Grigory Lukin.com

Monday night. How come we still don’t have food replicators in 2020?

Another Monday of yet another workweek. Another step closer to becoming a full-fledged Canadian resident, though.

I’ve decided to switch up my relaxation repertoire by switching from the zombie game (too monotone after some point) back to Elder Scrolls Online. I broke that particular addiction after spending a couple of weeks hiking through the Ontario wilderness in July. The real world is just way more picturesque and beautiful than even the best video game visuals… Nonetheless, the writing in the game is amazing and occasionally hilarious, and even though every interaction is hard-coded, that almost makes up for the lack of socialization if you try hard enough.

Today was the first day of my exercise regime. Let me just state one thing: there ought to be easier ways to overload on protein. Eggs are insufficient due to their high fat/protein ratio, and even with my awesome homemade protein smoothie with its 78 grams of protein can only get me halfway there. I’ve ended up setting ye olde slowcooker to cook some random beans I’ve found to cover the gap. On the upside, I’ve found my old digital food scale, which means I no longer have to use a complex system of cups to guesstimate the true weight of things. (Come to think of it, the scale miiiight have been for drug dealers dealers, since I can’t imagine why any cook would need to measure 0.1 grams of something.)

My landlords are not opposed to me buying and them installing a pullup bar (my only weakness!) but in the meantime I visited a local park a few blocks away. I’ve officially become the weird man haunting a playground after sunset. (In my defense, I wanted to see if there was a pullup-compatible metal bar I could exercise on.) That was a little too weird, even for me. Gonna have to hit up that secondhand sports good store, I guess. Aside from the pullup fiasco, though, and my arms feeling like they’re about to fall off after 40 minutes of exercising, all is well! The trick, as always, will be getting enough sleep. At least some positive changes will come out of this long lockdown… (I apologize in advance to all the chickens I’ll have to devour over the course of this vanity quest.)

In covid news, we’re out of monkeys. The pandemic has been highlighting some unusual and occasionally bizarre bottlenecks in the worldwide supply chain but huh, monkeys. Go figure. Evidently, 60% of the monkeys used for testing in the US had been imported from China. China stopped all exports once the pandemic started. No monkeys means no testing, and given how much testing all the various vaccine candidates are going through… It’s a great time to be in the monkey business.

There was a particularly unbelievable anti-mask protest in St George, Utah. This news report is only 99 seconds long, and it’s hard to believe that was a real event with real people – as opposed to, say, some poorly written satire. My favourite part was where the ornery mob tried to storm a school building.

One bit of good news: the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine trial has resumed after being placed on hold for a few days due to one person’s adverse reaction in the UK. Here is hoping the rest will go smoothly… Any vaccine that proves successful will be distributed to hundreds of millions around the world. Even if there are 100,000 participants in your final phase, a single bad reaction could mean thousands of identical reactions once it’s rolled out. That’s only 0.001% but someone somewhere will end up getting that bad lottery ticket. Whatever ends up getting approved at the end will have to be as bulletproof as possible. Toes and fingers crossed, eh?

Saturday evening. What if 2021 will make us all feel nostalgic about the comparatively peaceful and easy 2020?

This is the 183rd day since xgf (né gf) and I ran away from Toronto, started a big AirBnB adventure, and generally started safeguarding against the virus. It’s been 183 days since I’ve been to work: there’s a bunch of new hires there now who wouldn’t recognize my face if they bumped into me. This is an important day, because it’s the half-year mark. From this point on, the virus has officially taken up the majority of at least one year in my life, in your life, in everybody’s life. Am I the only one who wonders what things would’ve been like in the baseline reality, one that’s free of covid?..

I tried to be proactive and googled Workaholics Anonymous. Turns out, it’s a 12-step support group based on the same general principle as Alcoholics Anonymous. It amounts “please proclaim undying faith in some almighty higher power that’s totally not God :)” – or as close as you can get to a taxpayer-subsidized cult that barely even bothers hiding. Oh well.

Doing some more reading, here and there. In order to get any significant results from home workouts (or gym workouts, if I felt safe enough to go there), I’d have to consume an unholy amount of protein every single day. Homemade protein smoothies and tons of boneless chicken breast it is, then. Incidentally, the more I learn about the best way to grow muscle (and, conversely, the worst ways), the more I realize how counterproductive my previous efforts had been… I’d go to the gym right after a long day at the office, without any protein snacks at any point in the afternoon. Or sabotage myself by getting just 4-5 hours of sleep per night. Or other stuff… Well, at least now I know better.

One interesting aspect of this particular new hobby is all the meal-planning. Not so much meal prep (who has the time, eh?) as knowing what to munch on ahead of time. Given that I’ve lost about 10 lbs over the past six months solely due to poor eating habits, that’ll be interesting… I’m off to order a food scale and those little measuring spoon thingies.

