Cooped: The milkman cometh

27 March 2020 (Day 8) – Yesterday, the company that manages our building, Thorne Properties, sent out a notice asking residents, as part of our C19 response, to not let delivery people into the building but go to the lobby and receive the goods there. The notice also requested that people who were self-isolating because they’d just returned from abroad not frequent public areas of the building.

Catch 22.

We’re glad the community is taking this seriously, but we have an essential order of groceries coming tomorrow from Real Canadian Superstores. What are we to do?

This morning, I fired off an email to Thorne, copying our condo board president, and asked which they thought was the lesser of the two risks, letting the delivery person in or going down to the lobby ourselves. The response: could we ask a friend in the building to receive the delivery downstairs and bring it up to us?

It's a perfectly reasonable suggestion, except that, being anti-social, we don’t really have anyone who, under normal circumstances, we’d feel comfortable asking. The people we know best are even older than we are, and as or more vulnerable. Almost immediately, though, Jim, our condo board president, now in his 80s, volunteered. That didn’t sound like a great idea.

Another member of the board, a much younger guy, lives right across the hall from us. Jim sent me Christian’s email address and I, very apologetically, asked if he could do it. He responded immediately saying he’d be glad to.

Christian also mentioned that he and his partner have been self-isolating for two weeks now, almost as strictly as we are. And they’ve been sanitizing relentlessly. I found that heartening. They’re in their twenties, I think. We keep seeing enraging pictures in the media of people, young men especially, disregarding social distancing orders and congregating in public places. I shouldn’t be surprised at Christian’s and Jordan’s response, though. They seem really smart and level-headed. Thanks guys.

Karen and I have implemented a new meal schedule to support her diabetes-fighting dietary regime. It calls for overnight 16-hour fasts. If you eat late in the day – and our dinner time used to be about 7:30 pm – it means you can’t eat until almost noon the next day. Then you can eat as much as you want for eight hours.

If you’d like to find out what this crazy-sounding regime is about, it’s laid out in The Diabetes Code, a book by Toronto-based Dr. Jason Fung. He has a website here.

Waiting all morning before she can eat is pretty onerous for Karen, who sometimes gets up as early as 5 am. So we’ve adopted the Spanish custom of eating a big meal at “lunch time,” lunch time for Spaniards being 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Karen can now have her usual big breakfast in the morning, not as early as she once did or she’d like, but at a much more sensible time. She might have something very light later: fruit, yoghurt, nuts. I almost always have something too.

It definitely makes the rhythm of our days a little different. And I find I’m drinking less. (Karen is completely dry right now.) Thank goodness for my Duty Free single malt.

Late in the day yesterday – I think it was a little after five – I felt I just had to get some fresh air. We’d really enjoyed our time in the sun the day before. This was a cloudy, cool day, though, with a bit of a breeze. I bundled up and sat out on the balcony for 20 minutes anyway, reading. Karen, the outdoor fanatic, wouldn’t join me, and when I came in, she said, “That can’t have been pleasant.”

But you know what? It was. I’m looking forward to getting out today, maybe even with sunshine.

Desert Island: Back to Bach.

I discovered JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations 40 years ago. A co-worker’s weird, older psychiatrist husband played us Glenn Gould’s recently released and quite revolutionary version, at a dinner party. Nobody we knew played classical music at social functions. Gordon Lightfoot or Willie Nelson were more our speed. We felt quite adult. And weird. This version by another great Canadian pianist, Angela Hewitt, is my fave, better than Gould’s. A tiny sample...

Dirty Hippy: Unlike a lot of the old music, I’m never disappointed in this one. It holds up.

I had already started moving away from pop music by the time Moondance came out in January 1970, so I missed it. I knew the hits from radio, of course, but it was almost 20 years later that I first heard the entire album at a friend’s. “And it stoned me.” Moondance always lifts my spirits, as does the one he released the next year, Tupelo Honey.

4:00 pm. We’ve just finished a lovely Portal call with our English family, who are doing fine, able to get out for walks in a lovely part of the country, staying healthy – other than Louis who has a bout of pink eye right now. Hasn't slowed him down, though. Earlier in the day, they sent these videos of Louis. He's hilarious. If you watch, you might get an idea how much we miss these guys.

The Cryptic Corner

Nobody, apparently, is taking up my challenge, but I’m going to keep on with this primer on how to do cryptic crosswords. It’s something I do that I believe is helping keep my tired old brain sharp – well, sharper anyway. And it’s something I can lose myself in. Right now, it helps to have things you can lose yourself in so you don’t have to think about the dratted pandemic.

So. Yesterday’s clue: “Heroic tale in The Pickwick Papers (4).” This was in a recent Globe & Mail puzzle. As I said, it’s a hide-in-plain-sight type of clue. The answer: EPIC. The non-cryptic part is “heroic tale.” The answer is made up from the last letter of “the” and the first three of “Pickwick.”

A lot of cryptic clues are like riddles. A riddler tries to mystify you, often playing on double meanings, puns and sound-alikes. (Remember: “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?”) Or it could be stretching the meaning of a word, using metaphors or just offering a quirky definition.

Here are a couple of examples, again from recent Globe & Mail puzzles: “Pea jackets? (4)” Answer: PODS. Because a pod is like a jacket for peas, you see. Or, “He can’t help helping himself (12).” Answer: KLEPTOMANIAC. Cryptic puzzles can actually be quite funny.

Here’s one to be carrying on with: “The habits of actors (8).”

It got sunny today. We sat out on the balcony when the sun came around to it and baked, and read. Very welcome.