General Update

Hello!

We’re still under the cloud of COVID-19, so I thought I’d give you a general update. As you doubtless know by now, I live just around the southern edge of The Tundra, on the NorthWest shore of the eastern most of the Great Lakes.

The Five Great Lakes. Lake Ontario. I provide this information for those weak in geography, weak in Google skills, weak in map reading and those who have weakly managed to avoid reading this blog. Why? I don’t know. It’s a great blog, tremendous, I know blogs, as you know, and this is very good, it’s great, my uncle never wrote a blog, but he knew COBOL very well and everybody writes to me to tell me how great this blog is, you know, blogging is tremendous and its beautiful, very purple and I wrote a book and its doing very well, it’s huge. It’s very difficult to write a book, not everyone can write, but it’s very big, so this is going to be good, great, it will be tremendous.

One of these days, I shall speak moistly and also learn how the other fellow in India speaks and see if I can get into his speech patterns. But enough with the political comments and

On with the post!

Now, it’s generally well known that I’m lazy as lazy as can be. So it is with a matter of some pride that I have this report for you. I’ve been a very busy young man today. You scoff, but that’s ok. Just don’t cough and don’t cough on anyone near you. Lock yourself away if you have to cough and cough into your elbow, take a shower, wear a mask, wear gloves, stay away from people and do online type things, such as reading this blog or downloading my book, link available while stocks last forever, Kindle version only for a nominal fee equal to the price of a cup of coffee which you cannot buy these days since all the coffee shops are closed. So you really have no excuse!

I realize now that another paragraph has gone by and I…uh.. well.

Work Related

I woke up at the crack of dawn as usual at 7:45. Then after the nasal and dental polishing, I headed down to the kitchen. I set up the percolator and made split open an Englis muffin ( whole wheat ) and popped it into the toaster. Had a slice of sourdough multi-grain bread, untoasted with butter and headed down to log on.

I checked emails and saw nothing that said I was being crowned king of anything, so headed back up to see that the muffin was toasted and ready for the peanut butter ( crunchy ) and no-sugar orange marmalade. Assembled and ate the muffin and saw that the coffee was ready.

I poured out a cup for the Beloved Bangalan, and set up my own mug. I carried it down and logged in by 8:45am into the first call of the day.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the boring work stuff. <Too late! – Ed>

Around 4:30pm, I struck work! Exhausted, I fell back and the word went around that Ajesh B was spent, finished, kaput, had nothing left to give.

With that I moved on to the next phase.

Lawn Care – 1

Seeing the schedule for daily exercise regime was slightly delayed, I decided to put some care into the lawn. I walked all the way into the garage (at the front of the house) and walked back with the weed-burner. I walked out through the back door, down the steps and onto the grass at the back.

I turned on the gas, lit the burner and proceeded to aim the heat at each pesky weed. I watched in satisfaction as the dandelions shrivelled and died as I mercilessly incinerated them. The clover wilted and the moss shrank in terror at my approach.

Unfortunately, the gas canister finally ran out of gas. Lucky, lucky weed survivors!

I then walked up the stairs, across the deck in through the back door and out into the garage, which, if you recall, is at the front of the house. I went up the stairs to the bedroom to change for the evening walk.

The Walk Out

Ah, what a walk it was! 7.43 kilometers.  We walked towards the right, uphill and across the park and then across the 3 lane parkway. Downhill we went, down and down and down all the way to the river! We cut across the bridge to the other side and found a stone to sit on by the edge of the river.

The sign said the river contains three kinds of salmon, two kinds of trout and two kinds of smallmouth bass. We saw none. The river ran fast, as it does at this time of the year bringing with it the melting snow from up north. It ran swiftly away across the rocks and down to the mouth where it meets Lake Ontario around the spot where I had met the taxi-driver of Bangladeshi descent who featured in the story The Angler on the Credit.

The Credit River is a not a wide river at this point in it’s journey and we sat and talked and watched the rapids formed by the swirling water as it rushed away to the lake.

Then it was time to head back.

The Walk In

The walk in is a lot trickier than the walk outwards. This is primarily because it is all uphill and a 3km uphill walk is a tad more than a nuisance. Being smart, fast thinking and lazy, I hit upon the idea of not taking the straight road uphill, but to go right.

“I think if we go right and then cut across left, the hill is a lot gentler.”

So off we went right, past the tattoo parlour and the physical trainer our physiotherapist had told us to meet (and whom we hadn’t yet met) and past Jorge’s Auto repair and the car rental and Fix Auto shop and took a left.

I turned left, confident that the street ahead would allow me to take a right and head back through the subdivision. We ended up in a school.

Behind the school the football field and track stretched across in front of us. And I made a second mistake. I opted to go right and found myself in another subdivision. This street seemed familiar. We walked on, commenting on the house with the blue statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Ah, just up ahead is where we turn right and we’ll be at the parkway in no time.”

The street up ahead was the street we had decided not to use as the hill was too steep. So there we were, an extra kilometer under our belt, an extra kilometer that was supposed to save us the hill.

We climbed the hill and made it home. I checked my blood sugar and it was dangerously low. I quickly ate a dark chocolate, some walnuts with raisins and downed a glass of lassi made with yogurt and kefir, gently salted and peppered.

Cookery

I used the discarded sourdough starter I’ve been collecting and kneaded it into the dough for rotis. Now, this entails a mixer, so really physical labour is not involved. I set that aside and fired up the barbeque to grill the fresh fennel sausages.

I poured myself the last dregs of the moscato and drained it as I surveyed the lawn below while leaning on the railing of the deck.

Lawn Care – 2

I walked to the garage, at the fron…uh. I found a spanner, a sprinkler and went down to connect the garden hose. I then discovered that the garden hose was already connected at the other end to a pistol sprayer. I used that to water the lawn, the pots, the fence and the few plants starting to show up.

I took the sausages off the grill and transferred them to a dish and went to the garage, you know where that is, opened the door and turned on the hose there. I watered the front lawn, both sides and both the trees that stand at the edge of the curb. I also watered the rose bush at the side of the house.

I turned off the tap, shut the garage door and had dinner.

Photography

After dinner, the moon was pointed out to me. So I went downstairs into my office and found the camera, the harness, the charger, the transfer cable. I walked back up and took some shots of the moon.

Then I went up into the bedroom, opened the window and took some more shots of the moon.

Then I went to the front of the house and took a couple more photos of the front of the house.

Then I wrote this.

I still have to feed the sourdough starter and wash the remaining pots and pans.

No time to transfer the photos and upload them… You’ll have to come back for that!

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