Off the Cliff

Christmas eve was nothing much but a chance remark on FB led me to Google and YouTube, so I now know what a descant is. It's notes sung *above* the main melody and not, as I thought, something sung below. Or falling, or whatever. Requires a choir because you can't sing descant yourself unless you're Agnes Nitt-- though I vaguely recall some kind of singing where one person does sing two parts somehow.

The sun shone today, for a single interval in what has otherwise been a string of grey Dead Days. Slept in, took my time over breakfast and squaredle, then opened my presents. A marvellous knitted cowl from incandescens which will be greatly appreciated when I have to go out again, because my aging floppy hats no longer suffice to keep me warm. Also a Gladys Mitchell for my collection, for whichmany thanks. From Finder Jean, a year of the horse papier-maché horse and a canvas tote bag with Miyajima's torii on it. Aesthetic and useful both.

Cooked up my turkey roll with frozen veg and unfrozen potatoes, which turned into satisfying stodge. Turkey rolls don't naturally make gravy but with a little water can be induced to produce something like. Otherwise stayed tiddly on White Russians and may well do the same tomorrow if it snows as much as it says it will. 

Put out my recycling for tomorrow's deferred pickup and that was that.

Happy 250th birthday to Jane Austen.  

Went out in the dank grey on complaining knees and got my library hold finally. Then stopped by the Pour Boy which, whatever else it may be, is kinda sorta Vietnamese (mural of the Buddha on one wall, statue of same in an alcove) and had a very good chicken sandwich and salad. Bless the owners for not playing 'Christmas' music. (Yes I have been Whammed. Three notes only, but still.) I ate my sandwich to the strains of Steely Dan's Do It Again and Billy Joel's She's Always a Woman, and very nice it was too.

My blood draw luck deserts me once again. Early to bed last night was awake in good time this morning, so did exercises and stretches for what help they could give me and trundled, unmedicated, down the street at shortly after ten. To find the waiting room not merely full but with a line down the hallway and posted wait times of over an hour. Which, even masked, am not willing to do because the waiting room was full of unmasked coughers. Better luck tomorrow. Came home, breakfasted, and doped me up on lovely ibuprofen and paracetamol and in consequence am feeling, if not no pain, at least less than yesterday.

Also got daybook for next year from Midoco, though the clerk had to point out that the daybooks were by the entrance, not round the corner with the notebooks where they usually are. So that's ticked off the list at least.

Also went to Paupers for their lunchtime hamburger, which is less meat than the dinner version and hence more digestible. Paupers is not playing Christmas music yet, bless them, and is playing 60s and 70s rock. Could do without Sinatra but otherwise just a bunch of golden oldies.

Continue to read Miles Burton on phone and tablet, quite entertaining. Except certain of the cover art is unmitigated spoilers and what *were* the editors thinking,  passing a cover that actually shows the murderer and the murder method?

Googling around for discussions of Boneland gets me a reminder of Cocteau's Orphée, a forgotten fave from my 20s. Probably seen in that same Film Odyssey series that introduced me to Kurosawa that was another 'opposite of nail in coffin' (unconscious impetus?) that led me almost twenty years later to go to Japan. Seventeen years is nothing now but then it was several lifetimes. Anyway, Orphée. Brief clips on YouTube suggest I might find it reeeally overdone now, and Jean Marais is entirely Too Much. But. But. I would like to see it again.

Equally  I would like to go to some upcoming concerts hereabouts. Ballets Trocadero, or a candlelight and surely truncated Magic Flute. The latter is at a local church where I could enquire about how disabled seating works with first come, first served. The former is way down Yonge St and pricey, and I have these dental bills still piling up. But I'd like to be out and about again because this crippled mindset is getting me down.

Will I read Boneland? Am disinclined, especially if I'm supposed to think that all of the preceding books is Colin's dying hallucination, or Colin refusing to remember being raped, or something equally unpleasant. 

And of course not two pages later the author of Ghostland mentions John Gordon and The House on the Brink. But I am reading more Insp. Littlejohn because I can't read dead tree while bicycling and I must bicycle to offset the alcohol if not the actual carbs.

