Sunday night.

This is the last day of my 10-day staycation. It felt so damn nice and relaxing to just sleep and read and sleep and learn and sleep. Did I mention sleep? That “sleep” part was really nice. Oh well… There’s probably just a month left until I get my Canadian permanent residency, though there might be some delays. After that, a few other things will happen fairly quickly at one-month intervals, and after that… As days grow longer, so will my 2021 prospects grow brighter. (And yes, I did just knock on wood.)

Today’s adventure in logistics: I’ve managed to fit seven 18-gallon crates into my Kia, as well as a hamper filled with freshly dried laundry, and several suits, leather jackets, and my trusty old lab coat. (Fun prop, that.) I probably have just two trips left: I’ll knock them out on Saturday. For now, the focus is solely on moving things over: I can sort and arrange them later. Realistically, that means dumping them out of the plastic crates and onto a blanket I laid out on the floor. (Fancy, I know.) It’s so incredibly strange to see most of your possessions in one large pile, without any pattern, rhyme, or reason. It’s a bit like those word clouds that show the most commonly used words, except with things: old souvenirs and prized possessions and electronics, like some lazy modern artist’s snapshot of a life.

Boredom status: I’ve listened to an almost-three-hour-long podcast where Sean Carroll (you know, the physicist) described the way time travel could or could not work in Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity, all while playing Skyrim (my orc’s mercenary got stuck on top of a waterfall; it was pretty hilarious) and driving to and from my studio. It’s both humbling and educational to listen to experts talk about their favourite subjects. That goes so far beyond your basic pop science books and much closer to the deep end of the pool. I admit I lost track about halfway through, but both the podcast and the podcaster’s hatred of Back to the Future were rather entertaining.

In political news, there are more and more half-assed coup attempts in the US. At this point, it’s gone well past ridiculous into tiresome into “come on, really? again?” It started out with 12 Republican senators threatening to sabotage the congressional certification of the electoral vote on January 6. Their apparent ringleader, senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is demanding an “emergency 10-day audit” because of some alleged fraud, the evidence for which no one has been able to actually provide. To make things worse, Washington Post just published a story about (and a recording of) Trump’s call to Georgia’s secretary of state, where he demanded to “find” enough votes to help him flip the state. The call happened just yesterday. Either he made similar calls to the governors of other narrowly-lost states, or he doesn’t understand that Georgia alone won’t help him win.

Either way, there’ll be even more embarrassment and sabotage attempts before Biden’s inauguration on January 20. They could’ve been spending all that time and energy to come up with better anti-covid campaigns or help the 50 states with their vaccination drives…

In covid news, minor correction to what I wrote yesterday: Rod Phillips, Ontario’s disgraced finance minister who participated in Zoom calls so close to his Caribbean beach that people could literally hear the waves in the background, did not quite lose his job. He stepped down as the finance minister but he’ll remain an MPP (Member of Provincial Parliament). He’ll take a 30% pay cut but I’m pretty sure that at some point within a year, once the dust settles, he might find himself in another prestigious position. Standard PR maneuver, really: issue a non-apology apology, step aside (without quitting), then come back in six months or a year – two years, tops. What works for abusive comedians, works for politicians as well.

In more global news, both the US and the UK are starting to entertain some pretty scary vaccination ideas… The first idea is to give people just one dose of the two-dose vaccine – and hope for the best. That’d help vaccinate more people but the herd immunity would be much more difficult to achieve. The second idea is to mix and match random vaccines: get a shot of Pfizer followed by a shot of Moderna three weeks later, or vice versa. Every pharma company out there very quickly pointed out that that’s a horrible idea for which they will not be held liable. The last (but not least horrible) idea is to give folks two shots (yay) from the same manufacturer (also yay) but 12 weeks apart instead of three weeks. No studies have been done on something like that, and there’s no evidence that it’d result in identical or better protection.

They had months to prepare for this… I really hope it won’t come to that, and that they’ll just work out better logistics for that “last mile” vaccine delivery, but they’ve underperformed almost every step of the way in the past… Hope everlasting, eh?