Monday night. How come we still don’t have food replicators in 2020?

Another Monday of yet another workweek. Another step closer to becoming a full-fledged Canadian resident, though.

I’ve decided to switch up my relaxation repertoire by switching from the zombie game (too monotone after some point) back to Elder Scrolls Online. I broke that particular addiction after spending a couple of weeks hiking through the Ontario wilderness in July. The real world is just way more picturesque and beautiful than even the best video game visuals… Nonetheless, the writing in the game is amazing and occasionally hilarious, and even though every interaction is hard-coded, that almost makes up for the lack of socialization if you try hard enough.

Today was the first day of my exercise regime. Let me just state one thing: there ought to be easier ways to overload on protein. Eggs are insufficient due to their high fat/protein ratio, and even with my awesome homemade protein smoothie with its 78 grams of protein can only get me halfway there. I’ve ended up setting ye olde slowcooker to cook some random beans I’ve found to cover the gap. On the upside, I’ve found my old digital food scale, which means I no longer have to use a complex system of cups to guesstimate the true weight of things. (Come to think of it, the scale miiiight have been for drug dealers dealers, since I can’t imagine why any cook would need to measure 0.1 grams of something.)

My landlords are not opposed to me buying and them installing a pullup bar (my only weakness!) but in the meantime I visited a local park a few blocks away. I’ve officially become the weird man haunting a playground after sunset. (In my defense, I wanted to see if there was a pullup-compatible metal bar I could exercise on.) That was a little too weird, even for me. Gonna have to hit up that secondhand sports good store, I guess. Aside from the pullup fiasco, though, and my arms feeling like they’re about to fall off after 40 minutes of exercising, all is well! The trick, as always, will be getting enough sleep. At least some positive changes will come out of this long lockdown… (I apologize in advance to all the chickens I’ll have to devour over the course of this vanity quest.)

In covid news, we’re out of monkeys. The pandemic has been highlighting some unusual and occasionally bizarre bottlenecks in the worldwide supply chain but huh, monkeys. Go figure. Evidently, 60% of the monkeys used for testing in the US had been imported from China. China stopped all exports once the pandemic started. No monkeys means no testing, and given how much testing all the various vaccine candidates are going through… It’s a great time to be in the monkey business.

There was a particularly unbelievable anti-mask protest in St George, Utah. This news report is only 99 seconds long, and it’s hard to believe that was a real event with real people – as opposed to, say, some poorly written satire. My favourite part was where the ornery mob tried to storm a school building.

One bit of good news: the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine trial has resumed after being placed on hold for a few days due to one person’s adverse reaction in the UK. Here is hoping the rest will go smoothly… Any vaccine that proves successful will be distributed to hundreds of millions around the world. Even if there are 100,000 participants in your final phase, a single bad reaction could mean thousands of identical reactions once it’s rolled out. That’s only 0.001% but someone somewhere will end up getting that bad lottery ticket. Whatever ends up getting approved at the end will have to be as bulletproof as possible. Toes and fingers crossed, eh?