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Taco Tuesday night. Yum yum. (Note to self: buy non-broccoli vegetables to avoid sad tacos again in the future.)

Whelp, the big election day is here. It’s looking like a tossup right now. Definitely not the landslide many people had thought this would be. Florida and Texas have gone for Trump. A burst pipe in Georgia has delayed the ballot counting. (Seriously, Georgia? You had four years and one job.) As always, I’m hoping for the best and preparing for the worst – or, rather, I’m already as prepared as one can be, having already moved to Canada and all.

I just find it so hard to believe that the guy who literally danced in front of crowds as hundreds of thousands of Americans died might end up getting even more votes than he did in 2016…

I’d thought I’d be all cool, suave, and detached about this process, but I’m just not sufficiently emotionally detached from the US yet, I suppose. The first two years in a foreign country are the hardest. I remember trying to find the Russian community in Reno, Nevada when I was 18 and all alone. (That didn’t really work out all that well.) It got better and easier as years went by. I stopped following Russian news or caring about their politics (beyond what you glimpse in headlines) ages ago. Someday, I’ll probably get the same way about the second country I left behind, about the US. Today is not that day.

We might know the end result of the election tonight. Perhaps tomorrow morning.

In covid news, the UK is allegedly preparing to start its vaccination campaign in December. No vaccine has been officially approved yet, but two candidates are about done with their clinical trials. (It takes a while to fully prepare the logistics for something like this.) The first doses will go to frontline healthcare workers and people over 85, as it should be. This is not just a success story but also a monumental scientific breakthrough: the virus itself is less than a year old, and this would be the fastest vaccine development in history. The geek in me is utterly blown away. The rest of me is just as excited: someone, somewhere, will get their vaccines in a matter of weeks. That means, logistical challenges aside, things are getting better and faster than I’d ever hoped. I’m clinging to this good news like a life raft, even as I know the vaccine may be imperfect, might not work at all, and might not make it to Canada as fast as to the UK.

Hope everlasting. Hope never-ending. Hope persevering.

Monday night. The 18-month US election circus is finally going to end.

Another grey day, hastened along by the succession of routine tasks, so familiar as to become automatic. Two differences, though: first, the weather has officially gone to shit, but the gusts of whistling wind beyond my window make life a bit more interesting. Second, the landlords’ teenager was coughing up a storm this morning… This is one of those fun games we’ll all be playing this year: cold, flu, or covid?

I miiiiiight have overreacted, but I spent some time shortly afterwards on AirBnB, looking up month-long self-contained rentals (no roommates, please and thank you) in the general Toronto area. (You get a discount if you rent for 28 days.) There was a pretty funny one, a 145-sq-ft microapartment which would make for a hilarious life experience if it hadn’t been priced as much as normal, human-sized habitats. A surprisingly cheap rental from a newbie host went to my “nope” list after he said there’s only street parking, and I might get a ticket after 11pm. There was a cozy and beautiful place all the way in Niagara Falls: reasonably priced, self-contained, with fast wi-fi and parking… The sole downside is that my trip to submit the biometrics data for my PR application would turn from a 30-minute roundtrip into a three-hour one. No bueno, eh?

I ended up not renting anything: I’m rolling the dice that the kid just choked on his soup or has a bad cold… After a certain point, running stops being a viable strategy. Sure, I could bounce out of here until early December, but none of the existing risk factors would go away. The kid would still keep going to school, one of the landlords would keep going to the office, and they’d still be holding small social gatherings every week. But then again, if vaccines get distributed, say, three months from now, then maybe, just maybe, I could go into hiding for that long. Paying rent for two places at once would suck, but not nearly as much as lifelong neurological damage. I’ll give it two more days: if the kid keeps coughing, then it’s not a fluke, and then it’ll be time to go into covid self-exile once again.

In mildly better news, I’ve gotten to the point of being able to do 30 chinups more or less in a row. Considering I started in low single digits just a month or so ago, that’s a huge win, eh. Just finished reading “A bridge of years” by Robert Charles Wilson: it’s an interesting sci-fi yarn with a unique twist on time travel, though oddly enough, not as engaging as the previous book, which I read in 24 hours but liked a lot less. Heh. Next up, re-reading the excellent “City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis” by John C. Wright. It’s funny: Kindle just told me I bought this ebook almost exactly five years ago. I’m curious to see my younger self’s highlights and notes from a different temporal perspective.

