Grigory Lukin.com

Monday evening. Got some vitamin D and much-needed exercise by marching back and forth in my landlords’ backyard. (I live in a small suburban development here in Mississauga – hard to walk outside with all the neighbours and the occasional car.) Did a bit of news-reading, a bit of money-related research, and learned a few new French words.

My relatives each got me an Amazon gift card – I went and bought a gently used zoom lens for my old DSLR. It should arrive from Japan within a couple of weeks. I know, my quarantine hobbies are getting a little bit too numerous and ridiculous, but hey – I absolutely nailed it with rockhounding. (Xgf’s friends loved their party favours – small ziploc bags filled with gems.) There’s not a whole lot of wild nature in Toronto’s suburbs (there’s Lowe’s across the street) but I’ll see what I can come up with. Something to look forward to, anyhow.

It’s important to remind myself that in just another six months or so, things will be much better. There’ll be some kind of vaccine that may or may not be available to mere mortals like myself. (The 1% will get the first dibs, of course.) There’ll be fast tests available just about anywhere. …hopefully, there’ll still be a closed border: until and unless the US gets its shit together, they’ll remain an existential threat. It’ll be mighty different, and hopefully for the better. It’s the waiting part that sucks.

In covid news, more and more colleges around the US are realizing that maybe, just maybe, having thousands of students on campus was horrible idea. There are quite a few headlines: some schools are setting up online learning as an option, while others are closing down their campus entirely. (Which is a remarkably evil thing to do to students who live in the dorms and have no easy alternative.) If only someone could have predicted such a happenstance occurring. Verily, we live in the age of mysteries.

Sunday night. Today is the first day of the 20th quarter of my five-year plan. (I can’t help it – I’m Russian, and five-year plans might as well be part of my genetic makeup.) I started the plan in mid-November 2016, when things seemed particularly dark. So far, it looks like I’ll complete it, and likely ahead of schedule. I’ll describe it in more detail if and when that happens.

Today was the first of my highly corny themed days – the Sundae Sunday. It’s been ages since I had ice cream… When you’re on the run from the pandemic in AirBnBs, every cubic inch of the freezer is vital, and there just wasn’t that much space for sugary luxuries. I’ve yet to find a place that sells chocolate syrup (the organic food place across the street didn’t have any, and neither did Shopper’s), but strange allegedly organic sprinkles made for a fine topping.

Considering occupational dangers in my line of work and at my company (and because they require way more ingredients than I’d thought), Margarita Mondays are hereby changed to Money Mondays. Mmmm, money… Ever since moving to Canada, I’ve been procrastinating on learning about the local retirement accounts, tax incentives, etc. Come to think of it, I haven’t actually seen (nor touched) a $100 CAD bill. Huh. It’s been months since I’ve dealt with cash, so I don’t really remember what any of it looked like. Anyway, yay money.

I’m dealing with the stress of the pandemic and my work by engaging in hardcore escapism, much like I did in the past when things got too dark. After all the hiking and rockhounding I did on my vacation, the open world of Elder Scrolls Online no longer seems that great in comparison. I’ve started playing my old love, 7 Days to Die, once again. The plot is simple: you wake up naked and afraid in a world overrun by zombies, and need to assemble tools, find food, water, and shelter, etc – while trying not to get eaten. Every seven days, an endless zombie horde attacks you. Fun game. To keep the stakes high, I stop playing once my character dies. Somehow, some way, I’ve made it further into the game than ever before. I’ve just witnessed something truly horrific – zombies with suicide vests. That will be interesting. (It really does help you forget the so-called real world.)

In covid news: yesterday, FDA granted emergency approval to a saliva test used by the NBA. It delivers accurate results in a matter of hours, and can be done much less intrusively than, well, any other test their currently have. (Nasal swabs are no one’s idea of fun.) The expectation is that the test will cost $10 a pop. We’ll see how that actually plays out. If this works, it’ll be a game-changer. No more waiting for days on end, no more training covid-seeking dogs… It’s a little sad that it was the NBA that drove this change, and not, say, the CDC. (At some point, someone will explain why the hell they’d been so insistent on using their own covid-testing kits back in March.)