Wasn't intending to listen to Saturday at the Opera but happening to turn the radio on, there was The Marriage of Figaro which of course I had to stay in for. Alas that the broadcast only demonstrated that no one else quite comes up to the standard of Te Kanawa and von Stade. I should put that on the CD player for bicycling to, having exhausted my collection of Bach and not sure where to get more, now that amazon is a no go. Also Vivaldi. I like the Four Seasons but the hunting section now reduces me to giggles. Tumpti-tump-tump, tumpti-tump-tump, tumpti-tump-tump tum tum tum, tumpti-tump-tump tumpti-tump-tump tumpti-tump-tump TUM.

Got downstairs yesterday before breakfast to weigh myself because I was afraid my bagel and butter habit of the last week plus not moving much on my twinging leg would have had deleterious effects. Mind, the aging metabolism doesn't usually register these things for ten days, but still. In the event, am exactly the weight I was last week. So I'm not gaining, or at least not yet.

Got out to the store yesterday in between thunder showers and shower showers. Missed a chunk of Fidelio on the CBC thereby and when I came back they were playing something else, very oompapapa.  Except that was the end of Fidelio.  No idea how they stretched a two act opera into three hours: must have been a long intermission with talking heads. And since the voices of the CBC's male talking heads annoy me in their lack of mellifluousness, just as well I missed it. Mind, I'm impossible to please, because the extreme mellifluousness of Classic FM's female announcers irks me even more, and yes, Marilyn Lightstone, I am looking at you. 

Stayed in today because there was no break in the rain until too late for a Sunday shop.  Beaver on through False Value which is bearable-ish once you get past the split nareative chapters, and don't try to unravel the relentless Douglas Adams' references, which in my case I have not read, and for a break read Abigail, which is far more entertaining.

Couldn't sleep last night in spite of no caffeine all day and Zzquil before bed. So read Falco one-eyed until 4, packed it in, and slept- as ever with 4 a.m. bedtimes- until 10:30. Woke to find my Good Neighbour snowblowing the sidewalks up and down from his house.  Except it's SND Oliver's mom who has the snowblower and faceblind me couldn't tell if it was really the GN or SND's male tenant. OTOH can't see the tenant doing six frontages. Whatever, sidewalk is done and somebody  (I suspect NND) did my steps. So all I had to do was my front path.  At which point a rather late in the day bobcat came trundling down the sidewalk clearing those who don't have Good Neighbours.

Thought I'd listen to Saturday at the Opera, which became an exercise in frustration. It's on CBC-FM, but that was having some talk show. Got it on my phone, which seems to be how people are expected to listen to radio these days but is not optimal for listening to Rigoletto. Finally had recourse to my ancient boombox. Boombox's CBC is happy to play opera, so fine. How lucky I didn't put it out on the boulevard as I was tempted, since it won't play CDs or tapes anymore.

Mind, Rigoletto is shit. God but Verdi liked fridging his heroines. As did Puccini. It's not a necessity. Mozart managed not to. He fridged his hero, and good for him.

Succeded in cutting down a swath of the creepers out back and inflicting some damage on the mulberry that's trying to take over the AC compressor, but clearly I need to rake up the leaves that have fallen from the cherry tree. A nuisance, because stoop labour hurts, dammit. Have been looking at ads for back braces but I *have* back braces, they just don't brace enough. Will core strengthening ever have an efffect?

We're getting the brocade effect on the trees now, and about time. The maples in particular decided to turn red about three days before they began to fall. My poor  physio booked a bus tour of the fall colours up north a fortnight or so ago, and there was nothing to see.

That Guardian article about Horrible Histories has me ear-wormed now, because I was so taken with faux-Simon and Garfunkel singing the praises of the kinder gentler Vikings that I watched it about five times. And of course it referenced one of my two favourite codas of all time, so now the mental muzak is playing The Boxer nonstop. (The other one is Layla, of course.) Must admit I've lost my ear for Brit accents because I couldn't make out the lyrics of anything else the article linked to, and especially not Rowan Atkinson's Henry 8.

