Category: Uncategorized

I was feeling slightly optimistic about how things are proceeding in the province of British Columbia when on Monday, it was reported that at least twenty-eight workers at a Vancouver poultry processing plant tested positive for COVID-19. More than one worker at United Poultry admitted they went to work sick because they felt like they had to, otherwise they would not get paid. It’s unclear at this point if management at United Poultry actively made workers think this way or not. You’d think that if they did want sick workers to stay home, they’d go out of their way to make it crystal clear to all their employees. I know I don’t have all the facts but it doesn’t look good for management.

This one outbreak alone at the poultry processing plant was pretty much responsible for a spike in positive cases in the province. This just underlines the importance of not letting up and that putting your guard down for just a moment can lead to serious consequences. Everyone needs to be vigilant and see this through to the end.

As for this particular company, both provincial and federal authorities are now investigating their operations, as they should. I feel like they won’t be escaping any scrutiny for a long time.

I had to clean up and consolidate some of my recycling today and I found a whole bunch of plastic containers that, at one time, held half a dozen muffins. I found four such containers. So by my limited math skills, this meant that since the quarantine started, I had consumed twenty-four muffins over the course of about thirty days.

I’ve tried my best to have a balance diet since I was forced to stay home. I wrote about this earlier but one of my indulgences has been french fries. The other has been muffins. Previous to the quarantine, I rarely bought muffins. I didn’t think they were a healthy choice since you can only buy six at a time and since I live alone, that automatically meant I had to eat all six if I didn’t want to waste food.

The quarantine changed my thinking a bit. I wanted something delicious and a bit indulgent. The muffins were also a practical choice. There were six of them, which meant I could eat one a day and they would last me almost a week. In times like this, it made sense to buy foods that would last several days. The muffins have also been made part of my routine. After I have my daily Zoom call with my team in the morning, I go and grab a muffin, split it in half, apply butter or margarine to each side, and heat it up in my toast oven. In a few short minutes, I have a warm, buttery muffin for breakfast. It’s a good way to start the day.

There are four empty muffin containers in my recycling container right now and another container in my fridge that currently holds five blueberry muffins. I’m not sure if I’ll be eating muffins daily when all of this is over but I sure am going to continue it while we’re all hunkered down.

My mortgage is up for renewal at the end of June. I’ve approached mortgage renewals with a lot of anticipation. I view it as a great opportunity to get a better deal and save a lot of money over the long run. I recognize though that in the ten years or so that I’ve had a mortgage, it’s been relatively cheap to borrow money. Interest rates have been low compared to pretty much any time frame before this last decade.

I always receive the mortgage renewal offer from my lender with a bit of skepticism. My thinking is that there is always a better deal out there to be had and I should do my research before signing the offer. So, when the renewal offer arrived in my mailbox a few weeks ago, looked at it, and then had a few mortgage brokers offer their opinion on what my lender had sent me. Now keep in my mind, I hadn’t looked at mortgages in great detail for five years when my last renewal was up. I was aware of the interest rate that I was paying but I didn’t know what mortgages were like now and I especially didn’t know what mortgages were like during this pandemic.

So, I had no idea what my renewal offer was like in the context of the current mortgage market. As I began to contact mortgage brokers, each one pretty much said the same thing. The renewal choices that my lender had sent me were exceptionally good for me and that they would be impossible to meet, let alone beat, with any current mortgage offer that they could get their hands on. I was told that the pandemic had made most lenders a bit apprehensive about mortgages in the current world situation and that rates weren’t as competitive as they might have been just a few months ago (when the prime lending rate was even higher).

All of this was quite the education for me and I felt very lucky that my lender had sent me some awesome options for renewal. I wonder now that if my renewal had been set for later in the summer, would these offers be the same?

In the end, I went with a 5-year, variable rate mortgage, with the rate set at prime lending rate minus 0.90%. At the time of this writing, assuming the prime lending rate doesn’t change, starting in July, my interest rate will be 1.55%. I’ll have to check the records but I believe that is the lowest interest rate I’ve ever had for a mortgage. I had to do the math on this, so it might be wrong, but that translates to bi-weekly payments of around $260.

I feel extremely lucky during these difficult times that I still have a job and that I was able to renew my mortgage with such favourable terms.

So, as some of you might recall, I encountered computer problems almost exactly the same time as when I started working from home and when governments at all levels were urging residents to stay inside. Specifically, Windows 10 would not start on my desktop computer. I use this computer for work, since it can be hooked up to two monitors. This is also my gaming machine. While I love using my laptop for general use, my desktop does all the heavy lifting in terms of work and gaming.

Over the last month or so, I have tried fixing this problem to no avail. Approximately once in every thirty times or so that I start my computer, Windows will miraculously start. It’s a very time-consuming process and I can’t figure out what I’m doing differently between attempts that eventually gets Windows to start. I’ve resorted to letting Windows sleep rather than completing shutting it down. This is a stop-gap measure however because eventually I will need to reboot my computer again.

