Grigory Lukin.com

Tuesday night.

I took a long and scenic walking route to get some cider (it’s been a dry couple of weeks) and pick up one last thing from an Amazon locker. (It was a boring weekend, okay?) Along the way, I saw some people dining at outdoor patios… Pedestrians seemed evenly split: those still wearing masks, like myself, and those who looked like they were from another era: enjoying themselves with their faces unburdened by cloth. The risk of outdoor transmission is pretty low, especially if you’re not face-to-face with someone, but still. It was sweater weather again: so strange to see so many people all at once, not wearing coats, showing off their unique styles. The coming months will be weird as we still stay under various lockdowns and remain mostly unvaccinated.

Speaking of which… Apparently, if I drive out of Canada to get my shots in, say, Ohio, it’s unclear whether they’ll allow me back in, seeing as I’m still not a permanent resident. I contribute to the Canadian economy and pay my taxes, but their rules are strict: only permanent residents and citizens get to enjoy safe passage. (After which they’re supposed to quarantine.) Work permit holders such as myself may or may not get turned around at the border. Chances are, they’d let me back in, but if there’s even a 1% chance of failure, of losing everything I worked on over the last two years, I might as well wait. Once I get my PR, or once the border restrictions get looser, a lot of good things will happen in rapid succession. Until then, though… Blargh. Blargh, I say. It could take weeks or likely months.

Back to playing 7 Days to Die, I suppose. I know it’s not a productive way to spend time, but hey, it makes me happy. It’s also interesting to analyze myself from afar, to see which recurring mistakes I keep making. Last night, I could’ve built a quick ladder and climbed to safety instead of making a foolhardy last stand. The night before that, I almost starved to death while climbing a skyscraper: I finally found some leftover food, but there was a good chance that expedition would’ve been a one-way trip. It’s possible that I’m just trying to justify my bad habit to myself, but hey – there might be some value in seeing what I can learn. That, and I truly enjoy the “from rags to riches” aspect of the game, seeing as you start it by literally waking up naked on the side of the road.

In covid news, my sister in Los Angeles got her first shot of Pfizer. She’s 41, so it’s open for pretty much anyone. Her second shot will be three weeks away. I’m a bit jealous but mostly just happy for her. Things aren’t looking so good for AstraZeneca: US health officials said the data from their US trial might have included outdated information. AZ claimed 79% efficacy, but it appears that they cherry-picked the most favourable data, while in reality the results ranged from 64%-79%. That’s still fairly good, but they chose to lie. On top of everything else AZ did earlier – not testing on old people, messing up their dose regimens, etc, this is only the latest in a series of epic fails.

This makes their FDA approval less likely. This also raises some tensions here in Canada: we approved AZ weeks ago, and in light of this new and shady information, folks are asking questions. (Mostly along the lines of “WTF, eh?”) There’ll be even more distrust now, even as the top officials are saying no one should be concerned. What a goddamn mess. To be clear, I’d still take all the shots of AZ they’d care to offer, but I wouldn’t end my “plague diaries” chronicle until and unless I also got a shot of Johnson&Johnson or two shots (three weeks apart, please and thank you) of Pfizer or Moderna. This may take a while…

Stay safe, y’all.

Sunday evening.

Another weekend carefully wasted on video games and reading. Hard to believe that used to be my default preference once upon a time. (I’m an introvert – sometimes I simply must recharge ye olde battery without any human contact.) On the other hand, that’s another weekend without catching and/or transmitting covid, so I did my patriotic duty? Maybe? Kinda? I maybe kinda did my patriotic duty, yeah.

A year or so from now I’ll learn whether the experimental vaccine I got was the real deal or the placebo. Right now, I feel like I have a very mild cold, but that could be just my brain messing with itself as I play the “placebo or real?” guessing game. Heh.

A random stranger finally dropped by and took my damaged 42″ TV off my hands, at long long last. Way too many people either changed their minds or didn’t have access to a car to come by and pick it up. It’s finally gone… It’s been my companion for nine years. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I lugged that thing from Vegas to Dallas to Tampa to Seattle to Toronto, across more than a dozen addresses. If and when I get a replacement, it’ll be a tasteful 32″ or smaller TV. (Why yes, my life is very exciting.)

I’ve been doing some thinking about who I want to be and who I want to be with after this pandemic mess finally ends… Might fool around and create a new dating profile: nothing real-world for now, but I can’t think of a better opportunity to get a penpal and get to know one another while the world is slowly mending.

