davemerrill

Well, I got the COVID. Am feeling crummy but manageably crummy. Cough, aches, no fever, I can still taste and smell. We're quarantining at home for five days, this is day five, I feel like I'm coming out the other side of it. If I feel OK tomorrow I'm going back in to work. If not, it's one more vacation day I can burn.

Not quite sure where I got it - we had PCR tests on the 27th and the 29th and they came out negative. I started getting sneezy on Saturday the 1st but my sinuses have been nuts for a while now and I didn't think anything of it. My wife got her booster on the 3rd. She started to feel a little lousy, I was still sneezing, we happened to have two rapid tests thanks to friends in Cincy, so we tested on Thursday AM. She tested negative while I tested positive. Thursday afternoon is when I started feeling legit sick. So far I've been about the same. We really haven't been anywhere except to the grocery store or to walk outdoors. I went to work twice, but I don't work closely with anybody, I work an off shift mostly by myself. So who knows where this came from.

We have plenty of food, the cat has plenty of food, we have plenty to occupy ourselves with. We're just waiting it out.

For me, COVID feels... there's a weird hot ache behind my eyes, and fatigue, and a dry cough. I don't have that "beat with a baseball bat" deep body aches I get with the flu, my digestion and appetite have been fine, even the fatigue isn't too extreme. I have probably gone into work feeling worse. Definitely I felt worse the last time I had a solid case of the flu.

I've had two Moderna shots, the wife has had three Pfizers. I'm sure without those shots we'd be a lot sicker. My advice is to stay away from other people and get all the shots you possibly can get. And then stay further away from other people.

The lockdown that started April 3 should be ending in a week? Hopefully? We can sign up for early second doses today? Hopefully? Ontario's numbers have been trending downwards again. It would be nice to get through this. I can't say we'll get back to normal. I just want to go to a store and buy a pair of pants and a shower curtain.

Weather has warmed right up and it's very summerlike out there. If things aren't crazy maybe we can get to a beach or two soon.

Anime North's Stay At Home show went well, I think. My Anime Hell did about 500 viewers which is less than a live show, but my panels about 1981 and Gatekeeping In Fandom did about 180 viewers, which is more that I'd get in a panel at the actual Anime North. So it's a win.

I finished a new Let's Anime reviewing the new book LEIJI MATSUMOTO: ESSAYS ABOUT THE MANGA AND ANIME LEGEND, a collection of interviews and essays about the seminal manga artist. I learned a lot from the book, and I've been paying attention to Matsumoto for years, so there are some revelations in this thing, trust me. I'm not a big fan of the whole "all my works fit together into an extra-dimensional Eternal Hero cycle" thing he's been doing the last third of his career, but I know some people are. Have fun with that.

https://letsanime.blogspot.com/2021/06/across-leijiverse.html

I personally think "Maetel Legend" did its darndest to ruin "Galaxy Express 999" - the whole point of "Galaxy Express 999" is to make people think about what it means to live an eternal life in a machine body, and the whole point of "Maetel Legend" is that Maetel's mom Queen Promethium goes power-mad and decides to *force* everyone in the universe to have a machine body, throwing the whole moral of 999 out the window. Oh well. Gotta force everything into a "universe" I guess. I won't even get into the late 1990s nonsense of Matsumoto trying to drag Space Battleship Yamato into his own reservation. Let it be its own thing, man.

Fingers crossed we'll be able to take a vacation and cross the border this summer. Hopefully we'll see some friends down in the States!

Well, it's been a year since COVID hit us like a ton of bricks. Since then I have cut my own hair, ordered cat food online for curbside pickup, done four virtual Anime Hell screenings, watched a bunch of TV, and walked a lot of trails. I haven't seen a movie in a theater in more than a year. Haven't eaten in a restaurant since last summer. Haven't seen most of our Toronto pals in person in more than a year. Haven't seen my family or friends in Georgia or the rest of the United States since Dec. 2019.

Yesterday I was home from work getting a new battery put in the car. After that I had to pick up something I'd ordered for "curbside pickup" at a store I thought was freestanding but was inside the mall. Haven't been inside a mall since sometime last Fall, I think. Anyway there was a maskless guy in the hallway to the washrooms arguing with security staff. Forcing him to wear a mask was "discrimination," apparently. He wasn't there when I got out, so who knows if he wised up and left or if he took it to the next level and earned a criminal trespass.

