Sunday night. Back to work tomorrow, thought it’s complicated as always: on the one hand, Civic Day is supposed to be a holiday for every Canadian. On the other hand, the US Finance org doesn’t care about Canadian holidays, so certain things still must get done on the first business day of the month. Oh well, it’ll be a nice and slow transition back into the thick of things.
I hung out with xgf for the first time in three weeks today. Her leg muscle injury is worse than she’d thought, and she’d spent the entire three weeks in her little basement apartment… We went for a ride around Toronto and had a picnic at the High Park. It was wild to see so many people all at once, for both of us. There’s a strange, almost surreal discrepancy in seeing people wear their summer clothes with sunglasses and masks obscuring their faces. (I remain the only one with a faceshield. Heh.)
In covid news, a mega-church in Alabama is planning to organize 21 days of prayer, wherein thousands of people would gather together for 21 days to spread their thoughts, prayers, and virus-carrying droplets. This whole pandemic is like a bizarro world mirror showing how all the things that make the US so distinct can backfire just as spectacularly. The freedom of religion is good, but then you have churches everywhere insisting on meeting in person and, worse yet, singing. (I’m sure everyone’s heard about the choir cluster from the early pandemic by now.) Rugged individualism is good, inspirational, and great for business, but then you end up with millions of yahoos who think they know better than doctors and think the pandemic is a liberal hoax. No bueno.
In mildly better news: a few days ago, Russia announced that its vaccine is ready and pending final approval. They aim to do mass vaccinations in October. I’m trying not to be too optimistic because there hasn’t been outside verification. Russia had a very peculiar mini-epidemic of doctors falling out of windows (sometimes in the middle of conference calls), so anything they say (hell, anything anyone says) should be taken with a big grain of salt. It’ll be a real game-changer if this works, though – and if the rest of the world gets the vaccine too. Here is hoping Russia won’t use this leverage for political purposes…
Saturday night. This has been a long day. I got up at 6am, force-fed myself some black coffee with cereal (the only way a self-respecting adult should eat it), finished packing the car, and set off toward Toronto.
Either the farmer’s market got cancelled or my information was mildly inaccurate, but I didn’t find the notorious donut lady. Alas. Maybe next time. I did, however, end up taking what I think my best picture ever. That’s Madawaska river in Combermere, Ontario, at 7am on a quiet Saturday morning. Ontario’s nature is beautiful, but sometimes it simply takes your breath away… I simply had to pull over and capture that eye candy. The shot turned out great, considering I was leaning over the passenger seat and not really aiming. It’s so beautiful here. I noticed all too late, on my last night, that the starry sky in Palmer Rapids is unblemished by the town’s lights. (Bancroft, a town of 3,500 people, is about an hour west.) The AirBnB host said they’d planned to build an observatory there at some point.
The drive to Toronto, or rather the last 30 minutes of it, was as horrifying as usual: if suicidal drivers going 20% above the speed limit are any indication, Toronto is fully back to its pre-pandemic self. There was a very long eastward-bound traffic jam as everyone and their dog tried to escape the city for the long three-day weekend. (Civic Day is on Monday.) I ended up dropping off my rental car with two minutes to spare, and spent the rest of the day decompressing and playing with my precious gems. …I might have to invest in an actual display shelf now. Like I said, I have the strangest problems.
In covid news: this is not particularly significant, but I think it’s the same way around the world now: service industry workers just don’t seem to care about masks all that much anymore. At the car rental place, and at two stores I visited afterwards, employees wore their masks under the chin, or with the nose uncovered, or not at all. Some were righteously horrified by the vision of me wearing my mask, glasses, and face shield. Heh.