This week’s big grocery indulgence: salmon and dark chocolate. (Not at the same time, of course.) In the coming decades, cocoa and salmon will become more rare and more expensive. Gotta enjoy them while they’re still around. Not too long ago, as I was reading William Least Heat Moon’s excellent Blue Highways: A Journey into America, I was always surprised by his nonchalant dietary descriptions. He was road-trippingeron. That was half a century ago, and it’s hard (though not impossible) to believe you could just get a large piece of smoked salmon so cheap. These days, just a few ounces will cost you $10 or more. Another 50 years, and it’ll become an even more unavoidable delicacy. At some point in the future, people will get nostalgic over the early 2020s. It’s hard (but not impossible) to believe, but this will be many people’s idea of the good old days.

In covid news, this is pretty ironic… Miami Beach has declared a state of emergency after being overrun by thousands of maskless spring break revelers. That’s action and reaction, cause and effect: Florida has spent most of the last year doing everything in its power to attract tourism and downplay the effects of covid. (Governor DeSantis called Florida an “oasis of freedom” less than a month ago.) And now that there are legions of loud, party-seeking, aerosol-exchanging college students all over the place, the local authorities are suddenly starting to realize they’ve made a huge mistake. Miami Beach’s curfew will be between 8pm-6am for at least the next three weeks, until April 12th. There’ll also be traffic restrictions, some business closures, and the local cops have allegedly already arrested a few folks. If you tilt your head and squint a little, this is entrapment of sorts: Florida clearly wanted to get tourists, and now that it got what it wanted, it’s going “no, no, not like that!” This isn’t as filled with schadenfreude as the infamous Fyre festival, since a lot of the visitors this time are middle-class kids and not part of the 1%. I don’t feel sorry for them since their pandemic party got ruined, but I can see how they’d feel cheated and insulted. Sucks to be them.

Stay safe, y’all.

Friday night.

Well, I went and did it. There’s a 67% chance that the thing circulating inside me is the real experimental vaccine and not the placebo. I haven’t developed any superpowers so far, though the urge to take over the world (for its own good!) is stronger than usual. It’s hard to tell if the mild headache was caused by the vaccine or caused by skipping breakfast this morning. (Gotta love those caffeine headaches, eh.) Also, I’m a proud owner of a shiny new thermometer (to measure my temperature daily for the next week) as well as a 12″ ruler to measure the diameter of the injection site. (It almost certainly won’t grow to be 12″ wide. Heh.) It’ll be about a year before I find out whether I got the placebo or the real deal, but still, I like that there’s 67% chance I have some sort of protection now. Definitely better than the 100% chance of 0% protection I had 24 hours ago.

Meanwhile, my vaccine quest continues. The US rollout featured vaccine scavengers who would line up outside pharmacies to get leftover shots from punctured vials that had to be used up within hours. Canada is (allegedly) doing something different: if there are punctured vials at the end of the day, they’d go to the front-line workers on site. If there’s any left, the pharmacy in question would start texting folks who signed up online and said they can arrive within an hour. Soooo, I went ahead and signed up for the “yes, please, gimme” contact list at the 19 nearest pharmacies in the four-mile radius. I doubt they’ll text me: I answered the questionnaire honestly, and admitted that I’m not a front-line worker, not chronically sick, not indigenous, not homeless, not under the same roof with a vulnerable person, etc. (I mean, I am a fairly recent migrant, but I’m not sure that’s what they meant, so that one was a “No” as well.) I could’ve cheated with my answers, and I suspect at least a few people would cheat (who would bother checking their story 10 minutes before the closing time?), but it’s important to me to do this right. I’m at the very back of the line, and I’m okay with that, as long as no vaccines are wasted. This is a low-probability/high-payoff scenario. At some point starting today, I might get a text message around 6-7pm asking me to skedaddle to a certain pharmacy and get a leftover shot, and that’d make my life much easier. Yet another piece of bureaucratic communication to wait on… Toes and fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, a bit more boredom-induced online shopping with the end goal of alleviating said boredom, if only for a bit.

In covid news, Biden’s promise of 100 million covid shots within his first 100 days came true way ahead of schedule. It’s estimated that the US will deliver its 100,000,000th dose (under Biden’s administration, not overall) sometime today. That is huge. I know I criticize the US more often than I praise it, but kudos on a huge logistical accomplishment. Even bigger kudos if y’all start delivering our Pfizer orders we placed in 2020, please and thank you. Meanwhile, Canada set its own little record today by delivering almost 162,000 doses in one day. That’s tiny in comparison, but that number of daily doses grows with every passing day. It’s tantalizingly slow but progress is progress, eh.

