Grigory Lukin.com

Friday night. Someday, I’ll look back and mourn all the unique life experiences I gave up by hiding from the virus for almost a year of my life. Today is not that day.

To quote Rihanna, “work work work work work.” Ants make colonies. Beavers make dams. I make beautiful spreadsheets and save my company millions. My work laptop remains my sole window into the world to the point where being a badass analyst and burying my head in numbers is just my default behaviour. I’m trying to tell myself that this is different from my earlier bouts of workaholism back in Seattle, but I’m not sure I’m buying it.

Day three without caffeine: the headache is less painful now and starts later in the day, but it’s still annoying. One unexpected upside: I sleep so incredibly well now. I actually get tired by 11pm (as opposed to bouncing off the walls until and after 1am), and wow, that is some restful sleep. (For context, earlier I was up to five or six cups of black coffee each day. All the energy for zero calories!)

The landlords finally took their kid out of school: he’ll be learning online now. Not sure what exactly changed convinced them to do so, but I’m glad they came to that conclusion. Now the only two vectors are the landlady’s office job and a few guests they entertain every week or so.

In covid news, after a long and painful waiting period, Toronto and the region of Peel (aka a bunch of Toronto suburbs) are going into 28-day lockdown starting first thing Monday morning. It’s really quite overdue… The lockdown will have restrictions on non-essential shopping, indoor dining, hanging out indoors with people from outside your household, and hanging out in groups of more than 10 outside. How they’ll enforce it is a whole different question: I expect there to be a lot of anonymous calls about house parties, I guess.

The virus got to a few more VIPs: senator Rick Scott of Florida and Trump’s son, Donald Jr, both tested positive for covid. Allegedly, both are fine. Then again, given how much misinformation and outright lying there was about Trump’s condition when he was sick, his son could be in the ICU, and we’d never be informed otherwise.

In better news, the covid strain found in Danish minks is most likely extinct now. If 2020 were a TV show, the writers would be all over the place: the mink strain is yet another plotline that had everyone’s attention and then dissipated into nothing. But hey, a win is a win, eh?

And in political news, there is a very sad, very slow-moving attempted coup underway. It has essentially no chance of success, but a coup attempt is still serious business. Trump is refusing to concede to Biden and keeps flooding the courts with frivolous lawsuits that allege global conspiracies. On top of that, Emily Murphy, the GSA (General Services Administration), is holding up the transition process by not signing off on it. There is no doubt as to how won the election, so her waffling is purely political – and costing lives, since without a proper transition, the new administration won’t be able to plan the vaccine rollout. It’s anyone’s guess whether Murphy will finally fold under pressure and deign to do her damn job, or hold up this charade all the way through January… Either way, not something you’d expect to see in an alleged democracy.

Try to enjoy your weekend, folks.

Thursday night.

Is it sad that the most exciting thing to happen to me this week is my raging caffeine withdrawal? The headache isn’t as bad today, and it didn’t appear until the second half of the day. I’m not quitting the stuff for good (that’s no way to leave), I just want to make sure that I can survive without it. Treating my habits the way you would an overloaded computer: just shut down all the tasks until you’re left with bare necessities, eh. (I’m curious what effect caffeine and/or cider will have on me once I end this experiment a few weeks from now.)

Work is taking up ever more time… Still, this is my 12th peak season with the company, so very few things surprise me anymore. Even with the pandemic, this isn’t the most challenging Q4 I’ve ever seen. Just a matter of perspective: a few more weeks, and it’ll be vacation time.

Yet another new project to keep things from getting stale: I’ve started re-reading the entire Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. It chronicles the adventures of a broke wizard/private investigator in Chicago, and it’s a ton of fun. The first book, Storm Front, wasn’t his finest, but that’s the price of admission – it gets a whole lot better afterwards. Book #17, Battle Ground, came out just a few months ago, and there’ll be a few more to come. Just throwing this out there in case you’d like to experiment with some urban fantasy.

