Grigory Lukin.com

Friday evening.

I’m back, and everything went even better than expected. I don’t know if I’m just incredibly lucky, or if my obsessive preparation always ensures success, or if my innate pessimism means that any unexpected outcome is positive by default. Perhaps all three. Today’s Ohio trip took 13 hours and 20 minutes (4am-5:20pm) and 600 miles. Altogether, including the time it’d taken me to research and book my appointments, drive, and get my shots, the entire vaccination affair took me about 30 hours, 1,300 miles, and over $500 USD. I know it’s not very mature of me, but after all I went through, I utterly despise anyone who decides not to get a perfectly fine covid vaccine that’s available within 25 miles. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you decline the first vaccine you’re offered, you go to the very back of the line. We’ll vaccinate every teenager, child, and pet before getting back to you.

…but I digress. I tried a little too hard with my sleep cycle: after going to bed at 8pm last night, I woke up at 12:30am, and couldn’t fall asleep again. Upside: I didn’t sleep through my alarms. Downside: I was a bit sleep-deprived while driving. Nothing a RedBull couldn’t fix, though.

This time, I drove through the Michigan border, not the New York one. It was even emptier than before: when I finally got there after hours of driving, I was the only driver there. When I stopped at the covid test clinic in the town of Maumee (a suburb of Toledo, from what I gather), I still had time to kill. I marched down to the Maumee river, confirmed it was there, then walked back, and sampled that town’s finest cuisine. I’ll never understand why Burger King’s food is so insanely salty.

Test in hand, I made it to the Toledo health department, which was quite anticlimactic. There was no line this time: perhaps all those articles about the slowdown in vaccine sign-ups are true. I was too giddy to get my shot despite being almost two hours early, so I didn’t pay much attention, but there were about seven people spending their mandatory 15 minutes in the observation area. At a glance, they were between 35-70 years old. This time, there was no address verification – they didn’t even ask me for my ID, only for my date of birth, which they used to find my appointment in their database. (Minutes earlier, the security guard asked if I had an appointment or was a walk-in: are their vaccines really that abundant?..) A really cool medic in the adjoining room asked a few perfunctory questions, asked for my consent (I made sure to reply with an enthusiastic “Yes! Of course! Two thumbs up!” just in case), and gave me the second shot of the Pfizer-y goodness.

The really strange thing happened on the drive back… I’d already made peace with the idea of a second house arrest, another 14-16 days spent indoors without even going outside for a nighttime walk. Imagine my surprise when I rolled up to the border guard’s booth, gave him all my paperwork, and just got waved through. I even asked, “So there’s no test? No quarantine?” and he replied with “Nah, you’re good.” It wasn’t just his whim: there were no PPE-covered medics this time around. Did they leave to start their weekend early? Was their presence needed at the airport after Canada kicked off a month-long ban on flights from India and Pakistan last night? (A lot of Canadians are from India. This will have a major impact…) I don’t know, and I don’t understand, but an official representative of Canada’s government told me all was well, so here we are – no house arrest, just two weeks of recuperation (walks and all) while my body fully builds up its mRNA-based covid defense. This is the best of all possible outcomes, eh.

So here we are… After getting home, gobbling up a celebratory dinner of salmon a la instapot, and drinking some champagne with cheese and crackers, I’m about to fall asleep and end this strange long day. The side effects all my friends mentioned have yet to materialize after almost eight hours – but hey, even if I do feel like death tomorrow, that’s just the price of protection.

I still can’t believe this is over. On the drive back, on all those half-empty highways, I couldn’t stop grinning, laughing, and smiling. I spent a significant portion of that drive with my windows down and yelling at the top of my lungs, “I’m immune! I’M IMMUNE! I’M IMMUUUUUUUUUUUNE!” (Hey, I never said I was classy.) I’m a decent writer and I speak multiple languages, but I cannot begin to describe what a relief this is to finally end this strange chapter of my life…

Even as my own personal pandemic is over, the world is still aflame. Reports claim that several hospitals in India ran out of oxygen last night. Canada is still not sure when it’ll reopen, with more local-level measures being announced almost every hour. Brazil remains a horror show.

For posterity’s sake, here are the latest covid deaths as of right now: as always, these are merely the official figures which don’t capture undiagnosed deaths or excess mortality. The final figures, whenever they may come, will certainly be higher.

