Category: Uncategorized

My sister, my brother-in-law, and my niece are temporarily moving back to the greater Vancouver area this weekend. My niece is almost six months old now and I have never seen her in-person and obviously never held her in my arms. These unfortunate circumstances are because of the pandemic. My niece was born during a pandemic, something which will probably be a trivia answer for her as she grows up.

I am excited to see everyone when they arrive this weekend but I think I’m gonna be a tiny bit more excited to see my niece in-person. She is definitely an adorable baby and I cannot wait to hold her.

As many of you know, I’ve been working from home since mid-March of 2020. It has been well over a year since I worked a day in the studio. In that time, I’ve only returned twice to the office: once in the summer of 2020 to pick up my personal items and once in the fall of 2020 to get my flu shot.

Depending on where you are in the world, some people have begun to or already have returned to work in an office environment. If you want to know something amusing, the original work from home order from my employer called for employees to work from for just two weeks. Obviously that order has been extended several times over the last fifteen months or so. The latest news I have heard is that, at least for my team, we will definitely spend the rest of 2021 working from home at a minimum.

There are already signs of what working back at the studio will look like, whenever that happens. Earlier this week, all employees of the Vancouver studio were informed that over the next few months of the summer, everyone is to pick a day to come back into the studio to pack up all their personal belongings and to clean up their desks. Last summer, there was a voluntary opportunity where employees who wanted to come pick up their stuff could. It was purely optional and it was solely for the benefits of the employees who may have been missing their coffee mugs, toys, and other collectibles.

This new mandate, however, is for the benefit of the studio itself. Management wants everyone to remove all their personal belongings and to clean up their desks because it needs to be flexible about who may or may not be at work on a particular day. It is most likely the concept of one permanent desk for every employee will be going away for most people.

I think it will take many months for management and facilities to setup the studio for employees to return. It will be a different environment, where many employees are only at the studio for part of the week.

Anyways, I have at least another six months of working from home still and I’m ok with that.

Both my parents now have their appointments booked for their second shots. My Dad has his on Sunday and my Mom has hers a week and a half later. The timing is great because in this province, casinos are opening up again on July 1, Canada Day. By then, both my parents will be at least two weeks post-second shot, meaning they will be fully vaccinated.

I’m not sure when I’ll be getting my second shot but it’ll probably be in July sometime. I cannot wait to be fully vaccinated. There will be a definite sense of relief.

It was quite warm today in the greater Vancouver area. I guess it was apt that today was also June 1st. It feels like summer is at hand though in true Vancouver fashion, it will be rainy starting on Friday night. Today, however, was a hot one. I wore shorts for a walk during the evening and I didn’t feel cold in the slightest.

I need to start breaking out my hot weather clothes. It’ll be my second pandemic summer but I feel like there is an end in sight.

I e-mailed three different contractors on the weekend about some drywall repairs and only one responded. This contractor is going to try to come over tomorrow to look at the wall and give me a quote.

Not sure why the other two didn’t respond. Maybe they’re too busy. Maybe they saw my pics and thought the job was too small for them to be worth it (that’s fair). Maybe they don’t treat e-mail as a serious method of communication (one of the contractors had a web site in their Google profile but it was down).

Whatever it is, it seems like I’m gonna just get a single quote so far if I don’t expand my list of potential contractors. That’s not really smart shopping, so I’m gonna keep looking, just so I can have at least two quotes to compare.

Despite the deadline for filing your income tax return for 2020 was April 30, 2021, I didn’t actually calculate my income tax return until this weekend. I was going on the assumption that I was going to get a refund and not have to pay more tax. Luckily, my assumption was correct, most likely due to a final RRSP contribution in February for tax year 2020.

I really had no excuse for not doing it sooner and in the end, I just kept myself from getting my refund sooner. I’ll probably be lazy again next year.

After four years, I now have the ability to heat my living room. I woke up very early this morning to allow an electrician into my home, the first stranger to spend an appreciable amount of time in my apartment since the beginning of the pandemic.