In covid news, the WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he’s been exposed to something who tested positive for covid. He’s gone into self-isolation. If he gets it, it’ll be a strange omen. Incidentally, and for the record, the WHO’s current stance is against herd immunity. Just thought I’d point that out, given that they’ve been flip-flopping on this quite a lot. I believe the last time I mentioned the WHO, it was because one of their bureaucrats spoke well of the Barrington Declaration.

In other VIP covid news, it’s only now been revealed that Prince William has covid all the way in April, spent time in the ICU, and had difficulty breathing at one point. That news didn’t get shared with the rest of the UK, presumably to avoid panic. One can’t help wondering, though, how many deaths would’ve been avoided if folks knew that even a healthy VIP guy with excellent healthcare came so close to dying… Lies, good intentions, and obfuscation.

Despite my best self-assurances to the contrary, I just can’t turn away from a flaming runaway train that is the US politics. I’ll most likely spend most of tomorrow refreshing Trump’s twitter feed, if only to see his meltdown (or petty triumphalism, either/or) unfold in real time. Hey, what can I say, my threshold for entertainment is mighty low these days.

Sunday night. The first of yet another morbid month.

This ridiculous amount of time by myself has inspired me to dust off some old hobbies – or rather, things that I’d deliberately put aside because they’re just so damn addictive. This time, it’s the marvelous video game “XCom 2: War of the Chosen.” The plot is simple: evil aliens have taken over the world, and you’re in charge of the resistance in your stolen UFO. The combination of graphics, catchy music, and step-by-step strategy as you move your soldiers around… Let’s just say I’ve been known to spend multiple hours restarting the same mission just to get it perfectly right.

In pre-covid days, this game would easily gobble up several weeks’ worth of evenings, and a fair chunk of my weekends as well. Nowadays, it’s a very welcome distraction from, you know, everything.

The last votes in the US election will be cast in less than 48 hours. I’m curious, but not passionate – just emotionally removed, the same way you’d be if some TV show you didn’t really like released a new season. Things are heating up over there… In Texas, a bunch of yahoos in pickup trucks tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road, while the police offered no assistance. (Biden and Harris were not on the bus.) As a result, several campaign events had to be scrapped, so the domestic terrorists won. They’re also organizing roadblocks in New York, which is frankly pathetic. If they lose (if the election doesn’t get stolen again, this time via courts), I can only hope they’ll stop these shenanigans. It’s not like the US doesn’t already have enough bad press to deal with.

In covid news, there were some giant Halloween parties in – you guessed it – the States. Two in New York totaled almost 1,000 people, while the big one in Utah had somewhere between 2,000-10,000 altogether. I can maybe possibly understand the Utah party, since the state didn’t have a giant first wave in the spring. But New York? The same city that had to use forklifts to stack corpses into refrigerated trucks just six months ago?.. I hope some anthropologists dive into this fascinating borderline-sociopathic behaviour. That’d make one helluva documentary. (“To party in the time of plague”?) The worst part, of course, is that while the event organizers might face some charges, all the partiers will just keep on going to underground raves and off-the-grid parties. That right there is why we can’t have nice things, eh?

Welcome to November, y’all.

Saturday night. My Halloween costume this year is “a Russian-American-Canadian who stayed indoors for 232 days.” It’s very niche.

Another cozy weekend day of doing nothing. Treated myself to 50 grams of frozen smoked salmon I’d picked up during the recent grocery run. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the way it melts in my mouth. Absolutely scrumptious. (Free culinary tip: I don’t know how or why, but avocado and smoked salmon make for an amazing combination in a taco.)

I’m still hyped up on the news that my PR application is proceeding on schedule, with just about three months to go until I get it. Things will get quite a bit easier then…

In covid news, The UK has joined France and Germany with its own lockdown: it’ll last a whole month, and will begin on Thursday. It’ll be pretty strict and similar to the one in France: no haircuts or indoor dining, no going outside without a good reason, etc.