In somewhat covid-related news: for the first time ever, the US National Weather Service issued a “fire tornado” warning. Northern California is on fire, as is often the case this time of year, but it’s usually fire-tornado-free. The first time that happened in recent memory was 2018, in the Redding, California wildfire. Now the freak phenomenon is back. The flames are getting mighty close to my old haunt – the biggest little city in the world, Reno, NV. With the disaster season in full swing (fire tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, what have you), there’ll be a lot of misplaced people who will unwittingly start new covid clusters. Disaster management is never easy (especially under the current administration), but when you also have to keep everyone separated and equipped with masks… This might get ugly.

…I think I’ll help myself to another sundae, since the world is running a little short on good news tonight.

Saturday night. This week was not a good one.

The events of Thursday, as well as their implicaitons, dehydrated me too much to truly grieve on Friday. I’m updating my LinkedIn.

How do you deconvert from a company to which you have dedicated 67% of your adult life? How do you change your viewpoint from “I’m a devoted employee who has a few hobbies” to “I’m an amateur guitar player who learns French, and I have a job to pay the bills”? (I bought that poor guitar over two years ago and barely touched it. Really gotta do something about it.) The past few days have been bad… A negative feedback loop of “what if” scenarios and old conversations running nonstop through my head, impossible to distract from. Perhaps, if I nap or sleep more, my brain will put enough cycles between the recent past and the present to lessen the impact, if not archive it altogether. The echoes from the past are coming back: I hope this won’t turn into the hellscape that was the late 2016, when something very similar occurred.

One bright spot: today was the birthday celebration for xgf. It was myself, her, and her three friends. All five of us maintained our distance in her large backyard. We wore masks when we stepped inside (always just one at a time), and drank and feasted and conversed beneath the open air till late at night. Turns out you can play Pictogram without having any close contact, and we laughed way too hard at the shadow puppets we made with our hands. That kept the thoughts of work at bay.

A friend of mine (a roommate’s girlfriend, from eight years ago in Reno) has tested positive. As far as I know, this is the first time a friend of mine caught it. (There was also a work buddy in the US, but we’re not that close. He and his wife got better.) My friend lives in Arizona these days. She said she took all the precautions (masks, alcohol spray, etc) and doesn’t know how she got infected. Considering the runaway infection rates in that state, she could’ve caught it just about anywhere. She says the fever, the muscle pain, and the headaches are terrible. I hope she makes it…

The way the world is handling this crisis, with major countries like Brazil, the US, the UK, etc completely ignoring the advice of their scientists, doesn’t bode well at all for the climate change crisis. If major superpowers can’t act responsibly when thousands of their own people die every day and hospitals are full, what hope is there for prompt action with a less visible emergency, one that’s more gradual and will kill far more? We’re blowing past more and more points of no return. Has existential hedonism been the answer all along?..

In covid news, Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, has just died. He was 72, and his cause of death was not released. Trump visited him in the hospital just yesterday. If that was covid-related, there could be an interesting domino effect. If it wasn’t covid – well, at least his death was probably more peaceful than it would’ve been with the virus.

New Zealand’s streak is over. There’s a new cluster, and it’s an odd one. Contact tracers are stumped: their best bad guess is that the virus came on the packaging of imported refrigerated food. If true, that’s rather horrifying. That reminds me of the “Wild Cards” sci-fi book series: space aliens infect New York City with an experimental “wild card” virus that immediately kills 90% of its victims, gives 9% horrible deformities and mutations (the so-called jokers), and gives the final 1% (the aces) superpowers. The world’s history is permanently altered, and since the virus was spread in the stratosphere, the particles landed all over the world. As the series goes on, it spotlights unlikely pockets of infection around the world as people come into contact with the dormant virus. So… there’s a distinct possibility that nowhere will be safe, even if your region’s response is as perfect as New Zealand’s.

This is a cheery blog post, eh?