Not used to having physio on Tuesday. Wednesday has always been my day and would have continued as such but I was caught in the groove when booking online, which I do several weeks in advance to guarantee a spot. Saw the list of available hours, picked something as close to my preferred 2:30 as possible, and only much later realized that the 23rd was not a Wednesday because Ji Won has started coming in on Tuesdays as well. But alll to the good because tomorrow is forecast to be, what else, rain. Appears this is the rainiest summer on record which I can scarcely believe, not after 2008. But 2008 rained constantly while this year just dumps a month's worth of rain in a day, and does it repeatedly.

Pratchett LJ entry revives the memory of Flanders and Swann's Gnu Song. First lines are

A year ago last Thursday I was strolling in the zoo
When I met a man who thought he knew the lot.

If in future I should happen to remark 'A year ago last Thursday' you'll know what I mean.

Have finally located a song heard only once, decades ago in my distant youth. Turns out to be The Kingston Trio, Chilly Winds. Good. Scratch that itch.

Bought Ivory soap for the bathroom because my poor hands are sooo dry. Ivory soap *stinks*. Shall put the remaining two bars in the local Small Pantry along with the menthol shaving cream, in a bag marked 'can't stand the smell.' 

Someone in a local FB group was asking if anyone had a bike that would fit a 5'10 recent immigrant short on cash. Offered Old Paint but someone else had a man's bike so didn't hear back. That fell through, she messaged me today, so I went to double check that I can't in fact get my leg over the bar and no, no I can't. Not even close. So Guy can have it.

Woke up at 7:30 old time to pee, then said Not getting up at even 8:30 new time, and went back for another 3.5 hours to wake at noon new time, which was not unheard of even before this. Grey and flurrying all day, like watching cherry blossoms fall, especially since none of it stuck. I have a memory from childhood, fragmentary like all my memories, of a late November day like this. My mother had bought several boxes of Christmas wrapping paper,  square folded in square boxes,  which enraptured me at the time. The smell of it is on the tip of my nose, almost almost almost... so this kind of weather has  innate happiness associated with it.

Have also been earwormed with The Proclaimers' I'm Gonna Be the Man, which is great for exercising to, and which happily replaces the catalogue aria from Don Giovanni of which I was heartily sick. 

The trouble with sleeping past 11 is that I can't roll over and go back to sleep as I can do if I wake at 9. Yes, well. Life is rough.

Of course I also woke out of a frustration dream of trying to get three babies back to daycare, at night, in a triple stroller, through the University College (UofT version) campus, gone suddenly baroque with steps that aren't there and narrow gas lit passages, also with steps, that lyingly promised to take me up to Hoskins and Trinity College (again, UofT version: universities in the Brit-sphere have no innovation with respect to either names or architecture.) Could gave done without that, especially as my Christmas Eve dream was a  charming cosy murder mystery. I believe the white-haired Miss Marple-ish sleuth was in fact the murderer.

Weather is mild but grey and dank, and is supposed to rain all week, which is par for the Dead Days but also dispiriting. We may see some sun on Saturday. I went out today since the PoP was only 56% and got misted on. Tony Korean restaurant was fairly full, even at 3 in the afternoon, but the Koreans make the most of their holidays. When they get them, because the big supermarket and greengrocers were open. Bought celery for future turkey salads but was so full from egg and beef donburi that I skipped dinner. 

In a very ill hour, prompted by I forget what online, I looked up the Flanders and Swann skit in which Michael Flanders sings the French horn solo part of Mozart's fourth concerto for horn. Ill Wind, it's called, which arial font renders as a Roman 3, and I am now hopelessly earwormed.

I once had a whim and I had to obey it
To buy a French horn in a secondhand shop
I polished it up and I started to play it
In spite of the neighbours who begged me to stop.

I can beg all I like but it won't stop.

Evidently Valentines is a red letter day on the spammers calendar. Five calls before noon, or was it six? and a couple more in the afternoon when I'd arranged to be out. Because I'm never sure how clean cold water gets my clothes, and because with the forecasted early April temperatures I won't have the furnace on and hence hanging my clothes in the basement won't get them dry, I took a dark wash to the laundromat. Entering which I was greeted by the Skye Boat Song played on bagpipes, which was unexpected but nice. The television was showing news clips of Hazel McCallion's funeral, the long-time (into her 90s) mayor of Mississauga, the urban complex to the west of us. Died a fortnight short of her 102nd birthday. Politics doesn't often make for such longevity. And yes of course, later in the service they played Amazing Grace because no major funeral in these parts can happen without a piper playing Amazing Grace, even the Catholic ones. We're no longer the Scots city we were a century ago but certain traditions don't die.