I am sketching regularly again, I am working on a new comic story, it's supposed to warm up this weekend and I'm going to get back out on the bike if I can. By my calculation we won't be getting our vaccinations until sometime this summer. I'm hoping situations will stabilize enough for us to get across the border for a visit in July. Fingers crossed.

Been a long year.

worldwide cases: 65,395,834 (Oct. 25: 29,051,154)
worldwide deaths: 1,509,544 (Oct. 25: 924,879)
US cases: 14,149,770 (Oct. 25: 6,520,733)
US deaths: 276,406 (Oct. 25: 194,107)
Canada cases: 399,770 (Oct. 25: 138,712)
Canada deaths: 12,423 (Oct. 25: 9,221)
Ontario cases: 125,233 (Oct. 25: 46,485)
Ontario deaths: 3,727 (Oct. 25: 2,863)

that second wave picked up steam in Ontario and really shows no sign of going away any time soon. Ontario's daily infections have been in the 1700-1800 range for a few weeks. We've been in a new lockdown since Nov. 23....
"The orders, which came into effect at 12:01 a.m. on November 23 and will be in place for at least 28 days, include:
-no indoor organized public events and social gatherings, except with members of the same household
outdoor organized public events and social gatherings are limited to 10 people
-closing all outdoor dining and patios. Take-out, drive-thru and delivery options remain available and are strongly encouraged to support local businesses
-closing malls, except for essential businesses and pick-up of pre-purchased merchandise at designated pick-up areas
-closing all non-essential retail, except for curbside pick up
-limiting capacity of big box retailers with a grocery section and essential businesses to 50 per cent capacity
-closing all indoor gyms and recreational programs, with some City-operated community centres open for day camps, child care, mental health and addiction supports (not more than 10 people) and social services, such as food banks
-closing all hair salons, barber shops, nail salons and tattoo parlours."
(from the City Of Toronto website)

Obviously we aren't going anywhere for Christmas. Usually when the temp drops below freezing and there's a good dusting of snow on the ground, I start to feel like it's time to load up the car and head South - I'm a snowbird now, I guess - but this year we aren't leaving the country or the province. Or even the house, maybe. I've been in Toronto since 2004 and this is the first Christmas I haven't been back to Georgia. I guess we'll save some money, won't have to make a two day drive there and back, but it's still a bummer.

I got my hair cut right before the lockdown, I should be good until February. Most of my presents have been ordered online. We bought a little artificial tree. We did a video call with the family on Thanksgiving and will do one on Christmas. Between stat holidays and the remains of my vacation I wind up with two solid weeks of time off at the end of the year - I don't have to go back to work until Jan. 4. Hopefully I can use the time constructively?

worldwide cases: 26,337,473
worldwide deaths: 869,331
US cases: 6,151,253
US deaths: 186,806
Canada cases: 132,527
Canada deaths: 9,189
Ontario cases: 44,720
Ontario deaths: 2,859

COVID-19 is still a thing, everybody! Ontario's cases per day dipped below 100 for about two weeks, and now we're back up in the 130 per day range. Not great; my guess is that we're seeing a rise due to summer travel, summer get-togethers, restaurants starting to reopen, people getting out there and forgetting to wash their hands or sanitize or mask.

In the past month or so, what have we been up to? I wrote a Let's Anime column about a 1987 catalog of anime merchandise from an import company started by three Florida ladies who were instrumental not only in the anime fan community but in getting me into anime fandom.

http://letsanime.blogspot.com/2020/08/1987-catalog-of-dreams-and-vhs-tapes.html

The conversation about women in fandom has been an ongoing thing in nerd circles lately, but where I'm from, Japanese cartoon nerds, women were always a part of it. The first ongoing Japanese anime convention was started by a woman, the longest running national anime club was run by a woman, women have been there since forever. Of course, Star Trek fans don't need me telling them this.

What else did we do? We took a little out of town trip- our first overnight trip since COVID started - to Kingston. Kingston is weirdly kind of like Savannah - there's an old downtown on the waterfront, a lot of historical buildings, and a lively restaurant/tourist vibe. The antiquing and kitschin' selection is not the greatest, though. Our route took us down Hwy 7 through Perth and Perth had the best stuff of any of the places we visited. I had a week off so I rode my bike, caught up on naps, got the free meal at Denny's on my birthday (the first & so far only indoor restaurant we've been to since COVID). On Shain's birthday we went to the drive in and saw TENET, which is a po-faced James Bond movie crossed with either Dr. Who or that Tom Cruise movie based on the manga. TENET is a fine movie, not up to the hype every Nolan movie has these days (none of them are), but drowns under both a confusing storyline and a climax of three teams of identical masked SpecOpsTactiCool Seal Team warfighters all running around shooting at each other, daring the audience to care.

