Wednesday night.

Well, that was fast. I am now the proud owner of a sublease for a very basic studio smack in the middle of Toronto. (And with a parking spot!) The other guy was pressed for time, posted the ad with an offer I couldn’t refuse, and we signed the whole thing by email. (Yay PDFs!) I’ll pick up the keys tomorrow morning (which, unfortunately, means waking up before noon) and move the first batch of my stuff at the same time. It’s curious that my gem pile from the summer roadtrip managed to fit into just three buckets and one small box: they’d spent about five months laid out on a tarp in the corner of my room. Huh. There’s some kind of lesson here about our assumptions and reality.

In theory, I could just grab a Uhaul and move absolutely everything right away, instead of sloooowly transporting stuff from point A to point B (90-minute roundtrip) in my Kia. Just plain old laziness, I suppose. I should be done and out of here in a couple of weeks, hopefully. Three-and-a-half at most. (Ahh, yes, it just came to me. The studio has a fridge but not a freezer. I’ll have to diligently devour all my frozen goodies before I move. Yeah, that’s a perfectly valid reason. Heh.)

Small personal anniversary: today is the 200th day of my DuoLingo language lessons. They take up just a few minutes per day, but I’m better off for having taken them than not. Here is to many more days of linguistic edumacation.

…if this dog barking from the landlords’ daughter’s corgi continues, I might hire that Uhaul truck and run for it within a week. One definite quality-of-life upside of the basic studio: there are no pets allowed. No barking and howling or anything of the sort. Just blissful, beautiful silence.

In boredom news, I’ve borrowed the e-book version of Stephen King’s The Institute after seeing it on the Goodreads “best of 2019” list last night. I mostly like King’s short stories, since I still feel a bit cheated by the ending to his 1,000+page-long novel The Stand, but The Institute is showing great potential so far. King was 72-ish when he wrote it, and his writing and especially character description keep getting better and better.

In covid news, the first member of the US House of Representatives died of covid. Luke Letlow was Louisiana’s Congressman-elect. He was 41. He had no underlying health conditions. He was an anti-masker. He was photographed on many occasions not wearing a mask in indoor meetings. He had two little kids: three years old and 11 months old. Technically, he died of a heart attack. Contextually, that heart attack happened during an operation related to covid. (I’m not sure what that would be: were they pumping oxygenated blood into him?..) Covid deniers are disturbingly gleeful, pointing out that it was his heart that gave out, not his lungs. That’s like saying that a shooting victim died of blood loss: had there been no shooting, they would’ve lived. Had Letlow followed the most basic guidelines, he wouldn’t have caught covid, and he would’ve lived. Will anyone learn from him?..

Earlier, I wrote about other congress-critters who caught covid. Most of them were on the older side, and all of them recovered. Will Letlow’s death finally make his Republican colleagues realize that they’re as vulnerable as the rest of us? That they should maybe try to take this more seriously and stop obstructing aid? Time will tell.