Have yourself a fun and safe weekend, y’all.

Thursday evening.

My campaign to popularize “happy Thor’s Day” is still ongoing, though with limited results. A man needs a hobby, eh?

Coming back to the real world after about 90 minutes of random feel-good hypno files, stirring awake in a dark room, reminds me ever so much of working night shifts in a Reno casino in my early twenties. Wake up and truly start your day when everyone you is already ending theirs. So strange. There are only so many combinations of physical stimuli, and eventually your mind will start combining similar experiences despite them being very different memories. Or maybe my subconscious is so starved that it’s actively cannibalizing its own archives. Either/or. Heh.

About 12 hours from now, I will have received my first dose of an experimental covid vaccine. There’s no live virus in it, of course, and it might not ever work. (There is, in fact, a 33% chance that it’ll be a placebo.) Or maybe it will work, and I’ll develop at least a bit of immunity. Online, more of my old friends back in the States are bragging about having received their second shots. I’m happy for them. I really am. More and more states are announcing that, just like Alaska, they’ll start offering vaccines to anyone over the age of 16 starting in April. (Nevada, Rhode Island, others.)

Such a strange dichotomy. Canada was objectively safer than the US during the first year of pandemic. We had plenty of outbreaks, but nowhere near as bad as in the States. And now that vaccines are out, the US has it better. If I’d gotten my PR by now and been able to travel freely… Oh well.

In covid news, the US is finally getting off its ass and sharing the vaccines it’s not actively using. The bad news is that it’s the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has shoddy results among folks over 65, doesn’t protect against the South African variant, and may or may not give you fatal blood clots. The US stockpile of the AZ vaccine is allegedly dozens of millions of doses. It’s not authorized for use in the US because the clinical trials had all been done outside the country, and the US trials are still ongoing. (It sure would be nice if they “shared” the Pfizer vaccines Canada ordered last year instead…) So far, it’s sort of a large but symbolic gesture: Canada will get 1.5 million doses and Mexico will get 2.5 million. (To be fair, Mexico’s population is three times larger.) The understanding is that later in the year, if/when both Canada and Mexico have a surplus of vaccines, we’ll give as many back to the US.

Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, did his best imitation of an abused dog adopted from an animal shelter by calling the US “Our greatest partner, greatest trading partner, greatest friend in the world. That’s what true neighbours do, you help each other out in a crisis.” That’s quite the contrast to his earlier pleas to get in a truck, drive down to Michigan, and get the pre-ordered Pfizer vaccine from that factory and into Canada. On the balance, this is net positive news – I just can’t stop wondering what would happen if the South African variant were to sweep through Canada after most Canadians let down their guard and return to their normal lives. It’s unclear whether AZ can prevent hospitalizations or deaths against that particular variant, and even so, Canadians would receive just one measly dose each (followed by the second one about four months later), so even the official study results will be a bit too optimistic for what will happen here.

I have a very rich imagination. Even so, I never imagined I’d sign up for a clinical trial for an untested vaccine (because my measly single dose wouldn’t get here for several more months), nor that I’d end up in the middle of a country-wide experiment with questionable vaccines. Life is just full of surprises. Heh.

Stay healthy, my friends.

Wednesday evening.

Boredom level: I’m contemplating buying a $150 digital microscope with a built-in display and a 12MP camera. Oh, and 1,200x magnification. Something like this model made Opqpq. (That’s a Scrablle-winning word if I ever saw one.) This particular obsession is caused by a combination of a tweet with a cool picture taken by a digital microscope, and the book I’m currently reading about an obsessive taxonomist. This might be just another brief obsession, so for once, I’m going to wait for a week before I click that “buy” button. Possible benefits: cool photography right here, at home, without going outside to the cold weather. Also, science and stuff. I highly doubt that those fancy and exotic 12MP pictures will get me any notoriety or fame, but maaaaaybe? Who knows. The price is higher than what I’d typically be comfortable spending on a random whim, but the vaccine trial people will allegedly pay me for my participation, and that should more than cover the cost.

Boredom level, continued: in order to add at least a little variety and to fast-forward through these boring waking hours, I’m going to give self-help hypnosis a try. Those free hypno files are something I’ve dabbled with for years, on and off. (As a listener, not as an actual hypnotist. My accent doesn’t make for a very relaxing and soothing voice. Heh.) Here in the second year of the pandemic, singles meetups are illegal, and dating is a weird form of prisoner dilemma where each party tries to figure out if the other is honest about having zero covid exposure. Unless, that is, both parties are dumb and/or just don’t give a damn about covid anymore. That’s also a significant possibility. So, yeah, random human voices telling me sweet nothings through my stereo headphones as I wait to get tired enough to sleep until another identical day. That sounds healthy, right? Heh.

