Grigory Lukin.com

Sunday night. Much packing, lots of driving, a great deal of talking. It’s over between xgf and I, but it was beautiful while it lasted. More tomorrow…

Saturday night. This was our last full day together… It was eventful: one last drive to a park, a homecooked veggie&steak roast, a lot of packing for tomorrow, a laptop-lit bath (as one does in a cyber-age pandemic). We’re parting on very good terms: I’ve helped xgf improve her dating ad for her eventual return into the dating scene, we talked more about the things that didn’t work out, etc.

Big day tomorrow: driving 90 minutes back to Toronto, moving a lot of things to xgf’s new basement apartment from her old rental room, etc. I probably won’t make it back home to my own old rental till late in the evening. It will be so very strange to see my landlords again after more than 10 weeks away. (I’d only lived with them for six weeks before I departed on this covid odyssey.) It’ll be even stranger to find my room exactly as I found it – books, gaming PC, art-covered walls, and so on.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes…”

World news: the official guesstimate of the US deaths is about 100,000. New York Times published a long list of names, ages, and brief facts about the covid victims on their front page. A lot of people online are wondering why more of their fellow Americans aren’t taking the pandemic (and the incompetence-driven death toll) more seriously. The current consensus is that 100,000 is simply too large a number to visualize. Imagine 33 9/11’s… Not for the first time, I’m so extremely glad I moved to Canada.

Friday night. Ten full weeks since this adventure began. Hard to imagine that two days from now, I’ll be back in my giant rental room, back in the familiar surroundings but without the familiar presence near me…

Got an interesting proposition at work, but the timing was all wrong. My warehouse colleagues are wondering when I’ll return – the answer, of course, is when the official guidance calls for it. So far, the official line is that we can self-isolate through October. It’s been a bit of a reputation race between tech giants: Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been setting farther and farther dates for returning to work. (That process began in March.) Twitter threw down the gauntlet when they said their employees can work from home permanently if they’d like. Then Spotify followed the suit. A few days ago, Facebook said the same thing, but with an important caveat: the salary would be tied to the cost of living in the place where you’d actually reside. (Meaning their California employees wouldn’t keep their high salary if they worked remotely from rural Oregon.)

I’m curious to see what Amazon and Google will do. This whole mess is definitely affecting the way companies operate. My team has just onboarded five new hires, and they aren’t meeting any of us in person – it’s just a lot of remote training, making the process even tougher and stranger than it usually is.

…we spent our last Friday night together watching the sunset at a scenic overview, with the river fading into the darkness as we had yet another conversation about what would have been. Packed and strange day tomorrow as we’ll try to do a bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing.

World news: Brazil’s official death toll has crossed 20,000. The actual death toll won’t be known until much later, I’m sure. More insanity with the US politics, but what else is new?

Thursday night. Spectacularly bad day at work, but it was improved by a few other developments. Although it took my letter with fingerprints (FD-258) 12 days to go from Niagara Falls (the Canadian side, naturally) to West Virginia, the FBI processed my request in just one day. They sent me an email saying they’re pretty sure I haven’t committed any crimes – and that was the last piece of paperwork I needed to apply for permanent residency. The company’s lawyers said they got everything and will start on my application. That’ll take them up to four weeks to finish: up to six months for the application to go through, and then…

After the bad work day, xgf surprised me by making me a pizza and, unbeknownst to me, braving the outside world and going shopping a few blocks away. She got me my favourite cider at LCBO, as well as my favourite candy at the local convenience store. That was so damn brave of her, not to mention sweet… Just what I needed to lift my spirits. Afterwards, we took a drive to the same park we’d visited a few days earlier. There were a few more people now, but everyone stayed far enough apart. (Besides, we had masks.) On the way back up the hill, at sunset, we saw two deer hanging out in the woods. The night before, we also saw a very chill skunk and, on a different occasion, a wild fox: they were both just across the street from the waterfall. I wonder if it’s always like that in this quaint little town. If not, I hope the animals don’t get too shocked when all the humans get back to their usual routine.

The world news isn’t improving. Ohio said that starting June 1, weddings with 300 or fewer guests will be fine. (Talk about mega-clusters…) An American pastor who claimed he could heal covid with his faith died of covid. Brazil keeps getting hit hard. So, you know, more of the same old, same old.

