Grigory Lukin.com

Monday night.

…I just can’t get enough of that “outside” place. Today, I went out three times, as if I were a kid all over again. First, a Tim Hortons brunch (hey, you don’t get to judge me), then an excursion to a nearby park (it was sweater weather; thick sweater), and finally a run to the nearby store to finally pick up the remaining art supplies I’ll need to tackle the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain workbook. (It comes with a lot of requirements, eh.) Between that, the untouched set of oil paint I got for Christmas, and my friends’ assurances that yes, it is in fact possible to learn guitar basics on youtube, the second quarantine should be a bit more entertaining than the first. Hopefully, the weather will be better when I re-emerge from it: this is as close as I’ll ever get to hibernation.

But meanwhile… A selfish part of me spent quite a lot of time planning a very elaborate post-quarantine trip between Toronto, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Reno, Vegas, and New York, which would have to fit in 33 days. (For tax reasons, if I spend more than 35 days per year in the US, my expat tax immunity will disappear.) And then I saw some local headlines that vaccination site volunteers have been posting online to notify folks when there are available doses. New plan: once I get both of my shots and emerge from the quarantine, I’m going to spend as much time as possible helping my fellow Canadians get vaccinated, eh. I don’t believe in karma, but it’ll be something interesting to do, a chance to fight the good fight at long last, and a way to maybe make some new friends. (My penpal friend from Los Angeles can’t make it here in May after all. Bah, humbug.) But after that, though – that 33-day trip is going to be well deserved and utterly amazing.

I mentioned the Dying Light game a couple of nights ago. For the record, it’s completely and utterly terrifying. It’s made by the same people that created Dead Island way back in 2011, and it looks like they doubled down on the strongest parts of the game: urban landscape, infected (but not quite zombie) people running at you with improvised weapons, terrifying noises in the background, occasional human-like whimpers… I had to put the game aside for a bit and cleanse my palate with the most wholesome game I know – Stardew Valley. Trying something different this time: the new character is named Jenny, and she’s already created a parsnip monopoly while slaying monsters in underground abandoned mines. Sort of like Buffy but in the rural environment. That game is something else.

Next reading project: “Sell Out,” a series of short stories by Simon Rich. They were originally published in New Yorker and can’t be found on Kindle: I like a challenge!

In covid news, yesterday they were only four covid deaths in Britain. That’s still four too many, but that was their lowest daily death toll since September – a significant victory and hopefully the beginning of the end. It’s wild how some countries are seeing their healthcare infrastructure crumble while others are very nearly recovered. The next 12 months will be quite strange.

Good night, y’all.

Sunday night.

My first full post-quarantine day was delightful. Outside, you couldn’t really tell there were more restrictions than when I entered my 16-day house arrest. Including today, I have only five days before the second trip, before the second period of isolation in my little studio…

A Tim Hortons takeout meal is what passes for high cuisine when you account for safety in this here pandemic. (I would’ve gotten it through the drivethrough, but there aren’t any of those anywhere near.) An overworked cashier forgot to include one of my doughnuts: I didn’t protest. Inside, an old woman was defiantly wearing her mask under her nose. An old man with a walker, hard of hearing, wasn’t wearing a mask at all. The masked employees said nothing to either of them. Were they too afraid to anger their customers? Did they give a damn? Did they used to give a damn but stopped because they were overwhelmed? So many mysteries. For what it’s worth, the meal and the black coffee tasted absolutely delicious once I got them back to my place. It’ll become my staple – unhealthy but yummy – until my second trip, because the 16 days to follow will be more of the same old instapot cooking. (Why yes, my life really is very exciting right now. Heh.)

I finally got a chance to stretch my legs and spent a couple of hours wandering through the University of Toronto campus. It’s beautiful… The old cannons that were sunk when the French lost their claim to what is now Quebec. The beautiful Soldiers’ Tower. The wilted memorial garden. Once the world reopens, I’d love to see the inside of all those little museums and galleries too. For now, though, I made do with cherry blossoms: there weren’t many cherry trees on campus, but even so, it was beautiful.

I’m finally done reading Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, David Remnick’s Pulitzer-winning opus about the last few years of the Soviet Union. At over 600 pages, the pacing was uneven: some parts were dry and slow as molasses, while others were literally LOL-funny and fast-paced. (I’m sure that wasn’t the book’s intent but I got some interesting – and perfectly legal! – entrepreneurial ideas from it…) Overall, it was an excellent and educational addition to my collection. Growing up in post-perestroika Russia, history was always in a state of flux. Even in my class of 30 gifted kids, we weren’t allowed to learn what happened in the 20th century – probably because there was no official compromise on what to teach the next generation. As a result, we ended up covering Russian history from the 10th through the 19th century, and never went beyond. I think we covered the same 900 years three times in a row over the course of several years. It was pretty funny, really… Needless to say, they didn’t teach us anything about western history, either. (There was some world art appreciation which covered ancient civilizations; that was neat.) In our final school year, one of the teachers took pity on us and tried giving us a 40-minute-long crash course on the 20th century, but how much can you really fit into a single short lesson?