In other covid news: there was a sudden departure of two CDC VIPs: chief of staff Kyle McGowan and his deputy, Amanda Campbell. McGowan was Trump’s political appointee, and had previous ties with the HHS. Allegedly, he and Campbell were encouraged to depart because they were insufficiently loyal to the White House. I can’t imagine how much worse things will get once they’re replaced with “true believers.”

And finally, the sabotage of the US presidential election is gaining steam. The new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy (another political appointee), is consolidating power, removing expensive and necessary mail-sorting machines, and, apparently, has ordered the removal of blue mailboxes from key cities in politically important states. The ones that didn’t get removed… This really is absurd, but folks online are posting pictures of the remaining mailboxes that got padlocked shut, meaning it’s literally impossible to drop your mail, or letters, or mail-in ballots.

There are still 80 days to go until the November 3rd election. I really, really fear what else will happen, what abuses of power will become normalized by then… If we all somehow make it through this, I feel like we’ll collectively agree to never mention 2020 again, much like the 1918 pandemic survivors refused to mention it in their memoirs and textbooks.

Wednesday night. Today was my 34th birthday. I broke a very long-running annual tradition – so old that I don’t even recall when I started it. Each year, I go to Denny’s and get their free birthday Grand Slam meal. The coffee isn’t included, of course, but it’s still a hell of a deal. (Followed, of course, by a big tip.) I’ve done this for many, many years… Alas, with this pesky once-in-a-century pandemic, going to a diner is not really a good idea. I’ll raincheck myself and grab that Grand Slam (though no longer free) when I eventually get the vaccine. Another thing to look forward to, eh.

On the upside, I had my first birthday celebration in over decade, I believe. (I’m not big on parties.) Had a nice socially distanced meal with xgf: she baked a cute cake, prepared a pizza, made a wholesome birthday card, and then we played the same old video game we’ve been chipping away at this whole time. Her birthday is in a few days, so I’ve already got something neat for her: there’ll be a backyard party (just as socially distant) for myself and her two closest friends. These two tiny back-to-back birthday parties will likely be the social highlight of my year, not counting the work conference in Nashville back in January.

On the Trump-loving side of my family (in New York, of all places), my step-nephew (in his 20s and fully Americanized) decided to go to Miami to party it up. He’s going with his friend’s family: the family claims they all had covid in April and tested positive for antibodies. They believe it makes them immune. My step-nephew has no antibodies, but he might have an irrational belief in his immortality, like all young people do. My sister (his step-mom) has some health issues, so things would not go well if she got exposed to the virus…

There’s just so much we still don’t know. Either it really is possible to get reinfected just months after recovering, or there’s no good way to truly determine when someone is fully recovered. (Both possibilities are equally terrifying.) Or perhaps all the divergent – and ever-diverging – strains of the virus are sufficiently different that the antibodies of one strain might not work on the others. We just don’t know, and it’s really rather infuriating, intellectually speaking.

In covid news – future historians really won’t believe most of our pandemic stories. Florida’s Marion County sheriff Billy Woods has banned masks for his 900 employees and visitors. He claims he thought of that for two weeks, decided that there’s just as much “evidence” against masks as there is for them, and made an executive decision, while allowing a handful of exceptions. (Mostly when deputies respond to at-risk groups.) The sheriff is the epitome of the “Florida man” trope. Somewhere, at least a few lawyers are already cruising for clients who would sue him for exposing them to the virus. (Unless, of course, some national legislation forbids such lawsuits, which would be interesting to observe from very far away.) My best bad guess is that the sheriff is looking to launch his political career with this insane stunt.

In every zombie movie ever made, the most irrationally acting person is still far more rational than some of the authority figures we see around us. There’s some interesting commentary from the creators of the 2011 Contagion movie: they claim the things happening right now never would have been added to the film, especially the part about the erratically behaving president. Back then, they couldn’t have possibly predicted that a real-life president would tell Americans to inject bleach. Heh.

Speaking of… Another Florida man and his son got caught in Colombia after their fake miracle cure (just bleach, basically) killed seven people in the US. The profiteer used to refer to himself as an archbishop of a cult-sounding little church. That part, at least, isn’t stranger than fiction: in World War Z (the book, not the terrible movie) there was profiteer selling placebo anti-zombie pills during the early stages of the worldwide outbreak.