In covid news, the US is setting multiple grim records. The official covid death count has crossed 250,000. Around 2,000 people died of covid in the last 24 hours – the worst day since May. (There goes the six-month reprieve.) The total confirmed cases in the US exceed 12 million: the new 12th million showed up without much fanfare. The media isn’t splashing the 250K number all over the front pages because, well, folks are mostly used to it now… There’s also the law of large numbers at work: tell someone that 10 people died in terrible agony, and you’ll get an emotional reaction. Tell them that the death toll has gone up from 200K to 250K, and they won’t be able to visualize it, or react accordingly. We may see a day (or even more) with over 3,000 covid deaths in the US…

The CDC might be getting its mojo back, but it’s too little and too late. Their new official guidance advises Americans to avoid traveling for holidays. With Thanksgiving just a week away, though, that seems like a just-in-case CYA (cover your ass) exercise, since a lot of tickets have probably already been purchased, and will not be refunded. By this point, very few people are still on the fence.

California has announced curfew (10pm-5am) that will last for a month, from November 21st through December 21st. Considering the god-awful PR scandal involving California’s governor Gavin Newsom and his non-apology apology for dining at an incredibly fancy restaurant to celebrate his lobbyist buddy’s birthday, a lot of people online are not taking this well. This is Leadership-101: practice what you preach, and leaders always eat last. Because of that one ridiculous meal, Newsom destroyed his own reputation and will likely make more than a few people violate that curfew when they wouldn’t have otherwise. This is fuzzy math – you can never quantify just how much a single high-profile action will disrupt the system, but I’m sure this defiance will result in at least a few extra covid cases.

Stay safe, folks.

Wednesday night. So arbitrary.

Earlier in my quest to get to my baseline self, I decided to cut down on caffeine. I was making do with one cup of coffee (later replaced by black tea) with breakfast, followed by lots green tea throughout the day. Well, it turns out green tea has caffeine in it too. Ho hum. Starting today, I’m going full-on cold turkey – and ye gods, my head is killing me.

I’m pretty sure I’ve had caffeine every single day since I was a child. (Black tea is really big in Russia.) My body probably has no idea what the hell hit it: Tylenol has just barely managed to knock it down a bit. It’ll probably go away completely in a day or two: I’m curious what that’d feel like. And just because I’m human and want to have some beverages other than water, I’m going with chamomile tea, which tastes a lot better than it smells.

More phone conferences at work, and ever longer days…

In covid news, a pork processing plant in Iowa allegedly disregarded every covid safety measure, encouraged its employees to work while sick, and the plant’s management used to bet money on how many employees would catch covid. This is just so unbelievably, cartoonishly, mustache-twirling evil… It’d be over the top in any work of fiction: editors would laugh you out of their offices and readers would roll their eyes, and yet here we are. Here it is. This is our world, and the alleged events happened all the way in April. Who knows how many other heinous scenes like this took place all over the US, all over the world, this whole year. The worst part is that the wrongful death lawsuit against Tyson Foods, even if it’s successful, will not result in prison time for any of the factory’s management. At best, there’ll be some monetary compensations, and no lessons will be learned…

This virus is doing a fine job of shining light on every single aspect of humanity.

Tuesday night.

The busy season at work is just a few days away, and it’s daily affecting ye olde daily routine. Today was filled with phone calls. My hard-won culinary skills are devolving to the point where my lunch consisted of a microwaved can of beans. (They’re a fine source of protein and fiber, okay?) I need to catch up on sleep…

Christmas is just over a month away: between the holidays and the personal time I’m cashing out at the end of the year, I’ll have about 10 days all to myself. And after that, my Canadian permanent residence will be just a few weeks away. Huh, it’s pretty symmetrical: 37 days until my staycation, after which I should get the PR within 30 days. Just gotta blink a few more times, fast-forward through a few more weeks, and things will be objectively better. (I still have an occasional anxiety nightmare about somehow ending up back in the US, as if the last two years never happened. Fun stuff.)

It’s still unnaturally warm this year: aside from the year I once spent in Florida, this may be the warmest November I’ve ever experienced. I saw a few tiny dots of what might have been snow around noon today, but that was it. That means next summer will be that much hotter. So strange, this global warming.

In covid news, it’s the virus’s birthday. The first known case dates back to November 17th, 2019. It’s possible that even that person might not have been the real patient zero, though they must have been just a few degrees of separation away. The current worldwide stats are 1.33 million deaths, 55.3 million cases. The real numbers are higher, since there was so little testing early on, and excess mortality definitely shows higher figures than that. I wonder where we’ll be a year from now.

