My quarantine diary

Published on , 2131 words, 8 minutes to read

This is based on a series of posts I wrote when I was in quarantine in Canada after getting a new work visa. It was originally gonna be a 14 part series, but it ended up being a 7 part series. For simplicity, I'm going to put them all in this page.

Day 1

This is the first in a 14 part series where I will document my quarantine period for going back into Canada from the US.

14:11

I am sitting in MSP waiting for my flight to board. It boards at about 15:00. I've been sitting here for about 4 hours. I had lunch from a 1950's looking diner, it was some chicken strips and fries. The fries had a delicious salt and pepper coating.

My fiance is doing the final passes at the grocery store. We're getting a bunch of vegetables, eggs and rice. We have a lot of beans stocked up from last year, and hopefully we will have enough food to last us the two weeks.

The podcast episode I was a part of has been released[1].

=> https://reliability.substack.com/p/software-at-scale-002-christine-dodrill Software At Scale Episode 2

I feel nervous. It took some convincing with the Delta agent to be able to board this flight at all. I had to show them my LIMA and work permit application papers. Hopefully this anxiety is unjustified.

My keyboard wasn't selected for additional screening, thankfully.

My Animal Crossing island started snowing today. I managed to build a snowman, which the in-game UI called a "snowfolk".

The people on the plane are disembarking now so that the ground crew can clean the plane. I'm probably about to have to pack up. Flying internationally during a pandemic is a stressful thing.

I'm gonna try out Cyberpunk 2077 when I get home.

18:51

I'm in Detroit now. Normally after flights I feel hungry but this time I just didn't. I got a giant bottle of water. My fiance tells me we should have enough food to brave quarantine. Let's hope we do.

My fucking jacket is so hot holy fuck. I really need to get a thinner jacket. I would just be wearing my hoodie right now but I was having issues packing my clothes into my backpack, so I pulled my jacket out and am wearing that. I have it off right now while I write this at the gate.

This facemask is annoying lol.

So sometimes I just open up a text file, start writing and just let the words flow out until it feels like I am done. Today it got really fucking dark lol.

I was nervous before, but now I just feel calm. Really calm. Everything is going to be okay. I don't have any reasons to worry.

Just waiting for the desk person to get to the desk and give me a seat assignment. Then I will board the flight and head on to Toronto! After I get the work permit in Toronto I will catch another flight to Montreal and then finally go home and pass the fuck out.

23:51

Hello from the YYZ chapel. Being an ordained minister is great. I can get away with claiming that I need to be in here for religious reasons and they can't say no. It sucks that my next flight is at 9 AM.

Day 2

05:22

I stayed up all night. The only things keeping me awake at the moment are caffeine and spite. My fiance fell asleep around 2 am. I'm waiting at my gate currently and just starting to piss away the 3 hours I need to wait for my flight home.

I had Tim Horton's coffee around 4:30 AM. It was horrible at first, but as I drank more of it, it slowly grew on me. I probably should have had them add a cream or two.

I was one of the first people through security. The terminal is almost completely empty. There's a kid's playground at the gate. I would have thought COVID would shut that stuff down, however it seems to just be there anyways. I probably should have waited a bit longer to go into security. I could have finished my coffee. The Timmies on the other side of the gate isn't open yet (I don't expect it to be open until about 7 am).

When I get home I'm gonna call the Canadian government to let them know I'm entering quarantine, and then I will pass out. And when I pass out it will be glorious. I don't plan to move for the rest of the day.

My fiance fell asleep around 2 am, he tried to stay on the call with me as long as he could. I really wonder what I've done to deserve him.

I think this will be the biggest airplane I've ever ridden on. It has a center aisle as well as edge aisles. I have a whole center row to myself.

07:14

Still waiting at the gate. It looks like I'll be doing quarantine checkin with the government of Canada via an app! This is neat. I will have to make sure to do this every day. I should tell my fiance about this so he can remind me to do it with my medicine each morning.

I have this weird feeling of wanting to do some creative/fiction writing but also I have no real desire to do creative/fiction writing. It's the kind of fun mood that results in apathy.

14:53

I'm home safe. I got home at about 10 am and have been resting.

We had scrambled eggs + chicken breast meat + cheese + tortillas. It was really nice.

Day 3

02:09

I slept from 5pm to midnight. I am really well-rested. I had some BBQ chips and I'm watching Star Trek.

I had a nightmare I don't want to repeat here.

10:08

I just filled out my daily quarantine check-in. I slept for 4 more hours and I feel really goddamn rested.

I think I'm gonna have some coffee (McCafe medium roast, with cream and Timmies Hot Cocoa mix) and plan out what I'm gonna eat today. I might just have a can of soup.

I start my new job tomorrow. That feels surreal. I've provisioned my work laptop with NixOS. Let's hope that works out.