US: 570K deaths
Canada: 23.9K deaths
UK: 127K deaths
India: 187K deaths
Brazil: 384K deaths
Worldwide: 3.07 million deaths

So this is how it ends… Later than I thought it would, earlier than it would have if I didn’t keep hunting for every available opportunity. Two weeks from now will be my final workday in the corporate rat race. I’m not sure what will come afterwards. I’ve already come up with a new five-year plan: let’s see how fast I can get it accomplished. And in the meantime… I was a pretty good corporate drone, and an excellent analyst. Maybe now I can concentrate on my artsy side: finally learn that guitar I bought three years ago, or learn to draw something other than stick figures. In the next year or so, I’ll trade in my Kia Rio for a van, put a mattress inside, and go on a loooong drive across Canada, to look at all the attractions and cool picturesque places. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me…

Thank you all for reading. I hope it wasn’t too boring, eh. Your comments are always welcome – and who knows, maybe someday, somewhere, somehow our paths will cross, and we’ll meet up, and chat, and talk, and laugh, and laugh.

So long, and thanks for all the clicks.

Thursday afternoon.

Tomorrow is the end. Here, now, today, is my last day without the full two-shot vaccine protection. Sure, it’ll take my body a couple of weeks to fully ramp up its anti-covid defenses, but that’ll be on autopilot: there’ll be nothing else I’ll need to do. With tomorrow’s update, this blog series will finally end.

I’m writing down the bulk of my thoughts today instead of tomorrow: I don’t know whether I’ll get side effects from my second shot of Pfizer, or if I’ll be in any shape to write. Proper planning and practice prevents poor performance, eh?

I’m not sure how long I thought the pandemic would last back when I started this project in March 2020: memory is unreliable like that. I might have thought this virus could be constrained and isolated. I definitely don’t recall thinking this would go over a year – multiple years in non-G8 countries. Truth be told, I never thought this random project, inspired by a random post I saw on Reddit (“keep a journal, it’s good for you!”) would last over a year. Had I known that, I might not have started, but I’m glad I did.

My personal pandemic is about to end even as most of Canada remains unvaccinated, as Brazil remains every epidemiologist’s nightmare, as India is posting record-high case numbers and running out of oxygen, with people dying without that most basic supply – something that would’ve been unimaginable before covid. Over the past 13 months, I wrote primarily about the things that interested me: video games, books, investing, covid’s effect on public health, politics, finance, etc. There were quite a few aspects I didn’t cover: the plight of frontline workers who eventually lost their “hero pay” and in some cases had their stores shut down, or the spike in anti-Asian violence (almost always anti-Asian-women violence…) in the US and in Canada, or the way children and young adults all over the world regressed and got traumatized away from their teachers and peers, forced to stare at a laptop for months on end. All this – and more – happened, but there are some topics that I have no idea how to approach beyond just shaking my head and muttering “WTF? WTAF?..”

This pandemic highlighted – and will continue to highlight – the growing gap between the rich and the poor, both worldwide and within allegedly prosperous countries. It showed how inefficient world leaders can be, especially when they’re authoritarian populists. Bolsonaro’s Brazil became one of the world’s biggest covid hotspots. Trump and his wife Melania got vaccinated in secret in January – for once, he didn’t want cameras to see him, and his follow-up message to his supporters to get vaccinated was too little, too late. Putin finally got vaccinated on live TV, but his own administration never revealed what exactly he got injected with. (That may or may not have been Sputnik V.) Doug Ford got vaccinated with AstraZeneca a few days ago, just a week after publicly criticizing it, and then pretended to die right afterwards to get some cheap laughs from his entourage. None of those things inspire confidence; none of those alleged leaders showed any leadership. (Incidentally, this recent article provides the inside scoop on Ford’s flip-flopping, which it charitably calls “climbdowns.” The short version is that the lockdown measures were decided by a committee; no doctors had been consulted.)

The pandemic also showed that not all high-ranking doctors can be trusted. The WHO spent those first few precious months arguing that covid wasn’t airborne (even as the anti-aerosol evidence kept piling up) or that it wasn’t a pandemic at all. Dr. Fauci, despite all his stellar performance afterwards, originally told Americans that masks don’t work and shouldn’t be used. Later, he revealed that he was trying to trick people so that more masks would be available for healthcare workers. That might have been an okay tactic, but it was a terrible strategy which destroyed trust. Dr. Birx kept sucking up to Trump, at one point claiming that his extensive business background and his alleged ability to read balance sheets and such would make him great at reading academic papers on covid. (That was not the case.) Birx’s post-election attempt at a PR rehabilitation tour haven’t been very convincing. Here in Canada, Dr. Tam (Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer – our version of Fauci) told everyone that only sick people should wear masks. That was in March 2020, that most critical month… She doubled down on that statement in the following weeks, before finally recommending masks seven weeks later. She never did apologize. She still has her job.