It’s funny – I can’t remember when or how I originally heard about covid. It must have been in December or early January. When my coworkers and I flew from Canada to Nashville in early January, we were already concerned about catching covid at the airport, though that didn’t stop us from going out. (If only I had known that those would be the only truly relaxing nights of 2020… Heh.) The news was definitely following the virus even at the very beginning of the year, but I can’t tell how much of that made it on cable news channels, since I mostly get my information from specific subreddits and from following scientists on Twitter. I definitely didn’t anticipate spending 8 months (and likely a full year) working from home, nor many other things that followed.

In other covid news, senator Chuck Grassley has tested positive for covid. He’s 87 years old, which puts him into the highest risk category. As always, I hope he survives and learns from the experience. As always, I doubt the second part will really happen. Time will tell.

Monday evening.

In lieu of yet another recitation of mind-bogglingly boring daily minutiae, I’ll jump straight to the good stuff. Earlier today, Moderna announced that its covid vaccine is 94.5% effective. (As opposed to Pfizer’s 92% efficiency.) On top of that, it doesn’t need to be stored at ultra-cold temperatures like the Pfizer vaccine: a regular freezer would suffice.

This is great news for everyone, and the only way anyone can beat that is if they announce a one-shot vaccine, one that I believe Johnson&Johnson is working on. (Both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines are of the two-shot variety, to be taken several weeks apart.) Russia has yet to release a statement saying that actually, their vaccine’s efficiency is even better than 94.5%. Heh.

Fridays are usually when folks dump the political news they want to get little attention in the media. Looks like Mondays will be designated for covid-related announcements. If there’s a new glimmer of hope every single week, that’ll go a long way. There are quite a few other vaccine candidates that are probably eager to release their own preliminary data. At some point (hopefully this month), either Pfizer or Moderna will get an emergency approval from the FDA. At some point in December, there’ll be a lot of publicity when the first medical personnel and folks over 85 start getting their vaccinations.

And at the risk of sounding like a stereotypical finance guy – ye gods, this is great news for the stock market. My portfolio of covid-related stocks went up by 6% today, reaching the sort of number I never would’ve imagined when I was just a little bit younger. My future is tied to the vaccine rollout in more than one way, eh.

Stay safe out there, friends – this is almost over.

Sunday night, which means it’s time for another fast-forward through a new workweek.

I’m not sure what I’d do without video games as a coping mechanism. Last night, I stayed up till 4am to finish the XCom-2 game I’d mentioned earlier. (I hadn’t anticipated the ending to go for quite so long.) Today, I finally popped open Borderlands-3, which I got a month ago and was saving for a rainy day. (Incidentally, what’s up with all this rain? It still hasn’t snowed, and this might be the warmest non-Florida November I’ve ever had.) I ended up playing it the whole day, with a small interlude for my cheat-day pizza. Fun game: the cartoonish graphics and the goofy humour are just like in the prequels.

I have a pretty addictive personality: give me something sufficiently open-ended (like an open-world video game or a limitless hobby), and I’ll dive right into it. Typically, I allow myself just one or two new games per year, precisely because I know how much of my free time they take up. This year is a bizarre reversal: I want and need to spend my time doing something, anything, to deliberately fast-forward through time. I’m trying not to delude myself about vaccine availability: my working assumption is March 2021. Realistically, it may be April-June: after all, I’m not a medical worker and not in any risk group, so I’ll be the last to get my vaccination – and rightfully so. So, yeah, video games… Video games and learning languages and exercising and maybe reading (or at least flipping through) every book in my fairly sizable library. What a strange time, this lockdown.

In covid news, we’ve got some weird developments right here in the Greater Toronto Area. I know I talk a lot of smack about the US on this here blog, but Canadians are just as capable of doing stupid things fast and with gusto. A self-proclaimed “civil liberties group” called The Line Canada invades a different little Ontario town every weekend. A week ago, it was Aylmer: that town of 7,000 got invaded by 2,000 angry morons who protested lockdowns and restrictions. This weekend, it was a town of St.Thomas – just as small, but with 250 protesters this time around. That didn’t stop them from disrupting a remembrance ceremony, though. What a juxtaposition: a bunch of overly privileged marching morons invading the solemn ceremony of war veterans… We really do live in a South Park episode, don’t we?

