Tuesday night.

The biggest thing that happened today was finishing the Schitt’s Creek show. Xgf introduced me to it waaay back during our first month of the AirBnB odyssey, back in Deep River. I typically don’t like TV shows with spoiled rich protagonists who never worked a day in their life (looking at you, Game of Thrones) but Schitt’s Creek was remarkably wholesome. (Even if some characters did grate on my nerves sometimes.) It was filmed in Goodwood, a small town right next to Toronto. If and when this pandemic mess ends, I look forward to touring all the shooting locations like so many other tourists.

This is incredibly nerdy, but one of my posts on Reddit received over 10,000 upvotes and 10 awards from my fellow Redditors. (It was about a piece of trivia from WW2 that I discovered after spending about an hour reading random stuff on wikipedia.) One of the awards gave me a temporary trial of Reddit Premium, with access to their elite r/lounge subreddit. That place is remarkably free of controversial or political news – or any kind of news, now that I think of it. Just a bunch of people posting about their little life successes and not having much of a discussion. It felt a little bit too nice, which is suspicious in its own way. I wonder how many Internet reputation points I can score during this lockdown… Nah, that’d just be pointless.

A bit of good news: my New York sister flew back from Miami a week ago, and neither she nor her family has any covid symptoms. She said she tested negative twice, so huh, they actually managed to beat the odds. The way they described it, they just had two trips to a grocery store, and spent the rest of the time going from their condo to the pool and back. Even so, I’m glad they managed to get through the airport, fly out, and make it back without getting exposed. I still think it was a remarkably stupid idea to fly to a pandemic hot zone, but I’m glad she and hers are okay.

The much-awaited Georgia senate runoff election took place today. They’re tallying up the last votes right now. It looks like the two Republican candidates (David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler) are currently in the lead. Democrats need both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to win in order to control the senate. (50-50 split, with the VP being the tiebreaker.) Unless both Dems win, the Senate will remain under the Republican control, which means more obstruction – Mitch McConnell was recorded saying that exact thing just last month. Playing politics and sabotaging your opposition instead of passing stimulus bills… Still, there’s much that can be done just through executive orders.

I’m more curious about what will happen tomorrow, when Congress formally counts the electoral votes – the last step of the antiquated charade that is the presidential succession process. Trump apparently thinks that Pence can somehow overturn the whole process. A dozen of so Republican senators threatened that they wouldn’t count the votes if they think they’re fraudulent. The white supremacist gang Proud Boys will presumably converge on Washington DC to do who-knows-what. And just a couple of days ago, every living secretary of defense signed a public letter and stated that a) the election is over, and b) the military will remain neutral. Nobody knows what spooked them into making such a strange announcement, but whatever wild development (or overheard idea during a brainstorming session) inspired that, it must have been truly disturbing. Oh, and New York air traffic controllers received a broadcast from someone who promised to fly a plane into the Capitol on Wednesday to avenge the Iranian general that got killed in a US drone attack a year ago. (Thus almost starting a war.) I don’t go out of my way to find this sort of news – it just pops up on every news and social media platform. I feel confused just reading about all that from the comfort of my cozy bed in Ontario, so I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to actually have to live and deal with all that uncertainty in the US.

In covid news, England, Scotland, and Quebec are locking down. If I had to guess, I’d say most of the industrialized world is in some sort of lockdown at this point. And in LA county, ambulances have been instructed not to take people to the hospital if their odds of survival appear low. This is due to the ICU fullness and the severe oxygen shortage. They’re essentially in triage mode right now… I’ll never be able to come even close to imagining what it must feel like for those EMTs when they have to make that choice. If the UK variant spreads (and it does appear to spread much faster than the plain old covid-19), the strain on the system will be even worse.

Probably the only positive bit of news, covid-wise, is that the very first people who got vaccinated three weeks ago have just received their second shot, making them the first fully vaccinated people in the world. Time flies: feels like the first vaccinations were just last week. This is a minor but significant turning point. Let’s hope there’s more of those, eh?