Since I’ve exhausted all my resources on how to fix this, I am, for the first time in my life, considering bringing in my computer to a shop somewhere that can hopefully help me diagnose what’s wrong. There are a few things though make this a bit more difficult than it might seem. First, I don’t know who I could bring my computer to. Geek Squad at Best Buy? Are they any good? Would they know how to diagnose a problem like this? Or maybe a local shop like Memory Express or Canada Computers would be better. I’m leaning towards the more local shops as they seem to serve the more enthusiast crowd. Second, we’re living in difficult times now. I think it’s still possible to drop off computers for repairs but both the customer and the shop both need to follow safe practices. Are they gonna need to sanitize all the parts in my computer? I wouldn’t blame them if they wanted to. Lastly, having my computer gone for an indeterminate amount of time makes it difficult for me to work at home. I could use my laptop and hook up a second monitor to it but its screen is small and not ideal as part of a two-monitor setup. I suppose I could survive for a week working like that.

Perhaps I could wait until all this blows over but who knows when that will be!

I just realized today that for over a month now, I have only peed or pooped at home. Over thirty days of my personal waste has been dealt with exclusively in my only bathroom. This isn’t the norm for most people. When I was at work, I frequently pooped there. Almost everyone pees at work too. Think about all the times you’re out at the mall or at a restaurant and you go to the bathroom there. All of that has stopped for most people.

Now our bathrooms at home have seen a major increase in use. I bet some of them are pretty gross right now. I think I might go clean my toilet tomorrow.

I think today was quite possibly the laziest I’ve been since this quarantine started. If I had to guess, it’s probably because I haven’t slept so great the last two nights. I woke up feeling tired today, just like I did yesterday.

I can’t say I was super productive at work, I did manage to do a few things but I will admit this to you now, I probably am the least productive member of my team. That’s just me being honest. There are many reasons for this but one of them is because of the work from home situation.

I napped from about 6pm until 7pm. When I woke up, I didn’t get up right away. For whatever reason, I just stayed in bed and looked at my phone. I think I might have drifted off to sleep here and there. I didn’t actually get out of bed until around 9pm. I did that because I was kinda hungry again and wanted to make french fries.

I can tell I am still tired because there are still dirty dishes and utensils in my sink and it’s time to go to bed. I normally wash all my dishes well before bed time but I’m just so fatigued today that I’m going to leave them for tomorrow. I hope to have a much better night of sleep tonight.

I understand it’s a difficult time for millions of people as jobs have been lost and many businesses have closed. I feel extremely lucky that my job is still stable and I’m able to work from home for a supportive employer. Even though I’m in this privileged position, I am not immune from feeling a bit of stress and worry about the current state of world affairs. I cannot imagine what others then are going through during this time, as they face much adversity.

I know it’s not a lot, but I made a small donation of $50 to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank a few weeks ago. It’s the least I could do. The purpose of this post, however, is not that I donated. I wrote this post to highlight that my employer, Electronic Arts, has a company-wide program that matches charitable donations made by employees. The program is great and doesn’t make you jump through hoops to get your charitable match. There’s a web site where I fill out a form and attach my donation receipt. In less than five minutes, I was able to request a match for my donation. This program is awesome on its own but during this extraordinary times, EA has decided to double the charitable match. Now, for every dollar an employee donates, EA donates two. As such, my donation of $50 to the food bank has now turned into a $150 donation, courtesy of EA. I have an additional $6,000 or so of charitable donations that EA will match for me for the rest of this fiscal year.

I will be the first one to say that EA is not a perfect company and there’s lots of stuff it gets wrong but this charitable program is a good one. I understand they benefit from some tax breaks (so do I if I may be honest) with these donations but the end result is that the food bank has an extra $!50 to spend on food for someone who really needs it.

For the last month or so, I’ve prepared every single meal and snack I’ve consumed. For a whole month, if I ate something, it was because either I cooked it or re-heated it myself. There has been no delivery or take-out for me. I have never prepared so many of meals myself consecutively. I can’t remember the last time I had take-out. I wish I knew at the time it would be my last take-out meal for a while.

Well, as such, all this home cooking produces a lot of dirty dishes, utensils, and cookware. Unless it’s a pre-packaged, ready to eat snack (of which I have barely any of), if I need to eat, I’m getting something dirty that needs to be cleaned. I probably do my dishes by hand at least three to four times a day. I’ve thought about just leaving all the dishes until the end of the day and just putting everything into my dishwasher. I’ve resisted because some items can’t be put into a dishwasher, like a wok. It also kinda irks me if I see a big pile of dishes in the sink. This never used to bother me pre-pandemic, probably because I was out of my apartment a lot more. Since I basically spend all day inside now, I’m forced to see dirty dishes way more frequently. With all this time on my hands, it just makes sense to wash dishes after every meal or when needed.

As a consequence of all this dish washing, I burned through a ton of dish washing liquid in the last thirty days. In fact, on my last dangerous run to the grocery store, I had to buy a new bottle of that stuff. Lucky I did, because the current bottle I was using ran out today.

I can’t be alone in the increased amount of dirty dishes people produce during this quarantine. How is everyone else managing this?

I took a glorious nap around 7pm this evening. I felt very tired and it was just so nice to be able to put my head down on my pillow and just sleep for about thirty minutes. There’s construction going on across the street and it starts early. I usually don’t need an alarm because the noise wakes me up far earlier than my alarms does.

One of the very few benefits of being home all the time now is that I’m able to nap whenever I want to. I think about all the times I’ve been sleepy at work and wishing that I could be at home to just slip into bed for a few minutes. Well, my wishes have come true. I can steal away for a nap pretty much any time of day now. You see, there are some silver linings.