Saturday night. The first night of the eighth month of the first year of covid.

I slept 10 hours, treated myself to my weekly Tim Hortons drivethrough meal, and spent a few hours playing video games with xgf after driving two hours to her little town and back again. Not a bad day, all things considered.

Two more days off before the slow inevitable return to the work routine. I’m not sure if I’ve written this before… One has only so many stories. Once upon a time, when I was a lowly warehouse grunt doing manual labour, I worked four days a week, 10 hours a day, and unless there was optional overtime, I’d get three-day weekends more often than not. I remember being exhausted from having so much time off. (I was mostly single back then.) Ahh, to be young and stupid, eh? The work wasn’t intellectually challenging in any way whatsoever (which is why I ended up writing a bunch of e-books as an intellectual diversion), but it was simple, and honest, and physically stimulating. Sometimes I miss those days. Now three-day weekends are a rare treat, though not as rare as back in the US.

…this really makes me wonder which aspects of my present life (pandemic notwithstanding) I’ll end up being nostalgic about five, 10, or 200 years down the road. (I aim to live to be 1,729 – so far so good!) I already know there’ll be hardly any salmon in the future: it’s already expensive, and given everything that happens to their habitat… It’ll probably be a rare luxury within a generation. There’ll be other unexpected outages or plain old shifts in personal preferences, I’m sure. The stock Instagram answer is, of course, to enjoy every minute of every day and every bite of every sandwich, but really, who has the attention span for that? Heh.

In covid news, worldwide cases are accelerating. Over the past three days, there were a million new covid cases worldwide – a new record. There are far more that have gone undiagnosed, of course, but even with the imperfect and shoddy methodology the world currently has… That’s still an awful lot. It hasn’t even been a year since the first reported case, and here we are. This winter is gonna be a wild ride, and the social inequities playing out after vaccines become available… Stay safe and stock up on popcorn if you can, folks.