Grigory Lukin.com

Tuesday evening. The beginning of our second month of hiding out, regardless of how you define one month.

Gf woke up feeling unwell but feels a bit better now. We’re still experimenting with the electrolyte balances – one last try before going to a potentially virus-filled clinic. Otherwise, just a simple status quo day of hanging out and low-key relaxing. I’ve started watching the Handmaid’s Tale, and it feels strangely enjoyable to watch a show about a different, worse dystopia while living in the dystopia we have here and now.

This is either a slow news day or everyone else is getting the point of dystopian new overload. More people are dying. Current cumulative death toll in the US is 25,726; 901 in Canada. 643 new words in my little novel.

Stay safe out there. (Or in there, because you really shouldn’t go out.)

Monday night. Here’s a medical dilemma for you: gf has a condition that is not fatal but results in really bad complications. If we go to the local clinic, they may or may not be able to help (most likely not), and we may or may not catch covid-19 (also most likely not). It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation… We’ll give the sodium/potassium rebalancing at home one more try before heading to this town’s clinic for a blood test. Everything carries some risk, now more than ever.

Today was good, except for the part with gf’s health flare that spooked both of us. We spent the second half of the day carefully monitoring the symptoms, sitting by the lit fireplace, playing video games, and eating chocolate bunnies in a late Easter celebration. She and I are doing well and back to normal – if only we could figure out how to help her heal…

Have I mentioned that the world has gone mad? Because it’s getting even madder. Trump has created “The committee to reopen America,” which consists of his friends and cronies. Two of the seven members are his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. (Hello, banana republic.) None of the seven have any experience in medicine or epidemiology. If they force individual states to reopen (or at least convince Trump’s voters to come on out and shop), all the sacrifices will have been for nothing, and there’ll be many more waves…

Meanwhile, California, Oregon, and Washington created the “Western States Pact” to pull their efforts and resources. For years now, folks joked about the so-called Cascadia that those three states could form. If and when the pandemic ends, nothing will be the same. The US is losing prestige and reputation with every passing day: nurses have to wear PPE made of garbage bags; PPE shipments for other countries get intercepted and sent to the US; the president is an angry orange clown who just started claiming that no one had warned him about the virus in January/February. When the dust settles, the US will no longer be the world’s leader, and a lot of states (such as CA/OR/WA) might have serious grounds to politely secede from the union. Strange times…

Pictures from a Detroit hospitals show bodies being double-stacked and left to lie in random rooms. There’s been no official comment from the hospital’s administrators. In Ecuador, more than 800 bodies have been recovered from their homes, and there’ll likely be more. As of right now, there are 23,675 cumulative deaths in the US and 781 in Canada. New York alone has more than 10,000 deaths. I haven’t been looking closely, but I think we’re approaching ~2,500 deaths per day in the US…

With all the health scares, the sci-fi novel word count went up by just 313 words today – but hey, that’s 313 more than there had been. 300 days of that and you have yourself a novel, eh?

Sunday evening. Hard to believe it’s already been a full month. It feels like the call from my gf (“we must leave – now”) happened only yesterday. I mentioned this many times before, but still: it feels altogether too strange to compare our cushy life in AirBnB getaways with the news reports of creepy (and creeping) chaos just outside.

Last night was excellent. We feasted on pizza and wine and chocolate, attempted to start a fire in the condo’s fireplace (it was only partially successful), and watched a movie, followed by a bath. (If I only kept my mouth shut instead of getting snarky at the very end, it would’ve been a perfect evening.) The new electrolyte drink mix seems to be working: gf is enjoying more energy and less dizziness than at any point since we’d left Toronto.

The world is still a mess. On the upside, Italy is down to less than 500 deaths per day. On the downside, today is Easter, and a lot of churches in the US are bringing together hundreds, if not thousands of people for the religious services. Utterly defiant and mostly old – there’ll be a new wave of infections caused just by these church services. (Some reports suggest that in some states, the police hung out in the parking lots and did nothing.) A woman in India drowned her five children. The White House skipped the daily briefing (useless though it may be) for the second day in a row. It’s unclear whether Trump is out golfing or feeling unwell… Boris Johnson seems to have fully recovered after facing 50-50 odds. Let’s see if this will finally get him to trust doctors and scientists more.

Finally making a little progress on my long-neglected sci-fi novel. Just 642 words today (30,116 total) but that’s a start. Here is hoping other holed-up folks are working on something productive while the pandemic rages on.

Saturday night. All is well and getting better: gf and I had a breakthrough last night. (“We’re supposed to be on the same team.”) Things are getting better, at least in this little corner of the world.

Fun thing about food-stockpiling for worst-case scenarios: there’s never enough protein. The local grocery store was out of ground beef last time I was there: I’ll see if they have anything meat-like next time I go there. We have more than enough food to stay put at least two more months, but it’s mostly carbs, and what protein we have is split (unfavourably) with saturated fat. Neither of us is on keto, so that’s not helping. Bottom line: we’ll survive but we won’t become bodybuilders anytime soon.

