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Plague diaries, Day 146

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August 6, 2020

Thursday night. To quote the early 21st century bard known only as Rihanna, “work work work work work work.”

Apparently, an adjacent boss recently described me as “a ball of energy.” Heh. I’d be more impressed if that actually translates into something real.

I’m staying in touch with my relatives through a text group chat: apparently, my little nephew in New York has developed a maple syrup addiction. He went so far as to record a little video asking me to send him some from Canada. How could I possibly say no to that?

Xgf said that yesterday she braved the long taxi journey to three different appointments to get her torn leg muscle looked at. She got an X-Ray the same day (go Canada!) and an appointment for an ultrasound in the near future. (Still not too bad, Canada!)

In DuoLingo adventures, the French word for “the weekend” is “le week-end.” Heh.

In covid news, as more and more schools around the US are starting to reopen, there are some frankly horrifying pictures of crowded school hallways with hardly any kids wearing masks. One school district went so far as to threaten students that if they take pictures or post them online, “there’ll be consequences.” ACLU has gotten immediately involved – good for them. One school official said that enforcing mask compliance is hard because “it’s a personal choice.” Funny how they don’t have the same issue when it comes to enforcing arbitrary wardrobe rules for teenagers.

In British Columbia, retired Canadians have found a new hobby: tracking American boats that dock in BC instead of going north to Alaska. (That’s the only way they can make it past the border, thanks to the Alaska exception.) Some Americans are trying to fight back by disabling their transponders soon after crossing the border. I’m not a boat guy, but that sounds like a pretty big no-no.

The tensions between Canada and the US are getting worse: Trump has just announced that he’d restore the 10% tariff on Canadian imports. Trudeau has immediately replied that Canada will retaliate dollar for dollar, eh. (He might not have said “eh.”) Hard to say why this is happening right here and now: the cynic in me thinks it’s just another attempt by the White House to hijack the news cycle and make it about anything at all other than the pandemic. Ho hum. I wonder if at any point things will get bad enough that Canada will start giving out bounties for reporting illegal Americans. Heh. After all, 80% of Canadians want to keep the border closed, and that kind of solidarity is nothing short of remarkable. Ye gods, I’m so happy I’ve escaped to Canada before this whole mess began.

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Plague diaries, Day 145

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August 5, 2020

Wednesday evening. Things are getting hectic at work, but what else is new? As long as you keep your schedule clean, keep doing Excel magic, and – most importantly – don’t panic, all is well. (And yes, I do take my towel with me whenever I travel.)

Sliding right back into the old routine… Instead of spending most of the day hiking, it’s just a brief exposure to the sun in the backyard while I gobble up my dinner. (Today’s culinary adventure: cider and microwaved frozen burritos. Exciting, I know.) Learning a couple of new French words in DuoLingo, playing some more video games, yada yada yada.

It could be far worse, though: the gigantic explosion in Beirut, as well as its aftermath, is simply unimaginable. How on earth does one misplace 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate? Was it corruption? Incompetence? Both? Neither? I’ve read that the explosion was among the biggest non-nuclear blasts in human history. I’ve read that Lebanon’s economy is now destroyed. I’ve read many things, but I can’t even begin to understand what that must be like to go through so much strife, and stress, and violence, and the pandemic, and then have your capital city explode. This is a tragedy of such a scope that it’s impossible to fully grasp it. May it put our own petty struggles in perspective.

In covid news, it turns out a churchgoer in Ohio infected 91 others in one day. That is remarkable, an tragic, and was entirely avoidable. Dr.Fauci reports that his family has received death threats. Here is hoping none of those troglodytes actually follow up. And on a somewhat brighter note, Canada’s government has announced plans to invest a fortune into vaccine research, followed by distributing a vaccine (once a viable one exists) to Canadians.