I’m more than a little worried about the rogue sheriff’s county. The greatest manager I’ve ever had lives there now, in the city of Ocala. Florida is a covid hotbed at this point, and things are likely to get even worse, especially with such militant stupidity among its elected officials.

The annual Perseid meteor shower was tonight and last night. Xgf and I stepped outside when it got dark, but there was too much light pollution. We each made a wish on a passing satellite instead. Here is hoping…

Tuesday night. Time doesn’t fly so much as it slurs. This is incredibly corny, but I’ve devised a way to mix things up a little, if only to keep things from blurring together, with one workday being virtually indistinguishable from the one before it, or the one after:

• Sundae Sunday
• Margarita Monday
• Taco Tuesday
• Waffle Wednesday
• Thirsty Thursday
• French Friday
• Salmon Saturday

And before you ask, French Friday will probably involve overdosing on French lessons, not on French fries, though who knows. This also means I’ll have to learn how to make waffles and margaritas, but that’s a challenge I’m more than willing to face. Let’s see if this works.

One of the folks I follow on Twitter bought himself an entry-level DLSR camera with a fancy zoom (a Nikon D3500) and posted some astonishing pictures he took right off the bat. That made me think of the old Nikon D5100 I bought seven years ago and mostly used to snap pretentious pictures on an occasional vacation. (Though there was that one time, during my year in rural Texas, that I got so bored that I learned to take artsy self-portraits by hooking it up to a flat-screen TV… Fun times. That also led to me crashing an art show in Seattle as a featured artist.) I’d have to make sure it still works first, but then… A cursory search on Amazon shows there are some fine 300mm auto-focus lenses that cost only ~$200-$300 CAD. Considering how much I save by not going out, this miiiight be worth it.

And yeah, I know, this comes after my earlier writing about an art kit I never even opened (in my defense, I’m a completionist, and I never did find the ink the book recommended), or the wood-carving kit I got before I realized how hard it is to find suitable wood. All of this may very well be just lockdown-boredom-induced glorified shopping therapy, but hey, what else is there to do that’s not self-destructive? (The latter is the reason I wisely decided not to start a home bar, even though I have this lovely book of cocktail recipes.)

Oh well.

In covid news, Russia has decided to troll the entire world by registering the first-ever covid vaccine. In the true spirit of the cold war (which never really ended, did it?), they named the vaccine “Sputnik V.” The craziest part about this is that the vaccine still hasn’t passed a stage-3 trial. Unless I’m very wrong, they tested it on fewer than 100 people. That’s one hell of a gamble. If it works, Russia will get major kudos, respect, glory, etc, etc. If it doesn’t work, it’ll be a) yet another hit to their reputation, b) possibly dangerous if there are undiscovered side effects, and c) definitely dangerous if it doesn’t actually provide any protection against covid and instills a false sense of security. It looks like Russia aims to vaccinate as many of their own as it can, as fast as it can, so we’ll find out soon enough.

Inspired by that news, hotel and cruise stocks had a pretty good day today. Ye olde portfolio recovered a bit, and I imagine it’ll do more than just that as actual news about actual vaccines comes out.

In non-covid news, Joe Biden has picked Kamala Harris to be his VP. Good for her, eh.

And now, off to finish binge-watching the recent season of Better Call Saul and dream of shiny lenses…

Monday evening, and one hell of an anniversary. It’s been 150 days since xgf (né gf) and I decided to run away from Toronto, launching our own pandemic adventure (which went on for 72 days as we bounced between AirBnBs), and kicking off this blog. Thirty-three more days, and this blog will be half a year old. What a strange way to mark the passage of time.

I still haven’t fully unpacked from my big vacation roadtrip: I gave it a good college try and redistributed the prettiest rocks around my room, on my closet shelves, and in the bathroom. (Start the day by looking at something ancient and beautiful!) Between this, my antique camera collection, a small trunk filled with beautiful foreign coins (a passing obsession a while back), and a collection of visual art, my place looks more eccentric than ever. Assuming I don’t lose it all in a fire or a robbery, I wonder how strange my dwelling will look when I’m, say, 70. Heh.

