Grigory Lukin.com

Monday evening. In the spirit of keeping things interesting, I went all in on veggies during today’s grocery run. (Incidentally, my growing dislike of Walmart has led me into Loblaws for what I believe is the first time. Go Loblaws!)

I decided to steam a few of them in a microwave for dinner: just random stuff like carrots, beats, peppers, cauliflower, etc. Five minutes later, I accidentally ended up with impromptu borscht. You know what they say: you can take a boy out of Russia… Heh.

I also tried dragonfruit for the first time. It was delicious, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was destroying something beautiful as I sliced it in half. The world would be a much more entertaining place if all the random fruit/veggie arrangements were replaced with dragonfruit and other tropical beauties.

…yesterday, white cops in Wisconsin shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back after he broke up a fight and started walking back to his SUV. Miraculously, he survived. That happened just short of the three-month anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. Not a damn thing has changed. There are riots in Kenosha. No justice, no peace. Some countries go entire decades without engaging in horrifying police violence. The US can’t even make it three months. Not for the first time, I’m so, so glad I left. I feel sorry for those left behind, those who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave – “sorry” in the most fundamental sense of the word. Sorrow.

The fact that Blake survived is far less relevant than the fact that several white cops attempted to kill him in broad daylight. There will be the standard kabuki theater: they’ll be placed on leave, some hoity-toity task force will stretch out the investigation for months and years. Much, much later, there’ll be some official conclusion, followed by a non-apology apology. There will be no justice.

I remember the murder of Freddie Gray. The fact that those Baltimore cops stayed quiet and got away with it… That was horrifying – and just another in the series of many red flags. I was in Baltimore when that happened, launching Amazon’s newest warehouse. There were city-wide curfews, and we had to give our employees permission slips so they could get to work and back after dark. That was over five years ago. Not a damn thing has changed. Some place their hopes on Kamala Harris: if Biden wins the election, and if Trump lets go of the power peacefully (fat chance), and if Biden dies in office, and if Harris actually wants to enact change… That’s an awful lot of if’s, and that’s no way to run an alleged democracy.

In covid news: Trump has strong-armed the FDA into announcing emergency authorization for using convalescent plasma to treat covid. That’s largely meaningless, and most of the FDA’s personnel (and Fauci himself) were against it. There’s no way to scale up the production of plasma (humans are the only source), and the efficiency is overstated, in any case. Just more empty noise.

The Miami Dolphins will admit 13,000 fans into their stadium during the home opener on September 10th. There are highly idealistic plans that attempt to explain how 13,000 people will stay far away from each other, avoid close contact, and get into the stadium in a socially responsible way. And they say there’s no market for fairy tales anymore. Heh. This strikes me as just the latest in the ongoing battle of jocks vs nerds. Nerds wanted the country to go into lockdown, wanted masks to be made mandatory, etc. Jocks laughed and didn’t follow the rules. Now it’s the football season, and while countries like New Zealand can enjoy their public gatherings once again, the US jocks want something they haven’t earned. I wonder how many other states will do something similar. There’ll be some mighty depressing pictures of mobs of fans waving American flags and shouting nonsense in support of their beloved sportsball team.

…I get that my writing has become increasingly bitter and cynical. I’m aware of that. It’s just that the world at large, or at least my part of it, is going to hell in a handbasket. I worry about my friends, my family, and the people of the country I’d once loved. And there’s not a damn thing I can do to truly help them.

Sunday night. The beginning of yet another week, not too different from others, except that it’ll bring me another week closer to becoming a Canadian; to meeting my big goal; to getting vaccinated. (Whenever that may be.)

My body is very confused about the spike in physical activity yesterday: legs are sore and fine, but my left shoulder feels off. I guess 100 pushups out of nowhere will do that. (Normally, I’d do maybe 25 per day – assuming I remembered or felt like it.) Looks like I’ll have to set up leg/arms/whatever days.

My new (well, new to me) zoom lens will arrive soon, according to the FedEx tracker. It made it all the way from Japan to the US earlier this weekend. Then it spent a few hours in the state of quantum uncertainty, fluctuating between Memphis and Indianapolis, and finally made it to my Toronto suburb, Mississauga. Here is hoping nobody breathed/sneezed/coughed at it during the process. With luck, it’ll get delivered fairly soon.