I keep reminding myself to check my privilege and realize just how well off I am compared to so many others, so I will not be so crass as to say that my self-imposed living situation is even remotely like solitary confinement. Nope. Not saying anything like that, just to make it clear. What I am saying, though, is that things are mighty bleak and monotonous – the more different hobbies and distractions I can bury myself in, the better. (A friend of mine in Seattle has just taken up knitting – good for him.)

In covid news: winter is coming. Fauci is being a realist, but even though he tries to look on the bright side, the media insists on using only the darkest quotes as the headlines. Things like “the US won’t get back to normal till the end of 2021” or “December will be really bad,” etc. I wish I didn’t have to say this, but we’re dealing with an increasingly violent country here… I hope no one decides to shut him up by force. His family has been receiving threats for quite a while now. Fauci may have royally screwed the pooch by dismissing masks back in March (so that there’d be more for medical personnel), but he hasn’t had any major blunders since then. He is, on the balance, one of the good guys – and possibly the only good guy in the US government when it comes to this pandemic.

Winter is coming, and it probably won’t be pretty. Earlier, folks thought summer would be relatively covid-free since it dies in the sun and so many people are out and about. Well, that didn’t quite work out that way. (People love indoors and air-conditioning a whole lot more than gallivanting in the great outdoors.) Summer has been pretty bad. Winter will likely be just as bad, if not worse – though if it’s any consolation for the west coast, at least there won’t be any additional wildfires. Prediction: there will be an awful lot of pictures of snowmen and snow angels on social media, since there won’t be much else to do. At least that’s my big plan, in any case.

Friday night. Someday, I’ll find out why people hate and mock Maroon 5, Coldplay, and Nickelback. Today is not that day.

I celebrated the long-awaited arrival of the weekend by munching on microwaved frozen burritos and drinking cider in the backyard while reading about nutrition – as one does.

Today was the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attack. That attack killed about 3,000 Americans. This pandemic has killed at least 60 times as many, yet there doesn’t seem to be nearly as much outrage. I’m definitely not the first person to point that out, but America’s lack of urgency – or unity, for that matter – is still staggering.

Things at work are getting more… interesting, I guess you could say – reminiscent of the late 2016, when my main objective was, just as it is now, to count days till March, when a long-awaited (and frankly, idealized) event awaited me. Waiting for my PR (and a few other things) would’ve been much easier if there was anything besides work in my life.

For those of you reading this in the future (you lucky bastards), here is what one immigrant’s life is like in Canada during the pandemic:

Dating life: nada. Meetups and mixers are all cancelled, and for good reason. (Xgf is tempting fate by meeting up with random folks from dating sites. Good for her, but if she catches covid this way after all our precautions, I’ll be mildly peeved.)

Finances: got some measure of job security, not going out, not dating, and the only real expenses are groceries and alcohol. In other words, I’m saving more money than ever before – and funneling it into my stock market account. Some say that all the giant stock market swings are due to people like me who sit at home and day-trade. Personally, I’m more of a buy-and-hold investor these days, but I see where they’re coming from.

Exercise: I try to force myself to do body-weight exercises. Gyms reopened not too long ago, but it just doesn’t seem like a good idea to visit the one place where people huff and puff. For now, doing some laps in the backyard helps break up the routine, but winter is coming…

Hobbies: mixing up binge-watching TV shows, reading new books, playing video games, and learning fun new languages on DuoLingo mostly breaks up the routine. All the shiny minerals I found on my geological vacation in July make my room look like a fairly impressive provincial museum. I’m making small (very, very small) progress with cooking. Ended up falling in love with garlic salt, of all things. Trying to learn to love vegetables, though frozen burritos win every time. Heh. I’ve yet to unpack the new zoom lens for my camera, or the art set I bought months ago.

Work: things are extra-busy at Amazon this year. We call it “the forever peak” since we’ve been running nonstop since March. Typically, such workload is reserved for the last six weeks of the year. Stress. Burnout. Far more turnover than I’ve ever seen. I’m relatively essential, so I’ve held on to my job, if only out of stubbornness. I keep reminding myself to be grateful, since millions have lost their jobs. For the time being, I’m just working from home. What used to be a rare treat before the pandemic has turned into a strange and grey routine: hypothetically, I can sleep/eat/work/shower without ever leaving my room. Now that’s a scary thought… We’re good to continue working from home till at least January. What happens next will be interesting.

And so it goes. I’m playing this thing extra-safe, which means no unnecessary outings until I get a vaccine shot – and that means anywhere between 4-6 months more of this routine. Ho hum. One major consolation is that my Apocalypse Beard and my hair will both grow out by then. I wonder what my hermit look will be, especially if I actually manage to get in better shape. (Grigory “the wild man of Mississauga” Lukin. Heh.)

