Monday night.

Today was my first workday at the tiny studio that I now call home. Aside from two daily calls with my coworkers, there’s no more human interaction. It’s alarming how fast I adapted to the fact that I can just roll my chair from the bed to the desk to the kitchen, with an occasional bathroom break. A bubble of one…

My brilliant plan to spend my time walking around Toronto and people has one minor flaw: I forgot how early it gets dark. I typically finish work by 6pm, and prowling the streets in the darkness… Let’s just say there won’t be much to see. Google says February 24 will be the first day with the sunset after 6pm. Whelp, I guess I’ll just walk and gawk extra-hard on weekends.

I’ve come up with a new distraction to avoid watching the news: the Stardew Valley video game. I wrote about it a long time, during the second month of the AirBnB odyssey, about nine months ago. It’s such a simple, wholesome, and addictive game. There is no disease there, not even seasonal sniffles. (Though I think one NPC has allergies.) My alter ego has a little farm and spends his time selling his wares, fishing, and exploring local mines while fighting monsters. As far as I can tell, that game is more or less endless. That’s good: I might need that.

It’s been five days, and the US government still hasn’t held even a single briefing about the attempted coup. With every passing days, it’s getting more and more absurd. (Can you imagine going almost a whole week without any official updates after 9/11?) In a refreshing change of pace, the FBI is actually proactively warning the entire country that there will be armed protests in all 50 states (as well as Washington DC) this weekend, just before the inauguration. It’s hard to tell whether the protesters will be encouraged by the very nearly successful coup, or discouraged by all the arrests that followed. If even one of those protests turns violent, everything will go to hell: that’ll prove that the attempted coup was the beginning of a new trend, and not a random improbable outlier.

In covid news, another one of my coworkers got infected. He even knows how that happened: two weeks ago, he met up with his neighbour to watch a football game on TV. The neighbour tested positive a day or two later. My coworker got it a few days after that.

…if vaccines end up not working on all the new covid strains that have been popping up (especially the one from South Africa), and if the rollout continues at the same slow pace, then sooner or later we’ll all catch covid. I aim to be among the very last ones. (So far so good!) Learning how exactly the people I know got sick isn’t just morbid curiosity – it’s a way to learn from their experience, and to make my own that much safer.

Hang in there, y’all.