All of the above provides plenty of fuel for anti-vaxxers and overall crackpots, and only strengthens my own inherent distrust of authority figures. (Born and raised in the Soviet Union/Russia, remember?) Some leaders, some countries, some communities performed admirably against all odds (way to go, Navajo Nation!), but most did not. An idiot can skate by fairly long in absence of any real emergencies, but when they actually happen… Well, we’ve al seen the results. The Peter Principle is all around us at all times, and I’m not sure it’s possible to adequately tell if someone will perform well or absolutely crumble and self-sabotage when a true crisis comes along. All I know is that next time there are reports of a weird highly contagious virus, I’ll try to run off to New Zealand, or Taiwan, or Vietnam, or at the very least to Canada’s Atlantic provinces that formed their own bubble: it didn’t last forever, but it was quite impressive nonetheless. Not everyone has those options or mobility, I know: most people would have to make do with the idiot leaders and/or doctors that happen to be in charge at the time.

On the personal front… I am not okay. I’ve learned some cool and useful things about myself, such as the fact that cider doesn’t actually do anything for my stress levels, or that I can operate just fine without ginkgo biloba (though it does make feel great), or that I cannot survive without caffeine – those withdrawal headaches suck. I perfected my investing skills and learned a little French and a fair bit of Spanish. But on the other hand, I’ve gone pretty damn feral. It’s been many months since I touched another human being. (My party-loving Vietnamese landlords weren’t into hugging.) The only real-world conversations I’ve had over the past three months were with the vaccine trial doc. I can’t adequately describe my yearning to reconnect with the rest of the world, to date, to love, to party, to converse. I sense that I’ve grown much more irritable and easier to anger. I’ve definitely developed a video game addiction. With not much else to do but stare at various screens, my eyes dry up and hurt. (It doesn’t help that I have a stress-related tick where I forget to blink.) I maintain my pre-pandemic weight and try to do some half-assed exercises but with gyms being unsafe, I am – at best – in the same shape as before covid, and likely a bit worse. At least the vitamin D supplements (aka Canada’s national snack) keep me from getting depressed, to the extent that it’s possible.

If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you might think that I severely overreacted to this whole pandemic business and have only myself to blame for everything I just described. Who knows, you might be right. At first, it was a game of “dodge the virus” because things would’ve gone pretty damn bad for my then-gf if I caught it and infected her. And after those first 72 days, after we split up and went our separate ways, there were multiple reports of long covid, of survivors with ruined lungs or persistent brain fog. As someone who aims to die of old age with most of my brain intact, please and thank you, that alone was pretty terrifying. I’m up for many things, but I’m rather risk-averse when it comes to permanent damage, or high risk thereof. (If you ever see me riding a horse, a motorcycle, or both, please call for help.) I know quite well that I’m both lucky and privileged to have an okay job that allows me to work from home: had this pandemic happened just seven years ago, I would’ve been as screwed as the rest of all y’all. My experience has been very different from that of most of my fellow pandemic travelers, and it is my hope that maybe, somehow, someone will find this long (and occasionally dry) recollection of events useful.

In more down-to-earth news, today was spent preparing for the big trip tomorrow, as well as the big quarantine that will follow. A bit of cider, just one can every other day. Two bottles of champagne, one to celebrate my full vaccination tomorrow night, one to celebrate my last day at work two weeks later. A bit of salmon and chicken to last me a week: the tiny fridge doesn’t have a freezer, so the second half of my house arrest will consist of Ramen noodles, canned tuna, sandwiches, white chocolate, and good vibes. An urban hike to the nearest Royal Bank of Canada bank (which turned out to be closed due to an unspecified emergency – a covid outbreak?..), followed by a hike to a different branch, where I learned it takes three whole weeks to deposit a check from myself to myself, from the US to Canada. I hope the dude they send on horseback to Seattle will avoid highwaymen and make it there and back in time.

As a night owl, I’m rather proud of myself for successfully waking up (and staying awake!) at 5am today. I’ll aim for 3:50am tomorrow. I am prepared: the US passport, the Canadian papers, the index cards with the locations of the covid-testing clinic (for the low, low price of $210 USD) and the vaccination center and my fake Toledo address. The water bottles, and a few cans of coke, and some cashews. A backpack for both my home and work laptops in case I can’t reenter Canada. Multiple backup alarms. Podcasts downloaded on a USB stick for the long 10+ hour drive. The Ohio addresses are already punched into my GPS. This giant blog post written and about to be released into the worldwide web wilderness… This is as ready as I’ll ever get.

I can’t believe that after all this time, my personal pandemic is almost over. So close. So very, very close.

Cheers, y’all. Wish me luck.

Monday night.