In covid news, a new paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine claims that AstraZeneca is useless against the South African variant (aka B1351). The vaccine showed only 10.4% effectiveness, and that’s after two shots 21-35 days apart. Given that Canada still plans to vaccinate people four months apart, that 10.4% effectiveness will probably drop to zero. This is remarkably bad news… More and more European countries are stopping their AstraZeneca vaccinations due to the fears of blood clots. Even if some thorough analysis shows that there’s zero risk, that vaccine’s reputation is already ruined. And even if it got used on large scale again, the B1351 variant could sweep through that population as they try to return to their regular lives. This is such a hot mess… We’ll see how this plays out, I guess. For now, I’ll have to update my personal pandemic-ending criteria: not only two shots three weeks apart, but two shots of a vaccine that’s not Sputnik V and not AstraZeneca. That may take a while, eh.

Good night, y’all. Watch out for them South African viruses.

Monday night.

It’s quite tempting to just write “fuckity-fuck fuck” for today, and to continue in that vein for the rest of the week. So very, very tempting. It won’t accomplish anything productive, though.

So starts my second year of pandemic. Exactly 365 days ago, xgf (né gf) and I looked up an AirBnB in rural Ontario, packed up, and started our big AirBnB odyssey. In some other world, where we never broke up, we might still be hopping between AirBnBs all over Ontario – grizzled yuppie survivors. Heh. Xgf is fine, by the way: I know I haven’t posted about her in a while. She’s still with her parents in a small town almost an hour away from Toronto, still bickering with them, but at the same time she’s probably eligible for Ontario’s phase two vaccination, so her own personal pandemic might end soon. (Or at least the first part of it; nobody has any idea when second shots will come out.)

A zombie bear ate me In my game, Serves me right for going shopping with just a pistol and a shotgun, and leaving my AK-47 at home. (That was 13 hours well spent.) My new character is mildly more cautious, but he still got almost killed by a pair of wolves and (on a separate occasion) a flock of zombie vultures. They really ought to do something about animal control in that apocalyptic dystopia, eh. If and when this game gets adapted for VR, it’ll be beyond amazing. The jump-scares are terrifying enough when it’s just on a computer screen. If it’s actually in your immersive reality… Yeesh. That’d be some grade-A almost-Walking-Dead experience.

If aliens ever invade and take over, daylight saving time will be one of the first things they’ll eliminate to make our world more rational. (Or maybe people just hate it because it happens on a weekend and not, say, at 1pm on a Monday.) Still, we get a whole extra hour of sunlight now. I get to watch the sunrise in bed once again, and – more importantly – I can enjoy a fair bit of daylight by walking outside right after work. It’s such a small luxury, to walk around in fading sunlight without having to worry if my lunch break is over yet… The weather is still crappy, though, so I managed to catch just the first part of tonight’s sunset before speed-walking back home. (When my legs started shaking on that park bench, that was a bit of a giveaway.) If and when it gets warmer, things will get better.

I spent a fair bit of my weekend reading up on trading options. That’s an incredibly complex subject, and I won’t do more than just dip my toes and buy calls and puts for next year: playing it as safe as possible with fairly small amounts of money. In a way, this is the most sophisticated form of gambling: all the concepts, the Greek terms, the exceptions to exceptions to exceptions… It doesn’t surprise me at all that most people just stick to buying and selling stocks. Meanwhile, I found a site that lets you screen stocks for not just their 52-week high but the two-year high, which lets me find stocks that have either fully recovered from last year’s pandemic dip, or have yet to recover. It gave me 161 grossly overpriced stocks (negative earnings, currently at the two-year high point, and over $1 billion market cap), which I reviewed at my leisure, narrowed down to seven, and then to just two. Somewhere, someone decided to sell some very cheap puts on one of those stocks (CX, a Mexican cement company) for waaay out in January 2023. I’m sure I’ll make money on that trade – I’m only curious when.

…I need other hobbies.

In covid news, the long-awaited Ontario vaccination booking portal has finally launched this morning. There were some issues but it appears to be back up again. Yay progress. General Hillier, the guy who helped prepare the rollout, said he’ll be stepping away now that his work here is done. It seems odd to bounce out when there’s still so much to do, so who knows, maybe there’s more to it. Canada’s vaccination effort is going at a snail’s pace but, well, at least it’s going.

Good night, y’all.