Reading Remnick’s book, old childhood memories started bubbling back up: all the different newspapers we used to read, the sudden overnight changes in currency as our ruble lost more and more value, all the political chaos… Some parts were genuinely new to me: all the post-Stalin massacres, or the much lighter pieces, such as Yeltsin having lost his left thumb and index finger when he tried to break apart a stolen grenade using a hammer when he was 11 years old. (That was a very Russian sentence, I know.) My overall opinion remains unchanged: I left Russia when I was almost 17, back in 2003, I’ve never gone back, and I never will – or at least not as long as it remains a de facto dictatorship. Who knows, maybe it’ll eventually recover, the way Spain did after Franco stepped aside. Improbable but not impossible. If not… Oh well. The country that robbed my great-grandfather for the high crime of being a merchant and that threw my grandma into a Gulag work camp for almost a decade for the high crime of telling a few political jokes to her fellow university students – that country has an awful lot to make up for.

Aaaaanyway… I’m planning my Friday road trip to Ohio. It’s interesting how different towns and municipalities have switched into distinct little camps: some offer only Moderna, some only Pfizer, others can’t even tell what they’ll offer. The latter was why I switched my appointment from the town of Warren (their description was essentially a big shruggie emoji) to Toledo, which has a Pfizer-only vaccination center. If anyone asks, I am and always have been from Toledo. Love ya, Glass City! Goooo Rockets! Or Walleyes when it’s hockey season! Suck it, Bowling Green Falcons!! Go team go!!! There, that should help me pass any scrutiny, I think. Aside from my Canadian license plate and phone area code, I’m invincible: got my US passport, got a fake local address memorized, and overall treating it with the same sort of overkill seriousness that Annie from NBC’s Community did for her fake ID background. After all, how often does one get to roleplay as a vaccine spy in another country? Heh.

In covid news, the majority of US adults have now received at least one shot of their covid vaccine: as of today, 209,406,814 vaccines have been administered to 50.4% of all US adults. That is huge. Absolutely huge. Maybe now Biden’s lawyers will find some clever loopholes to kinda-sorta-not-really break the 2020 contract and export all the vaccines they’re not using to other countries. (Not even necessarily Canada – literally anyone, ideally Brazil.)

Meanwhile, in Canada… There’s a strange generational standoff: the AstraZeneca vaccine was approved only for people 55 and older. They had their pick of Pfizer, Moderna, and AZ but refused to take the latter, which resulted in a lot of half-empty vaccination clinics and, as some pharmacists claim, precious AZ vaccines expiring because no one under 55 was allowed to get them. (One pharmacist wrote about a 53-year-old plumber literally crying because he couldn’t get the AZ shot and nothing else was available.) This is a zero-sum game: by declining the AZ vaccine, they take away a Pfizer or Moderna shot from the younger crowd. The younger crowd, in turn, can’t get their hands on AZ even if they sign a liability waiver. The consensus right now is that the older folks are getting scared shitless through social media, word of mouth, and sensationalist TV reporting on AZ: they’re not deliberately malicious after the sacrifices other age groups have made over the past 14 months, but it sure seems like that from the outside looking in…

Good news on that front, then: Canada’s federal health minister, Patty Hajdu, has just announced that provinces are “free to use” the AZ vaccine on anyone 18 and older. The NACI committee (which, as far as I can tell, is not elected by anyone and wields remarkably disproportionate power for a bunch of mere advisors) is expected to officially concur in a few days. The practical outcome is that Ontario has said it’ll start administering AZ to folks 40 and older. (Great news, plumber-dude!) About time, eh.

And in all the insanity with Ford’s changes and counter-changes, I forgot to mention that even though Canada’s Moderna shipments are delayed, we’ll be getting a lot more Pfizer. We’ll be getting 8 million doses on top of what had already been ordered, and they’ll arrive between May-July. A total of 24 million Pfizer doses will get here between April-June if all goes well. That is excellent, excellent news – though I’m not sure if local provincial governments will be able to handle the logistics of vaccinating literally everyone. I hear good things from British Columbia, but Ontario has not been very organized, to put it mildly… We’ll see.

Good night, y’all.

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.

Friday night.

This ends in seven days. I finally made it through my last normal workweek and started my two-week vacation, and then… Wait until next Friday, drive to Ohio, get a test and my second shot, drive back. Send a two-week notice to my boss. Cash in the remaining personal time for the last week, then work (from home, as always) on the first week of May, while waiting two weeks for the second shot to fully settle. And then… Freedom. Early retirement, immunity, no more rat race, just pure exploration, and doing whatever the hell I want. (Within the latest public health guidelines, of course.) This is it, this is the final stage at last – at long, long last.