Yay Canada. Yesterday, after I mentioned the latest update in my quest for Canada’s residence, I remembered something my AirBnB host in Palmer Rapids told me a week ago. A friend of his was about to go through the same PR application process I’ve described here in the past. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find any fingerprinting agencies that stayed open during the pandemic. Her work permit has expired, and now she’s in the legal limbo. I hope things work out for her… I mentioned that there was one place that stayed open (though with very strong anti-viral protocols) in Mississauga, a four-hour drive west of my host. He said his friend didn’t think to look that far out. Now she may have to leave, all for the price of a single day-long roadtrip. …raises a question, doesn’t it? How far would any of us be willing to go to fulfill our dreams? At what point do we stop looking, even though the solution may be just a bit farther away?

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Plague diaries, Day 144

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August 4, 2020

Tuesday night. Getting back into the groove of things with far too much ease, just like when I returned from the AirBnB odyssey on day 73-ish. Ho hum.

Today brought some objectively good news about my immigration process: the company’s lawyers have finalized my PR application and sent it off. At some point between now and February 4th, I should receive an update – hopefully one that would declare me an official permanent resident of Canada, eh. That’s certainly good news, but I’m just so worn out by the process at this point… (Reminds me of working so very hard to get a permanent full-time job at an Amazon warehouse after being a temp for six months. That was 10 years ago. When I finally got the coveted blue badge, I just sat there, satisfied and tired, as full-time employees in the breakroom congratulated me. Heh.) I wonder – and not for the first time – how different the world will be when that particular achievement gets unlocked.

And once I get my PR, I’ll be eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship just a couple of years down the road… I’ll be a proud Russian-American-Canadian in no time!

In covid news – and for once, not the American news, Australia’s state of Victoria has declared “state of disaster.” They’re entering a strict six-week curfew because of approximately 700 new covid cases. All in all, they had about 200 deaths. Granted, their population is about 1/13th of the US (25 million) but at this point, having 25×700 = 17,500 new cases per day would be a major win in the US. It’s impressive but also sad to see other, more functional countries take action while my former country is just shrugging this off. In another world, where I didn’t screw up my job interview, I would’ve secured my transfer to Australia in 2018. I would’ve lived through the massive forest fire of early 2020, followed by this six-week shutdown. That Aussie Grigory would’ve had an entirely different lived experience.

Back to the US, though: this interview between Trump and Jonathan Swan, an Australian journalist, really must be seen to be believed. If at some point in the distant future historians refuse to believe that Trump was a real person (or as bad as he was described), I hope the footage of this interview will survive. I hope the opposition party plays his “it is what it is” soundbite nonstop. He’s just… stupid. I don’t say that because I have different politics – I’m just calling it like it is. He’s irredeemably stupid in the same way that Carter was naive, and G.W.Bush was unprepared, and Obama was inexperienced. Just plain old stupid, arguing that the most important metric is the ratio of deaths to cases, even as more and more Americans get sick.

Someone online has joked that at some point, the White House will claim the US has the lowest ratio of covid deaths to acreage. While that’d technically be correct, it’d also be absolutely ridiculous – much like the way the Soviet Union used to brag that they produce more concrete per capita than any other country. So what, eh?

The US is in for a wild ride… Good luck, y’all.

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Plague diaries, Day 143

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August 3, 2020

Monday evening. I’m not entirely sure how one is supposed to celebrate Civic Day, so I did my best impression of a civil Canadian just in case. (Eh.)

Back to the mundane routine: a few hours of work and catching up on my emails, a load of laundry, etc. One of the many benefits of my comfy and adventurous vacation is all the different ideas popping into my head: I might have found a new hobby. If I succeed at it, it’ll make my life a whole lot more interesting. Just to keep from jinxing myself, I’m not going to describe what exactly it is – suffice to say, it’s creative.

Folks online have come up with an interesting term for what I’ve been doing in regards to covid: doom-scrolling. There’s always this idea that staying informed is a virtue, that being curious about the world around you is a fine and admirable trait. With hundreds of thousands of death, there’s no shortage of doom-and-gloom stories, and scrolling through all of them, if only just headlines… Yeesh. And yet, I want to keep track of what’s going on, if only so I don’t lose the thread of continuity. (Can you imagine explaining the world around us to someone who just got out of a seven-month coma? Yeah, good luck with that.)

