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I am currently on a free trial of Apple TV+. One of the shows I’ve stumbled upon there is called “For All Mankind“. I got hooked on it immediately and it’s easy to see why. The show deals with alternate history and the exploration of space through NASA’s eyes. The premise is that the space race didn’t end with the United States landing a man on the moon. In the show’s reality, the both the political will and government money from the US government pushes space exploration beyond just a few cursory visits to the moon’s surface. Much of the impetus behind this is to best the Soviets, in pretty much everything space-related.

I’m a sucker for alternate history entertainment in all forms and I often wonder how different the world would be if the US didn’t stop that crazy pace of development they had in the race to the moon. How much further would humans be out in the stars? What cool and useful technology would we have now as a result?

The show gives me a view of a reality that could have been. There would be a permanent base on the moon by the early 1970s. The Mars rovers that we know so well now would have been on the red planet by the mid-1970s. Electric cars would be emerging on the commercial market in the early 1980s.

In their world, spaceflight is common, and the general view of space exploration is that it’s worthy of effort, time, and money. At any given time of the year, there are dozens of people that live and work on the moon, people from all nations. NASA is leveraging what they know about landing, building, and living on the moon to plan a manned mission to Mars.

All of this is exciting stuff for me and appeals to the childhood wonder I had and still have for space exploration. I started watching the show this weekend and I think I went through fifteen one-hour episodes so far.

All of this just makes me hope that I’m still around when NASA goes back to the moon. I understand that is supposed to happen in less than a decade but we don’t live in the reality of the TV show. We live in this reality where space exploration has been done on a shoestring government budget or has been left to private companies. Our technology is now exponentially better, faster, and lighter than anything NASA had in the 1960s but it’s not the technology that holds us back from sending humans back to the moon and beyond. What holds us back is a missing will, desire, and passion to do these things. We have become mired with problems down here that drag us down and keep us firmly on earth. I have always been so envious of the people who got to watch the moon landing so many decades ago. I hope to get my chance to see the same thing in a few years but who knows how many delays we’ll have until then.

For now, this show kicks ass and I’ll binge it until I run out of episodes to watch.

Cecily Strong, who is one of my all-time favourite performers on Saturday Night Live, filmed season two of her show Schmigadoon! in the Vancouver area. For whatever reason, she lived in the suburb of Coquitlam while staying here.

A few months ago, she appeared on Seth Meyer’s show and told a story about living in Coquitlam and encountering some bears. I grew up in Coquitlam and did nearly all my public schooling there. Never in a million years would I have ever expected Cecily Strong say the name of the suburb that helped form my childhood but it happened.

This month marks three straight years of working from home for me. In many ways, it doesn’t seem like three years as parts of me still think it’s 2020. On the other hand, my life of waking up early and commuting to work seem like it was a dream. Did I ever even have to be somewhere else to do work?

Even as my employer is readying a new studio space for my team, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be stopping working from home anytime soon.

One game I play almost everyday is something I call, “is there enough time for me to poop before I have to attend this Zoom meeting?”. This game gets played frequently for a few reasons. First, most of my meetings happen in the mornings. Second, my body really wants to poop in the mornings as well. The combination of those two things frequently leads to conflicting needs.

It doesn’t take me a long time to poop. Without going into much detail, but if my butt is on the toilet seat, I’m guaranteed to be taking care of business. As such, I can squeeze a poop into a fairly short window of time. I can’t imagine if I was one of those constipated people.

If there’s ten minutes to go before my meeting, that’s an eternity for a poop. I don’t even hesitate to go, as I know I’ll have a leisurely time. If I have five minutes, that’s also great. I can do everything I need to do in five minutes. At three minutes, that’s where it starts to get interesting. I have gone and pooped with three minutes before a Zoom call. With this much time or lack thereof, every second counts, so I need to be doing something every second. If I’m not expelling poop out of my butt, then I gotta be wiping. If I’m not wiping then I’m flushing. If I’m not flushing, then I’m washing my hands.