A couple of days ago, Vanity Fair published their inside scoop about the original covid plan that had been prepared by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The plan his group had come up with was actually surprisingly good, considering. Nonetheless, it got shut down in April, partly because Dr. Deborah Birx convinced Trump the covid numbers would improve shortly. The other, scarier part was the White House’s alleged belief that since the virus was hitting only the Democratic states (Washington, New York, etc), that would be a political benefit to the Republican party. That’s horrifying, but not outside the realm of possibility. There will be some mighty interesting tell-all memoirs years later…
I haven’t written much (or anything, really) about Dr.Birx on this blog. I try to avoid the topics I know little about, and I know next to nothing about her. I do know that she was a colonel in the US Army, and worked her way up in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health. Her path was different than that of the career CDC epidemiologists. (She joined the CDC only in 2005, when she was 49.) This is pure speculation, but it’s possible that the key difference between Fauci and Birx (the former stood up to Trump, the latter appeased him) is due to their background. Fauci also worked at the NIH, but he was never in the military. This is getting into pure armchair psychology, I admit, but I’m guessing his independent streak has been developed over the decades, while Birx (maybe, just maybe) got broken in by the military’s rigid command structure. I just don’t see any other good explanation for her unfounded hypotheses and predictions four months ago…
Social media reports should always be taken with a giant grain of salt, but folks in Miami are posting that it’s possible to buy a fake document stating you tested negative for covid. Horrifying if true. Likewise on social media, people are calling out some interesting inconsistencies in the official US covid data now that it no longer goes through the CDC. Some write that their local newspapers are filled with obituaries, even though the official covid numbers are showing a small decline. I remain on the fence: I wouldn’t put anything past this administration, but I also don’t want to spread what might not be true reports.
One of the first cruise ships that set off in Europe ended up becoming a covid hotspot. I’m genuinely curious how cruise companies plan to mitigate covid risks, and not just because I have some money riding on that. (I’ve invested in companies that got hit the hardest by the pandemic. In about a year or so, the return on investment should be impressive.)
I pity the future historians who will try to make sense of this gods-forsaken year…
Friday night. The last full day of my big geological roundtrip, and I made it count. I went to three different locations that were relatively close to one another. The first was a series of holes dug into the side of a rural road. At some point, there were some cool rocks there, but all that’s left now are ridiculously deep holes dug underneath hundreds of pounds of rock by rogue geologists whose risk/reward ratio is very different from mine. (See the first pic below.) I looked inside the holes, then at the “no trespassing” sign, and skedaddled.
The second location was the jackpot: a major old mine that got filled with rock a few years ago, lest folks go in and hurt themselves. The upside is that the entire slope was absolutely filled with shiny gems (mostly quartz and calcite) of varying sizes. I filled up my prospecting bucket with some goodies and stumbled on a gigantic triangular quartz boulder just hiding in tall grass. (Pic #2 below.) The third pic shows random quartz rocks just chilling on a hill in their natural habitat. There is beauty in this world…
I got a little lost on the way back, but my incredibly high-tech (heh) navigation tools finally got me back to the road, even if I had to annoy several guard dogs by walking far too close to local backyards. Got mildly sunburned but hey, that might have been my last opportunity in quite a while to soak up that vitamin D.
The very last place I visited was a bit disappointing, but still interesting: a graphite highway road cut that had contained some interesting minerals once upon a time. Not a whole lot left there after all these years, but it was still fun to see what some determined folks armed with chisels and hammers can do to a big rock given enough motivation. (The last pic on this post.)
Tomorrow will start off far too early: if I get up at 6am and have some quick breakfast, I’ll have just enough time to swing by the local farmer’s market, buy the local donut-smith’s famous pastries, drive 200 miles back home, unload the hoard of gems from my rental car (I know, I have the most terrible problems in life), and return it by noon. Should be interesting.
In covid news: my gym has reopened after a very long shutdown. Wynn Fitness closed its doors on March 16th, and didn’t reopen until… well, technically, they still haven’t reopened. The big day is Tuesday, August 4th. The new rules are atrocious: they’ll close at 6pm on weekends (discrimination against night owls!) and you have to book your 75-minute slot in advance. (There goes my pre-pandemic plan of spending an entire day in their pool to get progressively better at not drowning.) Incidentally, they’ve been charging my credit card for their relatively pricey membership the entire time… That’ll make for a fun phone call. As much as I miss the gym, I’m not going back until (at the very earliest) Ontario goes a full week without any new infections. Gonna have to cancel ye olde membership. Maybe it’ll give xgf something to distract her if I ask her to design a specific workout routine for me. (She may be frail, but she works out like a champion.)
In Georgia, an overnight YMCA camp became a cluster, as 260 campers contracted covid. Georgia is another southern state that has remarkably poor leadership: their governor made a number of moves that indicate either intellectual dimness or straight-out self-sabotage. I’ll leave the verdict to historians.
Vietnam fell off its pedestal with their first recorded covid death: an old man with severe pre-existing kidney issues. They put up a damn good fight, and in a way, they’re doing about 150,000 times better than the US. I doubt there’s any part of the world left that hasn’t had a single death. Well, except maybe for the folks on the North Sentinel Island, who shoot any approaching traveler (missionaries and such) full of arrows on sight. That’s a rather severe containment measure, but you can’t deny its efficiency when it comes to keeping the pandemic at bay.
