Thursday night. I’m trading this and the next two Thirsty Thursday for one sober October, but that fourth Thursday – that’ll be pretty epic.

I’ve spent the evening playing around with my shiny new toy – Echo Show 8. It’s pretty amazing how much progress digital picture frames have made over the years. This thing is a supposedly immortal tablet thingy that’s slightly bulky but can play videos, show you pictures, and do all sorts of Amazon Alexa stuff. I’m looking forward to having it light up the room when the alarm goes off tomorrow: it’ll be either fun or ridiculously unpleasant. Stay tuned for more in the exciting lockdown adventures! Heh.

On a more serious note, after I uploaded pictures of my favourite art, I’ve set up a never-ending slideshow on that 8″ screen. This has the potential for being somewhat distracting, but it’ll definitely brighten up the dull routine.

I’m playing the pandemic game extra-cautiously (in case you haven’t gathered as much on this 216th day of my indoor adventures), which means spacing out grocery store visits as much as possible. Seeing as I’ve just run out of fresh fruit, meat, tea (not the tea!), starting to literally scrape the bottom of my big tub of protein powder, and I’m down to my very last multivitamin pill… Yeah, I’m gonna have to brave the wild wild world of suburban Toronto tomorrow and hope for the best, eh.

My Apocalypse Beard has gotten long enough to chew on, all classy and suave-like.

In covid news, this is pretty funny: after all the gyms got closed for 28 days in Toronto, the locals started invading the gyms in the suburbs. There are news stories, suburban folks complaining on social media, etc. Some gyms have started carding the newcomers to make sure they’re locals and not those big-city slickers with their high likelihood of being all infected-like. (I don’t know what’s up with the southern twang either, but it feels appropriate when discussing the hilarious “big city vs tiny town” dynamic. Yeehaw, eh?) That was pretty predictable, and yet here we are. Lockdown don’t work all that well if they’re geographically selective, and the GTA (the Greater Toronto Area, not the Grand Theft Auto) is one big ol’ area. I bet the owners of the closed Toronto gyms are mighty upset about all this.

Chris Christie (New Jersey’s former governor) has been discharged after spending a week in the ICU. Just about everyone knew that the cover story (spending a week in a hospital “for observation”) was nonsense, but that’s the world we live in now: white lies reported as transparent news. Christie survived despite having multiple factors that were against him. He released a statement that stressed the dangerous nature of the virus and advised everyone to wear masks. That’s entirely different from Trump’s approach: after leaving the hospital, he called his infection “a gift from God” (I am not making this up), and now he’s back to walking around without a mask and calling covid “Chinese virus.” …interestingly, some epidemiologists claim that the synthetic antibodies he’d gotten will not last, and may in fact leave him more vulnerable to reinfection. That’ll be pretty ironic if he just keeps getting sick after continuously and blatantly disregarding every single precaution out there.

Folks in the future who won’t have lived through this pandemic will have no clue how crazy all of this really was…