Exactly 168 hours from now, I’ll be back home, likely experiencing some side effects as the second shot of Pfizer does its job. So soon. So very soon…

As promised yesterday, I switched to a pizza-based diet. Heh. The delivery guy handed it to me from around the lobby door, with both of us masked. I’m pretty sure I didn’t jump on this strange novelty (my first pizza in at least three months) like a ravenous beast, but it probably wasn’t pretty. I feel the way a python likely feels after devouring a medium-sized mammal: at some point, I’ll have to throw something else in my piehole, but that point is very far away. (And there’s plenty left for tomorrow.)

Another sign that things are looking up: a girl I went out on two dates with, well before the pandemic, texted me out of the blue. We’re not relationship-compatible, but it’ll be great to start building a local friend circle again. In fact, that’ll probably be my biggest project this year. And meanwhile, as I spend all this time in lockdowns and quarantines, I might go ahead and install Dying Light – a zombie game that I somehow completely missed, even though it came out in 2015. How weird is that? Steam really ought to offer discounts to people living in covid disaster areas, but fiiiine, I’ll pay the full $60 CAD for the enhanced edition. It’ll pay for itself if it keeps me from going mad with this house arrest business.

In covid news… There is a lot of covid news. After rescheduling his press conference multiple times this afternoon (presumably to reach some consensus on new measures), Ford told us that Ontario will not get hit with a curfew, but we also won’t be getting paid sick days. Without them, the rest of this giant restriction list is really rather pointless. I simply don’t understand political conservatives who oppose paid sick days: yes, it costs them some money to institute that, but it costs even more money if a sick employee infects their colleagues and customers. I get that it’s a one-way door: once they offer it, it’ll hurt them a lot politically to take it away later on. But, you know, pandemic? People dying? Full ICUs?.. I guess that doesn’t phase them.

One of the weirder new restrictions is the travel ban. Unless you have a good reason to drive into Ontario from Quebec or Manitoba, you might get turn around at a checkpoint. More disturbingly, the police have been authorized to pull over any car or stop any pedestrian, ask for their ID, and write them a ticket if they’re not traveling for an essential purpose. (Groceries, pharmacy, medical, exercise, or work.) An awful lot of civil rights groups are mighty pissed off about this. I hope that the sheer laziness of Ontario’s cops will be our salvation. They do nothing about people who drive 30% over the speed limit (or 20% under, for that matter) on highways. They did nothing about the BBQAnon demonstrations in November. (No fines were issued to any of those morons, as far as I know.) They stood there and watched as international travelers walked away from airports and said they’d rather get a fine than quarantine in a hotel. It’s possible we’ll end up under a miniature dictatorship with cops gone wild, but I think it’s more likely that absolutely nothing will happen. We’ll see.

Perhaps the weirdest part of it all was Ford asking other provinces for help (500 nurses, 100 respiratory therapists, etc) while declining Justin Trudeau’s offer of sending Red Cross to Ontario to help us out. (That is literally what Red Cross is for.) Trudeau is Ford’s political opponent (or so Ford thinks), and this is yet another in the long series of remarkably counterproductive decisions that keep extending our pandemic here in Ontario. The one thing they couldn’t restrict was air travel: that belongs to the feds, not provinces. People online are already joking about Ontario ordering a shipment of surface-to-air missiles… Oh, and the state of emergency/stay-at-home thingy got extended by two weeks. Now it’ll last until May 20th. It’s so extremely strange (not for the first time, nor the last) to consider that I’ll be fully vaccinated and living in an empty, locked-down city: my post-pandemic life will overlap with a full-on emergency order for weeks. That’s gonna be so strange…

Meanwhile, elsewhere… Things are getting much worse in India. Yesterday, they had 217,000 new cases, more than anywhere else in the world. That’s less scary per capita, but those numbers are growing and getting worse. This article describes (and shows in its video) the horrific hospital situation in New Delhi, with two patients per bed, and with dead bodies being placed outside the ward before they’re taken to the mortuary. A coworker of mine casually mentioned today that he just lost two relatives in India. Small world… India is capable of great logistical feats, but it also has well over a billion people, and it might not be possible for them to keep following social distancing rules. I hope things get better there, but if they don’t… That will get ugly.

Good night, y’all.

Thursday night.

One thing I’ve definitely accomplished during this pandemic: I got several of my local coworkers to start saying “Happy Thor’s Day.” They might be doing that just to humour me, but I want to believe that this one-man meme will take off. Today, Ontario. Tomorrow, Canada. Next week, the world! mwahaha

(Why yes, I am indeed quite bored.)