(The pipers predate Amazing Grace even if I can't remember what they used to play back in the 60s and 70s while escorting Lord Rajandraneth in his chariot down from the Hare Krishna temple on Avenue Rd, formerly what else a Presbyterian church.)

Fiesta Farms was also holding a funeral for its owner and may well have had bagpipes, but I couldn't go to see even if I'd wanted to. Funeral was in Heere bee dragonnes land ie Brampton, the urban complex north of Mississauga, inaccessible without car.  General public was invited and store was closed for the event, which was well enough. They were also closed yesterday morning for some unexplained police 'n' firetruck incident, which was kind of a first.

I note that Brampton may be on the chopping block: Tory premiers, of which alas we have one at the moment, like to create megacities under the mistaken notion that large = efficient. So Drug Fraud, as he is lovingly and correctly denominated, may well make it part of Mississauga. OTOH word is that Ford really wants to be mayor of Toronto like his little brother, the aptly named Rob, was back before. Our current mayor, the aptly named John Tory, suddenly declared his resignation on the weekend because of an affair he'd had during covid. Affair was long over, resignation was abrupt, everyone wondered what was the real reason. Pressure from DoFo? My ideal scenario is that Ford resigns as premier, runs for mayor, and is roundly defeated: but that's only a dream unless a really charismatic candidate pops up from somewhere. Which is unlikely.

Gladys Mitchell is ever so much more entertaining than any of Fowler's Seerius Litracher recs (though to be fair he recs her too) that I shall give up the latter until I've made a dent in TPL's collection of the former. Yay that she was so prolific and woe that TPL doesn't have them ALL. Am now reading the one about the standing stones of the Orkney Isles (gazing out to sea) with many interruptions to google pics of same. Damned unheimlich, those stones, let me say.

Let me note that I have also vacuumed the downstairs and swiftered the kitchen and hallway, so it's not all couch potatodom all the time. But even so, I still step on sharp little things that pain my sensitive feet. I want a new vacuum cleaner: or else, more likely, I want a cleaning service to get it done professionally

'Your brother hates music,' says my s-i-l. No surprise. I hate music too, when it plays in the background, because when music plays I have to listen to it. This puts me at odds with, at a conservative guess, 90% of the population because they seemingly can't abide silence. Not sure why. Are they afraid of their own thoughts? like those people in the experiment who gave themselves shocks rather than sit for fifteen minutes without stimulation. Whatever, it was always a problem for me at work, because it's hard to hear the nap room monitor-- or indeed another staff imparting information-- when Lady Gaga is blasting from the player. Of course, it could just be my hearing going, because I've been losing the higher pitches for at least a decade now, and lower pitches when there's ambient noise. And music is ambient noise for me.

But then there's that scientific conclusion that your musical preferences are set in your teens and twenties, and that maybe I wouldn't mind music at work if it was the Beatles or the Mamas and Papas. What made me think that was coming home the other day and crossing paths with a guy on a bicycle whose boombox was blaring behind him. But the box was booming Dock of the Bay and it didn't bother me at all.

The air show however, with its sonic booms, is noise, pure and simple, and physically painful. It's supposed to rain tomorrow and Monday and I sincerely hope it does, with low cloud cover obliterating the CN Tower. One day of it was quite enough, thank you.

Lying with one's legs up against a wall can get very boring unless you're an experienced meditator which lord knows I'm not, so I rousted out my luddite's walkman and listened to a random tape instead. (I can't do mp3s or whatever the latest digital is. Most of my tapes were made from obscure records in the 80s and 90s. Best I could do now is get one of those players that records to digital, but the state of my records after 30 years is not to be considered, and I have nothing to play the files on even if I did.)