Belgium’s medical system appears to be on the verge of collapse. In at least one city, medical staff who got diagnosed with covid but aren’t symptomatic have been requested to keep working. About 25% of their staff have covid… That’s horrifiying. There is a finite number of medical professionals out there. I wonder if there’ll be some accelerated medical bootcamps to train average people to do the most basic and useful medical tasks. (Like the EMT school, only a lot more specialized.) It may come to that if things stay sufficiently bad sufficiently long. Earlier this year, some countries allowed medical students to skip their final exams and go straight to work. They may end up doing that and more as the dark winter continues.

As always, here is hoping I’m wrong about it. Happy Halloween, y’all…

Friday evening. Yaaaaaay.

This is the Halloween weekend. If not for the virus, I probably would’ve been out there – walking around in some self-assembled costume, celebrating, people-watching… This year, I imagine there are still some house parties, but the most relevant official event I heard of was a haunted drivethrough. (I literally laughed out loud when I heard about it.) I like to think that once this pandemic ends, I’ll never miss another opportunity to go out ever again. Then again, everyone returns to their baseline, so that self-promise probably wouldn’t last. On the other hand, you only get so many healthy years, and this damn pandemic has devoured one of them… Gonna have to be fractionally more festive and party-going from now on, eh?

Today was, for once, a bit different. Some good news at last: Service Canada called and set up my long-awaited biometrics appointment. (A very fancy way of saying they’ll take my picture and take my fingerprints. Heh.) The big day is just 13 days away. My company’s lawyers said the permanent residency application is still on track, and they’re still expecting me to get it by early February. Just three more months, just 14 more weeks, only 14 more blinks that take me straight to Friday night as I fast-forward through yet another grey and uneventful workweek… Hope is a dangerous thing. I want to be all cute and clever and say “I’m contemplating allowing myself to begin considering cautious optimism” but no, I really do hope, sincerely and fervently, that everything will work out just fine and right on schedule.

As one of my all-time favourite quotes goes, “Hope… Do not look down, my friend. Even in the darkest of times, there is always hope. Hope for a better day, hope for a new dawn. Or just hope for a good breakfast. You start small, then see what you can get.” Something I always try to keep in mind.

In covid news, the US has set yet another record, this time with 98,000 new cases in one day. Simultaneously, here is what the President of the United States of America said at yet another rally earlier today: “You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID. You know that, right? I mean our doctors are very smart people. With us when in doubt, choose COVID. It’s true, no, it’s true. No, they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s terrible what he said,’ but that’s true. It’s like $2,000 more, so you get more money. This could only happen to us”

…I’m glad I left. It’s interesting, in a rather macabre way. I used to think that just ahead of the election (which is four days away), Trump’s administration would introduce some fake or untested covid vaccines, and fool people just long enough to get their votes. (In this scenario, they wouldn’t care about any side effects, since they would have won the election by then.) In reality, though, they’ve ended up downplaying the pandemic, essentially calling it fake news, and celebrating some imaginary victory. A news release from the White House Office of Science and Technology claimed “ending the covid-19 pandemic” as one of the administration biggest scientific triumphs. It’s really beginning to sound like 40% of Americans live in some alternate reality, where covid is fake, the pandemic is over, and there aren’t 1,000 Americans dying every day.

Oh, and Idaho Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin just recorded an anti-lockdown video of herself sitting in a car, holding a gun and a Bible, and talking about inalienable rights. This whole thing is too absurd to be real, too stupid to be funny, too believable to be shocking. There are four days left until the election: if one of those idiots decides to orchestrate a covid-related October surprise, it’ll likely happen this weekend – assuming it happens at all.

Stay safe out there, folks, and especially you, my American amigos.

Wednesday evening. 60% of the way to the weekend, which is a particularly meaningless social construct in this here time of plague.

Today was mildly interesting because of a) a grocery trip, and b) giving a couple of presentations at work. I could’ve lasted for a few more days without a resupply run, but my bananas started going bad, and a protein smoothie without bananas… Look, I’m not the most refined guy out there but I’m not a savage, you know?

The presentations at work were a refreshing change of pace. It’s amazing how much better you can get at public speaking if you have to speak to groups of people (on and off) for about five years. Fun times. It is my firm belief that the corporate America (and the corporate Canada as well) would be much better off with company-sponsored public speaking courses for every employee. Dreams and aspirations, eh?

