Monday night.

Today was marginally more productive than usual: I went through all my paperwork I’ve been lugging with me around North America: old mementos, tax documents, the many immigration documents, etc. I’ve learned three main things:

  1. Ye gods, I have a lot of greeting cards from friends and family and coworkers. Someday, somehow, I’ll actually sit down and read them all again.
  2. My old Russian classmates had a bunch of different looks and styles going on: a lot more than I remembered at the time. (Those class pictures from the 20th century will last forever!)
  3. I do not, in fact, have a birth certificate. It must’ve gotten lost somewhere somehow. Now comes the fun part: reaching out to my Siberian hometown to get them to fax (or mail?) me a copy, so I can translate and notarize it, so I can get a step closer to becoming a Canadian rescuer, eh.

No clue how busy folks are in Siberian hospitals right now, so this may or may not work. The whole process will almost certainly cost less than $100, but it’s such a churn… I wish I could ask my Amazon Echo to do it for me. (As a personal assistant, Alexa shows zero initiative. Tsk tsk.)

Tomorrow morning, at 7am, I’ll start the process for the experimental covid vaccine trial. That was about as early as they could fit me in the morning – work is rather understaffed right now, and I don’t feel comfortable leaving them for more than an hour. It feels so strange to actually make plans to drive 20 minutes north, to pick out a basic outfit for tomorrow, to remind myself to put some product in my hair lest they turn me away on sight. Heh. If nothing else, my car will finally get a good workout: I don’t think I’ve been on a highway since I moved into this studio. One major downside, of course, is getting up at or around 5am. Blargh. Blargh, I say.

In covid news, there was a bona fide covid riot in the University Hill neighbourhood in Boulder, Colorado. A party got out of control, and as many as 800 young people trashed the area, damaged cars, flipped over at least one of them, and ran away from the police. The video from the event shows zero masks worn by anyone involved. A guy who looks to be about 20 and who watched entirely too much Hunger Games gave an interview, claiming “this is a culmination of kindred spirits that have come together to put on something beautiful: a rebellion, revolution. They feel like they’ve had their freedoms taken away from them by the school, by the county. This was a revolt.” Yeah, no, someone is entirely too full of themselves. As months go by and restrictions remain in place while the world gets vaccinated, there’ll probably be more of this. This really is a global-scale marshmallow experiment, isn’t it?..

Good night, y’all. Stay safe, and get more sleep than I’m about to, eh.