We finished watching XABUNGLE and are now watching DUNBINE, and boy, that DUNBINE blu-ray looks terrific. I'm enjoying the show, even if it does meander a little. It's refreshing to watch an anime series starring adults that are allowed to be adults; the emo teens are there, but they're secondary characters. The outright thirst Show Zama is showing for Marvel Frozen is something else; he's not embarrassed or shy or awkward, either. Of course the Tomino names are a distraction.

We rented ONCE A UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD and THE PLAYER and BETTER TOMORROW II, one of these films is not like the others. I'd watch an entire movie of Steve McQueen and Joey Heatherton standing around the Playboy Mansion dishing gossip on Laurel Canyon celebrities, but at the end of the day Tarantino's movie is about cowboys vs hippies; the hippies lose. I guess that tracks. THE PLAYER's more cynical than I remembered but that movie might be peak Hollywood for me, that time where I knew pretty much every face, even if it's distracting remembering who's playing themselves and who's playing an Altman character. BETTER TOMORROW II is a movie I can remember liking more than the first one on first watch, but the sequel kind of lets its goofy side run away with things, defusing the drama, maybe? I mean, the movie stops dead to remind us of how awesome Chow Yun Fat's character was in the first movie, ask us how cool it would be if Chow Yun Fat came back, and then gives us concept illustrations of how it's going to happen, before it happens. It's a bold move that almost works.

COVID-19:

worldwide cases: 9,635,935
worldwide deaths: 489,922
US cases: 2,422,312
US deaths: 124,415
Canada cases: 104,463
Canada deaths: 8,567
Ontario cases: 36,046
Ontario deaths: 2,703

Since the last time I posted about COVID, cases have about doubled worldwide. The US never flattened that curve so it couldn't have a second wave, that first wave just kept on coming and the States reopened as if they could wish COVID away. My friends and family are still social distancing and masking but a lot of people aren't.

Fan Expo here just canceled, word on the street is that Dragoncon is next. That's the last big convention on my radar until AWA. If travel restrictions in Canada are still the same in October - anyone returning to Canada from abroad has to self isolate for 14 days - then I won't be at AWA, because I can't ditch work for a week and then ditch work an additional two weeks.

Ontario is opening back up. Our numbers haven't been great, but they've been steadily retreating. Patios and barbershops have reopened (I got a haircut yesterday, my first since February) and there are a lot of people desperate to hit those patios and barbershops. We're still masking when going to the grocery store or the antique mall, but we aren't masking when walking around casually outside, that's our compromise, I suppose.

I wound up booking vacation time in August around my birthday so I'll have a week off then, and I have no idea what we're going to do with it. If the border restrictions are still in place we can't leave the province, and if they aren't, I don't know if I'll be comfortable leaving the province.

Still here! Still surviving!

your COVID-19 update:
worldwide cases: 3,961,594
worldwide deaths: 275,397
US cases: 1,284,708
US deaths: 77,201
Canada cases: 67,674
Canada deaths: 4,697

New case reports in Ontario have been fairly steady, we're doing around 400 new cases a day for the past week or so. Lots of variables in this number. Who gets tested and why, how many people have it and haven't been tested, are asymptomatic and haven't been tested?

I think I mentioned the last public gathering kind of thing we did was in mid-March, a Terrible Toonie film thing at Eyesore, and so far nobody there has reported ill. Since then we have been to the grocery store, I think I've been to the Wal-Mart once, and we've done drive-thru and take-out at restaurants, we've been walking through the city and at whatever nature trails are still open. We've done a few video calls with friends and family.

I'm still going in to work every day, we're wiping everything down at the start of the shift, and we had a really slow few weeks, but things seem to have picked back up the last couple of days.

We rented a bunch of movies from Eyesore for curbside pickup (he's technically "closed" but people are coming in to pick up films reserved over the phone or FB)

http://d-merrill.blogspot.com/2020/05/may-2020-eyesore-cinema-rentals-short.html

I've done curbside and delivery of manga from The Beguiling, which has a new online order page:

https://www.beguilingbooks.com/

and we've been trying to support local businesses for lunch and whatever else we need. The Canadian Tire near us opened and they only do curbside, we've ordered a few things from them.

