Category: Uncategorized

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.

I had some ice cream this evening and I didn’t have my lactose pills handy. What followed was a gassy experience, ending with two poops. I feel much better now but I question why I continue to have ice cream without my pills.

So every few weeks, I’ve noticed I lose connection to the Internet in the morning for a few minutes and then it comes back.

It’s not frequent enough to be a major blocker but happens just enough to annoying. At first I contacted my ISP and they said they didn’t see any obvious faults on their end. They were able to tell me though that on a particular day where I reported an outage, their equipment in my building also got reset. They asked if my building had experienced a power outage. It had not. Then they asked me if my building was doing generator testing. I wasn’t sure.

I left it at that for a few days but one morning I had to go run an errand. As I was coming back, I had to use the elevator to go up to my place. While I was waiting for the elevator, the power seemed to be removed from the elevators and all of them stopped working. It was weird because the lights were still on. It was as if there was a selective power outage.

I called the property manager and it turns out my building does generator testing every second Tuesday of the month. This causes all the telecommunications equipment to lose power for a few minutes, along with the elevators. It’s super annoying and there’s nothing my ISP can do.

So every month, I lose my Internet a few minutes in the morning. I’ve learned not to schedule Zoom meetings on the second Tuesday of every month, in the morning. Does this happen to anyone else?

I got into the Bitcoin market last week when I purchased some shares in a Canadian Bitcoin ETF. I understand cryptocurrencies are volatile and I guess that was proven to me because less than a week later, my investment into Bitcoin is now worth 10% less. The great thing is I only put in about $1K into the ETF, so it’s not like I put all my life savings into the Bitcoin basket.

It’s kinda crazy that single billionaire can make some comments and make a cryptocurrency drop in value significantly. If it can drop significantly, it can probably rise significantly as well.

This is a great video on why captchas are getting harder to pass these days.

My four-day weekend is over and I really don’t want to go back to work. Having four days off was awesome. For the first two days, I did more errands and chores than relaxing. I washed my car for the first time since I bought it. I cleaned my kitchen and my bathroom. I did laundry. I re-potted one of my plants with new, nutrient-rich soil. I took some clothes to get dry-cleaned.

On Saturday and Sunday, I relaxed more and did less cleaning and organizing. I had dinner with my parents and I played lots of video games.

Tomorrow is Monday and it’ll be kinda tough to get back into work-mode again.

My four-day weekend has started. I hope everyone is doing well. I’ll be back on Sunday night with another exciting post.

I am approaching the fourteen day mark since I received my first vaccine dose. By most accounts, my body has now built up whatever immunity I should have received after just a single shot. Some fourteen months after the pandemic started, I now have some fairly good protection against the virus. While I do feel some relief, I haven’t changed a whole lot of my behaviour in terms of safety protocols. I understand I have received only one dose of the AZ vaccine. I need two doses to be considered fully vaccinated and protected. At this point, I am not even sure if my second dose of the vaccine will be AZ. In any case, since I am not fully vaccinated, there’s still a chance I can still get sick. There are documented cases where fully vaccinated people got sick and died. That’s just the reality of how viruses and vaccines work. Not everything is perfect. Until everyone is fully vaccinated (or at least as close to everyone as possible) and positive cases are down to more manageable numbers, it’s important to me to keep doing what I’ve been doing.

I guess the only thing that has changed is the slight sense of relief I’ve experienced that I mentioned before. Both my parents have had their first shot and so have I, so now I feel much more comfortable being around them. I also worry less when I’m indoors. I think I’ve been to a mall twice in the last fourteen months. I feel like I could go to a mall now while wearing a mask and I’d be in a safer situation than say a month ago, when I hadn’t had my first shot.

I’m looking forward to being fully vaccinated by the end of the summer!

I just had a three-day weekend but the people in charge of my team at work have informed us plebes that everyone is getting Thursday and Friday off this week! They are giving us some extra time off because we’ve been all working very hard lately and that hard work has paid off.

It’s a very kind gesture for management to allow us to have some time off and also to shift the schedule around so that the team having two days off doesn’t mean we’re just two days behind schedule for our existing work.

Wednesday is Friday this week!