new cases – 140 times more. Leadership matters. Even accounting for the 1/10 population factor, the US still had 14 times more cases per capita than Canada – and that was them on a good day. I doubt we’d ever get to experience 100 consecutive days without covid, the way Vietnam and New Zealand did (well, technically just 99 days for Vietnam), but still – at what point would I be able to draw the line and very, very cautiously venture out? Should one’s precautions be the same when thousands are dying and when the numbers drop by 90%? Or is this just my brain trying to sabotage itself? Not gonna lie, it would suck a lot to catch the virus after spending nearly half a year in self-imposed lockdown. Back to steamed veggies, refrigerated ciders, and frozen beef patties, I suppose.

And yet… As long as we keep the border closed and block the riffraff from that barbaric, backward, scientifically illiterate, violent, plague-infested ungovernable country down south (no offense), we just might become covid-free sooner rather than later. Maybe not 100 days in a row, but 10 – after starting with just one. One can only hope, eh?