The US Congress has adjourned for the weekend without finalizing the financial relief package. Now, barring some extraordinary intervention, millions of Americans will lose their $600/week unemployment benefits, and it appears that the eviction freeze will also expire. I’m not sure if landlords around the US will actually follow through, because evicting that many people will result in genuine riots. If 2020 has taught us anything, however, it’s that we can’t trust any of our prior assumptions.
And finally, the economic data released yesterday was downright apocalyptic: the US GDP plunged 32.9% in Q2. The silver lining for this mushroom cloud is that the official expectation had been 34.7%, so hey, that was a 180 bps win. The stock market reacted poorly, but not as poorly as you’d expected: a relatively small drop yesterday, followed by a small gain today. One of my stocks has actually gone up by 8% after they announced they’d buy out a competitor. A lot of the bad news is already priced in – it’s just a matter of sitting and waiting, which is a concept that’s hard to grasp and harder yet to implement. Wu wei, eh.
Thursday night. Herman Cain died of covid. As I’d guessed several days earlier, the terse status update from his hospital meant he was in bad condition. I feel bad for his family and loved ones, but… What happened was entirely avoidable. He deliberately disregarded every rule of this pandemic in many, many ways.
If Cain hadn’t gone to a public event (Trump’s rally in Oklahoma), if he’d worn a mask, if he’d distanced instead of sitting in a crowded section, he still would’ve been alive and well. There’s a possibility that he got exposed to the virus elsewhere, but if not… How many people who attended that rally, and how many people in their immediate social circle have died because of that single event?
At some point, we may have to come up with a term for deliberately putting yourself in the path of danger and trying to get sick. Suicovid? Covicide? Neither one sounds right, but we’ll need some word to differentiate those who got sick and died due to bad luck, and those who had brought it upon themselves. Herman Cain’s official cause of death may have been covid, but in the grand scheme of things that may as well have been suicide.
…in non-covid news, today was an eventful day. I drove out to the Princess Sodalite Mine an hour west of here, and it was well worth it. Sodalite is a beautiful blue mineral found only in this part of Canada, as well as a couple of distant foreign countries. I found a nice chunk in the “rock farm” area, but the main beauty of that mine was their store. I’ve seen museums that had less selection than that store. Better yet, you could touch, ogle, and buy every single gem. I dropped $200 CAD (~$150 USD) on a few beautiful exhibits: a fairly large dark quartz crystal from Brazil, some beautiful connected crystals (the gem’s name escapes me) from China, a cute present for xgf, and a couple of small (yet amusing) pieces of bismuth grown in Germany. If you’ve never encountered bismuth, please take 10 seconds to google it. It’s a trippy metal that forms the most bizarre and colourful shapes after it gets melted. The store’s prices were far better than I could’ve expected elsewhere, and now I’m the proud owner of several shiny museum-quality gems.
After that, I explored a rock pile behind a grocery store – an odd location I’d overheard a few geologists mention the day before. Not much there, but it was fun to play in the dirt. The local Tim Hortons managed to make three mistakes when I ordered a total of four snacks and drinks, which is actually rather impressive. It had been a while since I encountered such hilarious and blatant disregard for customer service. Made me feel like I was back in Russia all over again. Heh.
And at the end of the day… I hope I’ll never forget this last experience. I walked around a pretty local park, waiting for the sunset, for the darkness. I drove down to the worst-kept local secret, the CN rock dump pile that’s open for everyone. It mostly has plain old biotite mica (think shiny coal), but if you visit it at night, armed with a UV flashlight, a mosquito spray, and enough patience, you’ll see true magic. Unremarkable-looking rocks would glow green and orange under the ultraviolet light, looking for all the world like ancient runes concealed in plain sight. It really was magical: dark sky, the pale blue UV light, the faint and foreign glow of secret rocks… I’m so extremely glad I’d chosen to do this on my vacation. I’d never done anything remotely like this before.
Tomorrow will be the last full day of my trip: I might drive out farther to some of the abandoned mines that are supposed to have quartz deposits. It’s highly unlikely I’ll find anything as beautiful as the dark quartz I bought earlier today, but hey – worth a shot, right?
Stay safe, survivors, and I hope your lockdown life is treating you well.