…I just can’t get enough of that “outside” place. Today, I went out three times, as if I were a kid all over again. First, a Tim Hortons brunch (hey, you don’t get to judge me), then an excursion to a nearby park (it was sweater weather; thick sweater), and finally a run to the nearby store to finally pick up the remaining art supplies I’ll need to tackle the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain workbook. (It comes with a lot of requirements, eh.) Between that, the untouched set of oil paint I got for Christmas, and my friends’ assurances that yes, it is in fact possible to learn guitar basics on youtube, the second quarantine should be a bit more entertaining than the first. Hopefully, the weather will be better when I re-emerge from it: this is as close as I’ll ever get to hibernation.

But meanwhile… A selfish part of me spent quite a lot of time planning a very elaborate post-quarantine trip between Toronto, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Reno, Vegas, and New York, which would have to fit in 33 days. (For tax reasons, if I spend more than 35 days per year in the US, my expat tax immunity will disappear.) And then I saw some local headlines that vaccination site volunteers have been posting online to notify folks when there are available doses. New plan: once I get both of my shots and emerge from the quarantine, I’m going to spend as much time as possible helping my fellow Canadians get vaccinated, eh. I don’t believe in karma, but it’ll be something interesting to do, a chance to fight the good fight at long last, and a way to maybe make some new friends. (My penpal friend from Los Angeles can’t make it here in May after all. Bah, humbug.) But after that, though – that 33-day trip is going to be well deserved and utterly amazing.

I mentioned the Dying Light game a couple of nights ago. For the record, it’s completely and utterly terrifying. It’s made by the same people that created Dead Island way back in 2011, and it looks like they doubled down on the strongest parts of the game: urban landscape, infected (but not quite zombie) people running at you with improvised weapons, terrifying noises in the background, occasional human-like whimpers… I had to put the game aside for a bit and cleanse my palate with the most wholesome game I know – Stardew Valley. Trying something different this time: the new character is named Jenny, and she’s already created a parsnip monopoly while slaying monsters in underground abandoned mines. Sort of like Buffy but in the rural environment. That game is something else.

Next reading project: “Sell Out,” a series of short stories by Simon Rich. They were originally published in New Yorker and can’t be found on Kindle: I like a challenge!

In covid news, yesterday they were only four covid deaths in Britain. That’s still four too many, but that was their lowest daily death toll since September – a significant victory and hopefully the beginning of the end. It’s wild how some countries are seeing their healthcare infrastructure crumble while others are very nearly recovered. The next 12 months will be quite strange.

Good night, y’all.

Sunday night.

My first full post-quarantine day was delightful. Outside, you couldn’t really tell there were more restrictions than when I entered my 16-day house arrest. Including today, I have only five days before the second trip, before the second period of isolation in my little studio…

A Tim Hortons takeout meal is what passes for high cuisine when you account for safety in this here pandemic. (I would’ve gotten it through the drivethrough, but there aren’t any of those anywhere near.) An overworked cashier forgot to include one of my doughnuts: I didn’t protest. Inside, an old woman was defiantly wearing her mask under her nose. An old man with a walker, hard of hearing, wasn’t wearing a mask at all. The masked employees said nothing to either of them. Were they too afraid to anger their customers? Did they give a damn? Did they used to give a damn but stopped because they were overwhelmed? So many mysteries. For what it’s worth, the meal and the black coffee tasted absolutely delicious once I got them back to my place. It’ll become my staple – unhealthy but yummy – until my second trip, because the 16 days to follow will be more of the same old instapot cooking. (Why yes, my life really is very exciting right now. Heh.)

I finally got a chance to stretch my legs and spent a couple of hours wandering through the University of Toronto campus. It’s beautiful… The old cannons that were sunk when the French lost their claim to what is now Quebec. The beautiful Soldiers’ Tower. The wilted memorial garden. Once the world reopens, I’d love to see the inside of all those little museums and galleries too. For now, though, I made do with cherry blossoms: there weren’t many cherry trees on campus, but even so, it was beautiful.

I’m finally done reading Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, David Remnick’s Pulitzer-winning opus about the last few years of the Soviet Union. At over 600 pages, the pacing was uneven: some parts were dry and slow as molasses, while others were literally LOL-funny and fast-paced. (I’m sure that wasn’t the book’s intent but I got some interesting – and perfectly legal! – entrepreneurial ideas from it…) Overall, it was an excellent and educational addition to my collection. Growing up in post-perestroika Russia, history was always in a state of flux. Even in my class of 30 gifted kids, we weren’t allowed to learn what happened in the 20th century – probably because there was no official compromise on what to teach the next generation. As a result, we ended up covering Russian history from the 10th through the 19th century, and never went beyond. I think we covered the same 900 years three times in a row over the course of several years. It was pretty funny, really… Needless to say, they didn’t teach us anything about western history, either. (There was some world art appreciation which covered ancient civilizations; that was neat.) In our final school year, one of the teachers took pity on us and tried giving us a 40-minute-long crash course on the 20th century, but how much can you really fit into a single short lesson?