Random tape turned out to be the Harlock sound track. That dates to the late 90s, that half decade lost to reverse culture shock, but references a much earlier fannish golden age. Not that I was personally involved in it. My sister was, and American friends in Tokyo, and I caught sideways glimpses of those mid-80s glorious days from her APAs and their conversation. The reality may have been excruciating- raw tapes if you were lucky, appalling butchered dubs as the norm- but the ethos, as reflected both in the fans' recollections and, oddly, in the gung-ho Harlock music itself, is of a brave new world and an immense buoyancy.

The complete ending theme is at
https://youtu.be/u7BFIAn9wug

Translation text here, from .mit.edu. Fannish, as I say.
http://www.mit.edu/~rei/MANGA/harlock-song

* More Than a Feeling was roundly panned when it first came out-- lightweight, lacking musical complexity, blah blah blah, as if anything 70s had depth-- but now it's a locus classicus of some kind.

 DHL's business practices suddenly make more sense when I see what DHL is: Deutsche Post DHL Group. Thus the barrage of information and the promptness.

Watched the fundraising performance of Cats which was somehow available in Canada, but the link to donate wouldn't work. When I refreshed everything, got the message 'This video is private.' So maybe I reached the time limit? And can't recall who the beneficiary was. Somehow thought it was an English actors guild-- it was the London production-- but googling only gets me the American one. 

And yes of course I wept like a drain. Those songs don't get any easier with age.

(Really, why is Spenser in the Canon? A more lumpen poet I never read.)

My scale's battery has died only a few months after I changed it. Very disconcerting because I weigh myself every morning to remind me *why* I can't have pasta and cake and cookies. And because today was a rainy owie day, and a weekend, I couldn't get out to buy a new one. However rain let up in the afternoon so Boy Next Door got to have his birthday party in our mutual back yard. Happy shrieks of five year olds banging the pinata which had to be hung from the cherry tree in the sad absence of any other tree to hang it from. I do miss the plum tree and its evanescent fragrance, though for all I know it might have stopped producing blossoms and fallen over by now if we'd left it to its own devices.

Some odd tangent took me to Streetview where I discover that Markham St, currently and for at least the last three years a wasteland construction site, has been preserved in its 2017 glory because Streetview cars can't go up it. That is, in Streetview the chainlink fences are up on both sides of the street but the buildings, though empty, are still standing. Alas that there seems no way to capture that particular shot to remind me what was where; and once they've finished building their satanic towers the view will go.

Turned out the drawers of the study cabinet looking for Cohen's Ten New Songs and found it, along with a bunch of memorabilia last looked at in 2010. Meishi from Japan, people's addresses, maps of Tokyo restaurants. 'Guess I'll throw it all away...' And then Cohen sounds all different on the stereo than he did on the boombox and I'm gakkari all over again.

Half an ativan unaccountably failed to put me to sleep but did loosen the muscles up so that I awoke relatively limber. Two hours in the dentist's chair took care of that, but it was nice while it lasted.

OTOH I swear there's a special feature cab drivers use that renders one's phone mute because this is the second time this week a cabby has called me from precisely the wrong location, and though I had my phone in my pocket on 'ring and vibrate' I registered nothing. But when I say I'm at 2 Carleton there's no point you sitting in front of 8 Carleton behind a truck so I can't see you, calling me up to demand where I am in cellphone garbled blabbidyblah. Equally, when I say King and University on the University side, why are you sitting a block away at York St? Why, because that's the main entrance for the building at King and University and the dispatcher said nothing about 'waiting on the University side.' This is why cabbing it is such a fraught activity and I hope I'm done with it for a bit. Though with the gales of March/ April being as they are, there's no guarantee.

Finished?

Nghi Vo, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
-- still have a hold on the first volume but this novella is fun.

Pratchett, Reaper Man
-- not intentionally, but read on the fifth anniversary of his death

Plutarch, On Friendship
-- or whatever its title is. Mostly about false friends/ flatterers which, as I say, is a breed the common person is not likely to encounter. Two more essays and I'm done with this, and a good thing too because the book is falling apart *and* smells strange.

Mabinogion, The Lady of the Fountain and Peredur
-- oogie. Then started Culhwch and Olwen and dear god you if thought the Catalogue of Ships was bad... Can't see me going farther with this.

Reading now?

