Saturday night, whoop-whoop.

I was deprived of my usual weekend sleep-a-thon after being rudely awakened just nine hours later by my family’s ongoing texting thread. I’m really glad one of them just bought a house, but maybe more than 10 texts to celebrate on a Saturday morning is a bit excessive, no? Heh.

The plan to fight my cabin fever with pop culture immersion is partly effective, though not completely so. Tried and gave up on a couple of video games. Gobbled up the entirety of Way Station by Simak: a fine and imaginative sci-fi novel that aged quite well (considering it was written back in 1963) and had some beautiful writing. On the other hand, you could tell it was written a lifetime ago, because the sole female character was partly infantilized, partly treated like a prize horse by the very important men who decided all the very important things. I doubt I’ll be re-reading it…

In culinary adventures, I’ve finally unboxed and tried out the instant pot thingamajig that arrived about a week ago. I regret to say that my attempt to cook chili has resulted in soup-like concoction. Again. (A sign from the universe that I should become a soup chef?) On the upside, it was pretty funny to watch the landlords’ daughter’s Corgi go absolutely berserk when I let out the instapot’s steam. (The pupper wasn’t in any danger of scalding: we kept him away.) Whelp, the thing I created was still mostly edible, and there’s a lot of potential there. If it can really cook rice in just four minutes and quinoa in just one… Instapot, I think this is the beginning of a delicious friendship.

In covid news, the US has set a new record for new covid cases: over 84,000 new cases were recorded on Friday. Keep in mind that it’s still not easy to get tested there unless you lie about your exposure or symptoms. The real number is much higher, as always, but assuming the test access is the same as before, this flawed number is still an all-time high, still alarming, still dangerous. Dr Fauci just said in an interview that perhaps it’s time for a mask mandate…

And in more local news, someone started fires in toilet paper aisles of three local Walmarts over the course of one night. No one was hurt, the fires got put out, but that still caused $12MM CAD worth of damage. That might have been a bizarre attack by some anti-maskers making a statement against the lockdown. Then again, this is 2020, so anything is possible, eh?