Reading Remnick’s book, old childhood memories started bubbling back up: all the different newspapers we used to read, the sudden overnight changes in currency as our ruble lost more and more value, all the political chaos… Some parts were genuinely new to me: all the post-Stalin massacres, or the much lighter pieces, such as Yeltsin having lost his left thumb and index finger when he tried to break apart a stolen grenade using a hammer when he was 11 years old. (That was a very Russian sentence, I know.) My overall opinion remains unchanged: I left Russia when I was almost 17, back in 2003, I’ve never gone back, and I never will – or at least not as long as it remains a de facto dictatorship. Who knows, maybe it’ll eventually recover, the way Spain did after Franco stepped aside. Improbable but not impossible. If not… Oh well. The country that robbed my great-grandfather for the high crime of being a merchant and that threw my grandma into a Gulag work camp for almost a decade for the high crime of telling a few political jokes to her fellow university students – that country has an awful lot to make up for.

Aaaaanyway… I’m planning my Friday road trip to Ohio. It’s interesting how different towns and municipalities have switched into distinct little camps: some offer only Moderna, some only Pfizer, others can’t even tell what they’ll offer. The latter was why I switched my appointment from the town of Warren (their description was essentially a big shruggie emoji) to Toledo, which has a Pfizer-only vaccination center. If anyone asks, I am and always have been from Toledo. Love ya, Glass City! Goooo Rockets! Or Walleyes when it’s hockey season! Suck it, Bowling Green Falcons!! Go team go!!! There, that should help me pass any scrutiny, I think. Aside from my Canadian license plate and phone area code, I’m invincible: got my US passport, got a fake local address memorized, and overall treating it with the same sort of overkill seriousness that Annie from NBC’s Community did for her fake ID background. After all, how often does one get to roleplay as a vaccine spy in another country? Heh.

In covid news, the majority of US adults have now received at least one shot of their covid vaccine: as of today, 209,406,814 vaccines have been administered to 50.4% of all US adults. That is huge. Absolutely huge. Maybe now Biden’s lawyers will find some clever loopholes to kinda-sorta-not-really break the 2020 contract and export all the vaccines they’re not using to other countries. (Not even necessarily Canada – literally anyone, ideally Brazil.)

Meanwhile, in Canada… There’s a strange generational standoff: the AstraZeneca vaccine was approved only for people 55 and older. They had their pick of Pfizer, Moderna, and AZ but refused to take the latter, which resulted in a lot of half-empty vaccination clinics and, as some pharmacists claim, precious AZ vaccines expiring because no one under 55 was allowed to get them. (One pharmacist wrote about a 53-year-old plumber literally crying because he couldn’t get the AZ shot and nothing else was available.) This is a zero-sum game: by declining the AZ vaccine, they take away a Pfizer or Moderna shot from the younger crowd. The younger crowd, in turn, can’t get their hands on AZ even if they sign a liability waiver. The consensus right now is that the older folks are getting scared shitless through social media, word of mouth, and sensationalist TV reporting on AZ: they’re not deliberately malicious after the sacrifices other age groups have made over the past 14 months, but it sure seems like that from the outside looking in…

Good news on that front, then: Canada’s federal health minister, Patty Hajdu, has just announced that provinces are “free to use” the AZ vaccine on anyone 18 and older. The NACI committee (which, as far as I can tell, is not elected by anyone and wields remarkably disproportionate power for a bunch of mere advisors) is expected to officially concur in a few days. The practical outcome is that Ontario has said it’ll start administering AZ to folks 40 and older. (Great news, plumber-dude!) About time, eh.

And in all the insanity with Ford’s changes and counter-changes, I forgot to mention that even though Canada’s Moderna shipments are delayed, we’ll be getting a lot more Pfizer. We’ll be getting 8 million doses on top of what had already been ordered, and they’ll arrive between May-July. A total of 24 million Pfizer doses will get here between April-June if all goes well. That is excellent, excellent news – though I’m not sure if local provincial governments will be able to handle the logistics of vaccinating literally everyone. I hear good things from British Columbia, but Ontario has not been very organized, to put it mildly… We’ll see.

Good night, y’all.

Saturday evening.

Another anniversary, eh? Honestly, the thing that impresses me the most, anniversary-wise, is that I’ve logged over 300 consecutive days on DuoLingo. My Spanish is still quite broken but it’s definitely better than it had been before the pandemic.

Another day of the forever quarantine: reading, waiting, hibernating. It’s been six days since my mini-war with Switch Health’s video chat system, and five days since a courier picked up my test kit. Their portal says tests get processed within 3-5 days… After spending 20 minutes in their online chatroom, a customer support representative agreed that this is, indeed, weird, and assigned a special priority to get my kit located and processed.