Gardner, ed, The Metaphysical Poets
-- let's get this straight: I do not like the metaphysical poets, those clever-clog snots. By me they write the most unpoetical poetry it's possible to write. As Gardner says, "...the constant complaint of its critics is that it confuses the pleasures of poetry with the pleasure of puzzles. ...its lovers have always a certain sense of being a privileged class, able to enjoy what is beyond the reach of vulgar wits." Of course Peter Wimsey always has a volume of Donne about him, just to demonstrate how superior he is.

But I read this to have it read after umm 45 years maybe? and as I'm slogging along through the earlier metaphysicals I suddenly find myself in very familiar territory. It says it's Southwell, Mary Magdalens Complaint at Christ's Death, but here in the middle:

O true life, since thou hast left me,
Mortell life is tedious,
Death it is to live without thee, 
Death of all most odious.
Turne againe, or take me with thee,
Let me dye or live thou with mee.

This and the next two verses I know as  a song by Thomas Morley that actually reverses the order of the stanzas. And works very well as such, but the rest of Southwell's poem doesn't fit the tune at all. I mean, maybe all the metaphysicals need is a musical setting to render them palatable?

Next up?

Many things on hold in both e- and paper format, and I could make some of the latter active. Or I could go on rereading Pratchett.

Exercising to carols, which is fine, but would someone please tell me what was *wrong* with Benjamin Britten? Never met an old harmonious song- carol, folk song, you name it- that he didn't hate and couldn't wait to torture into (I assume; am musically illiterate) a pentatonic scale. And then a buncha 20th century composers did the same and all the choirs in Oxbridge jumped on the bandwagon. Really truly there's nothing wrong with the original tunes of There Is No Rose or Adam Lay Ybounden, and the Britten-tachi being all clever with them pisses me off far more than it should.

To clean out the ears: the Gesualdo Six singing Es ist ein Rose entsprungen in Ely Cathedral:
https://youtu.be/OAIro_A1CYw

The current Gesualdo Six + One doesn't seem to include the Sikh(?) guy, about whom I'd like to know more.

To celebrate the moment, and because my new card came yesterday, I ordered in for dinner. So did everyone else, it seems, because in the ten minutes I stood on my ill-lit front porch,  wearing white so I'd show up even if my house number didn't, two other Door Dash deliveries arrived for two separate houses across the street. My guy called me because, like many people before including myself on occasion, he or someone had writen my 543 as 534. I'm inclined to blame the map Door Dash likes to use, which showed my house to be on the west side of the street where the even numbers are. Though when I checked it again, they had me on Manning, the next block over.

I've ordered from these guys before but don't remember them being so generous with their portions. Granted I always order at least two dishes to make it worth their while, I still had a large bowl, looked at what remained, and thought 'Well, that's dinner sorted for the next four days at least.'

To work off some of the excess (pad thai noodles, hem hem) I did an extra 45 minutes on the bike machine. Turns out  Handel's Royal Fireworks  is the perfect music for this. Didn't even notice the time going by. That's half because I was reading my phone part of the time, and when I wasn't I was doggedly plowing through The Burning Heart, which is Kenneth Rexroth and a Japanese woman translating women poets of Japan. Granted the book dates from the 70s, and granted Rexroth or his co-translator have some satisfyingly nasty things to say about that dweeb Yosano Hiroshi- '(he) was a typical emotional exploiter of women. He attempted to disguise these proclivities with romantic nonsense about the spiritual glories of clandestine polygamy'- when we get to the classic poets who are translated by Rexroth alone, one finds this note on Izumi Shikibu:  'There survives a book of her poetry and her diary, one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature. Most of her poetry is erotic: she seems to have spent a life largely devoted to making love.' Yeah, sure, just like Catullus' life was largely devoted to making love, or Diana Rigg's. Like, we know Izumi Shikibu had a daughter and served at court. It wasn't all men all the time, even if men like to think so.

The book is falling apart and I'd happily trun it- Rexroth is so not my translator any more than Miner is- but I have no other translations of Yosano Akiko, so...

However, in other come-by-chance news, it seems Ovidia Yu has a series of detective stories stsrring a teenage girl in 1930s Singapore. Have put holds on two of them and shall pleasurably await their appearance.

