Friday night. Someday, I’ll look back and mourn all the unique life experiences I gave up by hiding from the virus for almost a year of my life. Today is not that day.

To quote Rihanna, “work work work work work.” Ants make colonies. Beavers make dams. I make beautiful spreadsheets and save my company millions. My work laptop remains my sole window into the world to the point where being a badass analyst and burying my head in numbers is just my default behaviour. I’m trying to tell myself that this is different from my earlier bouts of workaholism back in Seattle, but I’m not sure I’m buying it.

Day three without caffeine: the headache is less painful now and starts later in the day, but it’s still annoying. One unexpected upside: I sleep so incredibly well now. I actually get tired by 11pm (as opposed to bouncing off the walls until and after 1am), and wow, that is some restful sleep. (For context, earlier I was up to five or six cups of black coffee each day. All the energy for zero calories!)

The landlords finally took their kid out of school: he’ll be learning online now. Not sure what exactly changed convinced them to do so, but I’m glad they came to that conclusion. Now the only two vectors are the landlady’s office job and a few guests they entertain every week or so.

In covid news, after a long and painful waiting period, Toronto and the region of Peel (aka a bunch of Toronto suburbs) are going into 28-day lockdown starting first thing Monday morning. It’s really quite overdue… The lockdown will have restrictions on non-essential shopping, indoor dining, hanging out indoors with people from outside your household, and hanging out in groups of more than 10 outside. How they’ll enforce it is a whole different question: I expect there to be a lot of anonymous calls about house parties, I guess.

The virus got to a few more VIPs: senator Rick Scott of Florida and Trump’s son, Donald Jr, both tested positive for covid. Allegedly, both are fine. Then again, given how much misinformation and outright lying there was about Trump’s condition when he was sick, his son could be in the ICU, and we’d never be informed otherwise.

In better news, the covid strain found in Danish minks is most likely extinct now. If 2020 were a TV show, the writers would be all over the place: the mink strain is yet another plotline that had everyone’s attention and then dissipated into nothing. But hey, a win is a win, eh?

And in political news, there is a very sad, very slow-moving attempted coup underway. It has essentially no chance of success, but a coup attempt is still serious business. Trump is refusing to concede to Biden and keeps flooding the courts with frivolous lawsuits that allege global conspiracies. On top of that, Emily Murphy, the GSA (General Services Administration), is holding up the transition process by not signing off on it. There is no doubt as to how won the election, so her waffling is purely political – and costing lives, since without a proper transition, the new administration won’t be able to plan the vaccine rollout. It’s anyone’s guess whether Murphy will finally fold under pressure and deign to do her damn job, or hold up this charade all the way through January… Either way, not something you’d expect to see in an alleged democracy.

Try to enjoy your weekend, folks.