23:29

Been playing Cyberpunk all day. I stopped playing after a while and went over to my twitter account to shitpost about it. I was locked out of my twitter account for some reason. I filed a ticket with support because the SMS isn't showing up.

Ugh.

Day 4

18:03

I woke up just in time to start working at my new job at Tailscale. I spent all day reading documentation and asking questions. I'm working on a systemd-notify patch for the open-source code too.

Dinner today will be a classic southern style red beans and rice recipe with the following ingredients:

I stuck it in the instant pot and set it for 25 minutes. I will update you all when it is done.

No contact from Twitter yet. I'm writing a plea for my account back. I may end up creating a backup Twitter account.

If you are from my blog and reading this, hi!

18:50

I just made a plea to Twitter on my blog[1].

=> https://christine.website/blog/twitter-plea-2020-12-14 [1] Plea to Twitter

19:06

Well the basmati rice soaked up all the water. It's turned out semi-decent but it doesn't really have much flavor to speak of.

19:49

I have my twitter account back \o/

Day 5

19:06

I finished day 2 of my new job. I think I have some idea what's going on now.

Today's lunch was really simple. I made slightly fancy instant ramen. Here's what I used:

I stuck the ramen in the pot once the water started boiling. Once it cooked for 3 minutes I stuck in the flavor packets, vegetables and soy sauce. I let it settle for a few minutes and then served it. It turned out pretty good. When I do this in the future I would want to add the vegetables at the same time I add the noodles.

Tonight we had cambpells chicken noodle soup with parmesean cheese added to thicken it up. It was pretty good.

I'm considering making a pubnix for a community I'm a part of. It'd have a few simple services, including a gemini server. I'd also base it on NixOS so that it'd be easy to add more user accounts.

This is probably gonna end up being a bad idea, but meh yolo.

21:30

I'm playing with my gemini framework in Go named Rhea some more and I managed to implement reverse proxying in an impressively small amount of code:

package main

import (
	"crypto/tls"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"math/rand"

	"github.com/Xe/rhea/gemini"
)

type ReverseProxy struct {
	To     []string `json:"to"`
	Domain string   `json:"domain"`
}

func (rp ReverseProxy) HandleGemini(w gemini.ResponseWriter, r *gemini.Request) {
	conn, err := tls.Dial("tcp", rp.To[rand.Intn(len(rp.To))], &tls.Config{InsecureSkipVerify: true})
	if err != nil {
		w.Status(gemini.StatusProxyError, err.Error())
		return
	}
	defer conn.Close()

	r.URL.Host = rp.Domain
	fmt.Fprintf(conn, "%s\r\n", r.URL.String())
	io.Copy(w, conn)
}

That's it. I love how minimal this is.

Day 6

15:08

Almost halfway done with quarantine! I swear the moment I get out of quarantine I am going to have a meal from McDonalds. I'm gonna get my usual triple quarter pounder order with a McFlurry.

I had leftover beans and rice from Day 4 for lunch. I need to cook the chicken today. I might make pasta tonight.

Still spinning up at work. I am told it will take about a month in total to spin up. I am not rushing it :).

I kinda wish we stocked up on more snack food. Usually we go out for snacks about once per week, but we're in quarantine so we can't. I would kill for some BBQ chips.

I've continued working on my Gemini server/framework and I've gotten close to the point where I want to throw it online and test it in the real world. It's surprisingly little code to implement a Gemini server. If you want to use my framework in its current state, check out the types here.

=> https://github.com/Xe/rhea

It's really rough at the moment, but I'm working on cleaning it up.

Day 7

20:05

Halfway done! Good god it feels like this has been going on for forever. Next friday I'll be free. I plan to celebrate with a trip to McDonalds for a burger.

I just realized I said that yesterday, lol. I've been really craving having food that I didn't have to cook.

Tonight's dinner was stir fry. I took a chicken breast and cut it up into chunks then added that to a pan with some frozen veggies. I let it cook in avacado oil until everything heated up, then I dumped in a healthy amount of General Tao sauce and soy sauce for flavor. I let it cook until it was boiling in the pan, then I cut heat. I served it on plates. It was really good. If the instant pot was ready I would have used that to make rice to go with it, however I didn't have it clean at the time and didn't feel like washing it.

I got to an ending in Cyberpunk 2077 today and boy do I have opinions on it. I'm gonna go into more detail in a future post, but I had low standards and they couldn't even meet that.

I had cinnamon in my coffee today. It was probably a mistake. I will probably have a monster tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the holiday party for work. It involves a cooking part. I can only imagine what kind of a clusterfuck that will end up as. I hope I have the right pans for it.

I'm continuing to work on the wedding chapel in my animal crossing island. Bootstrapping a new character can be really annoying. There is so much snow there, but there's practically zero snow outside right now. This time last year there was a crapton of snow, but it's all melted away.

The series was ended because I forgot about it.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

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