So, here’s just a minor covid update: a bigwig from the Federal Reserve, one Neel Kashkari, claims that without one more long shutdown (four weeks, or ideally six), the US economy doesn’t stand a chance. The math checks out: if everyone tried really hard and stayed inside (again) for a month or so, the virus would be severely hobbled, if not defeated outright. The alternative – stretching out the current misery – seems easier on the surface, but it’ll cost a lot more lives and money in the long run. (Or even just the medium run.)

Of course, doing that would require the full cooperation of all fifty states and, most importantly, the White House… If Trump loses the election, and if he steps down peacefully, then maybe, just maybe, the Biden administration pulls the trigger and enacts the second lockdown in February 2021, six months from now. (Hopefully, I’ll become a permanent resident of Canada by then.) It just doesn’t seem likely that something on that scale would happen in 2020. Then again, I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll gladly be wrong on this as well.

To end on a positive note, here’s a mildly out-of-focus picture of an amethyst I found on my vacation. (I’ve brought back hundreds of little treasures like this one!)

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Plague diaries, Day 142

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August 2, 2020

Sunday night. Back to work tomorrow, thought it’s complicated as always: on the one hand, Civic Day is supposed to be a holiday for every Canadian. On the other hand, the US Finance org doesn’t care about Canadian holidays, so certain things still must get done on the first business day of the month. Oh well, it’ll be a nice and slow transition back into the thick of things.

I hung out with xgf for the first time in three weeks today. Her leg muscle injury is worse than she’d thought, and she’d spent the entire three weeks in her little basement apartment… We went for a ride around Toronto and had a picnic at the High Park. It was wild to see so many people all at once, for both of us. There’s a strange, almost surreal discrepancy in seeing people wear their summer clothes with sunglasses and masks obscuring their faces. (I remain the only one with a faceshield. Heh.)

In covid news, a mega-church in Alabama is planning to organize 21 days of prayer, wherein thousands of people would gather together for 21 days to spread their thoughts, prayers, and virus-carrying droplets. This whole pandemic is like a bizarro world mirror showing how all the things that make the US so distinct can backfire just as spectacularly. The freedom of religion is good, but then you have churches everywhere insisting on meeting in person and, worse yet, singing. (I’m sure everyone’s heard about the choir cluster from the early pandemic by now.) Rugged individualism is good, inspirational, and great for business, but then you end up with millions of yahoos who think they know better than doctors and think the pandemic is a liberal hoax. No bueno.

In mildly better news: a few days ago, Russia announced that its vaccine is ready and pending final approval. They aim to do mass vaccinations in October. I’m trying not to be too optimistic because there hasn’t been outside verification. Russia had a very peculiar mini-epidemic of doctors falling out of windows (sometimes in the middle of conference calls), so anything they say (hell, anything anyone says) should be taken with a big grain of salt. It’ll be a real game-changer if this works, though – and if the rest of the world gets the vaccine too. Here is hoping Russia won’t use this leverage for political purposes…

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Plague diaries, Day 141

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August 1, 2020

Saturday night. This has been a long day. I got up at 6am, force-fed myself some black coffee with cereal (the only way a self-respecting adult should eat it), finished packing the car, and set off toward Toronto.

Either the farmer’s market got cancelled or my information was mildly inaccurate, but I didn’t find the notorious donut lady. Alas. Maybe next time. I did, however, end up taking what I think my best picture ever. That’s Madawaska river in Combermere, Ontario, at 7am on a quiet Saturday morning. Ontario’s nature is beautiful, but sometimes it simply takes your breath away… I simply had to pull over and capture that eye candy. The shot turned out great, considering I was leaning over the passenger seat and not really aiming. It’s so beautiful here. I noticed all too late, on my last night, that the starry sky in Palmer Rapids is unblemished by the town’s lights. (Bancroft, a town of 3,500 people, is about an hour west.) The AirBnB host said they’d planned to build an observatory there at some point.