I spent a couple of years processing escalations from Amazon’s FBA sellers: all in all, I processed 25,000 of them. (Why yes, that was indeed hell.) I’m getting some serious déjà vu from this system: it sounds like their backlog is huge, and processing things in FIFO order still takes more time than their service-level agreement, which means waiting and escalating is the only way. Today is day 16 of my quarantine (day 15 if you exclude the travel day), and I’m pretty sure no one has ever reported an incubation period that long. At least the weather is grey and chilly and miserable, or I would’ve been even more tempted to just run outside and, I don’t know, speed-walk around the block like a Canadian outlaw? It’s literally in my dreams at this point.

No Man’s Sky still has some gameplay-breaking glitches, even after all these years, so I’m going to cheat on it with Dying Light, which has just finished downloading…

In covid news, Ontario’s government faced severe backlash from absolutely everyone after their new restrictions got announced. They’ve managed to unite absolutely everyone, which is sort of touching and beautiful in its own way. Business owners, cops, doctors, people who hate lockdowns, people who don’t hate lockdowns but like intelligent measures, etc… This front page from a local newspaper should give you some basic idea of just how upset people are. In the past 24 hours, a lot of local police departments tweeted that they will not stop random pedestrians and drivers to ask for their papers, followed by an official statement from the Ontario government backtracking that particular order.

In addition to that, a lot of parents got righteously pissed off that new restrictions shut down playgrounds without doing anything about factories or warehouses. (Latest research claims that most cases come from industrial workplaces.) Guess what? The playground ban got reversed too. If all these local back-and-forth events I describe are confusing to you, try and imagine what it’s like for 14.6 million people to live this way, day by day. The whole thing stinks of some random backroom compromises: it doesn’t look like any doctors or scientists had been consulted at all. It’s good and right that they’ve reversed the course on this, but in doing so, they made themselves look like even more of a joke.

While I was typing all of that up, I got a text from Switch Health – looks like they found my test kit after all. Not gonna lie, I was concerned that the results page would say the test was inconclusive, thus sentencing me to another week of house arrest, but nope – I’m free! Wooooo! I don’t know why the PDF was in French, but I’ll take it. It’s almost 9pm here, and dark, and chilly (49 degrees Fahrenheit) but I’m off on a celebratory walk around the city, if only to get some exercise after 16 days of doing absolutely nothing. Wooooo! Woooooo, I say!

Oh, and Alaska has become the first state to offer vaccines to tourists (starting June 1) after also being the first state in the union to offer them to any resident 16 or older. Vaccine distribution kiosks will be in airports, just outside the secure area. Way to go, Alaska!

Sorry, brand new zombie game – I’m off to stalk the dark and empty streets of Toronto for exercise and brain-oxygenating purposes.

Good night, y’all. Stay safe.

Friday night.

This ends in seven days. I finally made it through my last normal workweek and started my two-week vacation, and then… Wait until next Friday, drive to Ohio, get a test and my second shot, drive back. Send a two-week notice to my boss. Cash in the remaining personal time for the last week, then work (from home, as always) on the first week of May, while waiting two weeks for the second shot to fully settle. And then… Freedom. Early retirement, immunity, no more rat race, just pure exploration, and doing whatever the hell I want. (Within the latest public health guidelines, of course.) This is it, this is the final stage at last – at long, long last.

Exactly 168 hours from now, I’ll be back home, likely experiencing some side effects as the second shot of Pfizer does its job. So soon. So very soon…

As promised yesterday, I switched to a pizza-based diet. Heh. The delivery guy handed it to me from around the lobby door, with both of us masked. I’m pretty sure I didn’t jump on this strange novelty (my first pizza in at least three months) like a ravenous beast, but it probably wasn’t pretty. I feel the way a python likely feels after devouring a medium-sized mammal: at some point, I’ll have to throw something else in my piehole, but that point is very far away. (And there’s plenty left for tomorrow.)

Another sign that things are looking up: a girl I went out on two dates with, well before the pandemic, texted me out of the blue. We’re not relationship-compatible, but it’ll be great to start building a local friend circle again. In fact, that’ll probably be my biggest project this year. And meanwhile, as I spend all this time in lockdowns and quarantines, I might go ahead and install Dying Light – a zombie game that I somehow completely missed, even though it came out in 2015. How weird is that? Steam really ought to offer discounts to people living in covid disaster areas, but fiiiine, I’ll pay the full $60 CAD for the enhanced edition. It’ll pay for itself if it keeps me from going mad with this house arrest business.

