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.

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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.

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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

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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...

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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:

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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.

Keep moving

24 March 2020 (Day 5) - One of the biggest problems with self-isolating in an apartment is staying active.

Before we went away in January, I was playing hockey three times a week, 80-minutes games, often doing vigorous exercise one other day, and supplementing with walks and, in better weather, bike rides.

How was I going to stay fit and keep the endorphins flowing?

Karen pointed the way.

Karen is a dedicated Fitbitter. Even before we went away, she would often pace around the apartment to help meet her hourly goals – which her Fitbit reminds her about.

It was like watching a caged tiger.

Karen’s pacing, which she picked up almost immediately after we got home, also reminded me that when I used to travel on business, I sometimes jogged around my hotel suite if I didn’t have access to a gym or time to go outside. Boring as hell, but it worked.

So on the second day of our confinement, I jogged around the apartment in sock feet for 20 minutes: through the kitchen, along the hall into our bedroom, around the other side of the bed, back out and down the hall, through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen.

Repeat. About 40 times.

Now I’m dressing in my running gear, including shoes, doing 25 minutes in the morning, 20 in the afternoon – if I have the energy. And I’m wearing a headset, listening to CBC podcasts and shows.

Such is our new life.

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Photo of the Day

Sorry, a bit lame...

Discs of the Day

Bobby Baines, my son-in-law, challenged me to come up with one desert-island disc – one album I keep coming back to – every day for seven days, He asked me to cover the period before his ken, or interest, which he characterizes as “the dirty hippy” period.

The trouble is, I don’t keep coming back to that music. I remember it fondly, but I don’t listen to it very often. Most of it rattles my brain pan too much. So I’m going to modify the challenge and offer one of my real desert island discs, and then one blast from the “dirty hippy” past. Here goes.

Desert Island: The album I listen to when I need to calm down and mellow out – on a plane, for example. Just cello. If you don’t like the instrument, you won’t like the music.

I have a few versions. This one, by the Chinese cellist Jian Wang, I like the best. Here’s an exerpt. 

Dirty Hippy: Tougher choice. This one will raise groans and actually makes me go a little pink when I admit to still liking it – not because I think it’s bad, but because I think many won’t get it.

Ian & Sylvia, Beginning of the End

I bought it almost 50 years ago when we were living in our first apartment, the site of which – the building is long gone – I can see from my living room window today.

Corny as hell, but lovely. A sample.

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The Cryptic Corner

Wanna learn how to do cryptic crosswords? C’mon. Sure you do.

You can do them online. The Globe & Mail makes them available daily, for free. The Guardian in Britain also has free daily online cryptics. (Be warned, the Guardian puzzles are devilishly difficult.)

Basic rules of the game:

• Clues, even when they seem to make sense – they more often don't – are never what they seem; the setter is always trying to trick you.
• Ignore punctuation. If included – usually not –it's a diversion.
• There is always a non-cryptic clue embedded in the cryptic clue, usually at the beginning or end – a synonym or near-synonym, or at least a reference to the answer.
• There are many types of clues – anagrams, word builders, double meanings, puns, etc. (More on these as we proceed.) Sometimes it's a combination of types, and it's rarely obvious which it is.

Yeah, it’s meant to be difficult.

The simplest type of clue, to me at least, is the anagram, just like in the old Jumble game in the newspaper, though with a few wrinkles.

Here’s an example from a recent Globe & Mail puzzle: “Affected by heat from the Red Sea” Answer: SEARED.

Cryptic puzzlers talk about “parsing” clues – the essential task of sorting out which parts of the text point directly to the answer and which are...cryptic, and how. Here’s how you parse this one:

“Affected by heat” is the embedded non-cryptic clue. “From the” is a cue phrase for “you make up the answer from what follows.” RED SEA is an anagram for seared.

Simple, right?

So here’s another, one of mine: “A clean pin at the top.”

The first correct answer gets...fullsome praise. Murray Young, if you’re reading this, you’re ineligible for this competition.

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Finally, for Andrea McCann, as requested, here are pictures of Karen and I. Okay, maybe not exactly what you meant. They're from our "dirty hippy" period.

Nature's Revenge

23 March 2020 - Karen and I got back from Europe last Thursday. (I described the adventure in my other blog here.) 

Now we’re three days into a fortnight of self-isolation. No symptoms so far – other than general decrepitude.

I need something to do, so I’m starting this new blog, Cooped.

My 1973 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines coop, the verb, as: “To put or confine in a coop; hence to confine within a small space...”

That’s us.

Living in a high-rise condo complicates self-isolation. People who live in houses can open their front doors and go for a walk or a bike ride without the risk of infecting someone else – or being infected – as long as they keep their distance. Not so simple for us.

To get out of the building, which we haven’t actually tried to do yet, we have to push elevator buttons, or turn a door handle to get into the stairwell. We can use our elbows to push buttons and the door openers downstairs – which is what we did when we came in on Thursday – but what if someone wants to get on the elevator we’re on?

Tough to stay six feet apart in an elevator.

I, apparently quite stupidly, suggested we could stop people getting on and offer to get off ourselves and wait for the next elevator. A friend wrote:

“Welcome home. Nothing like getting on an elevator that has been voluntarily exited by someone who explained why they are self isolating. I sure wouldn't hesitate.” He kindly included a link to this helpful video.

Fair point. Funny guy.

So can we stick it out in our coop for two weeks? It’s a 1,100-square-foot apartment – not tiny, but not huge either. Being retired, Karen and I are used to rubbing along together. Just not all day every day.

We’ll see.

I’ll report on how we’re coping, what kinds of routines we’ve established. I hope to discipline myself to take photographs every day (see bottom of post) – although there’s not a lot of scope for photography in a coop.

I might try a little proselytizing for my favourite time-filling brain exercise, cryptic crosswords. I think I could teach anyone how to do it. And being an aspiring puzzle setter, I could even share some of my own clues as samples.

Oh, what fun, eh?

Or maybe this’ll be the first and last installment of Cooped. Who knows?

They're building three high-rise towers across the street from us. When built, they will almost completely block our view and most of the sunlight that streams in our living room windows now. Building, apparently, waits for no virus.

Office building across Dufferin Street that houses local RCMP detachment, among others. Our building and 1930s federal building reflected near middle of frame.

Social distancing in practice. Notice the person on the right who is veering off the sidewalk to avoid the guy coming towards them.

Taken during what would have been rush-hour this morning. Tells a story.