Wednesday night. Today was interesting: I spent the first half of the day talking to my contracted lawyers about my permanent residence application: apparently, one reason it’s taken them so long to prepare it is my ~16 addresses over the past 10 years. Heh. However, they did make several mistakes that I had to identify and call out. With luck, the whole thing will get submitted by the end of the week.
I spent the second half of the day at the commercial mine – the Quadeville Beryl Pit. For just $10 CAD, you get secret directions to an unmarked mine: after parking and then walking for about five minutes, you can pick all the fluorite, quartz, and amazonite your little heart desires! (Other minerals are also there, but not as evident.) It’s a bit on the nose that I, an Amazon employee, collected a bunch of amazonite. Might make a ring out of it… Heh. The actual ground floor of the mine had very high radiation readings (yay Geiger counter!), so I skedaddled the hell out of there. Still found some nice shiny rocks, though.
While I was out there, finally using the shovel I’d bought before my vacation, I overheard some locals: looks like the CN dump pile near Bancroft is a real thing, and you really can find some gems that glow under the UV light. The plan for tomorrow is to explore that town, hang out past sunset, and find some of those gems for myself. Alas, the famous mineral museum is shut down due to covid. Ditto for the annual gem convention, the Gemboree, which takes place here. On the upside, my AirBnB host told me about a local legend – the woman who makes the best donuts in the world. I’ll be driving by the Bancroft farmer’s market on Saturday morning, and will be able to buy some of her famous donuts then. I’m more than a little curious about the hype.
The host also uncorked some of the cider he’d made earlier this year: it’s sour and tastes pretty good, and it also seems to have way higher alcohol content than the usual stuff you’d find on sale. Life is good.
In covid news: congressman Louie Gohmert has tested positive for covid after deliberately avoiding masks or any other safety measures. He announced the news to his staffers in person – once again, without wearing a mask. It’s unclear how many people he’s managed to infect thus far… Like the saying goes, “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” I have no sympathy for militant stupidity of this sort. I only wonder why the people of Texas kept re-electing someone like him. Is it the plain old “jocks vs nerds” issue where no one wants to vote for a boring brainiac? No hope for human race… (Or at least not the US part of it.)
Tuesday evening. I’ve just had to double-check what today this is – losing track of time is how you know your vacation is going well.
Today’s hike took me to an abandoned iron mine that apparently got gobbled up by a swamp at some point after the 2000 geological survey. Not the most productive three hours of my life, but hey – exercise. The other location I visited was more interesting, though. An old apatite mine didn’t have much to show in terms of fun rocks, but after I got up and turned around, I found an old rusty pickaxe just 2′ behind me. (See the pic below.)
It looks like it was made at some point after WW2 (rubber handle and all), but I can’t narrow it down more than that. Had it been lying there for a year? Had it been there since before I was born? Had it always been there, an immutable artifact imbued with strange magic, while the world grew around it? Or maybe it’s the symbolic rusted manifestation of a post-modern Arthurian legend, and by pulling it out I became the king of geologists? There’s simply no way to know for sure, so I’ll go with that last option. (Pixcalibur!)
I got to meet my AirBnB host last night. Cool guy. He’s in his 40s, and he’s spent most of his life working with troubled teens by taking them hiking and kayaking at a local summer camp. He’s a true outdoorsman while I’m a stereotypical geek, but we overlap a lot in our love of hiking, shiny gems, search&rescue (he used to be a wilderness EMT), and cider. This may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. That was also the first in-depth conversation with someone other than xgf that I’ve had since early March… Ye gods.
My company’s lawyers have prepared the final packet for my Canadian permanent residence application (I got invited to apply about seven weeks ago.) Now it’s time for one last round of reviews, crossing the i’s, dotting the t’s, that sort of thing – and then it’ll be just a matter of waiting for some kind government official to bestow upon me the permanent resident status. (I talk about waiting a lot, don’t I? That’s 2020 in a nutshell.)
In covid news… Canadians have another reason to be righteously angry with the US. American troops on a stopover in Newfoundland have been leaving their hotel and going out in blatant disregard of the 14-day quarantine rule. They claimed that the border agents had given them the green light. No one is really buying that – folks are trying to figure out what exactly the policy is – but either way, it’s a hot mess.
At an LCBO store earlier today, an employee wore his mask on his forehead.