In covid news, Florida just really hates science and loves money. On Monday, Florida’s bars will be allowed to reopen after the 2.5-month shutdown. They won’t be allowed to exceed 50% capacity, but that still sounds like 49% too many. A covid-proof bar sounds just as likely as a self-contained smoking section in a restaurant. I don’t mean to be too much of a downer here, but they’ll probably get a spike in covid cases in a couple of weeks.

In more positive covid news, there were no covid deaths in Canada over the past 24 hours. That hasn’t happened since March 15. For context, this pandemic chronicle began when xgf and I ran away from Toronto on March 14. The fact that deaths, if not infections, have been eliminated, if only for a little while, is a major victory. Now we just need to build a border wall and make New Mexico pay for it, and we’ll be good to go.

Enjoy your weekend, platonic pandemic peeps.

Tuesday night. Some people say you shouldn’t shop when you’re hungry. I say they should mind their own goddamn business.

Taco Tuesdays got rescued when I found a “make your own taco” kit at a local grocery store. (Maybe I’m just not looking hard enough, but there’s a distinct shortage of hard tacos in Canadian stores.) This is an actual kit with a little bag of spice and a little bag of sauce, and it may well be the whitest thing I’ve ever bought. Nonetheless, it was pretty damn delicious. I needed it after today…

Unfortunately, I’m too professional to go into detail, but today at work it was, as kids say, a clusterfuck. (Do kids still say that? I hope kids still say that.) It was sufficiently bad that I’m taking most of tomorrow off just out of general principle. Alas, I still need to log on for a quick call in the middle of the day, but aside from that – woot! Partial freedom. I can’t help but wonder if I would’ve reacted as strongly had I received 72 hours of uninterrupted rest but nah, most likely not.

Nonetheless, I munched on some tacos and I’m pretty close to draining my strategic cider supply, so life is good, sort of. Not the best stress relief mechanism, I know, I know, but I’m working with what I’ve got. Oy vey.

In covid news: there was an unusual development in the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine phase-3 study. One of the volunteers in the UK suffered a serious adverse reaction. The testing has been put on hold. There’s no news on what exactly happened or how bad that was, but good on them for choosing safety over speed.

Allegedly – and it’s unclear how true that report was – large pharmaceutical companies aren’t too keen on Trump’s plan to just fast-track a random vaccine right before the election, phase-3 studies be damned. Looks like some lawyers and perhaps even some common sense took precedence over the prospect of profits. Of course, if that’s true, that just means some smaller, scrappier, less ethically challenged company will provide something that may or may not be a vaccine. After all, it’s pretty clear now that the White House has an answer in need of a question: all that matters to them is getting something – anything at all – to package and roll out as an easy win, as an October surprise, as a miracle cure that might do nothing at all, or might do terrible harm, none of which will matter as long as it provides that much-needed jump in the polls.

Not for the first time, nor the tenth, I really, really hope I’m wrong…

Sunday night. No Sunday sundaes today – xgf’s move back to her parents’ place has turned out to be more complicated than hitherto anticipated. It’ll be a three-day project (hopefully not a longer one), so there’s that. The upside is that I’ve managed to score eight hours of sleep two nights in a row. I think the last time that happened was during my big roadtrip vacation in July. (It feels so long ago now…)

Treated myself to a Tim Hortons breakfast this morning. (For all y’all yanks reading this – imagine the nicest fast food chain you’ve ever been to (okay, maybe not as nice as In’N’Out) and add a huge selection of 99-cent donuts. Then you’ll get Tim Hortons.) I haven’t actually been inside one of their franchises in about four months: it’s been exclusively drive-through. Sorry to say that things have gone south. The cashier had her mask underneath her nose. (Though there was a thick plexiglass barrier between us.) One of my fellow fast food fans wasn’t wearing a mask at all. There was a government printout hanging on the wall, stating your name and email may be recorded for potential tracing purposes – but no one asked me. I understand that folks get the pandemic fatigue, but jeez… At least try to go through the motions, folks.

In personal news… I’m doing what I do best – time-traveling by ignoring the present and daydreaming about the future. At some point, around roughly day 260, it will be 2021, a whole new year. I’m already daydreaming and brainstorming (dreamstorming?) different plans and far-out scenarios for different things I can do. They range from rather realistic to utter fiction, but hey, gotta have a hobby, right? April 2021 will be a very interesting month for me…

In covid news: Mexico isn’t doing so well. Parts of the country have run out of death certificates, leading to a million new ones getting printed and distributed. Just that scenario alone – vital state bureaucracy running out of death certificates – is horrifying and creepy and unimaginable as all hell. It’s hard to gauge the exact covid death toll due to poor testing or ambiguous death causes or what have you. Even so, by the official count, Mexico has the fourth-highest death toll in the world – behind the US, Brazil, and India. As far as I know, though, none of the above had to do an urgent order on death certificates, and… I’ve got no words. That’s simply horrifying. I wish them well, but it looks like there are some very deeply entrenched systemic factors in place: not just obesity or shoddy healthcare, but the inefficient government as well. I wish them well, for what little that may be worth.

