Author and illustrator Mo Willems is doodling every day at lunchtime on YouTube, under the aegis of his “Artist in Residence at Home” at the Kennedy Center:

Learners worldwide can draw, doodle and explore new ways of writing by visiting Mo’s studio virtually once a day for the next few weeks. Grab some paper and pencils, pens, or crayons and join Mo to explore ways of writing and making together.

Rather than completely cancelling our monthly Pen Night here in Charlottetown, we’re moving it into the clouds, via Zoom videoconference.

This is an experiment, as we’ve no idea if what works about Pen Night around a table will also work for Pen Night on the screen. If nothing else it will give us a chance to de-social-distance on a Saturday night.

While details will go our to the regular Pen Night mailing list that Dan at The Bookmark maintains, that this is virtual provides the option for special guest stars from away; if you’d like to join out virtual table on Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. Atlantic, please drop me a line and I’ll send you an invite. All you need is an interest in fountain pens; no experience necessary, you need not be hip to the arcane lingo, and you will find welcoming, kind people.

I was reminded last night that SARS touched Prince Edward Island in 2003 to the extent that I wrote about it here, and to the extent that the Chief Public Health Officer was issuing advisories about self-isolation for returning travelers. How quickly we forget.

This time around, with COVID-19, things are considerably escalated.

For our family, most prominently this means that the Stars for Life day program is suspending as of tomorrow, leaving Oliver to be at home for his days; fortunately, as he and I were ill last week (with a bonus non-COVID-19 illness, from which we’ve now both recovered), we’ve got a routine down, and our daily life will continue without much calamitous disruption.

Our pantry is well-stocked. It turns out that I’ve been hoarding tempeh for months now, so we’ve got enough soy protein to last us for a long time. I found out on the weekend that Purity Dairy not only sells its own milk and ADL butter, but also yogurt, meaning that with the dry goods we have already, and a weekly walk to Purity, we can likely make do without going to a larger grocery store for some time.

I’ve been a “remote worker” since 1996, so not only am I well-versed in it, but my remote colleagues and I are several hundred iterations into fine-tuning our remote workflow. The NHL may be cancelled, but Almanac.com will continue to hum along for all your “will the sun come up tomorrow?” needs.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken the morning to #CancelEverything: upcoming face-to-face meetings are either rescheduled for “when life returns to normal” or moved to virtual meetings via Zoom. The best advice seems to be that its prudent not only to avoid large groups, but to avoid cross-contaminating family groups, so even a dinner party with friends is no longer benign; that takes some getting used to, and involves a change in social protocols.

I realized that, as regards the world going to hell and people dying, I have a particular set of hard-wrought skills in this regard.

Here’s my best advice for you, a gift from Catherine, really, as it distills how she dealt with her uncertain times:

Ask yourself “right now, here, am I alive?”

If the answer is “yes,” then continue.

Friend of the blog, and Artistic Director of Norristown, Pennsylvania’s Theatre Horizon, Nell Bang-Jensen, in a video release this week:

As you can imagine, the idea of social distancing is very challenging for an arts organization whose whole mission is about bringing people together, in the same space, in the name of our shared humanity.

I don’t particularly care if COVID-19 means the end of professional sports, the stock market, the airlines, or capitalism; I do, however, want organizations like Nell’s to survive.

As Jamie Zawinski wrote about DNA Lounge in San Francisco:

Even though we’re closed, meaning that we have lost 100% of our income, we still have a lot of expenses that are not going away: rent, insurance, taxes, permit fees… We’re also still paying our employees while we’re closed. Depending on how long this crisis lasts, this could end up leaving us on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The same thing could be written by anyone who manages a theatre or gallery or workshop.

You don’t need to leave your house to help in the life support effort for the arts: find a way to make a donation online (donate to Theatre Horizon here; DNA Lounge has a Patreon).

Think of all the money you’re saving not eating out, not going to the movies, not buying theatre tickets: take that, and lend a hand.

An excellent four minute introduction to the Northumbrian smallpipes from Kathryn Tickell.

Danny Gregory writes, in part, in Hope to cope:

Worry is an obsessive series of thoughts that needs to be diverted. Stress is a body thing that needs to be purged like bad sushi. But you can’t just think your way out of Anxiety. You need distractions that have a physical component. The New York Times suggests listening to music, skipping rope or rubbing velcro.

I have another remedy.

I open my sketchbook, uncap my pen.

Drawing is a mental and a physical activity.

It drags me off the obsessive carousel of worry and puts me into physical action. It breaks the spell and gives me a job.