In my virtual world, No Man’s Sky, I ended up adopting a brontosaurus-looking dinosaur, and now I have a giant pet merrily running around when I explore new worlds. (I know “brontosaurus” is not the preferred nomenclature but hey, I was grandfathered in, so I get to use it forever.) The imagery and the overall feel of those virtual worlds is downright amazing, even though I know it’s a lie. This is, at best, a shoddy substitute for real travel, for real discovery. I remember, back in August, when I returned from my giant roadtrip where I explored abandoned mines and collected lots of shiny minerals. After all that, the virtual world of Elder Scrolls Online seemed like a flat cardboard cutout, though it boasted some amazing graphics. This is a little bit like Matrix: can I truly enjoy the incredibly detailed and beautiful virtual worlds when I know that I’m literally unable to explore the real world?..

Online, the Vaccine Hunters group has expanded its arsenal: now there’s a twitter account that sends out notifications as soon as we learn about a pop-up clinic. Those started going up within the last two weeks: they’re not announced in advance, they target hot-zone neighbourhoods, and they just set up and give out several hundred doses to everyone who lines up. The twitter account spreads the message as soon as we learn where the new pop-up clinic is located that day. This is so cyberpunk… A ragtag group of cyber-volunteers using the worldwide web to send out immediate notifications to people’s handheld mini-computers, telling them the locations of pop-up clinics distributing the rare vaccine against a highly dangerous virus that’s killed three million people. And as in any decent cyberpunk novel, the government is utterly useless and held hostage by giant international corporations. Heh. What a world…

Due to work and the general lack of know-how, I don’t have the time or the ability to help locals find their vaccination appointment slots. That said, by now I’ve consulted quite a few Canadians (about 15-20) on the logistics of getting to the US to get vaccinated. It’s hard to believe that driving to another country is easier than finding a vaccine here, locally. I’m sure at least a couple of the people I talked to will heed my advice. If a person that helps smuggle people across the southern border is called a coyote, does that make me a moose? Gonna have to change my online nickname from Platypus Prime to Major Moose if this keeps up!

In more prosaic and down-to-earth news, I’m kinda running out of food. I’d planned to buy enough groceries to last me two weeks in quarantine: even with my bread going moldy and with the eggs getting frozen solid in this ridiculous tiny refrigerator, I still have some stuff left to munch on, but not a whole lot. Today’s lunch was a can of tuna, two apples, some muesli with honey, and a cup of green tea. I’ve still got a big box of cereal, an untapped jar of peanut butter, and a block of cheese, Last night, I devoured the last two cups of Ramen noodles and the last of the tortilla chips. (They make a fun, if sad, meal if you microwave them with some cheese on top. Sad but delicious.) Protein is gonna become an issue soon.

Today is my 14th day of quarantine, and you’d think I’m free to go. Unfortunately, the official rules state I must wait for the results of my 10th-day covid test. A couple of issues with that… The courier company they use doesn’t work weekends, so they picked up my sample on the 11th day instead. (And if your 10th day falls on a Friday – congrats, your quarantine is now three days longer just because of the pickup delay.) And given the utter chaos and all the bottleneck issues of their mandatory video chat on Sunday, I’m going to assume they’re quite overwhelmed and might have a backlog of tests to process… As always, I hope I’m wrong. I really, really want to go for a long walk outside: if all the streets are empty and I don’t pass any other people, then how am I a danger to everyone else? It’s been two weeks since my last human interaction, and I have no symptoms, so in a way, I might be the safest person in Ontario right now. I’m going to stay put for two more days (at least in part because the weather forecast is pretty bad) but if there’s still nothing by Saturday… I’m honestly not sure what I would do. On the one hand, I want to be a law-abiding Canadian. On the other hand, not all the laws are meant to be obeyed. If their lab is so overwhelmed that it’d take them, say, two weeks to process the results, are people really expected to spend 24 whole days indoors? (27 days if their test happened on Friday.)

If I do choose to be a blindly rule-following shut-in – well, that right there is a perfect opportunity to go full-on bachelor and live off pizza delivery. I do need my protein, and I just don’t trust the grocery delivery people to keep meat cold enough while they’re delivering it. That’d also make for a weird party story at some point in the future – how I was a patriotic Canadian by spending my staycation locked in a small studio, eating pizza, and playing video games – all for the sake of public health! If I do that, I’ll be living my teenage dream: for my 13-old self, that would’ve been a perfect lifestyle. How strange this life is…

In covid news, things are getting even worse here in Ontario. Ontario’s population is 14.6 million. The latest projections show that we’ll get 12,000-18,000 new cases per day by the end of May. The province’s 2,300 ICU beds could also become overwhelmed, with 1,600-1,800 of them going to covid patients. Every option is on the table right now: ugly options such as triage, as well as riot-inducing options such as mandatory curfew. (Quebec has had it since January, but when they tried to lower it to 8pm, people literally rioted.) I wonder if one of Ford’s many advisors will finally convince him to institute paid sick leave. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person to back down and admit he was wrong, and his stubbornness is making this pandemic even longer.