At the extreme, I have gone to poop with two minutes before a Zoom call. These are usually very dire circumstances. I obviously wouldn’t wait that long before going to poop, so either the need just crept up on me suddenly or I was stuck in another meeting while needed to poop badly and found myself with just two minutes to go before the next one. A two-minute poop is just not great time. Everything is just rushed too much. It’s only done so that I don’t have to feel the need to poop while in the meeting.

Personally, I think going to poop a minute before a meeting is not doable. If this happens, corners will be cut. Parts of you will be left messy or if not, then you’ll be late to a meeting. Now, you might be wondering, have I gone and pooped while in a Zoom call. The answer is yes. If I recall correctly, it happened once. My camera was obviously off. I was muted. It was a meeting where at least ten people were present. I knew beforehand that I wasn’t going to speak and I also did not expect anyone to ask me questions. The meeting was purely informational, so I was there to just listen anyways. The great thing about having a wireless headset and mic is that I can move pretty far from my computer and still be engaged in a meeting. To be very clear, I would never poop in a one-on-one meeting. There are boundaries and lines in the toilet that I would never cross. This is one of them.

There is an apartment on my floor that has their front door facing the elevators. As such, in the years I’ve lived here, I noticed a few things about this apartment as I’ve stood waiting for the elevators.

For many years before the pandemic and probably about two years into it, whoever lived in there was either very quiet, not there frequently, or probably a combination of both. I saw the tenant once in all that time.

A few months ago, this gentlemen either got evicted or left on his own accord. A note that was placed on his door sorta makes the eviction option more likely as it stated he hadn’t paid his rent for a while but I can’t be certain why he ultimately left.

Since then, it’s been very difficult to figure out who lives there now. Once I saw a woman at the doorway of the apartment speaking to what appeared to be a contractor. They were discussing some work that could be done to the apartment. I could only assume this women was the owner of the apartment, the landlord.

Then I saw a young couple leaving the apartment and we shared an elevator together. I saw them again a few days later. This made me assume these were the new tenants.

Oddly, I haven’t seen them again and just a few weeks later, a middle-aged woman leaving the apartment. Was this a relative of one of the tenants?

Then, just this week I saw an older couple leaving the apartment and we shared an elevator downstairs as well. All these people were of different ethnicities and ages. I saw all these people in course of two months or so.

I can’t figure out who is living there now.

My brother-in-law shared a video this week of my niece counting to five aloud. This was quite a milestone. She turned two in December and has been babbling toddler words for a while. They don’t quite make sense and her parents have to translate what they mean to those who don’t know.

She definitely understands words better than she can say them though. When you ask her to point out colours, she’ll know which ones they are. She also knows parts of your face like ears and noses. She even knows who is uncle, grandmother, and grandfather.

Back to counting though, like I said, this is a milestone. To know the order in which you count up and to also understand the concept of quantities is good progress for a toddler. I maybe biased but I think she’s a smart little kid.

I’m seeing my niece on Saturday and I hope we can count some toys or coins together.

Last Monday was a public holiday and my team was gifted two days off for Thursday and Friday this week. In total, I had a three-day weekend last weekend and we’re coming to the end of a four-day weekend right now.

It got cold again in the greater Vancouver area, so I spent most of my time off just sleeping in, playing video games, eating, and watching TV. I have work tomorrow but I’m not sure if I remember what I’m doing or how I’m supposed to be doing it.

This is one of the times where it would be really convenient to win the lottery and not have to go back to work.

I was walking by a home this afternoon and through the window I saw a Christmas tree was still up. The lights on it were lit.

I think in years past there would be a chance I might have judged the homeowner for this but not now. The world is a tough place to be in right now. If keeping this tree up gives them even the slightest more joy in their lives, I’m all for it.

