Order bread, coffee beans and meals for curbside pickup or $5 delivery in Charlottetown. Order by 9:00 a.m. Wednesday for Friday delivery.

It’s a win-win-win: Receiver gets business, you get food, and everybody stays safe.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

On Saturday Oliver announced his expectation that our regular smoked salmon bagel routine be hewed to. I was able to scrounge almost everything I needed from items on hand, except for pickled onions.

What to do?

Make pickled onions!

I’d been under the impression that this would take weeks. It does not. Here is my easy recipe:

• Put the kettle on.
• Slice up some onions. I didn’t have any onions, so I sliced up some shallots.
• Put the sliced onions in a bowl and pour boiling water over them. Let sit for a minute or two.
• Prepare a mixture of apple cider vinegar, sugar and salt. I had no sugar, so I used molasses.
• Put the onions in the vinegar mix and put in the fridge until cool.

Now you have pickled onions. Or, in my case, molasses-pickled shallots. And a happy child.

Bonus song to sing while making pickled onions:

Oh Oliver, you’re a funny one, with a face like a pickled onion and a nose like a fat tomato, but we still love you…

Repeat for every person in the room.

Thanks to my fellow YMCA summer day camp councillors for the memory.

Mindful of Dr. Heather Morrison’s guidance, I have avoided grocery shopping as much as possible, and had not been out to Sobeys in the last 10 days. But our staples were running low, and Oliver slept in, so I let him sleep and dashed out this morning to refill the pantry.

The first change I noticed was a disinfection station for carts and a handwashing station for people at the entrance; I did my duty and scrubbed the cart and my hands well. And then turned the “do not touch your face” dial in my brain up to maximum.

Shopping in a store with 8 foot aisles under a “stay 6 feet away from anyone” regime was tricky, but I mostly pulled it off. That I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and that I was in a heightened state of “I might not shop again for weeks” anxiety led me to buy things like a pint of winter strawberries and a bag of hemp hearts, things I normally wouldn’t. But I was generally rational otherwise. Oh, also, the tzatziki-flavoured Triscuits.

I kept my distance at the cash, and let the person in front of me check out completely before unloading my cart. Sobeys, sensibly, isn’t bagging into bags you bring yourself, so there was something of a mad dash to unload and then load. I got to scan my own Airmiles card on the big scanner; that was a thrill.

When I got home I was uncertain as to whether I needed to disinfect every package I unpacked, so I made a stab at doing so, focusing on the things most likely to have been fondled by others.

I did not buy any tempeh.

And so now we’re set at least until the first week of April.

Oliver, meanwhile, has developed what seems to be a sinus infection; if avoiding COVID-19 means he needs to sample from a buffet of non-fatal illnesses, I’m not happy, but I’ll live with it.

I appear to be on a bereaved-widower plan at our family doctor’s, as they’ve been putting me through to talk to the nurse on the phone, which has never happened before. While I’m not without parenting skills, suddenly occupying all of the family’s C-level offices means that I lack the comfort of someone else to double-check with, so I’ll take all the help I can get.

One of the side-effects of COVID-19 is the newly-instituted morning video message from Archdeacon John Clarke at St. Paul’s. You need not be anything other than a human being to profit from it.

How to Make These Next Few Weeks a Little Easier, Courtesy of Birds, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that I’ve been anti-bird, but I have seldom felt common-cause with the bird-watching set. For the past couple of weeks, though, birds, just the everyday around town birds, have fascinated me. Perhaps because I can see and hear them without the distractions of urban life that have largely melted away. Oliver and I spent 20 minutes just looking at the interplay between ducks and gulls and the outflow of Government Pond a couple of Sundays ago.

I often talk about the power of birds, but this year they take on an even more powerful meaning. They enliven our days, brighten the trees, serenade in our backyards and city parks, and bestow us with so much joy and hope, all bundled together in feathers and lively personalities.

That’s a paragraph that I’m particularly able to accept this morning.

Very early on in her life with cancer, Catherine benefited from a call with an anonymous “cancer buddy,” a veteran who knew the drill.

One piece of useful advice she got was to up our family handwashing game: keep the soap stocked, get a supply of cloth towels to use once and then launder, leave hand sanitizer by the front door. And make sure everyone washes their hands, all the time.

When you wash your hands in a life or death way, as we’re all doing now, they can start to shrivel up and die in a way that exceeds the capabilities of regular moisturizers.

Fortunately, I found O’Keeffe’s Working Hands. You only need a tiny bit of it—indeed the instructions on the tube command this—to return your hands from the dry wastelands, and they don’t end up feeling greasy or sticky.

You can find O’Keeffe’s in most pharmacies these days. A tube lasts me 6 months.

Fire danger is low.

These cards I printed in May 2018 seem particularly useful during these trying times.

I didn’t know how much I was missing day to day interactions with human beings, at least ones that I have not fathered, until we held Pen Night online tonight, spending two and a half hours together in a videoconference. A meeting that, after a few had dropped out, and with pixelation to protect the innocent attendees, looked like this:

It was wonderful. Not quite as nice as a face to face get together, but, as I said as we concluded, something that resulted in at least a 25% increase in the state of my mental health.

It’s good to be reminded that social distancing doesn’t mean that we need to cut off contact with humanity; that this pandemic has come at this time, with the tools and bandwidth to support high-fidelity telepresence, is a great gift.

We used Zoom for the meeting, an app that all the cool kids seem to have landed on all at once over the last year (one wonders whether its status as the hip anti-Skype will hold once the calculus lectures start to be offered via Zoom next week as e-learning fires up across the continent).

You can use Zoom for free to host a meeting for up to 100 people for up to 40 minutes; I upgraded my Zoom to the $15.00/month plan which allows meetings of up to 24 hours (what a Pen Night that would be!).

This is my second Zoom of the pandemic era, and in both cases the attendees were a mix of young and old, digital-savvy and not; everyone seemed to figure it out without needing additional support, which is perhaps Zoom’s greatest selling feature: it just works.

If you have a board or a club or a group or a night, and you want to keep it going despite the need for us all to remain apart, I heartily recommend you consider this as an option; tonight it wasn’t so much the inks and the pens and the paper and the notebooks that was the important thing for me, it was the collegiality. Collegiality seems in short supply these days; fortunately it’s easily manufactured.