Funny story about that shipment. That was the first time in years that I’ve used Fedex. Earlier today, some scammer called me at the very early hour of 10:30am (rude!) and woke me up with a pre-recorded message saying the delivery fee was $30 short, and I should enter my credit card info over the phone. Now, even when I’m rudely awakened at an unbelievably early hour such as that, I know a scam when I hear one, so I hung up. Here’s the question, though: is there a mole at Fedex who sold my shipment info to scammers? Or are the tracking cookies on my laptop becoming so intelligent that they send my shopping data to random scammers? Or was it both? How strange, this modern world…

In covid news: there was a stampede at a night club in Lima, Peru after the police raided an illegal party. There were about 120 people at the party. During the rush for the exit, 13 of them died. There’s no word on how many were injured but survived. By doing something this tactically stupid, Peru ensured a 10.8% mortality, worse than covid’s fatality rate by a huge margin. I suspect that won’t be the last incident of this sort.

In Massachusetts, there’s a large man who gives hugs to shoppers at Walmart and then tells them, “Just giving you a covid hug. You now have covid.” It’s unclear whether he actually has covid. The police are looking for him, though with a mask on, camera footage isn’t very useful.

And there are reports that Trump is planning to roll out the Oxford vaccine before the stage three trial ends, and before it secures the FDA approval – as long as it happens before the election. This could well turn out to be just another terribly shortsighted decision from the government that turned a medical crisis into a political blame game. The vaccine may or may not work, and that’s why there are testing procedures in place. If Trump forces it through, and if that gives him the popularity bump in the polls just before the election… Well, life in Canada will get mighty interesting in the first week of November, what with tens of millions of Americans googling how to claim refugee status. We’ll know for sure how this gambit (and the election) plays out in less than three months. The world will be so much more different by then…

Saturday evening. It feels so good to do absolutely nothing, with the option of doing a little bit of everything.

Last night, I made a leap of faith and signed up for a DuoLingo membership – an upgrade from their free version. It costs about $10 a month and has the potential of becoming an amazing investment. In the free version, you’re limited to making just five mistakes per day. Now, for the price of a few Tim Hortons breakfast sandwiches, my potential to make mistakes is limitless! (Mwahahaha.)

With this overabundance of linguistic freedom, I took a quick stroll across their non-French offerings. Arabic has a very unusual alphabet. Since that’s the fundamental part of learning the language, I’ll come back to it a bit later. Apparently, I remember a whole lot more Spanish than I’d thought. Finnish is beautiful and very clear in terms of both its grammar and pronunciation, but I probably won’t get to use it very much outside Finland. Curious about their Navajo module… Not for the first time, I wish DuoLingo had been more widespread when I was a perpetually under-stimulated warehouse grunt, about a decade ago. Oh well, the second-best time is right now, right?

My slowcooker love affair continues. I think I accidentally reinvented chili (or a sad version thereof) when I dumped everything I had together: beef, beans, onions, and spices. The result looks downright bizarre (seeing as I didn’t have any tomatoes), but it’s mighty scrumptious.

Since I still don’t trust my fancy gym enough to go back (and those pre-scheduled 75-minute blocks are incompatible with spontaneity), I’ve decided to gamify my current routine. No cider unless I complete 100 pushups and/or squat for the day. (The exchange rate is 100 exercises = 1 bottle of cider.) Who knows, I might actually emerge from this pandemic more buff than I’d entered it. And on the same note, I’m making a deliberate choice to switch from black coffee to black tea. The latter seems to be slightly better for metabolism. The former is apparently bad for cortisol, aka the primary stress hormone. (That explains so much about folks in Seattle…)

Lots of changes, but since I’m kind of stuck in self-imposed lockdown here, I might as well make the most of it.

In covid news: the Trump administration has declared that covid lab tests will no longer need to be approved by the FDA. This is a classic catch-22: people hate it when the FDA takes its time to study the full impact of promising tests and drugs. On the other hand, without that rigorous process, there’d be a lot more junk on the market – and that’s where we’re headed, it seems. This is unlikely to do much to stop the pandemic, and will likely result in confusion and inaccurate homebrewed tests produced by random entrepreneurs. (Incidentally, I’ve just found out that my step-nephew from New York has been selling bedazzled masks online. Heh.)

