Thursday night. Is there a greater tragedy than not being thirsty on a Thirsty Thursday?

An interesting development today: the company that’s helping me apply for PR in Canada has emailed me about biometrics. Apparently, Canada stopped taking the applicants’ biometric data when the pandemic began, all the way back in March. They’ve just reopened them – and hopefully won’t close them again if new cases keep rising. They’ve got one hell of a backlog, but that means at some point I’ll get a call from my friendly neighbourhood government official, inviting me to come in and give them my retinas and what not. That will likely be the only social interaction I’ll have that month, so I guess I’ll have to keep my phone’s volume set on high just in case. (The “do not disturb” mode is so much more peaceful.)

The body is still aching all over from daily workouts, but in a good way. Yay variety!

In the ESO game I’ve resumed playing, I’ve discovered the concept of player guilds – as well as guild-only markets. Now my character specializes in buying random food ingredients in bulk, cooking hundreds of servings, and destroying that fantasy world’s economy by dumping them all on the market. The mad chef! …hey, there’s no wrong way to roleplay, okay?

In covid news, the updates coming out of the US are getting wilder every single day. It took months for this story to see the light of day, but evidently there had been a program proposal to send five masks to every address and PO Box in the US, all the way back in April. The White House shut it down, presumably because Trump didn’t want to cause panic. (One assumes he didn’t want to panic Wall Street, because his random tweet-storms sure as hell cause panic domestically.) It’s hard to tell how many lives would’ve been saved…

On a brighter note, the Navajo Nation has crushed covid. They had a fraction of the US resources, and far less personnel, but they followed all the CDC guidelines, enacted strict lockdowns, mandated masks, organized a PR campaign equating wearing masks with showing respect, etc. The end result is that earlier this month, they had one day with no new recorded cases. (Even though they had four new deaths…) They recorded one new case the following day, so there was no winning streak per se, but that’s still great news. In May, the Navajo Nation was a major covid hot spot. Now they’re the envy of everyone around. The US could’ve been in the same exact boat if it just followed its own damn guidelines… Anyway, good for the Navajo Nation.

From an anecdotal perspective: now that the west coast wildfires no longer threaten them, my brother tried getting a covid test just in case before visiting our mom. (They both live in Seattle’s suburbs; she’s in her 60s.) The local clinic told him that tests are reserved only for those who are showing symptoms or were exposed. In other words, the whole “if you want to get tested, you can get tested” thing the US politicians have been promoting is still a lie. Even now, in mid-September, after all these months… Whoever reads about this pandemic in the future, without having experienced it (lucky bastards), will not be able to understand the sheer insanity of it all. Hell, I’m here and now, and even I can’t wrap my mind around it. This is gonna be a long winter…