Absent any particular kind of progress in my life, I’ve decided to double down on DuoLingo’s French lessons: pushing through them as much as I can until I make too many errors (the paid version has no limitations; the free one does), as opposed to just launching it for one mini-lesson per day. I’ve passed a threshold of sorts a few days ago when I realized I could read French jokes. (I still had to double-check it on Google Translate, but yep, I’d gotten it right.) I still can’t quite grasp the intricacies of pronunciation, but I’m definitely making progress. I guess this self-imposed lockdown is good for something after all. (And I really can’t recommend DuoLingo highly enough. I wish it’d been around when I was much younger.)

In covid news: my old gang of do-gooders, the King County Explorer Search & Rescue, has cancelled their annual recruitment drive due to covid concerns. The training process is long and demanding: eight months spent learning orienteering and first aid skills in crowded classrooms, going on weekend-long hiking trips (cold and long and miserable, for the most part), learning to use a compass with 99% precision, etc… There really wasn’t any way for them to run this training for hundreds of people in a safe and socially distant manner, but still – that’ll be a huge loss to the organization. I miss going on rescue missions with them: there’s nothing quite like this in Toronto. (Mainly because there’s nowhere to hike.)

Folks online are making an awful lot of jokes about buying cheap, gently used motorcycles a few weeks after the Sturgis bike rally. Not the nicest kind of humour, but that’s probably exactly how things will play out. The Georgia school that suspended the student who shared a picture of a crowded hallway ended up with several covid cases. They’ve closed down the school for two days for disinfecting. I honestly can’t tell if they think the virus is a hoax or if they’re deliberately playing dumb: by now, everyone should know that the incubation period can be far longer than two days, and that all of this is just kabuki theater. I feel bad for the kids.

The New York Times has published a story about annoyed Canadians gently harassing American tourists who lie about their plans to visit Alaska. (Anecdotally, some of the harassment is not so gentle and results in vandalized vehicles.) RCMP (aka the Mounties) hasn’t done a whole lot in terms of enforcing, with only a handful of citations. That may change. The NYT story is the most high-profile reporting I’ve seen so far on the growing schism between my two adopted countries. I’m rooting for Canada on this one, eh.

And to wrap this up, here’s a cute pic of the French joke I mentioned earlier:

Sunday evening. Last night, we got out of the hospital shortly after I posted the blog, having spent about 4.5 hours there altogether. They didn’t find anything specific (big surprise there) and referred xgf to a specialist next week.

Afterwards, we drove to an A&W and got a veritable feast, since neither of us had eaten in 7-8 hours. Indoor dining is off-limits, of course, so we made do outside. It was strange to see multiple groups of people – mostly couples, sometimes groups – sitting on the curb and having quiet little meals. Everyone was well enough apart and enjoying the nice weather and the delicious food. It was very anachronistic – the same way you’d feel about 1950s-style drive-in theaters making a comeback without much fanfare.

This morning, I spent two hours of my precious life checking local stores to find a very specific charger for my phone. (The old one gave up the ghost at some point last night.) Ended up finding one at roughly 5,900% markup from the $0.50 I imagine it actually cost to make. Heh. This is something I hadn’t considered when prepping for the apocalypse: the planned obsolescence of everyday gadgets. Over the past month, I had to improvised surgery on my work laptop (the battery shorted out for some reason), followed by my gaming mouse that I use for work. It doesn’t work or sound quite the same now, but revenants rarely do. Most people I know don’t keep backups for their keyboards, mice, chargers, etc. At some point, things might get ugly.

In covid news: evidently, the town of Sturgis, SD, hosts a giant biker rally every August. This year, the expected attendance is 245,000 – and none of them are wearing masks. Considering that a) most of these wannabe bad dudes are actually small-business owners and average yuppies, and b) they’ve come from all over the country, then c) there’ll be quite a few deaths caused by this mega-cluster.