Earlier today, one of my landlords (the stay-at-home husband) tried to explain to me that masks don’t work, because he saw some study (???) that said 85% of Americans wore masks (not even close to the truth), and then the US got sick anyway. He is not a high-information news consumer… I think he read that on some social media. I tried showing him some sites that stated unequivocally that yes, masks do indeed work, but he didn’t seem persuaded.

I’ll be honest: my landlords worry me. They throw social gatherings (5-10 people) almost weekly, they have this strange recurring cough which kind of implies they already caught the common cold from someone else, so they weren’t perfectly careful, and they’re both big fans of Trump. Both are concerned about the pandemic, but then they invite half of their social circle to feast and chit-chat, and then gleefully share a piece of fake news about masks…

If I catch covid, it will be through them. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many other options at the moment. I can afford my own little apartment somewhere in a high-rise, but the virus can travel through plumbing and ventilation systems. Ideally, an isolated cabin would work best – just like the one in Deep River, at the very beginning of this journey. Unfortunately, Toronto has a rather limited supply of cozy isolated cabins. Ho hum. Theoretically, I might be able to self-isolate even further, locking myself inside my roof (it has its own bathroom, so water won’t be an issue), but that’d also require getting a tiny stove and saying goodbye to all the refrigerated food… Crazy, but not impossible.

In covid news, France and Germany are going into nationwide lockdown for four weeks (France on Friday; Germany on Monday) due to approaching the maximum capacity in their ICUs, as well as the ever-increasing new cases. In France, the lockdown means you can go to work (if WFH is not an option), you can shop for the most necessary supplies, and you can spend one hour outside for exercise. Schools will remain open, unlike their previous eight-week lockdown in the spring. Germany’s rules will be very similar. I hope they pull this off.

The stock market’s crash is accelerating. Last week was choppy, but this week… It’s been crashing for three days in a row now. Today Dow fell by more than 3%. I’m a very patient person, so I’m just holding on to my stocks (most of which I’d bought back in June) and waiting until all of this gets better at some point in 2021. Others, who are not as patient or strategic, must be losing their minds right now. I’ll almost certainly load up on more stocks within a month, once I get my twice-yearly bonus. And yes, I know, I’m privileged as hell. I know. I just want us all to get through this relatively intact, and thinking far ahead is my personal coping mechanism. Hang in there, y’all.

Tuesday evening.

More of the same old, same old, eh. Today’s big adventure was successfully not turning rice into soup twice in a row with my instapot. I’m cautious not to say I’m getting the hang of it, because that’s a surefire way to jinx myself for all eternity. Gotta say, I’m mighty curious about the instapot’s cake-making feature… Eggs and rice I can understand, but cake? That’s black magic at work.

(I know, I know, the lockdown life is absolutely riveting and filled with excitement.)

At work, the business hours got permanently extended by an hour, from 5pm till 6pm. That leaves me just five hours per day for myself. That’s one way to cut down on existential despair, I suppose: it typically goes away when I make all the pie charts in Excel. I’ll really have to start clawing back my 30-minute lunches, though.

My quest to get back to baseline continues: I figure I can extend the sober October for another month or two, and I’m cutting my caffeine down to just one cup of coffee at breakfast. (Sidenote: green tea is disgusting.) It’s curious to feel my body adjust: I actually get tired and sleepy by 11pm now. What a fascinating concept. Is that what life is like for non-workaholics? Heh, I must sound like the lamest recovering drug addict ever, now that I’ve cut down on ginkgo biloba, cider, and caffeine.

In covid news, Russia has ordered national mask mandate: they must be worn in all crowded public spaces. There’s also a strong recommendation for local authorities to establish 11pm-6am curfew. If you believe the official numbers, Russia is currently in the fourth place in terms of covid cases. (The top three belong to the US, India, and Brazil.) Then again, that’s the same country that would literally throw dissenting doctors out of their windows if they dare to disagree with Putin. (No, that wasn’t in the Soviet Union. Yes, that happened here and now, in 2020.) I hope this new measure works out for them, and helps stem the tide.

In other covid news, a store security guard in Chicago got stabbed 27 times by two sisters (age 18 and 21) when he asked them to put on their masks. The news says he’s survived the attack. Not everyone, but some people, out on the frayed edges of our society, are starting to regress – rapidly and ruthlessly. There will almost certainly be more of these headlines, and more frequently, as the pandemic goes on…

And to wrap up the news cycle – I didn’t write about this two days ago because it was a little bit too depressing. Nonetheless, I guess I’d better present this without comment, if only to keep it as a dark bookmark in this here historical record. This is what the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows recently said during an interview with Jake Tapper:

Meadows: “We’re not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics.”
Tapper: Why aren’t we going to control it?
Meadows: “Because it is a contagious virus just like the flu.”

