Would you like to swing on a star?

30 March 2020 (Day 12) – And so it continues.

We had a small amount of excitement yesterday when friends Pat and Ralph dropped by to deliver some toilet paper they’d kindly gone out and sourced for us. (Guess where they got it? Real Canadian Superstores – the retailer that didn’t have any to include in our grocery delivery of the other day.)

We, of course, couldn’t go down to meet them at the front door because of our building’s request that returning travellers in self-isolation not go into public areas. And they weren’t supposed to come in. So our poor put-upon neighbour, Christian, kindly agreed to go down and collect the TP for us.

We went out on the balcony, shivered in the wintery air and waved and shouted. “Hi, Ralph! Hi, Pat!” They were little ants down on the driveway, but the sight of their smiling faces looking up was very welcome. They had brought their dog, Pensy, who Pat says got quite excited when they went towards the door. She thought she was going to get to come up in the elevator again.

Thanks again Pat and Ralph. And Christian.

Other than that, one day blends into the next.

We keep busy. Karen has been watching video craft lessons on her computer and doing the exercises. For a class she’s either taken or was going to be taking here in town (probably not, now), she’s making an art book, a small hand-made book with collaged pages.

Each page is an interpretation of the lyrics of a different song about stars or the sky. So she’s been wandering around the apartment singing “Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar...or would you rather be a...mule?”

Work in progress - would you like to swing on a star

Why stars? They were one of Louis’s other early obsessions, along with owls. At one point we or his parents had to sing “Twinkle, twinkle little star” to him about 50 times a day. He still sings it to himself sometimes

She’s also still doing her Fitbit-inspired walking religiously: at least 250 steps every hour – 10,000 to 15,000 a day. Pretty good for a caged lioness. The Fitbit website, though, is apparently down, which means she can’t pore over her sleep results and other statistics the Fitbit app aggregates.

She reads as much as or more than ever. Reading the paper – and Karen reads three every day – is a deeply-ingrained habit, for both of us, We never got into the habit of watching TV news and almost never do. If we had to rely on getting hard-copy newspapers, we’d be feeling very out of touch at this point. But we’ve been using an online service called Pressreader for years.

Pressreader costs about $40 a month and gives you access to thousands of newspapers around the world, including The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The London Free Press, The National Post, The Guardian, etc., etc. What you get is a digital facsimile of the print edition displayed in an app on a tablet, phone or computer. We use our 8-inch Android tablets. Works great.

For books, and Karen reads three or four a week, she had to make slight adjustments. When we’re at home, she goes to the library at least once a week to borrow hard-copy books. When we go away, we both rely on library copies of e-books, which we download and read on our Kobo readers. She’s simply continued with that since we got home. I switched almost exclusively to reading on my Kobo a couple of years ago, so there’s been no adjustment for me.

We can borrow e-books from our library anywhere we go, of course, as long as we have Internet.

Demand for e-books from our library here in London – as elsewhere – has sky-rocketed in the last five years or so. Publishers apparently charge libraries orders-of-magnitude more for each title than the same thing sells for at retail. They also put onerous restrictions on how libraries can use them. This limits how many titles libraries can afford to acquire, especially given that they’re often among the hardest hit by public spending cuts. Many of Britain’s library systems, for example, are in crisis.

All of this means that access to reading material for us could be limited. I often have trouble finding anything I want to read at our library. Luckily, we have access to a couple of other libraries to which we wangled memberships years ago, one in the U.S., one in the U.K. For whatever reason, they’ve never cancelled our memberships. Thank goodness (or carelessness.)

It can be argued that we, as avid, reasonably well-off readers, should be supporting a struggling publishing industry – and its authors – by buying our books. Fair comment. But given the number of books we read between us in a year, it would become a major line item in our expenses. And we’re not expecting to be as well-off post-COVID given the thrashing our investments are taking.

As for me, I spend an absurd amount of time on this blog, and trying to solve cryptic crossword puzzles – with only mixed results – and reading (but only one newspaper a day for me, and far fewer books than Karen). I’m still jogging around the apartment at least once a day for 20 or 25 minutes, listening to podcasts of the CBC’s The Current with Matt Galloway. (Highly recommended by the way.)

We now eat our big meal of the day at 3 pm to accommodate Karen’s anti-diabetes diet regime. It breaks up the day differently.

By 8:30, we’re ready for some TV. We don’t watch any more than we used to. It’s almost all from streaming services. We’re currently enjoying Valhalla Murders, a nordic-noir set in Iceland, and Unorthodox, based on the memoir of a woman who escaped her strict orthodox Jewish community and tried to become a musician. Both on Netflix.

We were watching PVR-recorded episodes of the latest season of Outlander, but we’re thinking the series might have reached its best-before date. It’s leadenly slow-moving and they’ve made the mistake of bringing attention to all the implausibilities of time travel.

 The weird thing is in all this, the days just whiz by.

*

Desert Island: Dave Brubeck was another of my early jazz heroes. I still listen to him regularly.

Time Out, the most famous of his albums, was the first I bought, very early on, probably in the 1970s. I remember years later going in to Tower Records when I was in Manhattan on a business trip and buying the CD version. This album, Brubeck Time, made in 1954, actually predates Time Out by five years, but isn’t nearly as well known. I didn’t hear it for the first time until about ten years ago, when I got this re-engineered CD edition. The music isn’t as out-there as Time Out in terms of its use of unusual time signatures, but the band is just as good, the sound is a little plusher than Time Out and Paul Desmond’s lyrical sax is wonderful. I don’t know why it isn’t more popular.

Dirty Hippy: This is another cheat, stretching the “dirty hippy period.” (Although, I notice our moderator – son-in-law Bobby Baines – approved my selection of a 1980 release yesterday.)

I allow this as a “dirty hippy” selection – even though it came out in 2014 – because the artist, Frazey Ford, former lead singer with the folk group The Be Good Tanyas, was apparently raised by hippies in BC. The music is pretty retro too – 1960s-style rhythm and blues. She made the album with backing from legendary soul star Al Green’s band, The High Rhythm Section. The songs and the inimitable drugged-out singing style are all Frazey, though. Very easy to listen to – although not always that easy to make out the lyrics.

The Cryptic Corner

Yesterday’s clue was “Support eastern Vikings with five hundred (7).”

Solution: ENDORSE.

Non-cryptic clue is “support.” You build the answer by arranging the abbreviation for eastern (E), the Roman numeral for 500 (D) and a synonym for “vikings” (NORSE).

I’m going to change it up a bit. As mentioned, I’m no whiz solver myself. I’m often frustrated by not being able to quite complete puzzles. Here’s a recent Globe & Mail puzzle, mostly filled in, but with three words unsolved. Can you get them for me? Pat?

The screen grabs are taken from The Globe’s cryptic crossword web applet – which you can fine here. If you want to see all the clues for this puzzle, scroll down and find the puzzle archive, select Sat Mar 28 from the drop-down menu and hit Go.