Sunday evening. If civilization collapses in a way that permanently eliminates the power grid, ice cream will become a strange and coveted memory.

A nice and quiet day filled with gaming, reading, and now some binge-watching before bed.

In today’s culinary adventures – to quote Arrested Development, I’ve made a huge mistake. I tried to pre-plan today’s meals by throwing a lot of chicken and beans into the slow cooker last night. Well, the end result was some highly nutritious yet completely tasteless goo that almost certainly broke the Geneva Convention. It took three separate attempts to eat the damn thing: it was so very, very tempting to just throw it all away, but hey, frugality. Lessons learned: even the slowcooker magic can only take you so far.

Today was a relaxy cardio day: just 20 minutes of stomping around in circles (in rectangles?) in the backyard. The end of my first week of trying to eat healthy (at least in terms of eating enough calories and protein) and doing compound exercises daily. I kind of sort of maybe feel like I can possibly some impact already, but that’s almost certainly placebo effect. I’m mighty curious how I’ll look a month or six months later, as long as I don’t give up on this project.

In covid news: depending on whose counter you trust, the official US death toll has either crossed 200,000 or will do some tomorrow. (It really is absurd: the excess deaths crossed 250,000 over a month ago. One counter says it’s 204,000 total; another says it’s 199,000.) Regardless, it’s bizarre how normalized this ongoing tragedy has become… The ongoing death toll means the US gets as many casualties from covid every three days as it got during 9/11. Is this indifference driven by the lack of larger-than-life visuals (it’s hard to ignore collapsing skyscrapers…) or by the existential fatigue? Or maybe by the media not reporting more on the runaway pandemic taking place in its own backyard?

I remember starting this blog and seeing the cumulative – not daily – US death toll go up to two thousand, then four, then more. That was a lot back then. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it reached 500,000 or more. When numbers get this high, you become numbed to them. Most of this was so easily avoidable…