Evidently, a prison in Arizona told the inmates to decline covid tests in order to drive down the official numbers. That was less of a suggestion and more of a threat, with severe repercussions. The families of some of the inmates have gone public with this, as they rightfully should. And in some odd news, a major movie starring Ben Affleck is moving its production from the US to Canada due to covid-related reasons. I wonder if this will be the first of many such moves. If the pandemic never gets fully extinguished, it’ll be difficult to convince millionaire celebrities to risk their lives on a crowded movie set.

And now, as promised quite a while ago, some vacation pictures from my 2,500-mile roadtrip across Ontario just a month ago:
1. a cozy reading perch on the shore of Lake Superior;
2. mysterious and abandoned-looking industrial buildings in Thunder Bay, about 15 hours north of Toronto;
3. an amethyst mine-farm-thing in the same location, where you could find 4. and buy your own rocks, or just pay for the cheap ones on display;
the Sleeping Giant, an amazing mountain formation in northern Ontario.

Friday evening, though the only real difference is not having to set an alarm.

Odd day at work today: I may have helped save the day in an entirely avoidable emergency. Scored some reputation points with newbies, got some assorted kudos, bought myself some more time. It feels so very strange to know that my entire future, my very ability to stay in Canada, depends on holding on to the same job, at the same location, from which I may not quit or transfer. Those are some stakes, eh? Until and unless I become a permanent resident, I can’t feel fully secure.

If something were to go wrong, I’d have to go back to the US – that bizarre plague-infested ungovernable region that keeps children in cages and elected an angry orange clown (on technicality, that is) to represent them. Hard pass. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has physiological needs as the foundation of its five-stage pyramid of happiness. I have a picture of that pyramid saved on my computer. If I’m not wrong, the file name is something like “hahahahahahahahaha.jpg” which should give you some idea where I stand on that issue.

Just 29 more weeks, tops, until I get the coveted permanent resident status. Somewhere, right at this moment, my application is getting closer and closer to the front of the queue – likely just a virtual file and not an actual paper-and-ink folder on the desk of an anonymous bureaucrat tasked with deciding my future… Really, can’t wait.

In somewhat more upbeat news, the zoom lens I got myself for my birthday is on its way from Japan. There’s a minor thrill in refreshing the FedEx tracker to see how much closer my shipment has gotten to me since the last update. Two technological wonders, one tracking the other. Isn’t globalization great?

In covid news, the US data reporting has been bounced back from the HHS to the CDC. I doubt they did that because of the PR reasons or due to some public outcry. More likely than not, they just couldn’t wrangle all the different data streams. If we ever do find out what happened, it’ll be a while. Birx tried to put a positive spin on this, promising a “revolutionary new data system.” Either she singlehandedly created a next-gen version of Excel, or she’s completely out of good news, and has to resort to the technological equivalent of dangling a set of keys in front of confused little children. Ho hum.

To wrap this up, here’s a pretty hilarious GIF that rather perfectly encapsulates the lockdown lifestyle:

Wednesday night. And just like that, we’re close to the weekend. Time is so strange these days…

My plan for corny memorable days has hit a bit of a barrier due to my lack of supplies (and knowledge) required to make waffles on Waffle Wednesdays. Ho hum.

My Vietnamese landlords downstairs are either having a very passionate discussion or arguing with their 16-year-old son at the top of their lungs… This lockdown is bad for everyone.

At work, I am the last one left. We’ve been having some attrition and transfers out of our team, with more and more newbies hired as replacements. This really hit home earlier today, when I caused blind panic in approximately 20 coworkers when I inquired how close they were to completing the first draft of an important annual document. Heh. I’d forgotten none of them were even here a year ago. Funny, that. …I always did relate to Deckard Cain, the last of the Horadrim.

…yeah, they’re definitely yelling at each other. Damn. I’m not close enough to any of them (and none of them speak English well enough) to interfere or do anything meaningful. Double damn.

In covid news, it looks like my Arizona friend is feeling better. Hopefully, this isn’t one of those rollercoaster headfake recoveries that turn on a dime.

The official US death toll (aka the lowest number they’ve managed to come up with) has officially crossed 170,000. (Unofficially, the US has passed 200,000 in excess mortality at the end of July.) In Canada, the official death toll is 9,049. Considering the 10x difference in population, the US death toll per capita is twice as bad as it is in Canada. There are no winners in this macabre game.

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.