In covid news… There is a lot of covid news. After rescheduling his press conference multiple times this afternoon (presumably to reach some consensus on new measures), Ford told us that Ontario will not get hit with a curfew, but we also won’t be getting paid sick days. Without them, the rest of this giant restriction list is really rather pointless. I simply don’t understand political conservatives who oppose paid sick days: yes, it costs them some money to institute that, but it costs even more money if a sick employee infects their colleagues and customers. I get that it’s a one-way door: once they offer it, it’ll hurt them a lot politically to take it away later on. But, you know, pandemic? People dying? Full ICUs?.. I guess that doesn’t phase them.

One of the weirder new restrictions is the travel ban. Unless you have a good reason to drive into Ontario from Quebec or Manitoba, you might get turn around at a checkpoint. More disturbingly, the police have been authorized to pull over any car or stop any pedestrian, ask for their ID, and write them a ticket if they’re not traveling for an essential purpose. (Groceries, pharmacy, medical, exercise, or work.) An awful lot of civil rights groups are mighty pissed off about this. I hope that the sheer laziness of Ontario’s cops will be our salvation. They do nothing about people who drive 30% over the speed limit (or 20% under, for that matter) on highways. They did nothing about the BBQAnon demonstrations in November. (No fines were issued to any of those morons, as far as I know.) They stood there and watched as international travelers walked away from airports and said they’d rather get a fine than quarantine in a hotel. It’s possible we’ll end up under a miniature dictatorship with cops gone wild, but I think it’s more likely that absolutely nothing will happen. We’ll see.

Perhaps the weirdest part of it all was Ford asking other provinces for help (500 nurses, 100 respiratory therapists, etc) while declining Justin Trudeau’s offer of sending Red Cross to Ontario to help us out. (That is literally what Red Cross is for.) Trudeau is Ford’s political opponent (or so Ford thinks), and this is yet another in the long series of remarkably counterproductive decisions that keep extending our pandemic here in Ontario. The one thing they couldn’t restrict was air travel: that belongs to the feds, not provinces. People online are already joking about Ontario ordering a shipment of surface-to-air missiles… Oh, and the state of emergency/stay-at-home thingy got extended by two weeks. Now it’ll last until May 20th. It’s so extremely strange (not for the first time, nor the last) to consider that I’ll be fully vaccinated and living in an empty, locked-down city: my post-pandemic life will overlap with a full-on emergency order for weeks. That’s gonna be so strange…

Meanwhile, elsewhere… Things are getting much worse in India. Yesterday, they had 217,000 new cases, more than anywhere else in the world. That’s less scary per capita, but those numbers are growing and getting worse. This article describes (and shows in its video) the horrific hospital situation in New Delhi, with two patients per bed, and with dead bodies being placed outside the ward before they’re taken to the mortuary. A coworker of mine casually mentioned today that he just lost two relatives in India. Small world… India is capable of great logistical feats, but it also has well over a billion people, and it might not be possible for them to keep following social distancing rules. I hope things get better there, but if they don’t… That will get ugly.

Good night, y’all.

Thursday night.

One thing I’ve definitely accomplished during this pandemic: I got several of my local coworkers to start saying “Happy Thor’s Day.” They might be doing that just to humour me, but I want to believe that this one-man meme will take off. Today, Ontario. Tomorrow, Canada. Next week, the world! mwahaha

(Why yes, I am indeed quite bored.)

In my virtual world, No Man’s Sky, I ended up adopting a brontosaurus-looking dinosaur, and now I have a giant pet merrily running around when I explore new worlds. (I know “brontosaurus” is not the preferred nomenclature but hey, I was grandfathered in, so I get to use it forever.) The imagery and the overall feel of those virtual worlds is downright amazing, even though I know it’s a lie. This is, at best, a shoddy substitute for real travel, for real discovery. I remember, back in August, when I returned from my giant roadtrip where I explored abandoned mines and collected lots of shiny minerals. After all that, the virtual world of Elder Scrolls Online seemed like a flat cardboard cutout, though it boasted some amazing graphics. This is a little bit like Matrix: can I truly enjoy the incredibly detailed and beautiful virtual worlds when I know that I’m literally unable to explore the real world?..

