The phrase “tabletop exercise” was used during today’s episode of the Dr. Heather Morrison Show, and I was curious to know what it means.

According to the U.S. National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers & Studies, 

Discussion-based exercise where personnel meet in a classroom setting or breakout groups and are presented with a scenario to validate the content of plans, procedures, policies, cooperative agreements or other information for managing an incident.

In other words, it’s a “practice run,” but not in the field.

It’s one of a number of “discussion-based exercises” in the emergency measures field that includes seminars, workshops, games, and drills.

Paul Capewell visits the National Gallery in London:

The system for limiting numbers and following a one way system is necessary to enable galleries like this one to reopen. Although they are large spaces, they can be tricky to navigate and – possibly even by design – allow the visitor to get lost in a reverie and wander the halls for hours. This sort of flaneuring is incompatible with the Covid world, and one way systems are now found everywhere from supermarkets to art galleries.

As an amateur psychogeographer, I appreciate any use of the word flaneuring.

And Paul’s reflections make me realize that it’s not restaurants and movies and coffee shops that I miss because of COVID, it’s being carefree.

My iPhone doesn’t know that Catherine died 9 months ago, so it keeps on doing things like this:

What would have once been a passing dip into nostalgia now takes on a decidedly different tone.

I was not, I am happy to report, plunged into despair by my iPhone’s callous disregard for Catherine’s passing, however.

Time has passed. Seasons changed. I’m no longer on emotional tenterhooks.

On the way to get our flu shots this morning, I remarked to Oliver that the time since Catherine died is the same amount of time she was pregnant with him. We couldn’t figure out whether that was properly called a coincidence, something ironic, something remarkable, or just a thing.

We got our flu shots at Dr. Hooley’s office because Dr. Hooley’s nurse Cheryl has the best bedside shot-giving manner that there is. When Cheryl came out to steady the horses, she offered Oliver the option of flu mist or flu shot, which was news to me, as, based on last year’s experience, I thought the days of flu mist were over. Oliver, who really really really doesn’t like shots, decided, nonetheless, to have the flu shot: I’d already put the numbing creme on his arm, and he wanted to follow through. Which tells you something about the power of trajectory in Oliver’s mind.

I really really wanted to tell Catherine about that. She was the only other person who would understand it in the same way I do.

Over the weekend, amidst an internecine battle with Oliver about whether we needed to go on an outing for the sole purpose of listening to the Spotify playlist that he’d prepared, I realized something: I’ve been focusing a lot on the absence of Catherine in Oliver’s life, and the absence of Catherine in my life, but not so much on how those absences resonate to affect our relationship with each other.

Parts of the role Catherine played in Oliver’s life are now left to me.

Parts of the role Catherine played in my life are now left to him.

And, as she’s gone, and as Oliver and I aren’t everything for each other, we’re also simultaneously becoming new people, all on our own.

And understanding that is more about untying logistical and emotional thickets than it is about out and out sadness.

I dropped in on the monthly grief club on Zoom last week (“grief club” sounds a lot better than “open grief support group,” its formal name).

Any trace of resistance to listening and talking about grief in front of strangers left me months ago. I can bear witness to tears and agony and joy and frustration and anger and not look away, not judge, not offer advice, and yet feel my presence is of value, and feel the value of the presence of others. On a more practical level, grief club is a barometer: from month to month I can see, with some remove, how I am evolving. 

One of the things I’ve seen is that, although I have my moments, I’m less sad, less angry, less frustrated. Having figured out protein and laundry, having purchased new sheets and a new dishwasher, having realized that floors left unswept accumulate dust with regularity, I look back with some amazement over the nine months since Catherine died, and I am happy that the feeling of drowning that was once all-consuming has, at least for the moment, passed. There are moments, days even, when I don’t think about absence.

Not feeling like I’m drowning allows some room for me to think about other things.

The future.

Or at least the winter.

Or at least next week.

Just in time for the nip in the air, the Nordic Breakfast is back at Receiver Victoria Row!

There’s a new shop in the C1A 4R4, ANN Wellness, at 120 Prince Street, the space formerly occupied by lawyers, psychologists, dancers and, most recently, silk scarf merchants.

The new shop, which is amidst a “soft opening” this week, sells “nature-made” products; when I dropped in today they had a modest selection of food (granola bars, sugar, coffee, quinoa) and personal care products (shampoo, soap, toothpaste). I’m hopeful that their selection will expand into the kind of staples that having a shop on the block would make very handy–milk, bread, and the like. 

The greeting card market is getting very particular.

Earlier in the month I found myself on the north shore, between Rustico and Cavendish, and I took a photo with my iPhone. Yesterday my iPhone suggested that it could automagically transform this photo into an animated GIF if I wanted. So I took my iPhone up on its offer.

It’s a remarkable effort on my iPhone’s part, with waves that seem like they never end. You can see the edges of the loop if you stare carefully, but otherwise it looks like endless waves.

As seen through the front doorbell camera. Ladders in every direction.

I’m getting the eavestroughs replaced on 100 Prince Street this morning, and the crew from North Shore Eavestroughing needed the parking spots in front of the house for their truck.

Irrationally, this is the kind of thing that gives me anxiety. So I nipped my anxiety in the bud, invested $5 in a set of four safety cones at Home Hardware, and affected a professional-grade street-blocking with absolutely no legal right to do so.

It worked.

Oliver is over on the couch, with his laptop on his lap.

I assume he’s surfing the net, or watching YouTube, or doing any of the myriad other things he does online.

Except he’s talking to someone.

“Who are you talking to, Oliver?”

He doesn’t answer.

I stand up, walk over, and take a look at his laptop screen.

He’s on a Zoom call with the Green Party candidate for District 10.

Of course he is.