Drawing diverts and slows down my overstimulated imagination and it anchors me in the Now. The Taser effects of stress start to wash out of my system. Adrenaline and cortisol get filtered away. My heart slows. My breathing normalizes. I get perspective on what I’m drawing and on what is roiling my mind.

I’ve found sketching to be very helpful, in exactly the way he describes.

Even more helpful that that are the words of Mark Rice-Oxley in The Guardian:

The most annoying question news anchors ask their correspondents is: “How worried should we be?” Not just because worry is hard to quantify (“er, very”?); not just because it’s a leading question.

But because the answer should always be: “We shouldn’t worry at all. Worry is pointless. There is bound to be something better that we can do.”

Indeed, psychotherapists might go on to say that if we are eaten up with worry, we should ask ourselves about the worrisome thoughts we are having: are they actually true? And are they helpful to us? If the answer to either is no, then worry is not serving us well.

It’s perhaps naive to simply say that we shouldn’t worry because worrying isn’t helpful: it were only that easy.

But I’ve found it uncommonly useful regardless.

Even though in the years since I last wrote about it, I’ve become a vegetarian, I’d always entertained hopes that the much-vaunted Peter Pan restaurant, on the Peter Pan corner, would be resurrected.

But, with the news that it’s fallen to the wrecker’s ball, those hopes are dashed.

Catherine and I enjoyed a lot of Peter Pan Burger Baskets and milkshakes in that parking lot over the years.

Here’s the ad in The Guardian from from June 26, 1958 announcing the Grand Opening:

A year ago this morning I weighed 195 pounds. This morning I weigh 184 pounds.

I know this because I’ve been weighing myself on a wifi-enabled bathroom scale for the last year:

That I weigh 11 pounds less year-over-year is not so much an accomplishment as a side-effect, more an accumulation of accidental fitness, shifting from eating lunch out to eating lunch at home, the prostrating effects of grief and, over the last week, an unnatural dip due a nasty bout of gastroenteritis (that I do not recommend, at all, as a weight loss program).

The most noticeable effect of this, day to day, is that I’ve been having trouble keeping my trousers up.

For years I wore trousers with a 38 inch waist and a 30 inch inseam (we Rukavina boys were gifted long torsos and short legs from our father); six months ago I realized that I could wear trousers with a 36 inch waist, at least in Levi jeans. And that helped. But I still had trouble keeping my pants from falling down.

I found the solution this morning–duh!–was simply to punch another hole in my belt, an inch upstream from the last one. Now–ta da!–my trousers stay up just fine.

The GI bug manifested itself first in Oliver: he barfed all over the living room on Sunday afternoon, and developed a low-grade fever, chills and a headache. Once I’d dealt with coronavirus fears–it’s a breathing thing, not a barfing thing, it turns out–I settled him into a routine of small sips of water and pieces of toast and we hunkered down for his recovery.

Then, on Monday, 24 hours after Oliver, just as it seemed like we’d turned a corner, my own guts unloaded. Fortunately not all over the living room. And I developed the same symptoms as his.

Tuesday I was more catatonic than I’d been in forever: there were times that I literally could not get out of bed. Oliver was well enough by this point, fortunately, that he could be relatively self-contained as long as I rousted myself to bring him a glass of water and a piece of toast every once in a while.

By Wednesday we were both tentatively on the mend: we kept down a bagel and peanut butter, and some plain rice. I folded the mountain of clean laundry that had been accumulating on the laundry room floor.

Today Oliver’s home for the day–his last, I’m hopeful, before returning to his regular routine–and I’ve dipped my toe back into the office. I had some cereal and a cup of coffee for breakfast and, well, so far so good.

All in all not something I’d wish on anyone, but compared to the coronavirus, a walk in the park.

I didn’t leave the house for three days and already had touches of cabin fever and could not watch another episode of Seinfeld.

Fourteen days of self-isolation? I have newfound empathy for the self-isolating around the world.

CleanTalk, the comment spam filtering service that I use to allow me to reasonably maintain the ability to accept comments here, reports that in the last week it filtered 51,821 spam comments and allowed 12 legitimate ones.

Most of the spam comments were SQL injection attempts from hosts in the Russian Federation and Germany.

While CleanTalk is doing an excellent job at filtering–it let through exactly zero spam and filtered out exactly zero ham–it’s exhausting to consider the amount of the Internet’s capacity that is taken up with attempts to undermine it.

Finally the anti-golfing movement takes hold on the Island.