Grigory Lukin.com

Monday. We’re falling into a routine: I roll out of bed at 7am (with a kick of encouragement), grab a shower, eat breakfast (usually black coffee with dry cereal) spend some time online, and open my work laptop to clickity-clack on it till 5pm, with a small break for lunch. Gf wakes up, does yoga, spends time online. We do indoorsy things in the evening. (The gf has a name, but it’s very distinct and easy to identify, ergo the “gf” shorthand.)

Strange news… National Guard is being deployed in the US. Senator Klobuchar’s husband tested positive. An elderly couple tried taking chloroquine by themselves: he died, she’s in the ICU. Today was the first day with over 100 American deaths. (And who knows how many just don’t get tested.) Nothing but gloom and despair online and on social media. Took a short drive to the local grocery store today: this time, they were out of chicken and frozen blueberries. Ran into the local LCBO just as they closed and grabbed a six-pack of cider. This is probably the longest I’ve gone without beer in 5 years. Heh. (For non-Canadians, LCBO is a government-run monopoly, a store designated for liquor sales.) During the 2-minute drive to the grocery store, the new radio talked about tactical approaches to catching those who break quarantine. On the drive back, the radio talked about possibly restricting movement between provinces: on the border of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, travelers are being told to self-isolate for 2 weeks. This feels like an omen of things to come. Will we institute a national lockdown?

I was surprised to see that the US/CAD exchange rate has shifted from 1.33 to 1.45 right after the stock market collapse 2 weeks ago. This means my Canadian savings are suddenly less valuable in the US. Conversely, this means my US savings and stocks can buy 9% more land in Canada…

I work at Amazon. I’m a financial analyst in the FC Finance org. (FC = fulfillment centre = warehouse.) Been here more than 10 years, but only 1 year in Canada. FC Finance means you’re generally supposed to be present at the FC. Earlier today, we got new guidance: now, just like the rest of our Finance brethren and sistren (mostly brethren), FC Finance folks can work from home. I had a 3-week vacation to Tunisia booked for April 5th-26th… Not going anymore, obviously, but this is good to know: gf and I were worried about the gap between 3/31-4/05, when I might have had to drive back to work and expose myself to potentially infected folks.

New plan: since we can’t renew this sweet little AirBnB cottage after 3/31, we’ll rent a place for a month and score a nice discount. The most likely candidate right now is a place in rural Quebec…

All is well on the personal front. All the gyms are closed – and even if they stayed open, that’d be too risky. Gf and I are trying out bodyweight exercises. She’s lifting cans of creamed corn. I’m doing bicep reps with bags of sugar and/or an old-timey wooden chair. Life goes on. Just not everywhere. And not for everyone.

Apocalypse shopping list:

1. Keto blood test monitor (with strips) – not found at the local Walmart.
2. PS4 controller – cost twice as much as it would’ve on Amazon
3. 1/16 tablespoon measuring spoon thingy – also not found
4. a tub of creatine – found it exactly where I thought it’d be
5. malaria meds that may work on covid-19 – nope, only by prescription
6. grapefruit juice – this was weird: the fine people of Pembroke love it, apparently. There was none left.

The trip to Walmart was mostly uneventful: a 30-minute drive from our cottage across a very quiet town of Pembroke, with shuttered businesses and empty parking lots. Gf decided to stay in the car: I put a balaclava over my nose and mouth to keep from touching it. Ended up scaring a few folks at Walmart.

The store was strangely devoid of activity. Things that were sold out: beef, grapefruit juice, Angry Orchard cider. A few people were out shopping, acting normally, not wearing PPE, not following the social distancing guidelines. The cashier said they’d be cutting their hours and would close at 8pm instead of 10pm going forward. The first hour would be only for the elderly; the last hour would be for the employees themselves to stock up on supplies.

There were a few signs posted around the store: they limited eggs to 2 cartons per person, toiler paper to 1 package per person, and were completely sold out of alcohol-based first aid products, hand sanitizers, surgical masks, and aloe vera. Hell if I know why someone would need aloe vera…

Gf and I spent a few days cataloging, reorganizing, and repacking my hoard of emergency supplies, med kits, and tools I bought back in the King County Search & Rescue, as well as along the way. I’m fairly certain the 70L backpack and the suitcase full of goodies could be sold for $10K CAD on Kijiji. Most of the equipment is first aid-oriented (so very, very much first aid), but there’s also enough gear to help survive in the wilderness for a fair bit. Nice bonding activity, in any case.