The drive to Toronto, or rather the last 30 minutes of it, was as horrifying as usual: if suicidal drivers going 20% above the speed limit are any indication, Toronto is fully back to its pre-pandemic self. There was a very long eastward-bound traffic jam as everyone and their dog tried to escape the city for the long three-day weekend. (Civic Day is on Monday.) I ended up dropping off my rental car with two minutes to spare, and spent the rest of the day decompressing and playing with my precious gems. …I might have to invest in an actual display shelf now. Like I said, I have the strangest problems.

In covid news: this is not particularly significant, but I think it’s the same way around the world now: service industry workers just don’t seem to care about masks all that much anymore. At the car rental place, and at two stores I visited afterwards, employees wore their masks under the chin, or with the nose uncovered, or not at all. Some were righteously horrified by the vision of me wearing my mask, glasses, and face shield. Heh.

A couple of days ago, Vanity Fair published their inside scoop about the original covid plan that had been prepared by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The plan his group had come up with was actually surprisingly good, considering. Nonetheless, it got shut down in April, partly because Dr. Deborah Birx convinced Trump the covid numbers would improve shortly. The other, scarier part was the White House’s alleged belief that since the virus was hitting only the Democratic states (Washington, New York, etc), that would be a political benefit to the Republican party. That’s horrifying, but not outside the realm of possibility. There will be some mighty interesting tell-all memoirs years later…

I haven’t written much (or anything, really) about Dr.Birx on this blog. I try to avoid the topics I know little about, and I know next to nothing about her. I do know that she was a colonel in the US Army, and worked her way up in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health. Her path was different than that of the career CDC epidemiologists. (She joined the CDC only in 2005, when she was 49.) This is pure speculation, but it’s possible that the key difference between Fauci and Birx (the former stood up to Trump, the latter appeased him) is due to their background. Fauci also worked at the NIH, but he was never in the military. This is getting into pure armchair psychology, I admit, but I’m guessing his independent streak has been developed over the decades, while Birx (maybe, just maybe) got broken in by the military’s rigid command structure. I just don’t see any other good explanation for her unfounded hypotheses and predictions four months ago…

Social media reports should always be taken with a giant grain of salt, but folks in Miami are posting that it’s possible to buy a fake document stating you tested negative for covid. Horrifying if true. Likewise on social media, people are calling out some interesting inconsistencies in the official US covid data now that it no longer goes through the CDC. Some write that their local newspapers are filled with obituaries, even though the official covid numbers are showing a small decline. I remain on the fence: I wouldn’t put anything past this administration, but I also don’t want to spread what might not be true reports.

One of the first cruise ships that set off in Europe ended up becoming a covid hotspot. I’m genuinely curious how cruise companies plan to mitigate covid risks, and not just because I have some money riding on that. (I’ve invested in companies that got hit the hardest by the pandemic. In about a year or so, the return on investment should be impressive.)

I pity the future historians who will try to make sense of this gods-forsaken year…

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Plague diaries, Day 140

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July 31, 2020

Friday night. The last full day of my big geological roundtrip, and I made it count. I went to three different locations that were relatively close to one another. The first was a series of holes dug into the side of a rural road. At some point, there were some cool rocks there, but all that’s left now are ridiculously deep holes dug underneath hundreds of pounds of rock by rogue geologists whose risk/reward ratio is very different from mine. (See the first pic below.) I looked inside the holes, then at the “no trespassing” sign, and skedaddled.

The second location was the jackpot: a major old mine that got filled with rock a few years ago, lest folks go in and hurt themselves. The upside is that the entire slope was absolutely filled with shiny gems (mostly quartz and calcite) of varying sizes. I filled up my prospecting bucket with some goodies and stumbled on a gigantic triangular quartz boulder just hiding in tall grass. (Pic #2 below.) The third pic shows random quartz rocks just chilling on a hill in their natural habitat. There is beauty in this world…

I got a little lost on the way back, but my incredibly high-tech (heh) navigation tools finally got me back to the road, even if I had to annoy several guard dogs by walking far too close to local backyards. Got mildly sunburned but hey, that might have been my last opportunity in quite a while to soak up that vitamin D.