Meanwhile, there are some bad logistical delays. Moderna’s shipment of 1.2 million shots was expected to arrive next week. Instead, it’s delayed, and might not get here until the first week of May. With everyone and their dog being terrified of AstraZeneca (thanks, media) and refusing to take the AZ appointments, that leaves just Pfizer. With no domestic vaccine manufacture of its own, Canada depends on other companies and other countries for all of its supply, and this is just one of the possible scenarios that unfortunately materialized. (Other, worse scenarios include the EU banning all exports. That would be bad.) Because of the delay and the uncertainty, the entire country’s vaccination scheduled is up in the air. Some of the local clinics have already stopped offering new vaccination slots… So fragile, this vaccination timeline of ours. The big ambitious goal of giving each Canadian at least one shot by Canada Day (that’s July 1st for all you outsiders) might be in serious danger now. As always, once again, I really hope I’m wrong…

Stay safe, y’all. Enjoy some fresh groceries and lovely walks outside on my behalf, eh? I’ll just be here, munching on patriotic pizza and playing patriotic video games.

Tuesday night.

That Old Man’s Sky game never ceases to surprise me. One random planet I just landed on is filled with dinosaurs. It’s also highly radioactive, so good luck to all the promo-mammals out there. You’re gonna need it, little dudes. Oh, and the overabundant flying killer robots aren’t helping either, but hey – it’s a planet full of dinosaurs, and that makes up for a lot of things. I’ve established my latest base (conservatively named “Dino World!!!”) out there, and just the sheer entertainment value will be enormous as I explore that new world.

That game came out five years ago, and it’s still amazing – at least to me. It would’ve been the height of science fiction just 20 years ago. And 15 more years from now… I can’t even imagine. We might not get holodecks, but what fascinating new directions will the video game industry take, I wonder? Haptic-feedback bodysuits, as featured in Ready Player One? More versatile and less bulky VR headsets? Something entirely different? Between advances in small drones, 3D printing, and gaming, we’ll probably get a lot of really cool stuff in the coming decades – assuming we don’t get more pandemics and get out of the semiconductor bottleneck. (Oh yeah – if you’re reading this in the future, the supply lines for high-tech components have pretty much collapsed.)

My impromptu (and entirely self-imposed) house arrest is made mildly more bearable by the crappy, chilly weather outside my window. The occasional person coughing their lungs out just underscores that the outside world isn’t really all that great right now. Still, I look forward to being able to go on a long walk, or partake in my usual Tim Hortons meal… It’s really minor, considering all the huge societal changes that have occurred during the pandemic, but wow, I’d never thought that fast food, of all things, would become the meal I’ll look forward to the most. After my second vaccine, and after yet another two-week house arrest/quarantine, and if they allow restaurants to reopen… I can’t wait to have the first proper meal in well over a year. I fetishize the sensation of holding a menu and contemplating the overabundance of choices that won’t come from my instapot. I salivate even now as I imagine the crunchy, juicy, texture-filed sensation of a cheeseburger…

This line of thought is not helping my house arrest blues.

In covid news, there’s an interesting interview with Dr Michael Warner, the head of critical care at a nearby Toronto hospital and a formidable social media presence. His stories are chilling… More importantly, he claims the ICU shortage is so severe that they had to clear out their pediatric department to make more space for sick adults. He claims the exponential growth is turning Toronto into the same nightmare as New York and Italy a year ago. When an expert of his caliber speaks, we should all listen. One of the factors he explicitly mentions is Doug Ford’s refusal to even consider paid sick days in Ontario – as if it were some political issue and not a vital necessity. Ford is a college dropout and an idiot, but other people aside from him, around him, ought to have realized how exponential growth works. There are more low-key headlines about Ontario potentially switching to triage when ICUs completely run out… It’s tempting to say that we should let mathematicians run things to prevent future nightmares like this one from happening ever again, but that’s not a perfect solution either. Robert McNamara was a great mathematician, for example, but he had zero understanding of psychology or politics, which is why he failed to win the Vietnam War despite clear numerical superiority. Will we as a society ever be able to find a good compromise between electing idiots and nerds?