In other news, I finally finished my WWII comic, "Souvenir", it's a short story set during the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. You can buy it in both print and digital formats at our Gumroad page:

https://gumroad.com/misterkitty

And we're still ticking right along with Mister Kitty's Stupid Comics, giving people something silly to read during the apocalypse. The latest one is a bad 1980s indy superhero named Seadragon, because everybody who wants to build their own super hero team needs a guy who is an Aquaman type of character. No real reason, it's just what everybody does. https://misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics668.html

I am probably going to be doing some sort of Anime Hell watch party or streaming video thing at the end of the month, and I'm really not sure how I'm going to do it. YouTube and Facebook both check posted videos for copyright infringement, Twitch is for live gaming and requires a secondary piece of software to actually play the video files, I don't know what the other options are, but we'll find out.

The http://anime-hell.com/ website host wants another $250 to host it for the next three years; instead, I am likely going to migrate the entire thing over to our Mister Kitty host, throw up something simple, and let that be that. Website construction and maintenance is not a thing I have any interest in. I figure if I was going to be good at it, I'd be good at it already.

Anyway, it looks like the rest of the summer is going to be me working, us watching movies, getting out of the house whenever we can do so without being in a crowd, and hoping things improve enough so the antique malls can open back up. Because we are JONESING for some JUNKING over here.

Total Confirmed: 1,681,964
Total Deaths: 102,026
Total Confirmed Canada: 21,243
Total Deaths Canada: 532

It's Good Friday. Last night we had a Zoom tele-Passover with Shain's family, mostly people here and in Winnipeg chatting and showing off their dogs and cats and babies, with a little bit of reading and singing. Everybody's doing well and it was really nice to see everyone; it wasn't an in-person gathering, but it felt good.

I survived a round of layoffs at work. They let several press guys go, and our digital midnight guy was laid off. I don't know what this means for my shift at the moment, but right now it seems like a distant problem, not even a problem. Traffic is nonexistent, there is nowhere to go but work, what does it matter when I go in there?

We went and stood in line at the one open grocery chain (T&T) to get milk and Coke Zero and toothpaste. It's blustery and 40F out there. Tomorrow we might run up to the Nations store at the Stockyards; they're supposed to have masks, which we're supposed to have, I think.

I finally finished the WWII comic I've been working on for years, and I'm going to offer it to the Mr Kitty patrons first, and then to the general public, so stay tuned for that announcement. It's weird to think of it as "finished" - it seemed like I wasn't making any progress at all for years, but once the inking started things moved along fairly quickly, and the digital end of things didn't take that long at all. Mostly figuring out the workflow, that was my big learning curve. Now I'm thinking about my next project, which is about as different as you can get from a chunky WWII comic, and I'm pretty intimidated because it's working in a style I don't normally work in, but it'll be fun to grind through it, I think.

I bought the latest version of Urusei Yatsura from the Beguiling using their "curbside" system, and I bought the new Blu-Ray of Tex Avery cartoons from Eyesore, which technically is supposed to be closed but is sort of doing "office hours". I urge everyone to support their local businesses wherever possible because they are gonna need it. I know Amazon is now permanently fixed into everyone's lives, like a cancerous parasite, but make an effort to not give Bezos any more money if you can.

BTW that new version of Urusei Yatsura manga is just about perfect, they're up to Vol. 5 and I'm going to buy them all, forever.

Well, my work is still essential (? gonna find out this morning if that's still the case, I guess), the new kitty is running around like a maniac, and we're still COVID-19 free as far as we can tell. It's been two weeks, more than two weeks, since we were at any gathering of anyone that wasn't grocery shopping or work or gas, and we haven't exhibited any symptoms so we might get away with this thing. My family is also well and is doing its job staying away from everybody, everywhere, forever, for the time being. Keep it up!

Right now the stats are: 737929 infections worldwide, 35019 deaths, 156507 recovered. Canada has 6320 cases and 65 deaths.

Movies we've watched have included the new INVISIBLE MAN which is a good suspense picture, kinda Hitchcock, and LITTLE WOMEN which is great, just a terrific adaptation. Also THE CROWN and THE TIGER KING on Netflix. The original KAMEN RIDER is on Tubi and it is interesting watching the Kamen Rider genre figure out that it's a genre; the early episodes are thin on plot and sometimes feel like the 1966 Batman minus the camp.