An even bigger mess is “Doctor” Stella Immanuel. It was only a matter of time before Trump found a doctor who was sufficiently unhinged to back him up all the way. Immanuel got her medical degree in Nigeria, then became a practitioner in Texas, and claims her Nigerian experience allows her to prescribe hydroxychloroquine to everyone. (What is it about Republicans and hydroxychloroquine? Did they buy a huge stockpile they’re trying to get rid of? Did they all pitch in with their retirement money?) If that wasn’t bad enough, Immanuel also claims that doctors make vaccines using alien DNA (space aliens, to be precise) and that there are sexy demons who invade your dreams and suck out your life force. (To be fair, I’m not 100% sure about that last thing – I had to stop reading to protect my poor brain cells.)
So… yeah. The rest of the world is slowly reopening after going all in on science and empirical evidence. The US has a literal witch doctor advising the president and being retweeted by him. Many people have said this before, but it bears repeating again and again: if you were to write this all up as a novel at any point before 2020, any self-respecting editor would’ve had you committed out of general principle. (Or at the very least thrown out of the building, with a restraining order to follow.) Life will forever be stranger than fiction, if only because it can be far more absurd – and not subject to the editorial process.
Monday evening. It took 27 hours in my rental car (of which ~16 were spent driving), but I made it from Thunder Bay to my AirBnB near Palmer Rapids. It’s beautiful here. One hour east of Bancroft, two hours west of Ottawa, smack in the middle of the forest, where even GPS gets confused and turned around. The house is huge and gorgeous, but the wifi sucks. Equivalent exchange, eh?
During my big long drive, I saw a town called Hornepayne; a habitat for polar bears (likely shut down, like everything else); a small abandoned settlement with crushed decrepit wooden buildings; statues of a yeti, a polar bear, and a T-Rex; a city that was one giant construction zone with far too many stoplights; a Tim Hortons that almost ran out of bacon – a surefire sign of the apocalypse if there ever was one.
Spent the night at a Tilden Lake rest stop. Strange thing about Canadian rest stops: they exist, but if you don’t react to the sign posted just before the turnoff, you’ll miss them and have to drive another 40 minutes or so before you get lucky. (Or you can make a U-turn in the middle of the highway, though that’s a bit less ideal.) It was pitch-black when I pulled over at midnight, with strange beasts hooting in the distance. It was amazingly quiet and lovely when I woke up. A cute little lake right by the road, reeds and all.
I feel almost bad about my quiet and enjoyable vacation: xgf has run out of options for housing, and justifiably thinks that Toronto is too dangerous, covid-wise. In September, she’ll be moving back with her parents in a small town near Toronto. She’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. Her father thinks the pandemic is a Jewish conspiracy to depopulate the world. That’ll be a very bad arrangement…
In covid news: Germans have trained dogs to sniff out people who have covid. They have a 94% success rate, which is far better than most tests on the market. It’s a remarkably low-tech solution – I’m kind of surprised no one had tried it earlier. (High-tech hubris?) I ran out of podcasts during my drive: on the radio, Canadians were outraged (but in a polite and diplomatic way) about a weekend party in Brampton that was attended by over 200 people. (Brampton is one of Toronto’s suburbs.) Folks are understanding because no one is actually enjoying this lockdown, but also furious because this is not helping anyone. There were only eight constables on duty in the entire city, so the party guests skedaddled without being stopped or having their names recorded. (Contact-tracing will be complicated.) The house owners, though, might face a giant fine. I can’t help thinking if the same event would’ve provoked the same reaction in the US…
The town of Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side of the border) is slowly reopening: casinos will stay closed, while indoor dining will be resumed. That may lead to more clusters, as everyone will drive down there. (It’s just a couple of hours east of Toronto.) Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien has tested positive for covid. He’s part of Trump’s inner circle, so an awful lot people must be shitting giant-sized bricks right about now. And Herman Cain, who got diagnosed a few weeks ago, is allegedly “receiving oxygen,” which could mean anything at all. Worst case, this means he’s in an induced coma, fighting for his life. He’s 74… Even if you take just the official, low-level death counts, the US has crossed 150,000 deaths. That kind of number can’t be visualized or comprehended, and there is no end in sight…
And with this, I’m off to enjoy an evening of reading to engage in some much-needed escapism. Stay safe out there, folks.
Sunday morning. I’m sloooowly packing up and getting ready to leave this weird little basement apartment while my new neighbours’ kids wreak havoc upstairs. This might just be the strangest AirBnB I’ve ever stayed in (there are no smoke detectors…) but also one of the most picturesque locations. (Nothing can really beat Niagara Falls.)