And last night, the police in Brampton (another town near Toronto) had to break up two separate crowds with hundreds of Diwali celebrants. They gathered outside their temples, presumably not maintaining the six-foot distance, and definitely in violation of the local covid guidelines. There was a surge of cases after the Canadian Thanksgiving in mid-October. There might be another surge due to Diwali. There’ll almost certainly be one due to the US Thanksgiving. (At least the US/Canadian border is still closed.) And then there’s Christmas… Somehow, folks aren’t buying my appeals to cancel the holidays this year and celebrate them 110% harder (with interest) next year. Heh.

Saturday night, huzzay.

My life is very unusual, and the sort of problems I have would seem like great advantages to others. Case in point: I’ve just realized that I suck at gaining weight. I started counting my calories and strength-training a few months ago, and really had to force myself to eat to meet my daily goals. (Daily metabolic rate +10% on top.) I started out being a bit more underweight than before the pandemic. Fast-forward to mid-November, and I’ve gained a total of 7 lbs after several months of deliberate overeating. That does not quite meet my definition of bulking up. Heh.

I might as well start a #GrigoryProblems hashtag, which would include being unable to gain weight, getting more vacation time than I know what to do with (altogether, about six weeks off per year if you include personal time off), and saving too much money. (Approximately 60% of each paycheck, after taxes.) I know, I know – I’m overprivileged as hell. I’m well aware of that, eh.

To give y’all a flavour of the biggest concern in my life right now: I spent another hour trying and failing to install the add-ons for my MMORPG, Elder Scrolls Online. Alas, nothing worked. Seeing as trading with other players is the main way of obtaining in-game gold, and trading without add-ons is more or less impossible, I’ve given up on the whole thing. After reaching level 150, there’s not a whole lot more to do, even though some of the in-game dialogue is occasionally witty and beautiful. It no longer brings me joy, so off into the bin it goes. On the upside, there’ll be a bit more free time now. (I know, my lockdown life is glamorous as hell.)

In any case… In covid news, there’s been more and more cases of tone-deaf politicians violating their own rules – or at least appearing to disregard them. The House Democrats had to scrap their big fancy dinner in the Capitol after the news (and pictures of the venue) got out. Pelosi claimed there was extra ventilation and plenty of space between the tables, but that’s not quite how that works. (All it would take single sneeze, or just one waiter who came in to work sick.) It’s unclear if their Republican counterparts are going to hold an in-person dinner, or if they’re just better at controlling their leaks. And California’s governor Gavin Newsom ended up attending a fancy birthday party hosted by his lobbyist friend, and seems apologetic only because the news got out. Either he was too incompetent to understand how risky that was and how bad that’d look, or he understood but didn’t care. Neither of those explanations befits a leader.

With leadership like this (and lots of similar stories from the Republican party as well), it’s no wonder regular people are giving up on following the official guidelines. Part of that is just the plain old pandemic fatigue. I’m more introverted than most people, and even I get mildly cabin-fever-y once in a while, in this self-imposed lockdown. If the Powers That Be don’t care, who will?

And on that happy note – have a fine weekend, y’all.

Thursday night, and yet another step closer to becoming a Canadian.

Today was my long-awaited biometrics appointment at Service Canada. It was remarkably uneventful, aside from a fellow immigrant who was too cool (and angry) to stand in line. That security guard had the patience of a saint. After some perfunctory identity verification, the guy at Service Canada took my picture, got my fingerprints taken using a very sci-fi-looking device (like something you’d see in a 70s movie), and that was it. Remarkably uneventful for such a key event.

Online, my fellow wannabe-Canadians are a bit panicky about their timelines: earlier this year, the pandemic stopped all the immigration processing. They resumed in September – according to the Service Canada guy, they work evenings and weekends to process that backlog. That’s mighty impressive, and raises my opinion of Canada by yet another notch. (I know, I know, this country has some serious issues, but compared to the wannabe-dictatorship with mass shootings and caged children that I escaped in 2019, it’s pretty damn perfect.)

