Monday night.

It’s quite tempting to just write “fuckity-fuck fuck” for today, and to continue in that vein for the rest of the week. So very, very tempting. It won’t accomplish anything productive, though.

So starts my second year of pandemic. Exactly 365 days ago, xgf (né gf) and I looked up an AirBnB in rural Ontario, packed up, and started our big AirBnB odyssey. In some other world, where we never broke up, we might still be hopping between AirBnBs all over Ontario – grizzled yuppie survivors. Heh. Xgf is fine, by the way: I know I haven’t posted about her in a while. She’s still with her parents in a small town almost an hour away from Toronto, still bickering with them, but at the same time she’s probably eligible for Ontario’s phase two vaccination, so her own personal pandemic might end soon. (Or at least the first part of it; nobody has any idea when second shots will come out.)

A zombie bear ate me In my game, Serves me right for going shopping with just a pistol and a shotgun, and leaving my AK-47 at home. (That was 13 hours well spent.) My new character is mildly more cautious, but he still got almost killed by a pair of wolves and (on a separate occasion) a flock of zombie vultures. They really ought to do something about animal control in that apocalyptic dystopia, eh. If and when this game gets adapted for VR, it’ll be beyond amazing. The jump-scares are terrifying enough when it’s just on a computer screen. If it’s actually in your immersive reality… Yeesh. That’d be some grade-A almost-Walking-Dead experience.

If aliens ever invade and take over, daylight saving time will be one of the first things they’ll eliminate to make our world more rational. (Or maybe people just hate it because it happens on a weekend and not, say, at 1pm on a Monday.) Still, we get a whole extra hour of sunlight now. I get to watch the sunrise in bed once again, and – more importantly – I can enjoy a fair bit of daylight by walking outside right after work. It’s such a small luxury, to walk around in fading sunlight without having to worry if my lunch break is over yet… The weather is still crappy, though, so I managed to catch just the first part of tonight’s sunset before speed-walking back home. (When my legs started shaking on that park bench, that was a bit of a giveaway.) If and when it gets warmer, things will get better.

I spent a fair bit of my weekend reading up on trading options. That’s an incredibly complex subject, and I won’t do more than just dip my toes and buy calls and puts for next year: playing it as safe as possible with fairly small amounts of money. In a way, this is the most sophisticated form of gambling: all the concepts, the Greek terms, the exceptions to exceptions to exceptions… It doesn’t surprise me at all that most people just stick to buying and selling stocks. Meanwhile, I found a site that lets you screen stocks for not just their 52-week high but the two-year high, which lets me find stocks that have either fully recovered from last year’s pandemic dip, or have yet to recover. It gave me 161 grossly overpriced stocks (negative earnings, currently at the two-year high point, and over $1 billion market cap), which I reviewed at my leisure, narrowed down to seven, and then to just two. Somewhere, someone decided to sell some very cheap puts on one of those stocks (CX, a Mexican cement company) for waaay out in January 2023. I’m sure I’ll make money on that trade – I’m only curious when.

…I need other hobbies.

In covid news, the long-awaited Ontario vaccination booking portal has finally launched this morning. There were some issues but it appears to be back up again. Yay progress. General Hillier, the guy who helped prepare the rollout, said he’ll be stepping away now that his work here is done. It seems odd to bounce out when there’s still so much to do, so who knows, maybe there’s more to it. Canada’s vaccination effort is going at a snail’s pace but, well, at least it’s going.

Good night, y’all.