Gonna spend most of today and half of tomorrow driving to a town near Bancroft, the mining center of Ontario. Who knows what I’ll find there. My snacks are ready, my water bottles have been refilled, and my USB drive is loaded up with more podcasts to help the 15-hour drive go by. I miss the cadence and comfort of long conversations… Podcasts help, if only a little.
Saturday night. Today was my last full day in Thunder Bay. I tried to make the most of it: slept in (of course), went to my secret spot to get more beautiful quartz crystals, then bought some local cherries ($3.99 CAD/lb – not the best deal, but not the worst either), and munched on them while reading my favourite author’s new book on a park bench overlooking Lake Superior and the Sleeping Giant. ’twas a good day.
I don’t relish the thought of waking up before 11am tomorrow, but sacrifices must be made, eh? I’m currently watching a pot full of uneaten eggs boil (maybe that’s why it won’t boil) while eating the last of my frozen burritos and drinking the last of my cider. I’m very self-sacrificial like that. I thought of turning on the gas-powered fireplace to fully maximize the low-key hedonism of my last night here, but it’s gas-powered, my sense of smell has never been too good, and it’s been emanating strange levels of heat… I figure I’ll skip the fireplace part. With my luck, I’ll just blow the whole place up, and that would be bad for my AirBnB rating.
In covid news… Look, you’ll just have to take my word for it that it gets crazier every single day. If we ever have a trend reversal that lasts, say, a week, I’ll be sure to mention it. The Sinclair Broadcasting Group is a giant media empire that controls hundreds of local TV news stations, among other things. They control the information consumption of millions of Americans. Someone leaked their plan to air a weekend program accusing Dr.Fauci of creating covid-19 for his own nefarious purposes. (I don’t read right-wing online conspiracies, but apparently they call it “plandemic” now.) There was a lot of outcry, and Sinclair backtracked and said they wouldn’t air the program. Good news: cockroaches still run if you shine a light on them. Bad news: it’s out in the mainstream (or almost mainstream) now, and who knows what crazy folks with guns will do…
A couple of nights ago, someone burned down the Democratic HQ in Phoenix – a bit of an escalation, considering that in the past they’d never gone beyond bricks through windows or petty vandalism. Things are getting heated up… Arizona, in particular, has had more covid deaths recently than the entire European Union. Considering that the EU has 60 times more people, that’s actually kind of remarkable – in a horrifying, unbelievable, nightmarish sort of way.
I’ll spend all day tomorrow driving toward Bancroft, where I’ll spend my second half of the vacation. Should be fun. I wonder what percentage of Ontarians have explored as much of their province as I have? I enjoy gamifying things, and it’d amuse me greatly if I were in the top 30%. Heh.
Friday evening, and life is good. After sleeping in (again) today, I went out and found an abandoned mine, with a classic 1950s car hanging out upside down in a small stream nearby. Looks like decades ago, someone lost control on the country road a few meters above… I hope they made it.
At a second place I visited, I found quartz. Lots and lots of quartz. Huge amounts of quartz, to be precise. Several hours later, I am now a proud owner of more than a bucket of quartz, big and small. I shall henceforth be known as an eccentric guy who gives a small amethyst or quartz crystal to everyone he meets. Heh. This is so unbelievably different from just wasting away indoors, sitting behind a computer… I’ll go back to that life soon enough (just seven full days remaining till I return to Toronto), but damn, what an amazing experience…
In covid news, things are still getting worse. One poor rural county in south Texas is instituting a triage system, where a committee would send home those who appear to be too sick to be helped. This isn’t very different from what they’d done in Italy a few months ago, but it’ll be a huge shock to the system for Americans.
Meanwhile, schools across the US are set to reopen next week-ish. I’m never sure about their exact start and end dates, since there are no kids either at work or in my adjacent personal life. (My landlords’ 16-year-old son is the youngest person I know.) Anyhow, there’s a great big push to send kids back to school. That will not end well… Some say that was political calculus gone horribly wrong: an attempt by the White House to appeal to suburban voters, followed by doubling down and refusing to change their position when it clearly backfired. Quite a few states are adamant that they’ll go with online learning only: it’s far from perfect, but it’ll keep their communities from developing new clusters. It’s a hot mess… I suppose in a way the timing was mildly fortuitous: had covid appeared in June instead of December, the US would’ve been dealing with the worst of it during the school year. Silver linings, eh?
Tomorrow is my last full day in Thunder Bay. Gonna have to make it count. Good night, friends.
Grigory Lukin.com 