Slow day today… Sunday. We lounged in bed while reading the news together. The first day-over-day death reduction in Italy. At least two infected congresscritters. Senator Rand just got diagnosed positive after being exposed a week ago – he took zero precautions, didn’t self-isolate, and may well have infected half the senate by now. Someone in Mike Pence’s office tested positive as well.

…my degree is in political science, and I’m a virology fanboy. Given how contagious this virus is, how disproportionately it affects the elderly, and the median age of congresscritters and Supreme Court justices, I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few major politicians (and likely more than just a few) end up dying from it. When the first major US public figure dies, things will get even hairier.

On the personal front, things are going well. Gf and I are having interesting conversations, playing Borderlands with our newly acquired second controller, trying (and mostly failing) to bake cookies. Her house back in Toronto has ~8 people living in the same three-story house. All of her roommates have lost their jobs or quit because they didn’t want to be dealing with close-contact retail customers during the pandemic. The only exception so far is the graphic designer roommate, but his job isn’t secure either. They’re all even more broke and depressed than before, and planning to start teaching classes (yoga, painting, etc) from their house. I’m positive that’ll be the new trend elsewhere, rendering the quarantine efforts counterproductive, generating strange new clusters of disease. I wish them well.

Figured I might as well keep a written record for whomever is curious in the future.

The first 7 days were relatively action packed. On Saturday, March 14th, my girlfriend and I decided that things have finally gotten bad enough to consider leaving Toronto. She has asthma and is at risk of complications should she catch the virus… We found an AirBnB cottage in a nice little town of Deep River, Ontario: 4,500 people, 5 hours away from Toronto, a nice place to wait out the plague and see how it develops. We booked it through March 31st.

We left on Sunday afternoon and spent the night in Huntsville. I had arranged to work from home with the boss-man, and spent Monday WFDing (working from diner haha) at Wimpy’s – a diner with a surprisingly good menu and very friendly staff. (All the coffeeshops in town were either long out of business, with derelict Google listings, or not allowing customers to sit inside.) It was more than a little disturbing to create financial reports, deep-dive into discrepancies, etc, while the TV in the background kept talking about the first round of border closures and their implications; while the stock market crashed; while the diner’s staff were whispering about the sudden lack of business. (This was the first round of border closures: tourists were still allowed through, but that got changed to “essential travel only” later in the week.)

We reached Deep River late. The cottage was nice, and cozy, and amazingly well stocked – more so than any other AirBnB I’ve ever stayed at. The host, Brady, even left us 3 rolls of toilet paper – that most improbably precious commodity in these strange times. (We brought 6.5 rolls of our own: together, that should be enough for a downpayment on a house in Toronto.)

The town is tiny. One Chinese restaurant, a couple of competing churches, one food store that has improbably nice selection: Jan’s Value Mart might not be accepting returns (I spent $50 on the wrong kind of dairy products…) but they’re stocked better than most Toronto stores. They’ve changed their hours to close earlier, and set up an early-morning hour just for the elderly shoppers.

We’ve stayed inside since our arrival – streaming TV shows, reading the increasingly more disturbing reports of the coronavirus on Reddit, learning how to cook new and delicious things. WFH is easy when there’s reliable wi-fi, and all we really need is one extra PS4 controller so we could play shoot-’em-up games together. We’re feeling fine, though gf’s new keto diet resulted in a rather bad case of keto flu. Not even reacting to the stock market’s fluctuations anymore. (I sold my stocks on Monday and went all in on oil; it dropped hard, but once it returns to baseline, I’ll make a nice profit. A few months away, perhaps?)

The news reports have gone past disturbing and into the surreal territory. A video clip of a man in Spain who walked a toy dog on a leash to get past the lockdown rules. A video of cops and hazmat-wearing people tackling European teenagers in a park. Over 600 people dying each day in Italy. The rising panic in the US. A picture of a completely empty Los Angeles freeway. Disturbing pictures of the Las Vegas strip with dark casinos and empty boardwalks. A friend’s wife’s family saying they lost their casino jobs. Gf’s Toronto roommates reporting they’ve run out of toilet paper – they didn’t take the warnings to stock up seriously. Heh.

It’s Saturday, and it’s cold out today. -9. A bit too cold for hiking, but we might brave a trip to Pembroke (a slightly bigger town of 13,900 people 30 minutes away) to pick up that extra controller at Walmart and see how people are reacting. Stay safe out there, y’all, and consider keeping a written record of your own.