…ye gods, just seven more months – or maybe even less – till I become a permanent Canadian.

Wednesday night. More packed schedules and deadlines at work, more walks and talks and making memories once I’m done with work for the day. The waterfall is lovely. Standing so close to it, watching the water change colors and plunge with such great force… I’m sure it’s possible to get use to that spectacle at some point, and that’s a point I never want to reach.

Yesterday, we went for a late-night stroll. There was a Tim Hortons that was open, but only with a drivethrough. A small crowd of people gathered outside their parked cars, eating and drinking soda and chitchatting. It was a bit sad to see such a desperate attempt to socialize, to find others. Needless to say, they weren’t following social distancing rules.

Despite what I wrote earlier, we decided to make one last trip to Walmart. (What good is life without tangerines and grapes?) I drove out, xgf stayed home. Social distancing has gone to hell. They still make people line up outside and let them in at ~15-second intervals, but the place was crowded. (As was the parking lot.) It was almost at pre-plague levels. This time around, hardly anyone wore masks. …I wonder how long I’ll be able to get away with wearing a mask + goggles + the face shield I plan on buying. Cyberpunk 2020, eh?

Bought myself a new pair of shoes – a steal at $25 CAD. Of course, if my previous pair of shoes (also purchased at Walmart) hadn’t literally fallen apart, I wouldn’t have had to get a replacement from the same store chain. It’s the circle of life! It’s funny, how many things fall apart so quickly if you have a very limited supply. Xgf’s compression tights (the only pair) are developing small holes; I’d brought only two pairs of jeans with me, and both are starting to develop holes; my big supply of pens is buried somewhere deep in our luggage (this condo isn’t big enough to unpack), so we’re down to the last two precious writing utensils.

World news: Brazil’s official death toll exceeds 1,000 per day now. Unofficially, who the hell knows. Global warming is hitting my native Siberia hard, with 105 degrees, and it’s only mid-May. (Putin once said that global warming would benefit Russia – cold weather and all. Be careful what you wish for.) In Michigan, two separate dams failed, and 10,000 locals had to be evacuated. Their little town will be 9′ underwater. It doesn’t help that one of the dams failed its most recent inspection and didn’t get any repairs afterwards. The cherry on top? There’s a chemical plant that’ll likely be flooded. There’ll be more news like this, I’m sure, and it’s interwoven so tightly with the pandemic’s developments. We’ve caused (or at the very least greatly accelerated) so many different disasters, and now they’re starting to overlap. This century will be so strange…

Tuesday evening. Xgf likes to dye her hair every now and then, and she’s had me join her. Either the hair dye finally wore off all at once, or some optical illusion passed some critical yet undefinable line, but I suddenly have far more grey hair on my temples I’d had before the plague. Oh well.

Xgf is still having bad dreams. We’ve run out of grapes, but with just five days left till we move apart, she said it’s not worth the risk to go to a grocery store just for this. She’s eaten all the candy – I had to bring out the emergency chocolate reserves. Heh. One hundred and twenty hours from now, I’ll be back in my bachelor routine of sitting in my oversized isolated rental room… I’ll miss her.

World news: more infections popping up in China, leading to more lockdowns. Georgia was caught cooking the numbers in the dumbest possible way, moving the dates around to change the growing trend into a diminishing one. Florida fired the woman who designed the covid dashboard after she refused to fake the numbers. In other words, more of the same old, same old.

Monday evening. How does one celebrate Victoria, anyway?

Today was good. We slept in, then took a drive to another local park, and went on a two-hour walk down to the river, then back up the steep slope. It was beautiful. As a bonus, there were no sprained ankles or butt landings into the mud, so it went rather well.

Back home, when making a very late lunch (early dinner?), I ended up steam-burning my hand when I removed plastic cover off a plate of microwaved rice. Ow. Ow ow owwww. Currently self-medicating with a bottle of cider, a tylenol, and some of xgf’s burn cream. Aside from a little tingling, it’s all good – at least for now. Could be worse: one of my favourite cartoonists burned off most of his arm when he added a bit too much oil to his frying pan. Here is a fun research project for anyone reading this in the future: what was the above-baseline increase in google searches for burns and other domestic accident injuries? I bet it was more than just a few.