This was the last piece of the puzzle. Now I just need to hurry up and wait: at some point between now and early February, I’ll get my permanent residence, and all of this will have been worth it. So close. So very, very close…

In culinary adventures, I’ve decided to try and get more protein from actual food, as opposed to my amazing protein smoothie. (It’s got ~80 grams of protein, and I’m not entirely sure that’s such a good idea.) That resulted in some interesting dietary decisions. Yesterday, I gobbled up six cups of Greek yogurt. Today, I force-fed myself a pound of chicken while contemplating the life choices I’d made to end up at that point. Heh. And they lockdown life is boring.

The stock market is slowly but surely crashing after the Monday election/vaccine euphoria. The smartest thing to do would’ve been to sell my skyrocketing stocks on Monday. I did the second-smartest thing by selling some of them on Tuesday, followed by slowly (but surely) buying them back as they declined in price by 10% or more. That’s risky, since the tide could always turn and I could miss out on another mini-rally, but I accept the risk. Nonetheless, with all the upcoming vaccine announcements there’ll almost certainly be more one-day spikes and mini-rallies, especially once the distribution begins: any vaccination campaign, no matter how small or where, will have a profound psychological effect on the entire world.

In covid news, this chronicle of a covid outbreak in Maine is equal parts fascinating and horrifying. A wedding reception had 55 guests. One had covid. After 38 days, 176 others got infected because of that one person, and seven died. (None of the seven had been at the wedding, so they didn’t even get to enjoy the damn cake.) Of particular interest is the fact that people kept going to work once they started showing symptoms. That’s an almost uniquely American phenomenon at this point: a combination of stubbornness and lack of social net: they either didn’t want to skip work or couldn’t afford to. Perhaps both.

The Maine outbreak was remarkably well researched, but it was just one of many: a perfect postmortem of a typical cluster, of which there are so many… Weddings, funerals, birthday parties, all sorts of gatherings people want to have despite the odds. Diwali starts in two days, and will likely lead to even more clusters, even denser groups of people celebrating and sharing their germs… This is gonna be a long winter.

Wednesday night. The end of the beginning of the end of the week.

Have I mentioned that I love Canadian holidays? Because I love Canadian holidays. There are 13 of them in Ontario vs 5-6 in the US, and the occasional day off is an amazing chance to recharge. Today was a somber holiday, of course, and I did my part to join the world in spirit at the 11th minute of the 11th hour.

I made the most of this day off by hitting the grocery store during the off-peak afternoon hours: I probably could’ve lasted a few more days, but those bananas and bread ended up looking pretty sketchy. Oddly enough, the local “Play It Again Sports” store (like Gamestop but for sports equipment) had a lot of weight plates in stock. I remember them being completely empty around two months ago, so this is an interesting turnaround. (Maybe they’ve finally fixed the supply chain?) I’ve just looked up my own archive: huh, I’ve started my strength-training regimen 59 days ago, all the way back on day 184. Time really does fly… I ended up buying another 40 lbs of weight plates for my dumbbells: a bit challenging, but I’ll likely get used to it by the end of the month. Bigger, better, stronger, eh?

The hair on my temples is now long enough to blow into my eyes when I drive with the window open. What an interesting sensation…

In covid news, there’s a new data reporting portal – Covid Exit Strategy. I don’t know if they’re as non-partisan and objective as they claim to be, but their data looks interesting. (Especially this wall of indicators over yonder.) According to them, 47 out of 50 states are currently in the “uncontrolled spread” mode, with Vermont, Maine, and Hawaii being mildly better. That is not encouraging… In one of my old haunts (Reno, NV – I’ve had a lot of haunts), the main hospital is setting up a triage area in their parking garage. This may sound shocking here and now, but I’m afraid it’ll become the new normal if more hospitals get overrun during the coming winter.

Things aren’t looking all that good in Canada, either. In Ontario, the positivity rate among those tested hit 5.7%, the highest it’s been since late May. Moving in a wrong direction here, and all the talking heads on the news agree that a new lockdown is almost certainly coming: they just don’t know the specifics quite yet. The fact that Doug Ford, the guy running the province, doesn’t seem to understand basic math is certainly not helping. Ho hum.

Try not to join the grim statistics out there, y’all.