The very last place I visited was a bit disappointing, but still interesting: a graphite highway road cut that had contained some interesting minerals once upon a time. Not a whole lot left there after all these years, but it was still fun to see what some determined folks armed with chisels and hammers can do to a big rock given enough motivation. (The last pic on this post.)

Tomorrow will start off far too early: if I get up at 6am and have some quick breakfast, I’ll have just enough time to swing by the local farmer’s market, buy the local donut-smith’s famous pastries, drive 200 miles back home, unload the hoard of gems from my rental car (I know, I have the most terrible problems in life), and return it by noon. Should be interesting.

In covid news: my gym has reopened after a very long shutdown. Wynn Fitness closed its doors on March 16th, and didn’t reopen until… well, technically, they still haven’t reopened. The big day is Tuesday, August 4th. The new rules are atrocious: they’ll close at 6pm on weekends (discrimination against night owls!) and you have to book your 75-minute slot in advance. (There goes my pre-pandemic plan of spending an entire day in their pool to get progressively better at not drowning.) Incidentally, they’ve been charging my credit card for their relatively pricey membership the entire time… That’ll make for a fun phone call. As much as I miss the gym, I’m not going back until (at the very earliest) Ontario goes a full week without any new infections. Gonna have to cancel ye olde membership. Maybe it’ll give xgf something to distract her if I ask her to design a specific workout routine for me. (She may be frail, but she works out like a champion.)

In Georgia, an overnight YMCA camp became a cluster, as 260 campers contracted covid. Georgia is another southern state that has remarkably poor leadership: their governor made a number of moves that indicate either intellectual dimness or straight-out self-sabotage. I’ll leave the verdict to historians.

Vietnam fell off its pedestal with their first recorded covid death: an old man with severe pre-existing kidney issues. They put up a damn good fight, and in a way, they’re doing about 150,000 times better than the US. I doubt there’s any part of the world left that hasn’t had a single death. Well, except maybe for the folks on the North Sentinel Island, who shoot any approaching traveler (missionaries and such) full of arrows on sight. That’s a rather severe containment measure, but you can’t deny its efficiency when it comes to keeping the pandemic at bay.

The US Congress has adjourned for the weekend without finalizing the financial relief package. Now, barring some extraordinary intervention, millions of Americans will lose their $600/week unemployment benefits, and it appears that the eviction freeze will also expire. I’m not sure if landlords around the US will actually follow through, because evicting that many people will result in genuine riots. If 2020 has taught us anything, however, it’s that we can’t trust any of our prior assumptions.

And finally, the economic data released yesterday was downright apocalyptic: the US GDP plunged 32.9% in Q2. The silver lining for this mushroom cloud is that the official expectation had been 34.7%, so hey, that was a 180 bps win. The stock market reacted poorly, but not as poorly as you’d expected: a relatively small drop yesterday, followed by a small gain today. One of my stocks has actually gone up by 8% after they announced they’d buy out a competitor. A lot of the bad news is already priced in – it’s just a matter of sitting and waiting, which is a concept that’s hard to grasp and harder yet to implement. Wu wei, eh.

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Plague diaries, Day 139

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July 30, 2020

Thursday night. Herman Cain died of covid. As I’d guessed several days earlier, the terse status update from his hospital meant he was in bad condition. I feel bad for his family and loved ones, but… What happened was entirely avoidable. He deliberately disregarded every rule of this pandemic in many, many ways.

If Cain hadn’t gone to a public event (Trump’s rally in Oklahoma), if he’d worn a mask, if he’d distanced instead of sitting in a crowded section, he still would’ve been alive and well. There’s a possibility that he got exposed to the virus elsewhere, but if not… How many people who attended that rally, and how many people in their immediate social circle have died because of that single event?

At some point, we may have to come up with a term for deliberately putting yourself in the path of danger and trying to get sick. Suicovid? Covicide? Neither one sounds right, but we’ll need some word to differentiate those who got sick and died due to bad luck, and those who had brought it upon themselves. Herman Cain’s official cause of death may have been covid, but in the grand scheme of things that may as well have been suicide.