In other news, the US is recommending a “pause” for the Johnson&Johnson vaccine. That follows six cases of blood clots in women, one of whom died. The CDC is investigating that, while the FDA is claiming the pause would probably last just a few days. More than 6.8 million doses of J&J have been administered in the States, which means the odds of blood clots are less than one in a million. Even so, when people realize that mRNA vaccines have no such associated risk (as far as I know, at least), they’ll likely rush toward them instead. Scientists can – and do – change their minds as they get more data, but average people are far less flexible. The media is having a field day with this… If you listen to their reporting, you might walk away thinking people are dying of blood clots left and right. This is a shiny new story for them, and they’re squeezing it for all it’s worth, all the while generating vaccine hesitancy and prolonging this pandemic as a byproduct. If they’d spent nearly as much energy and enthusiasm to describe how horrifying it must be to die of covid and never wake up after getting intubated… Well, we might have had far fewer cases, let’s put it that way.

…it’ll be so bizarre to be among the few fully vaccinated Ontarians if the local healthcare system gets overrun… Like a time traveler going back to some medieval plague outbreak. I really, really hope it doesn’t come to that.

Good night, y’all. Stay safe out there.

Monday night.

Just nine more workdays left until I’m fully out of the workforce: four more this week, then five more three weeks later, on my final week. Feels so strange… I’ve set it up so that my last week of work would also coincide with the end of my second and final quarantine. Strategy, eh. Keeping that in mind, even the routine humdrum of creating a lot of written bridges (think TPS reports from the Office Space) on Mondays didn’t phase me. At this point, it’s a collector’s edition sort of event: it’ll only happen one more time, and that’s it.

Aside from the occasional outbursts of rage at inefficient, impotent, and incompetent bureaucracy and its designated contractors, I can’t stop marveling at lucky I am, and how fortuitously all of this worked out. There are so many ways things could’ve gone wrong… I’m not going to be one of those white dudes who, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, would say they achieved everything through their talent and hard work. Nah, luck was a major factor. I did many things right, but there are plenty of alternate universes where things played out rather poorly for me.

On a meta level, I find that my life got a lot calmer after I stopped visiting that politics blog I mentioned a few months ago. (Lawyers, Guns & Money.) At this point, I have no idea what’s happening with the US politics, and I love that. There’s some noise about yet another politician being caught in yet another sex scandal, but I have no idea about the specifics, I have no one in my life telling me about that, and I’m perfectly happy with that state of ignorance about the things I can’t change anyway.

…outside my window, someone is coughing their lungs out. I don’t think I’ll open it up for fresh air tonight. Microscopic odds, but why risk it?

In covid news, our Vaccine Hunters group is going. The Ontario chatroom on Discord has grown from 40-ish people to 100 to almost 200 as of today. (And that’s not counting the 10,000 Twitter followers.) Some of the stories people share, though… Some of the local clinics are empty, either because no one wants to sign up for the AstraZeneca vaccine, or because they made their criteria so narrow that most people can’t get in. Someone made an excellent analogy: this is just like the plane boarding process when they invite the platinum members to board, followed by gold, silver, ruby, kryptonite, etc. And then, when they finally announce it’s time for general boarding, everyone goes in all at once. Likewise here.

What’s worse is that there are lots of anecdotal accounts about people refusing to sign up for the AZ vaccine at all, even when that’s the only option available. It’s a fascinating paradox: vaccines are a scarce resource (at least here in Canada), yet the existence of choice between vaccines turns people into picky eaters, whereas the only logical reaction should be “OMG yes, yess, yassssss, give me, give me give me give me!” Some of my fellow vaccine hunters are claiming that some of their over-the-hill friends and relatives who refused the AZ vaccine are now in the hospital with covid… Many more are claiming are that after the initial refusal to sign up for an AZ slot, their loved ones haven’t been able to find any slots at all. Heh. So spoiled. So very, very spoiled. The other day, there was a local news story about a woman who actually burst into tears when she found out her vaccine appointment was for AZ, not Pfizer.

Also in Ontario; that big initiative to vaccinate everyone 18 and older in the postal codes with the most covid cases? Yeah, that was a lie. Doug Ford announced that on television with his health minister standing right behind him, but did not actually authorize the health ministry to do anything about that. Now there are thousands of people calling their local hospitals, demanding their vaccination slots, and (I imagine) very depressed hospital workers telling them for the thousandth time that no, there is in fact no way for them to get vaccinated. This is such a dumpster-fire. An absolutely, utterly self-inflicted wound.

It’s so strange to try and reconcile all the covid-related news coming from every direction: there are some amazing breakthroughs in technology and vaccination campaigns, all the while cases are rising all over the world. (And here in Canada as well.) For example, Canada has just performed its first double-lung transplant for a guy with covid. (Only 40 of those have been done for covid victims worldwide.) But at the same time, Japan is setting up 2-week quarantines for travelers from Spain, Finland, and specifically Ontario. (Not Canada, just Ontario. Ever feel like the universe is just picking on you? Heh.)