There are 20,641 cumulative deaths in the US as of right now, and 654 in Canada. The US has crossed the point of 2,000 deaths per day. About 10 days ago, a friend of mine on facebook told me the US would never cross 3,000 deaths per day. (One 9/11, rounded up.) Looks like I’ll win that argument, though I’ll hate being right in that particular instance… In other world news, Krakatoa has erupted again, as if this year wasn’t weird enough already. Ebola is back in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This will be a very strange and painful year.

In personal news, I’m going to try and dust off my old sci-fi novel draft: last time I worked on it was two years ago. Let’s see if I can log 2,000 words per day…

Friday night. Things aren’t improving with gf. Spent the night talking about our communication styles, doing Tarot readings on our relationship (her hobby, not mine), and reverse-engineering the electrolyte formulas of health supplements, as one does. Still unclear how this will end.

About 2,000 more dead in the US. Over 1,000 in one day in France – their highest ever. Almost 1,000 in the UK. Boris Johnson appears to have recovered – hopefully that’s not the headfake recovery that lands patients back in the ICU sicker than before. There are mass graves being dug on Hart Island in New York. Some claim that’s standard, and the island is usually used for pauper funerals. Others are saying these are legitimate mass graves. Nobody much cares about the truth of the matter – it’s all about the horrifying visuals.

Worst Friday night ever?..

Thursday night. Well, at least we’re talking again. Had a good sit-down talk about the importance of communicating exactly how you’re feeling instead of being a stoic badass on the outside (her), as well as not being a panicky dumbass (me). The fate of the relationship is still unclear, but at least this is some good day-over-day improvement.

Gf had another health scare today, on the verge of passing out… This is a strange time: if we drive to the hospital (40 minutes away), we’ll run the risk of catching covid19 in their waiting room. If we don’t drive to the hospital… Well, gf’s condition is bad but not life-threatening – at least according to her. We spent the evening reading studies on CSWS (cerebral salt-wasting syndrome) and the impact of long-term dehydration: there’s a lot of counter-intuitive science, and chugging a glass or two at once is far less efficient than sipping a few ounces every 30 minutes. We’ll try to do hydration and sodium intake smarter, not harder.

There’s some kind of religious holiday tomorrow. Passover? Easter? Never really paid any attention to that stuff. (In fact, still not entirely sure if Christmas is on the 24th or the 25th… Folks take 36 hours off for their alleged celebrations.) Either way, there’ll be an awful lot of Twue Believers (TM) flocking to their favourite megachurches, even despite all the warnings and admonitions, especially in the south. Especially in Florida. A whole lot of clusters will be traced back to this upcoming weekend.

Another 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment. That’s 17 million total thus far, making the Y axis of all the prior charts utterly ridiculous. Congress passed a $2 trillion (USD) bill to get some money going, but only $1,200 each will go to taxpayers. Not a whole lot, considering what all the other countries are doing. The stock market has been inching higher these last few days. No more 7% downswings. I think that’s a dead-cat bounce. Almost 2,000 more Americans died over the past 24 hours: the new total is 16,719 as of right now. (509 in Canada.) This will likely get worse. Wall Street appears to be convinced the worst is all behind us now. There’ll be no trading due to the holiday tomorrow, so it’ll be a long 3-day weekend for stocks. OPEC+ has just agreed to cut their oil production by over 20%, so the oil prices might bounce up by Monday: I have some money riding on that.

Almost forgot to mention: my car has been fixed. Reddit thought it was either the battery or the alternator. CAA drove up again (only an hour spent waiting in the snow!), confirmed the alternator was fine, and gave my battery another boost. I caaaaarefully drove to a mechanic six miles away and got a new battery in no time. (The price seemed reasonable, too.) Since I was in the actual town, I went to the SAQ and spent 10 minutes standing in line outside: they had rather strict rules that included “you touch it, you buy it” and 2-meter distancing, which everyone followed once inside, and abandoned once they got past the clerks’ field of vision. They didn’t have the Portuguese Dao wine that gf likes, but they did have some exotic cider I’d never encountered before.

The town’s grocery store was a whole different story: no one was allowed inside, and cars lined up in impromptu lanes, with shopping carts and homemade posters and “danger” tape separating them. The concept was ingenious: a guy would walk up to each car and give the driver the cellphone number of one of the store clerks. Then the store clerk would talk to you on the phone, picking your order for you as they went. You’d pick up the order outside once they called your name. I chatted with a fellow named Morris, whose English wasn’t very good: given their low stock (no baking soda, spinach, or ground beef), that made for an interesting conversation. I’m still not sure if Morris screwed me over or if that was an honest mistake, but later on, at home, I figured out that the $107 bill for the groceries was so high because he billed me for eight bags of tangerines instead of just one. I want to think that was an honest mistake, but 1 and 8 are nowhere near each other on the keypad… Low-key misdemeanors in the time of pandemic, eh?

Stay healthy, y’all.