Month: June 2020

So, it’s June! The months have blurred together. It feels like I’ve been working from home forever now. I think the calendar says it’s been about three months, but it does seem longer. Traditionally, I view June as when summer really gets going. That’s when my expectation of hot and sunny weather increases to a point where I get really disappointed when the inevitable rain and cool temperatures arrive for most of the month. What will summer look like for me in 2020? I’ll probably spend most of it like I did the spring. Mostly inside and perhaps increasingly outside. I’ll probably be bored a bit more. I might force myself to pick up a new skill or read some books that I should really get to.

Did you know that if 2020 had not turned into the disaster that it continues to be, the original plan was for me to be in Los Angeles on Sunday? Yes, on June 7th, I was supposed to go to LA for Electronic Entertainment Expo 2020, North America’s largest video game convention. It would have been my second time going, after my initial trip in 2016. I had a hotel by the beach. It would been good time to visit LA. I might have caught up with some former co-workers who now live in other cities. I would have seen the new PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X up close. I might have come back with a slight tan.

The pandemic saw to the end of that trip. Adding to that, just very recently, there is now social unrest in Los Angeles and many parts of the United States. While I think all of us could have done without the pandemic, the protests are something that needed to happen in response to some terrible and systemic injustices. In light of that, the fact that I can’t go to LA this Sunday is an infinitesimal inconvenience compared to what is at stake in the country south to me. It goes without saying there needs to be countless changes to how their society perceives people of colour. It will not be quick fixes. It may take several decades. I just hope it happens.

So, I’m ok with having to stay home for the summer of 2020. There’s a lot more important issues in the world right now.

The annual general meeting of the strata council for my apartment is usually held every year in May. Going to these meetings is a necessary evil of being a homeowner in a multi-dwelling building. It’s a boring time, you sometimes come to lose respect for some of your fellow homeowners, and in the end, you just find out how much more you’ll be paying in strata fees.

Normally, a package containing info about the meeting and what resolutions we’re gonna vote on in the meeting arrives in the mail several weeks beforehand. On the day of the meeting, everyone goes to the meeting in the common room on our ninth floor. Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you can probably guess why this year we won’t be able to attend this meeting in person.

It’s June now and we haven’t had the meeting yet. In fact, I just found out yesterday what they are doing instead. Sometime later this month, we vote on the resolutions via proxy voting, which is essentially mail-in voting. The AGM materials will still be mailed to us and it might take them several weeks before that happens. To facilitate discussion of strata business and to ask questions, a Zoom meeting will be held sometime this month. I find this to be very interesting as this will be the first time all the owners will have met using online meeting software. Some of the owners are older and I wonder if they’ll be able to setup Zoom and join the meeting successfully. There could be anywhere from 20 to 60 people in this Zoom meeting, so this will need a strong moderator who can wrangle the participants and maintain order.

2020 continues to be a year of many firsts. I will report back on how the meeting goes.