New Zealand has just celebrated 100 days without community transmission of covid. Vietnam is just a couple of days behind it. (An even more impressive achievement, in a way, considering Vietnam’s larger population and land borders.) Ontario has had six days in a row with fewer than 100 new cases per day. Toronto got 23 new cases. That’s a drop in a bucket, considering the city’s population and the way things had been earlier.

It’s so, so tempting to start going out again… During my CBD oil walkabout yesterday, I passed by a favourite pizza bar of mine: they make a mean thin-crust pizza, and their cherry cider is almost as good as some of the finest I enjoyed in Seattle. And yet… It’d be the height of hubris to get back to business as usual, only to catch the virus after all this time. But it’s so very, very, very tempting… Oh well. Still plenty of stuff to play and read and binge-watch in my comfy indoor cave.

Saturday evening. I’m at the hospital with xgf. This isn’t covid-related: her torn leg muscles is getting worse.

On the one hand, Canada is far more efficient than the US: they’ve provided an X-ray and an ultrasound fast and free of charge. On the other hand, arrogant human nature is the same everywhere: the admitting doc disregarded the explanation and requested the ultrasound for an entirely different part of her leg. She did receive an appointment for a more comprehensive ultrasound later on, for what it’s worth.

So… Sitting. Waiting.

Odd day, this. Earlier, I got my wish of people-watching by walking up and down Toronto looking for non-existent dispensaries (you’ve failed me, Google!) before finally finding one that had the THC-free oil for xgf.

The phone battery is dying – just didn’t want to break the narrative by skipping even a single day. Here is hoping they’ll find what’s wrong. Here is hoping we’ll get out of here soon. Here is hoping…

Friday night, whoop whoop. It’s not that I’m getting cabin fever (there’s still too much to read and watch and play and binge), but I kind of want to just go to the center of the city and just walk around and look at other people, even while socially distancing and with everyone wearing masks and sunglasses. As I told my coworkers today, October is only seven weeks away. It’ll start getting colder again soon. This has probably been the strangest summer I’ve ever experienced. (The runner-up is the summer of 2013, when I was 16 and moved to the US. It was so strange.) This summer, I want at least one memory of meaninglessly meandering in the sunlight… Toronto’s winters are mean.

Things at work remain hectic, but still manageable. Chit-chatting with coworkers using our internal messenger. It’ll never cease to amaze me how much people are bored by Excel – or maybe they just really hate it that much? Over the years, I taught myself some basic functions, then figured out how other people’s Excel tools work, and then started making my own, ever more complex and full of features. Anyone can do what I do if they just spend one weekend watching youtube videos and practicing on their laptop, and yet no one ever does. Fascinating, really. But hey – job security. Can’t complain, eh?

Tonight’s culinary adventure: fried pasta with egg. Boil some pasta, then throw it on a frying pan, pour a few eggs in, mix it up, fry thoroughly, add some spices for taste – and voila! A crispy delicious meal filled with carbs and a bit of protein. Nom nom.

In covid news: in the US, the Republican-controlled senate still hasn’t passed the new covid relief package. All the protections from the previous package have run out, and millions of Americans can get evicted if their landlords choose to pursue that option. Even if 1% of them do that, that’ll result in tens of thousands of people being forced onto the street…

The official covid death toll in the US has crossed 160,000. The actual, unofficial death toll is much higher, but we won’t know it till later. Some estimates say the death toll will reach 300,000 by December. Then again, earlier estimates had predicted that by August, we’d be done with the pandemic, and only 60,000 would have died. So much for that. There are also 5,000,000 confirmed covid cases in the US. Considering how many people were asymptomatic or just never went to get tested (especially given the logistical nightmare of obtaining a test), the real number is likely much higher. This is what exponential growth looks like. …I don’t want to imagine how much worse things will get.

And to end this on a mildly lighter note, if you’re into dark humour: the US government has issued a travel advisory for New Zealand because it has 23 active covid cases. Not 23 million, not 23 thousand, but just 23, all of whom are in quarantine. Folks online are having a field day with that – this really is stranger than fiction.

Good night, y’all. Try to make the best of one of the last summer weekends.