…in non-covid news, today was an eventful day. I drove out to the Princess Sodalite Mine an hour west of here, and it was well worth it. Sodalite is a beautiful blue mineral found only in this part of Canada, as well as a couple of distant foreign countries. I found a nice chunk in the “rock farm” area, but the main beauty of that mine was their store. I’ve seen museums that had less selection than that store. Better yet, you could touch, ogle, and buy every single gem. I dropped $200 CAD (~$150 USD) on a few beautiful exhibits: a fairly large dark quartz crystal from Brazil, some beautiful connected crystals (the gem’s name escapes me) from China, a cute present for xgf, and a couple of small (yet amusing) pieces of bismuth grown in Germany. If you’ve never encountered bismuth, please take 10 seconds to google it. It’s a trippy metal that forms the most bizarre and colourful shapes after it gets melted. The store’s prices were far better than I could’ve expected elsewhere, and now I’m the proud owner of several shiny museum-quality gems.

After that, I explored a rock pile behind a grocery store – an odd location I’d overheard a few geologists mention the day before. Not much there, but it was fun to play in the dirt. The local Tim Hortons managed to make three mistakes when I ordered a total of four snacks and drinks, which is actually rather impressive. It had been a while since I encountered such hilarious and blatant disregard for customer service. Made me feel like I was back in Russia all over again. Heh.

And at the end of the day… I hope I’ll never forget this last experience. I walked around a pretty local park, waiting for the sunset, for the darkness. I drove down to the worst-kept local secret, the CN rock dump pile that’s open for everyone. It mostly has plain old biotite mica (think shiny coal), but if you visit it at night, armed with a UV flashlight, a mosquito spray, and enough patience, you’ll see true magic. Unremarkable-looking rocks would glow green and orange under the ultraviolet light, looking for all the world like ancient runes concealed in plain sight. It really was magical: dark sky, the pale blue UV light, the faint and foreign glow of secret rocks… I’m so extremely glad I’d chosen to do this on my vacation. I’d never done anything remotely like this before.

Tomorrow will be the last full day of my trip: I might drive out farther to some of the abandoned mines that are supposed to have quartz deposits. It’s highly unlikely I’ll find anything as beautiful as the dark quartz I bought earlier today, but hey – worth a shot, right?

Stay safe, survivors, and I hope your lockdown life is treating you well.

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Plague diaries, Day 138

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July 29, 2020

Wednesday night. Today was interesting: I spent the first half of the day talking to my contracted lawyers about my permanent residence application: apparently, one reason it’s taken them so long to prepare it is my ~16 addresses over the past 10 years. Heh. However, they did make several mistakes that I had to identify and call out. With luck, the whole thing will get submitted by the end of the week.

I spent the second half of the day at the commercial mine – the Quadeville Beryl Pit. For just $10 CAD, you get secret directions to an unmarked mine: after parking and then walking for about five minutes, you can pick all the fluorite, quartz, and amazonite your little heart desires! (Other minerals are also there, but not as evident.) It’s a bit on the nose that I, an Amazon employee, collected a bunch of amazonite. Might make a ring out of it… Heh. The actual ground floor of the mine had very high radiation readings (yay Geiger counter!), so I skedaddled the hell out of there. Still found some nice shiny rocks, though.

While I was out there, finally using the shovel I’d bought before my vacation, I overheard some locals: looks like the CN dump pile near Bancroft is a real thing, and you really can find some gems that glow under the UV light. The plan for tomorrow is to explore that town, hang out past sunset, and find some of those gems for myself. Alas, the famous mineral museum is shut down due to covid. Ditto for the annual gem convention, the Gemboree, which takes place here. On the upside, my AirBnB host told me about a local legend – the woman who makes the best donuts in the world. I’ll be driving by the Bancroft farmer’s market on Saturday morning, and will be able to buy some of her famous donuts then. I’m more than a little curious about the hype.

