Basking

25 March 2020 (Day 6) - Karen placed our first grocery delivery order with Real Canadian Superstores yesterday. It’ll come Saturday morning.

RCS is already one of the most expensive stores in Canada. (As an example, Honeycrisp apples, which are a staple for us, were $1.99 at Food Basics, $3.99 at RCS.) Then the store adds a service charge of $3.50, plus 7.5% of the total bill for delivery, plus another 7.5% for a tip for the driver (which is fair enough if the person actually gets the money – it’s not a job I’d want.)

Worth it? Absolutely.

We had been subsisting on a small amount of fresh food a friend (thanks again, Joan) had brought in before we got home, plus stocks of frozen food. We’ve almost run out of fresh veg and fruit now.

We’re lucky Karen is a food hoarder with a full fridge freezer and a chock-a-block chest freezer in the utility room. But those supplies are depleting now too. We’re also going to need toilet paper soon. It’s in our RCS order, but who knows if they’ll actually have it with all the idiotic panic buying going on.

For the first time yesterday, we also stepped outside into the more or less fresh air. Temperatures got up to high single digits in the late afternoon and the sun shone. We stood on our balcony for five minutes, until the sun went in and a cool breeze sprang up. 

Felt pretty good while it lasted.

Today promises more sun and higher temperatures. We’re hoping to be able to bundle up and sit out there for awhile.

*

In the middle of the day today, the Internet suddenly crapped out. This is one of my worst fears, that we lose access to the Net and our provider is unresponsive because short-staffed. Then we’d really be isolated.

The other concern is that our phone – we get both phone and Internet from Primus – is also over the Net. When the problem first came up, we still had dial tone on the phone, which suggests the connection here to the Primus server wasn’t completely lost.

But when I used the phone to call Primus technical support, and later, friends, the calls were dropped after a minute or so. There was a message about unexpected problems due to overnight maintenance on the Primus tech support line.

The Internet finally came back over two hours later. Whew! Scary.

*

I’ve instituted a new wrinkle in my apartment running routine. I switch directions every five minutes. So now I’m anxiously watching the clock to see when I can allow myself the relief of turning in the other direction, and seeing a slightly different perspective. I'm beginning to understand what life in prison might be like.

Old man running: around the bend into the living room

*

Late in the day. We did get outside. The sun shone, the temperature got up to 12C by 5. I set up our folding chairs and bundled up and we sat out there together for about 40 minutes, me reading, Karen embroidering, then writing in her journal (this is mine), then reading. She’s still out there as I write this.

For the first 20 minutes or so, there was loud construction noise from the building site across the street – a digger pounding away at the floor of the foundation for reasons unknown. But the apartment is so dry and stuffy that it was still worth it to be out there. 

Rain coming in next couple of days...

*

Desert Island: The music I want played at my funeral, should there be one.

I started listening to “classical” music 50 years ago after hearing Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spak Zarathustra” as part of the soundtrack of 2001 A Space Odyssey. I haven’t listened to that piece in years, but come back to the Four Last Songs periodically. It’s consoling music. I included the final song, “Im Abendrot,” in the music played at my mother’s funeral. I started with Elizabeth Schwartzkopf’s amazing 1970s recording, but have mostly switched now to Fleming’s, which benefits from more modern recording technology. She also, of course, has a fabulous voice. Try it, you might like it.

Dirty Hippy: I still crank this one up occasionally. (Yes, Shelley Boyes, I did once listen almost exclusively to music that got radio play.)

Not much you can say about this chestnut. For me, it was the last hurrah of the sixties. “Little darlin’, I feel the ice is slowly melting...” Possibly my favourite track:

*

The Cryptic Corner

Did anybody get the sample clue I posted yesterday? No? C’mon, easy-peasy!

“A clean pin at the top.”

“The top” is the non-cryptic clue. CLEAN PIN gives the letters of the answer: PINNACLE.

Note that in this case there is no cue phrase to tip you that it might be an anagram clue. You have to figure it out yourself. Every setter follows a slightly different set of rules.

Sometimes the cue will be a question mark at the end of the clue, sometimes a cue word such as “arrange,” “order” – or more creative things like “destroy” (you’re destroying the order of the word or words in the clue...)

Another simple kind of clue is one that plays on double meanings. If you see a clue with only two words, there’s a pretty good chance it’s a double-meaning clue. An example from yesterday’s Globe & Mail puzzle: “Corrects signs.”

A bit of a nasty one. The answer is TICKS. It's a stretch, I think, but “ticks” could be used to mean both things.

Here’s one to puzzle on: “Order a car.” No, it’s not two words, but it’s the same type of clue.