Saturday morning – a rare and collectible example of yours truly blogging before noon. Slept just a bit over eight hours, and it feels so strange: relaxing yet groggy. Objectively, I know I’d be better off if I got this much sleep every night, but after decades of getting by on six (or fewer) hours of sleep, that’s really quite unimaginable. (Consider how strange your life would be if you had two extra fingers on each hand. It’s a bit like that.) But then again, maybe if/when I eventually hit my early retirement…

I have fond memories of my year of funemployment – after I graduated from UNR but before I had to get a ground-level warehouse job with Amazon. There was some hustling, there were some gigs, there were some unwise financial decisions (the only time in my life I maxed out a credit card), but there was also riding a bicycle through the deserted desert streets of Reno after midnight, and staying up till 4am in a cozy papasan chair with a pot of coffee and a bag of locally baked donuts and some detective novels… That was as close to being off the grid as an unemployed college grad could get in the middle of recession. Someday, I hope to return to that simplicity.

In covid news: I didn’t think of this at first (since I’m deliberately avoiding people and all), but most everyone else will be partying during this three-day weekend, especially in the US. There may well be a spike in cases, some more clusters, etc. A barbecue to die for, eh?..

And now, time to slither out of bed, check on my impromptu chili in the slowcooker, then drive to the bank, and then spend the rest of the day helping xgf pack up and move… Yay variety. Have a fun but safe weekend, y’all.

Friday night, whoop whoop. This is supposed to be a three-day weekend, but between a) helping xgf move on Saturday and Sunday, and b) a work call I accidentally scheduled for Monday morning, it’ll be more of a weird, extended, not-quite-relaxy interlude than anything else.

The landlords’ 16-year-old son is apparently staying with his older sister, who lives a few miles away. Still not sure what all the shouting was about recently, but hey – looks like at least someone figured something out. Sometimes damage control is the only option when you can’t quite put things back together.

At the risk of sounding more flaky than I usually am – got yet another new hobby! Decided to step up my exercise game with some actual structure, for once. I stayed up somewhat late last night, reading different arguments for and against pre-recorded workout routines like P90, P90X, P90X3 (someone definitely ran out of imagination on that one), Insanity, etc. A stray comment led me to “Bigger Leaner Stronger” by Mike Matthews. Seems to be rooted in science and common sense, unlike a lot of other products I’ve seen. It’ll be interesting to see how far this takes me. So far, I’ve enjoyed the opening chapters defining key nutritional concepts in very plain language. (I used to know most of this, but that was so long ago.)

It’s occurred to me that I enjoy hobbies with immediate, tangible outcomes more than the more abstract ones… Learning French as opposed to learning how to draw. Working out and cooking as opposed to, well, most other things. The hardest part – and I already know this much about myself – will be forcing myself to get eight hours of sleep each night. I’ve accomplished a lot of fairly impressive things in my life, but getting that much sleep is something I’ve never been able to do. We’ll see how that plays out.

And speaking of patience, stocks are being weird again. The market is being even more irrational than usual, going up and down by as much as 2-3% per day. Interestingly, my risky stocks are finally going back up while all that is happening. Carnival Corporation, one of the major cruise ship companies, will resume its cruises this Sunday – though from Europe, not from the US. A few of their competitors announced plans to start cruising again in 2021. Cue fun, fanfare, festivities, and a spike in stock prices. It took almost exactly three months, but my portfolio is now back at the high level it’d hit before the market crashed in early June. I’m about to hit another significant financial threshold – might pop that 3-month-old bottle of champagne next week at long last. Macabre, I know, celebrating something while the world is in such a horrid state… But one must celebrate something, eh? Can’t be all doom and gloom all the time: there’ll be time enough for that later.

Speaking of which, in covid news – there’s a new and scary model from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The model states that the US covid death toll could reach 410,000 by the end of the year, and possibly as high as 620,000 if the government decides to go with the herd immunity model and let everyone get sick. If there’s one thing about this pandemic, it’s that it exceeded everyone’s most pessimistic estimates, making fools of pundits and professional prognosticators. The combined US death toll in WW2 was 418,500 – and that was enough to leave a permanent mark on the nation’s history. It’s possible that that figure will be exceeded in just about four months… I don’t even know what to say. That number is even more difficult to imagine than the current ~200,000 deaths. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but it seems like hope is all that’s left in terms of options…