Online, the Vaccine Hunters group has expanded its arsenal: now there’s a twitter account that sends out notifications as soon as we learn about a pop-up clinic. Those started going up within the last two weeks: they’re not announced in advance, they target hot-zone neighbourhoods, and they just set up and give out several hundred doses to everyone who lines up. The twitter account spreads the message as soon as we learn where the new pop-up clinic is located that day. This is so cyberpunk… A ragtag group of cyber-volunteers using the worldwide web to send out immediate notifications to people’s handheld mini-computers, telling them the locations of pop-up clinics distributing the rare vaccine against a highly dangerous virus that’s killed three million people. And as in any decent cyberpunk novel, the government is utterly useless and held hostage by giant international corporations. Heh. What a world…

Due to work and the general lack of know-how, I don’t have the time or the ability to help locals find their vaccination appointment slots. That said, by now I’ve consulted quite a few Canadians (about 15-20) on the logistics of getting to the US to get vaccinated. It’s hard to believe that driving to another country is easier than finding a vaccine here, locally. I’m sure at least a couple of the people I talked to will heed my advice. If a person that helps smuggle people across the southern border is called a coyote, does that make me a moose? Gonna have to change my online nickname from Platypus Prime to Major Moose if this keeps up!

In more prosaic and down-to-earth news, I’m kinda running out of food. I’d planned to buy enough groceries to last me two weeks in quarantine: even with my bread going moldy and with the eggs getting frozen solid in this ridiculous tiny refrigerator, I still have some stuff left to munch on, but not a whole lot. Today’s lunch was a can of tuna, two apples, some muesli with honey, and a cup of green tea. I’ve still got a big box of cereal, an untapped jar of peanut butter, and a block of cheese, Last night, I devoured the last two cups of Ramen noodles and the last of the tortilla chips. (They make a fun, if sad, meal if you microwave them with some cheese on top. Sad but delicious.) Protein is gonna become an issue soon.

Today is my 14th day of quarantine, and you’d think I’m free to go. Unfortunately, the official rules state I must wait for the results of my 10th-day covid test. A couple of issues with that… The courier company they use doesn’t work weekends, so they picked up my sample on the 11th day instead. (And if your 10th day falls on a Friday – congrats, your quarantine is now three days longer just because of the pickup delay.) And given the utter chaos and all the bottleneck issues of their mandatory video chat on Sunday, I’m going to assume they’re quite overwhelmed and might have a backlog of tests to process… As always, I hope I’m wrong. I really, really want to go for a long walk outside: if all the streets are empty and I don’t pass any other people, then how am I a danger to everyone else? It’s been two weeks since my last human interaction, and I have no symptoms, so in a way, I might be the safest person in Ontario right now. I’m going to stay put for two more days (at least in part because the weather forecast is pretty bad) but if there’s still nothing by Saturday… I’m honestly not sure what I would do. On the one hand, I want to be a law-abiding Canadian. On the other hand, not all the laws are meant to be obeyed. If their lab is so overwhelmed that it’d take them, say, two weeks to process the results, are people really expected to spend 24 whole days indoors? (27 days if their test happened on Friday.)

If I do choose to be a blindly rule-following shut-in – well, that right there is a perfect opportunity to go full-on bachelor and live off pizza delivery. I do need my protein, and I just don’t trust the grocery delivery people to keep meat cold enough while they’re delivering it. That’d also make for a weird party story at some point in the future – how I was a patriotic Canadian by spending my staycation locked in a small studio, eating pizza, and playing video games – all for the sake of public health! If I do that, I’ll be living my teenage dream: for my 13-old self, that would’ve been a perfect lifestyle. How strange this life is…

In covid news, things are getting even worse here in Ontario. Ontario’s population is 14.6 million. The latest projections show that we’ll get 12,000-18,000 new cases per day by the end of May. The province’s 2,300 ICU beds could also become overwhelmed, with 1,600-1,800 of them going to covid patients. Every option is on the table right now: ugly options such as triage, as well as riot-inducing options such as mandatory curfew. (Quebec has had it since January, but when they tried to lower it to 8pm, people literally rioted.) I wonder if one of Ford’s many advisors will finally convince him to institute paid sick leave. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person to back down and admit he was wrong, and his stubbornness is making this pandemic even longer.

Meanwhile, there are some bad logistical delays. Moderna’s shipment of 1.2 million shots was expected to arrive next week. Instead, it’s delayed, and might not get here until the first week of May. With everyone and their dog being terrified of AstraZeneca (thanks, media) and refusing to take the AZ appointments, that leaves just Pfizer. With no domestic vaccine manufacture of its own, Canada depends on other companies and other countries for all of its supply, and this is just one of the possible scenarios that unfortunately materialized. (Other, worse scenarios include the EU banning all exports. That would be bad.) Because of the delay and the uncertainty, the entire country’s vaccination scheduled is up in the air. Some of the local clinics have already stopped offering new vaccination slots… So fragile, this vaccination timeline of ours. The big ambitious goal of giving each Canadian at least one shot by Canada Day (that’s July 1st for all you outsiders) might be in serious danger now. As always, once again, I really hope I’m wrong…

Stay safe, y’all. Enjoy some fresh groceries and lovely walks outside on my behalf, eh? I’ll just be here, munching on patriotic pizza and playing patriotic video games.