Oh, seriously? I've been reading that title wrong for what? five, six years now? It's Umibe no Kafuka, shore, not hamabe, beach. Helps to actually look at the kanji occasionally.

Next door's music as well as the tedium of peddling a balky machine for thirty minutes straight has the upside of reintroducing me to a bunch of CDs bought in the 90s and rarely listened to since. These include several boxed sets of Dance Music Through The Ages and Best of Bach, bought to drown out my neighbours at International Women's House in Heiwadai. When I came back here it was no longer necessary to drown out my neighbours and, since I prefer silence to anything when I'm studying or reading, silence is what I opted for. Also my bought-here boombox, though a lovely Sony made in Japan beastie, in relatively short order (6 years) became picky about what it would and would not recognize, and the boxed sets were first to go. This made me sad because I still listened to the opera ones. But now, Renaissance dance music is just fine for bicycling to, though it really is a bit monotone.

Balky bike machine is why I can't do anything else except bike. Stop paying attention to where my feet are and it sticks. Otherwise I might be biking for hours.

Cold and rainy again, and I realize that this year I won't be able to turn down the thermostat and go partake of someone else's heat for five or six hours a day. So I turn down the thermostat and layer up, starting with the insulated longjohns I've contemplated throwing out for several years now because long underwear is far too hot once you're inside any Canuck interior. Never throw anything away: you never know when the world will turn upside down and you'll need it again.

 OK. So that's how it works then. Because my allergies have taken another new lease on life right when there's nothing to be allergic to, and because I had acupuncture today, and because I really don't want to be coughing during acupuncture, I took a swig of my precious prescription cough syrup. And some twenty minutes later became aware of a mellow cheerful optimistic glow, the sort wine or scotch used to give me but don't anymore. Truly, that cough syrup didn't do this the first two years I was taking it, but now it does; and now too I see why people take opioids for the buzz and not the analgesic effect. Luckily or un-, I have very little of it left and am not sure my new doctor will give me more. What I do have is an OTC cough syrup that's supposed to calm tickly coughs. It's also the one that works *with* the Covid virus. But my chances of being infected are infinitisimal, since I'm in close prolonged contact with absolutely nobody. My acupuncturist is the only person who comes within four feet of me and that's in an open breezy room with both of us masked. So I shall chance it. But would obviously rather have the addictive codeine-and-whatever concotion.

I've grown progressively clumsier with age, certain to knock anything over if I don't reach carefully and consciously. Spilled a whole tin of Pepsi onto the bedroom carpet the other day. Today I sent the stylus flying off the bedside table, which then rolled under the futon platform drawer and out of reach. Virtue of necessity, I shoved furniture out of the way, removed drawer, and swept underneath the platform, retrieving my stylus and various pills and rather fewer dust bunnies than I expected. But this let me go through the drawer itself, which I can't do ordinarily because it won't open fully, and I discover that that's where all my pantyhose were stored. I never wear them, of course, but periodically I've wanted to for dress up dinners  and the like. Now I can, if there are ever dress up dinners again in my lifetime.

Equal virtue of necessity, since I need something to drown out next door's music, I've been playing those myriad CDs I bought over the last three decades and, well, never listened to past 2002, or occasionally ever. There's stacks of them denuded of their cases, which I will reunite some day. Another quarantine project. But now I listen to the whole album while eating supper or pedaling my bike machine, rather than my usual habit of skipping everything but the one or two tracks I like. Result today was bicycling for almost half an hour when I'm usually ready to quit  at 15 minutes. So yay me.

System can take five CDs but there seems no way to go from one to another using the remote. The controls on this thing are not intuitive. So I treat it as a one disc system, which at least alleviates technical anxiety.

It's never too late to form totally random associations. Last month I reread Lord of the Rings and also listened to an opera compilation I've had for ohh 25 years? And now when I hear Puccini's Ch'ella mi creda, the totally ear-wormy aria from Girl of the Golden West- but of course, all Puccini is ear-wormy- I see in the background what I think is Lothlorien, which I must have been reading at the time. Can't pin it down more than that: it's shady trees and possibly elves, which means not Rivendell. And it's not exactly annoying but is a bit... intrusive.