Saturday evening.

Another anniversary, eh? Honestly, the thing that impresses me the most, anniversary-wise, is that I’ve logged over 300 consecutive days on DuoLingo. My Spanish is still quite broken but it’s definitely better than it had been before the pandemic.

Another day of the forever quarantine: reading, waiting, hibernating. It’s been six days since my mini-war with Switch Health’s video chat system, and five days since a courier picked up my test kit. Their portal says tests get processed within 3-5 days… After spending 20 minutes in their online chatroom, a customer support representative agreed that this is, indeed, weird, and assigned a special priority to get my kit located and processed.

I spent a couple of years processing escalations from Amazon’s FBA sellers: all in all, I processed 25,000 of them. (Why yes, that was indeed hell.) I’m getting some serious déjà vu from this system: it sounds like their backlog is huge, and processing things in FIFO order still takes more time than their service-level agreement, which means waiting and escalating is the only way. Today is day 16 of my quarantine (day 15 if you exclude the travel day), and I’m pretty sure no one has ever reported an incubation period that long. At least the weather is grey and chilly and miserable, or I would’ve been even more tempted to just run outside and, I don’t know, speed-walk around the block like a Canadian outlaw? It’s literally in my dreams at this point.

No Man’s Sky still has some gameplay-breaking glitches, even after all these years, so I’m going to cheat on it with Dying Light, which has just finished downloading…

In covid news, Ontario’s government faced severe backlash from absolutely everyone after their new restrictions got announced. They’ve managed to unite absolutely everyone, which is sort of touching and beautiful in its own way. Business owners, cops, doctors, people who hate lockdowns, people who don’t hate lockdowns but like intelligent measures, etc… This front page from a local newspaper should give you some basic idea of just how upset people are. In the past 24 hours, a lot of local police departments tweeted that they will not stop random pedestrians and drivers to ask for their papers, followed by an official statement from the Ontario government backtracking that particular order.

In addition to that, a lot of parents got righteously pissed off that new restrictions shut down playgrounds without doing anything about factories or warehouses. (Latest research claims that most cases come from industrial workplaces.) Guess what? The playground ban got reversed too. If all these local back-and-forth events I describe are confusing to you, try and imagine what it’s like for 14.6 million people to live this way, day by day. The whole thing stinks of some random backroom compromises: it doesn’t look like any doctors or scientists had been consulted at all. It’s good and right that they’ve reversed the course on this, but in doing so, they made themselves look like even more of a joke.

While I was typing all of that up, I got a text from Switch Health – looks like they found my test kit after all. Not gonna lie, I was concerned that the results page would say the test was inconclusive, thus sentencing me to another week of house arrest, but nope – I’m free! Wooooo! I don’t know why the PDF was in French, but I’ll take it. It’s almost 9pm here, and dark, and chilly (49 degrees Fahrenheit) but I’m off on a celebratory walk around the city, if only to get some exercise after 16 days of doing absolutely nothing. Wooooo! Woooooo, I say!

Oh, and Alaska has become the first state to offer vaccines to tourists (starting June 1) after also being the first state in the union to offer them to any resident 16 or older. Vaccine distribution kiosks will be in airports, just outside the secure area. Way to go, Alaska!

Sorry, brand new zombie game – I’m off to stalk the dark and empty streets of Toronto for exercise and brain-oxygenating purposes.

Good night, y’all. Stay safe.