The host also uncorked some of the cider he’d made earlier this year: it’s sour and tastes pretty good, and it also seems to have way higher alcohol content than the usual stuff you’d find on sale. Life is good.

In covid news: congressman Louie Gohmert has tested positive for covid after deliberately avoiding masks or any other safety measures. He announced the news to his staffers in person – once again, without wearing a mask. It’s unclear how many people he’s managed to infect thus far… Like the saying goes, “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” I have no sympathy for militant stupidity of this sort. I only wonder why the people of Texas kept re-electing someone like him. Is it the plain old “jocks vs nerds” issue where no one wants to vote for a boring brainiac? No hope for human race… (Or at least not the US part of it.)

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Plague diaries, Day 137

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July 28, 2020

Tuesday evening. I’ve just had to double-check what today this is – losing track of time is how you know your vacation is going well.

Today’s hike took me to an abandoned iron mine that apparently got gobbled up by a swamp at some point after the 2000 geological survey. Not the most productive three hours of my life, but hey – exercise. The other location I visited was more interesting, though. An old apatite mine didn’t have much to show in terms of fun rocks, but after I got up and turned around, I found an old rusty pickaxe just 2′ behind me. (See the pic below.)

It looks like it was made at some point after WW2 (rubber handle and all), but I can’t narrow it down more than that. Had it been lying there for a year? Had it been there since before I was born? Had it always been there, an immutable artifact imbued with strange magic, while the world grew around it? Or maybe it’s the symbolic rusted manifestation of a post-modern Arthurian legend, and by pulling it out I became the king of geologists? There’s simply no way to know for sure, so I’ll go with that last option. (Pixcalibur!)

I got to meet my AirBnB host last night. Cool guy. He’s in his 40s, and he’s spent most of his life working with troubled teens by taking them hiking and kayaking at a local summer camp. He’s a true outdoorsman while I’m a stereotypical geek, but we overlap a lot in our love of hiking, shiny gems, search&rescue (he used to be a wilderness EMT), and cider. This may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. That was also the first in-depth conversation with someone other than xgf that I’ve had since early March… Ye gods.

My company’s lawyers have prepared the final packet for my Canadian permanent residence application (I got invited to apply about seven weeks ago.) Now it’s time for one last round of reviews, crossing the i’s, dotting the t’s, that sort of thing – and then it’ll be just a matter of waiting for some kind government official to bestow upon me the permanent resident status. (I talk about waiting a lot, don’t I? That’s 2020 in a nutshell.)

In covid news… Canadians have another reason to be righteously angry with the US. American troops on a stopover in Newfoundland have been leaving their hotel and going out in blatant disregard of the 14-day quarantine rule. They claimed that the border agents had given them the green light. No one is really buying that – folks are trying to figure out what exactly the policy is – but either way, it’s a hot mess.

At an LCBO store earlier today, an employee wore his mask on his forehead.

An even bigger mess is “Doctor” Stella Immanuel. It was only a matter of time before Trump found a doctor who was sufficiently unhinged to back him up all the way. Immanuel got her medical degree in Nigeria, then became a practitioner in Texas, and claims her Nigerian experience allows her to prescribe hydroxychloroquine to everyone. (What is it about Republicans and hydroxychloroquine? Did they buy a huge stockpile they’re trying to get rid of? Did they all pitch in with their retirement money?) If that wasn’t bad enough, Immanuel also claims that doctors make vaccines using alien DNA (space aliens, to be precise) and that there are sexy demons who invade your dreams and suck out your life force. (To be fair, I’m not 100% sure about that last thing – I had to stop reading to protect my poor brain cells.)

So… yeah. The rest of the world is slowly reopening after going all in on science and empirical evidence. The US has a literal witch doctor advising the president and being retweeted by him. Many people have said this before, but it bears repeating again and again: if you were to write this all up as a novel at any point before 2020, any self-respecting editor would’ve had you committed out of general principle. (Or at the very least thrown out of the building, with a restraining order to follow.) Life will forever be stranger than fiction, if only because it can be far more absurd – and not subject to the editorial process.

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