The head of China’s CDC has admitted that the efficacy of his country’s Sinovac vaccine is so low (perhaps as low as 50%) that they’re considering mixing vaccines to try and boost the odds. The fact that he actually went on record with that is remarkable. And Slovakia is claiming that the shipment of the Sputnik V vaccine from Russia is very different from the vaccine that got a glowing review in The Lancet two months ago. Russia is claiming that’s all fake news and demanding its vaccine shipment back. That’s the same country that submitted fake urine samples to try and hide the proof of doping among their top athletes… I’m biased here, I know, I admit it – but they’re really not going out of their way to help clarify things. Oh well.

Just 11 more days until my second drive to Ohio… Can’t wait.

Stay safe, y’all.

Sunday evening.

Well, that was interesting… As per Canada’s travel restrictions, travelers must take a covid test at home (using the kit they get at the border) on the 10th day of their two-week quarantine. (For some reason, they counted the border-crossing day as day one. That’s a bank error in my favour, even though I crossed the border around 7:30pm.)

I checked the instructions first thing this morning. They seemed easy enough: open the kit, get everything ready, don’t touch the specimen collection tube thingy, and log on the SwitchHealth site to have a nurse walk you through the process during a video chat. You’d think it’d be easy. You’d think wrong.

I went so far as to wash my hair, actually put on some clothes, and arranged my chair so it’d get the best lighting available in this single-light-bulb studio. And then… When I logged on at 10:20am, it said I was #1,456 in line. It also said “The nurse will be with you shortly.” Heh. It moved fast, but not fast enough: approximately 400 people per hour, so it would’ve taken over three hours to get to me. I set my phone down and did some light gaming on my PC, all the while making sure the phone didn’t fall asleep. About three hours later, I got to #360 in line, and then it just died. The error message said the connection timed out. Their site’s FAQ claimed that if there are connection issues, you can just refresh the page and get back to your spot in line. That claim was incorrect.

It was 1:45pm, and now I was #2,231 in line. It was moving faster – about 500-600 people per hour were getting either helped or disconnected. By 5pm, I was once again #360 (or thereabout), when it kicked me out again. When I refreshed, it said my new spot in line was approximately #1,400 or so. Their site said there was an option to do the testing over the phone if I had no computer or no Internet connection. (The fact that you needed Internet access to read that on their site was pretty ironic.) I then spent 45 minutes on hold without encountering a single human being. I did, however, get blasted with an annoyingly cheerful and loud little tune. Remember that Walking Dead episode where Darryl got tortured with the “Easy Street” song? It was a little bit like that.

Finally, after I posted an angry thread on Twitter, I got that company’s attention. After a lot of back and forth, they called my cellphone and walked me through the process: all voice, no video. That was a simple nasal swab test where you swab your nostrils, not the brain-poking test that people hate. I scheduled the courier pickup for tomorrow.

…I am not proud of my reaction, but there’s no point in lying on my own blog. I felt rage. Passionate, incandescent, I-want-to-destroy-something-beautiful rage. They had one job. They literally had one and only job: to help people with their take-home test kits. And yet they still managed to fuck it up. Every single step of the way was a failure: their process (with about 50-100 nurses, I think) didn’t scale, their site didn’t restore your place in line, their customer support lines weren’t staffed…

But that was a third-party company that somehow won the contract. (I hope it was through nepotism. If they are indeed the best tech/health company out there, we’re all in deep trouble.) The local health authority was supposed to send people to check up on me and make sure I was actually staying at home. Today is the 10th day, and all I got was three robo-calls that asked five incredibly simple yes/no questions. I could’ve answered them from anywhere. The threat of enforcement, of home visits, of everything else, was just so many empty words. The paperwork they gave me mentioned large fines, too, but if the way US tourists who strayed from the road to Alaska got treated last year is any indication, there’ll be no fines, either. (At no point during the pandemic did they actually enforce the rules or use the power the rules granted them.)

A couple of years ago, I used to co-manage a giant fee program that affected 200,000 people and had the annual revenue of several hundred million dollars. There were only two of us running it (with some colleagues who owned separate, adjacent pieces), and we had to make sure everything was flawless. All our customer support people were provided with the latest FAQs and manuals. The customer-facing pages on our site were modified, proof-read, made crystal-clear, and had multiple examples. The communications were sent out several times, in several languages. The data on the projected fees was available in multiple places. All that work, for a single (though large) recurring campaign at a single corporation. And here we have a prosperous industrialized country that tried to roll out a quarantine procedure (which they had a full year to brainstorm) for all of its residents and visitors, and this bureaucratic nightmare was the best they could come up with. The very fact that this could be done over the phone and not by video means that a sufficiently long (and slow-motion) YouTube video could’ve done the trick. Instead, they got thousands of people spending an entire day hoping they don’t get disconnected.