In the first year of the pandemic I saw someone put up their tree in mid-November. I thought that was fine. What I saw today was fine too. We’re all trying to do our best.

I have been passing gas through my bowels all evening. If I had to guess, it was because of the yogourt I had tonight. My Mom gave me some this weekend and it wasn’t the lactose-free kind. I had what I thought was a small amount but I guess it wasn’t small enough.

In other news, I have a two-day work week this week. Today was a public holiday and I only have to work this Tuesday and Wednesday. My team gets a four-day long week every three months and this is the week we’re getting that. Some of my co-workers have taken vacation for those two workdays, so they get a whole week off. I could have done the same but since it should be a quiet week, I have some work things to get done before everyone comes back next Monday.

If you own a smartphone or know how to use the Internet, you’re probably aware there are a plethora of ways one can order food now. Any number of apps now vie for your business. One of the downsides of these apps is the gouging they inflict on the restaurants, taking a cut of your money, which in the old days, all went to the restaurant itself.

I’ve come to expect now that restaurants will make a patron pay more per item if you order via one of the apps, just to make up for the money that lose to the app maker. The most common markup I’ve seen is about a dollar more per item. For example, if you go to the restaurant and see an item costs $10 on the menu, it’ll show up as $11 on the app.

For the most part, I’m ok with this markup, especially if I’m just ordering one or two items. In exchange, it means I don’t have to talk to anyone on the phone, there’s less chance my order gets screwed up since it’s printed out for everyone, and I can chill in my home until it’s time for me to go pick up my food.

This weekend though, I noticed the most wild markup I’ve seen with these apps. There’s a pizza place downstairs called Pizza Garden. Their pizza is fantastic and the quality of their pies makes them a step above some of the other pizza joints in the area. The “Primo” pizza, which I ordered via their own website (so no need to markup) is about $21 for a medium size. If you use “Skip the Dishes”, there’s a two-dollar markup for the same pizza and size. If you order via “Uber Eats”, the same pizza is marked up four dollars. Should you unfortunately use “DoorDash” to order this pizza, it’s marked up a staggering $7. That’s almost $30 for a medium pizza that contains no seafood or solid gold.

I’ve never seen such wildly different prices for the same item at a restaurant. I don’t know if “Door Dash” takes a massive cut compared to the others or if Pizza Garden just hates “Door Dash” more than the others.

This is just a warning that if you can’t use a restaurant’s own website or app to order, it can’t hurt to see how much you’ll be paying depending on which of those other apps you use. You could wind up paying more than you should.

Shortly before bedtime last evening, I felt a muscle or muscles near my right shoulder blade tighten up, causing me sharp pains if I moved my arm or head in a certain direction.

I had been doing light exercise with my right arm that evening so I’m almost certain it was related to that. Maybe it was because I didn’t warm up or that muscle was cold. When you get older, any number of things can cause your body to go wrong.

I was getting tired though, so I was able to gingerly put myself to bed. I’m a side sleeper, so certain angles would cause intense pain in my back. Trying to push up to get myself upright was a particular hell. I’m not sure how I did it but I fell asleep. I did wake up about two hours before my alarm and I was dismayed to feel the pain was still there.

I fell back asleep again but only for a bit. I decided to get up, get hydrated before my morning Zoom meetings started. Sitting at my desk and drinking water seemed to help things. As about an hour later, the pain was going away slightly.

At lunch time, it got worse and I was feeling a lot of discomfort. It got to the point where I even got a slight headache. I took an Advil at that point. Lucky for me, I was able to move my mouse and type without too much pain, so I actually got a good amount of work done.

It’s evening now and the pain has now mostly gone away. The area just feels a bit sore, as if a muscle had been worked too much. I took a hot shower to both clean my genitals and also to use the hot water to loosen the muscles a bit.

I’m hoping that I’ll be good to go tomorrow because my apartment is a mess and I was planning to use a large chunk of Saturday to do the manual labour of vacuuming, dusting, and general cleaning.