I would later find out that my electrician’s name was Chris. Chris had to cut two exploratory holes in my drywall where my electric fireplace was. This was so that he could location the proper wiring for the new baseboard heater.

Once he understood what was going on behind that wall, he knew had to cut along the bottom of the wall and then across the wall where the new heater was going to. This was required because he had to splice new wire and pull it along. He was able to purchase the exact same heater that is in my bedroom.

The actual wiring and installation of the heater took very little time. Most of the time was spent trying to figure out what the wiring situation was like behind the wall. Chris then had to leave for about an hour to get more wire and also buy my heater.

He was very professional and even vacuumed my living to room to get all the debris cleaned up at the end.

As I’ve mentioned before though, this is just step one. As you can see in the above photo, the baseboard trim has been removed for two of my walls and there are now two holes in the wall where the fireplace used to be. I need to repair the walls and then paint them. I need to start getting quotes on the drywall repairs very soon.

I could never be a tradesperson. My lack of skills with my hands notwithstanding, I could never work the hours. The electrician is supposed to be at my apartment at 8am tomorrow. I usually don’t roll out of bed for work until 10am on most days. I need to get to bed now.

In March of 2020, I was preparing my living room so that an electrician could come in and install a baseboard heater. I had removed the only source of heat in my living room, a fake fireplace, a few years prior and it was now time to get a new source of heat. I moved some furniture around so I could remove some baseboards from the walls. My living room was in a “temporary state” when the pandemic hit. The plan was to have some furniture in temporary locations and stuff just set aside for a few days while I made room for the heater and for the electrician to do their work.

The pandemic threw those plans out the window. I had gotten as far as getting quotes from some contractors but imagine having a stranger come into your home during the last few weeks of March of 2020. That would have been crazy.

It’s now May of 2021 and on Thursday morning, an electrician will finally come to install that baseboard heater. More than a year after I had anticipated the work being done, it’s will actually happen this week.

This is actually the first step in a series of home improvements that I will be doing. The next step is to repair some drywall and after that, some painting.

In 2013, there was a massive fire in my neighbourhood that took out several businesses. Among them was a Vietnamese restaurant that I frequented. It was the only place I could get a bowl of pho within walking distance. The next closest Vietnamese restaurant was probably a 25-30 minute walk, all uphill.

Before the fire, my local Vietnamese restaurant was probably open for about a year. It burned down and I held out hope that the owner would find some way to open up again, somewhere close by. I don’t know the details but they never did. Maybe they didn’t have insurance, maybe they didn’t want to be in the restaurant business anymore, it could have been anything and I don’t blame them for not being able to bounce back.

About four years went by before another Vietnamese restaurant opened up in the neighbourhood. This one was about a block further down than the old one. I was beyond excited to have them open their doors. I didn’t hesitate to visit as soon as I could. To my delight, the food was great, reasonably priced, and the lady who ran the establishment was friendly and engaging. The restaurant was conveniently close to one of the train stations, so on many nights when I was coming home from work, hungry and not sure what to do for dinner, it was an easy choice to pop in for a pleasant meal.

This weekend, this wonderful restaurant was destroyed by a devastating fire that also gutted several other businesses. Like many restaurants, I am sure they scrambled, adjusted, and pivoted as best they could to survive a pandemic where dine-in patrons weren’t allowed for months at a time and even where they were, people were vary of going to restaurants. I personally just had take-out from there just a few days ago. I got a bowl of pho and two of their awesome spring rolls. It was one of the best meals I’ve had in weeks.

The expectation is that this province was going to allow restaurants to have dine-in patrons starting tomorrow. This will be a huge development for all restaurants and coupled with dropping positive case numbers and increasingly vaccinated population, I am sure all restaurant owners are seeing the light at the end of this long pandemic tunnel. But to get this far, to work so hard to get this far, to overcome all the obstacles and challenges, to see the beginning of normal operations ahead, only to fall victim to a fire that they had no control over. It’s incredibly sad for all the businesses affected today.

I don’t know how of many of those business owners will bounce back from this fire. I hope they all have insurance. I hope they find a way to make it all work again.