At least they’re honest, eh?.. Stay safe out there, friends.

Monday night.

If not for all the doomscrolling of different news feeds, I wouldn’t have been able to tell this day apart from any other. There are some superficial differences such as weather or various cooking experiments, but really, today was just another drop in ye olde routine bucket. Not better, not worse, just exactly the same. (I can really relate to Nine Inch Nails’s “Every Day is Exactly the Same” song.)

Speaking of kitchen experiments: I’ve made two more attempts to cook with the instapot earlier today. Upside: the boneless chicken breast is amazing, and definitely faster than boiling. Downside: I keep making rice soup instead of, you know, rice. There’s some magic ratio of water and time – just gotta find it first. Once I do, though, I’ll end up with delicious and healthy lunches done in just five minutes. Huzzay!

In local news, there’s a disturbing shortage of flu shots… There’s a drug store just a block away from me: I call them up every few days, and yet there’s nothing. Those who need it the most should get it first, but I’d be a lot more comfortable if I knew when my turn is going to be. (Even if it’s sometime in mid-November.)

In covid news, hospitals around the world are getting into grim overflow situations. A hospital in Poland had to start staging its covid patients in a covered outdoor structure used for parking ambulances. The city of El Paso, Texas, has declared two-week curfew from 10pm-5am. Since October 1, they’ve seen a 160% increase in positivity rate, as well as a 300% increase in hospitalizations. There are emergency isolation tents being set up in parking lots… Elsewhere in the US, there’s talk of resorting to triage to ration medical care when hospitals get completely overwhelmed. That will be ugly, and the halfhearted measures some of the states may enact won’t benefit them until weeks later. Systems have momentum, and if you’re trying to hit the brakes only when your local ICU gets 100% full… You might reduce the impact somewhat, but you’ll still end up in a horrific crash.

Winter won’t officially start until December 21, but for all intents and purposes, dark winter is already here.

Sunday night. Who knew the end of the world as we know it could get so monotone?

Today was filled with mildly productive procrastination. A bit more gaming, followed by finally sorting out the big pile of shiny rocks I gathered during my roadtrip vacation in July. I now have a small box of gorgeous gems (about 5% of the total), a bag of plain-looking rocks that glow in the UV light, a bag of okay-looking amethysts, and about 50 lbs of uggos. (They should still be fun for your average non-rockhound person, though.)

Along the way, I played around with my DLSR, only to find that somewhere, somehow, I misplaced the memory card reader and a bunch of other accessories. Gotta love that two-day Amazon delivery, eh.

Speaking of which: at some point in the past 18 months, Amazon must have enabled the Pandora skill on Canadian Echoes. (This sentence would make zero sense to someone from the year 2000.) The best thing about Pandora is being able to listen to stand-up comedians and set up your own comedy stations: as far as their algorithm is concerned, Maria Bamford and John Mulaney are just unusual-sounding musicians. It’s a little sad how refreshing it is to hear human voices all around me again…

In covid news, several of VP Mike Pence’s staff have tested positive for covid. That includes his chief of staff. Allegedly, both Pence and his wife (the Second Lady? the first Lady-in-Waiting?) have tested negative, so Pence can continue campaigning and traveling, seeing as he is somehow defined as “essential personnel.” Then again, at this point there’s so little trust in the White House communications that even if Pence did have covid, there’s a fair chance they’d just say the same thing. (It’d make his reelection odds even worse if he had to stay in isolation for the next two weeks.)

Tomorrow, the Republicans in the US senate will hold the final vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court. That says all you need to know about their priorities: no stimulus bill for regular Americans, but filling an empty Supreme Court is urgent business. If you were to write this in a political novel (before the pandemic, of course), any sane editor would’ve told you that the satire and jaded humour were a bit too on the nose. To make things more interesting, there’ll probably be another maskless White House celebration tomorrow night. There’s every reason to believe it’ll turn into another super-spreader event…

Hang in there, my yankee compadres.