Xgf is feeling better and less resentful after our conversations yesterday. She keeps a very tight lid on her emotions, so it’s never easy to tell what exactly is on her mind. She did say she had more dreams last night, same as every night for the past few weeks…

The world news is getting even wackier, breaking all the previous wacky records of wackiness. Trump has just announced that a) he’s been taking hydroxychloroquine for a while now, b) the inspector general he removed was an Obama appointee, as if that somehow makes it justified, and c) all the doctors who oppose Trump are Democrats and need to be disregarded. This is a whole new level of craziness… The stock market had a remarkable day, with Dow going up almost 4%. (Over the weekend, there had been some financial reassurances and news of successful stage-one trials of a potential vaccine.) After the big financial maneuver I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve put my money into a few carefully selected stocks. They’re already up 11.6%. They may well double if/when the economy recovers. The hardest part will be teaching myself patience. Heh.

I’m future-leaping hard. At some point, perhaps two months from now, I’ll take another vacation – I’m thinking of giving the nascent prospecting/rockhounding hobby a try by renting a van and going far, far away, perhaps to Thunder Bay, about 14 hours north of Toronto. I hear they have great amethysts…

Sunday evening. Things are getting weirder. After sleeping in today, xgf and I got in a rather strange discussion. She talked about her anxiety regarding living alone, and about what she perceives as my lack of affection, and about harming herself. It got to the point where I started brainstorming a scenario for her that would have us hopping from one AirBnB to another for the next 3-12 months, until there was some semblance of vaccine or until she found somebody else to move in with. After I spent over an hour brainstorming all of that, finding a viable solution, and committing to keep her safe, xgf said “you’ll hate what I’m about to tell you next” and said that was just a test to see if she could still rely on me. (And that she does, in fact, plan on living in that empty basement apartment.)

…is there a sophisticated German word for emotional blackmail and manipulation done for the sake of lifting a suicidal person’s spirits? Because I can’t think of any phrase that would adequately convey how very, very wrong that is.

Had some quality alone time since then. One more week.

Saturday night – day one of the three-day weekend. Today was mostly good. We found a giant park with very few people in it – it was still open, unlike many others. Went for a nice little hour-long hike – the sun, the greenery, the clear and cloudless sky… If it hadn’t been for a gang of random jerks riding through the forest on motorcycles, it would’ve been a perfect outing. (There were signs posted to keep motor vehicles out, but I guess some folks are living out their weird little fantasies while everything is locked down.)

Xgf is still very anxious about moving – just a week away now. She’ll always have the lifeline of her parents – they live an hour away. They’ll be able to come pick her up if the loneliness becomes unbearable. The stir-craziness is getting to her: earlier today, she asked me if Amazon created the virus to wipe out their competition… (That was shortly after we saw an article about JC Penney declaring bankruptcy – the end of an era.)

The news is still a hot mess – more children falling sick, more distractions from the White House and spikes in new cases in newly reopened states. And to think, this year isn’t even halfway through… At some point not too long from now, folks will think of even this mess as the good ol’ times.

Friday night. Today was more than a little stressful… Xgf got stir-crazy (her words) and wanted to order Vietnamese takeout. (She loves pho.) While we were on the phone, placing our order, we heard someone cough on the other end – in a very loud and phlegmy manner. Xgf thought it was the hostess, I thought it was one of the cooks next to her. Either way, we hung up and baked another pizza instead.

That near-miss negated the nice walk through the abandoned touristy area near the waterfall. (Folks really hate it when it rains on a chilly day, apparently.) There was so much mist… It was lovely. But still, a near-miss – after nine weeks of hiding out, after being so careful, we could’ve been done in by a simple takeout order from a diner that cared more about profit than pandemic prevention. That was far too close.

I get that there’s a possibility that person had just a cold or the flu, but just the fact that any restaurant employee would come in to work while coughing their lungs out… Even if that wasn’t covid, that was irresponsible as hell. Canada isn’t like the US: being unemployed here doesn’t doom you to starvation.

Here is hoping all y’all are having a somewhat more enjoyable Friday night.