and things went downhill from there

There are things that I miss from before the pandemic.

One might think that that I miss being able to go places without wearing a mask. Seeing movies in the theatre. Dining out without having to show my vaccine passport.

But those are all things I can deal with.

What I really miss is my blithe faith in humanity. I miss the feeling that we could all come together to overcome a real crisis to our people. I miss when people didn't simply accept the death of hundreds of thousands of people because they didn't want to take simple, free measures to stop the spread of a virus.

Anyway...

We are having freakishly warm fall weather this year. That makes sense, since we broke heat and drought records this summer. Our weather services are saying that there is a lot of residual heat in the ground and lakes that will keep us warm through much of the fall.

We woke to a fairly thick fog this morning, and I decided to take advantage of the warm weather to ride my bike up to the park and get some pictures in the fog. Sadly, by the time I had some breakfast and got on the road, the fog was visibly lifting as I was riding. Still, I managed to capture the last wisps of it in this shot.


As I was leaving the park, my knee¹ was really starting to bother me, so my plan had been to head home. As I was nearing the house, though, I was feeling a bit better and decided to head to the park at the south end of our street instead. Normally you would see downtown from this angle, but there was still enough residual fog to obscure it from view.


I really like the way this one turned out. Between the last bit of fog in the distance, and the contrast of my bike against the cheery fall colours, it is a striking shot IMO.


¹Ah yes, my knee. I either tore or sprained something in it a couple of weeks back. For the first few days, I could barely walk. Even now it hurts to walk, but it's more bearable. The part that sucks is that it hurts when I lay down to sleep because it's lateral pressure that causes the most pain, and I tend to sleep on my side.

On the plus side, I discovered that riding doesn't hurt it that much because there is almost no lateral movement when I am peddling a bike. To that end, I have been getting out to ride as much as I can since I'm not getting in much walking these days. The knee is improving every day, but it is still not at 100%. We're planning to take in the big farmers' market tomorrow, which should be a bit of a test for it methinks.

Today is the anniversary of the first case of the novel coronavirus reported in Winnipeg. We all knew at the time that we were probably going to end up in lock-down at some point, and that happened a few weeks later. I never imagined at the time that within a year, I'd be about a month away from being in the next demographic to receive a working vaccine against the virus that was rapidly bringing the world to its knees. This thing went from "we are years away from a potential vaccine" to "hold out your arm" in a head-spinningly short span of time. 

There are a couple of things at play in the fast turn-around. First, the technology for producing a vaccine has improved dramatically in recent years. Labs don't even need access to the virus any more to work on an vaccine, they just need to go on the internet and download a copy of its genome. Another thing is that when they talk about taking four years to develop a vaccine, at least three of those are spent in building proposals and counter-proposals, requesting funding, and all of the preliminary administrative work that usually happens before they even start doing basic science.

On another note, 2020 feels like it flew by in a blur. When it was happening, the year dragged, and I remember people joking at the end of March that, "The year of March is finally over, now begins the full year of April..."

There is an interesting brain property where boring things don't form lasting memories. When they are happening, they feel like they are going on forever, but in retrospect they feel like a blip. It's the reason why an 8-hour delay at an airport feels like half a lifetime, and then the rest of the vacation feels like it flew by. Then, when you are looking back, the airport barely registers as a memory compared to the rest of the trip. Our brains store the entire time at the airport as a single event, which makes it feel much shorter after.

2020 was the equivalent of spending an entire year in an airport lounge. It was long, and boring, and not worth storing.

I fired up Semagic with a specific topic in mind, then got distracted by Reddit (I had to tell somebody they were wrong on the Internet), and by the time I got back here I had forgotten what I was going to write.

On the subject of Semagic, it just received its first updated in years. I am pleased to see that this program is still getting some measure of support.

I don't think I've mentioned the pandemic here, even though it's been an ongoing issue for months. In part, that's because it's become a weirdly political issue, and I prefer to steer my political posts to Facebook since it's already a steaming shit pile of politics anyway.

We've been faring well through the outbreak so far. Our province has handled it pretty well, and we're still in good shape in spite of the recent minor spike (we were down to a single active case when some idiots attended a large funeral out in Alberta and brought the virus back to share with friends and family here).

atara and I have been doing our best to keep ourselves safe. We have not dined out since the start of March. We avoid in-person shopping as much as we can, wear masks, and spend as little time in the shops as possible. We keep a log book with locations and times as a form of contract tracing in case there are any significant outbreaks here. We are both high-risk individuals if we catch the virus, but she is more concerned about it than I am. We engage in low-risk behaviour.

On a broader level, for the most part Canada has handled it fairly well - though we've seeing a small up-tick in the past couple of weeks. Our biggest concern at the moment is not with our own handling, but that we share a border with this:



It's like living next to the world's largest fraternity house in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. You've managed to mostly get the zombies out under control, but your neighbours insist on partying like nothing is going on. You see them standing out on the lawn, bazooka-chugging beers and denying the presence of zombies, even as those self-same zombies are gnawing on their heads.

What is even less assuring is that their leadership is clearly lying about the zombie count. The kind of knife-edge flattening of a curve just doesn't happen with real data. I just hope that our leaders up here are not fooled by these bogus figures when it comes time to consider opening the borders. We've already got a problem with our neighbours sneaking over the border (either by boat, or using the Alaska loophole to get into the country when they have no intention of passing straight through to Alaska).

Yesterday we had reports of troops coming up here and ignoring the 14-day quarantine rule because they didn't feel like sitting in a hotel for two weeks. We've had people come up here under the family exemption and ignore the 14-day self-isolation rule, causing local outbreaks when they wandered away and went shopping/dining while symptomatic. Arrest them, deport them, and ban them for life. I wish our border services were a bit more aggressive with these folks.

Recent polls have shown that support up here for keeping the border closed indefinitely are running at about 90%.

It's not that we don't like our neighbours - indeed, a large percent of our population have friends and family on the other side of the border, and it sucks not getting to see them.

The driving fear is that the the infected horde have demonstrated an inability to follow even the simplest rules when we let them into the country.

It didn't have to be this way.

It doesn't have to be this way.

But it is.