At first, earlier this morning, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking how cool it was that over a thousand of my fellow travelers were waiting with me – all of us, separate but united, doing our part. (The whole “waiting in line” thing also reminded me of the Soviet Union, much like the book I’m currently reading.) Now I’m just angry. I know that it’s basic human nature to look the other way until some calamity (in this case, incomprehensible level of incompetence) affects you personally. I know all that. I tried making excuses when Canada failed to set up any sort of quarantine for international travelers. Or when the quarantine was so inefficient that people could literally walk away from the airport and the police did nothing to stop them. Or when so many provinces put unqualified generals in charge of their vaccine efforts. Or when it turned out there were no vaccination plans aside from “um, maybe we’ll vaccinate every last person over 80 first before giving to any other ages or high-risk groups?” Every step of the way, I tried to rationalize it, to assume that was just a coincidence, over and over and over again. Until that bureaucratic hell hit me personally. Heh.

Let’s be honest: most countries fucked up in their pandemic response. Very few did most things right. But even with that in mind, Canada’s efficiency is closer to Brazil than to New Zealand. So many perfectly avoidable mistakes. So much basic incompetence. So few effective leaders. So little planning, especially since they’d had so much time… Not even the year-long prep between the first cases and the first vaccines: Canada never implemented the recommendations in its own official report after bird flu outbreak over 15 years ago. At some point in the future, there might be yet another full-scale postmortem analysis of all the things that went wrong. It’s possible but unlikely that anyone will lose their job. It’s possible but unlikely that the report’s recommendations will get instituted for the next pandemic.

I still like Canada. I’m still glad I moved here. But ye gods, what a shitshow. Lessons learned: next time you start seeing sporadic online reports about some mysterious new virus that seems to be very good at killing people, go ahead and jump on the first plane to Taiwan, New Zealand, or Vietnam. It’ll be a bloody mess everywhere else, same as it has been.

I’m quite certain that today’s rage shaved off at least a few days from my life expectancy. The bad news is that I’ll have to deal with the same bureaucratic stupidity three weeks from now, when I finish my second and final quarantine. The good news is that after that, I’ll hopefully (toes and fingers crossed!) be free of bureaucrats for the foreseeable future. I’ll never be a self-sufficient handyman like Ron Swanson from that Parks & Recreation show, but I’m starting to think that by the end of this year, I’ll share his incredibly cynical attitude to all things government. I guess it takes a pandemic to break a political science major’s faith in the system, eh.

Stay safe, y’all. I hope your Sunday was more pleasant than this mess.

Saturday night.

The highlight of my week: a clandestine run to the backyard to take out the garbage. The bread I bought just before my big trip had gone moldy – I guess humidity is objectively high and it’s not just me, eh. Instead of enjoying artisanal locally grown mold spores for several days, I obeyed the spirit but not the letter of the law when I ran outside and threw away my accidental science experiment. It’s pretty funny: my studio’s door got jammed in place due to misuse, and I actually had to give it a good shove to get out. Heh.

The highlight of my day, aside from that: chasing wild animals in No Man’s Sky, feeding them treats, and digging through their virtual alien poop to find the right chemical (cleverly called “faecium”) to advance my mission. Alas, they kept giving me alien milk and eggs instead. That did result in my making alien cream and churning it into alien butter, but it took a while to find a replacement formula to synthesize artificial alien poop the mission required. Ahhh, the glorious quarantine life…

I’m getting giddier with every passing day. Just 13 more and I’ll get my second shot. This feeling is a lot like the anticipation you get as a long-wished-for vacation draws ever closer. You know it’ll be a major change of scenery, and you’ll experience something new, and your life will, in some small but measurable way, be a little bit different afterwards. For me, this will be a ticket to freedom, at least as far as this goddamn pandemic is concerned. I know I’m lucky and most folks in Canada won’t get to experience the same… In our Vaccine Hunters group, those who finally got their first shots are saying their second-shot appointment is in late July, more than three months from now. Only time will tell if NACI’s nationwide experiment with long gaps between the shots will be successful. If it fails… I’ll be in a very bizarre position of being a very rare person with both shots in their system, while whatever new variant will rage all across the country. Hopefully it’ll never come to that, but the odds are greater than zero, as with all things.

In covid news, this is an interesting article from a few days ago. It profiles three different Canadians who traveled to the States (temporarily or permanently) to get their shots. It’s not just me, then: to quote a great old show, “There are dozens of us! Dozens!” Heh…

In more serious covid news, India is kicking ass: it holds the world record for getting to 100 million administered vaccine doses faster than anyone else. They accomplished that in 85 days, whereas it took the US 89 days; it took China 102 days. That’s a huge logistical accomplishment, though it’s mildly tarnished by the fact that 100 million isn’t even 10% of India’s population. (Or, to be fair, China’s.) Still, though – the race is on, and here is hoping other countries will try to beat that record.

Good night, y’all: may your bread stay fresh and may your virtual aliens produce all the poop you want.