I turned 54 years old today.

The day started with calls from loved ones, followed by our usual Sunday waffles (I added some cocoa, because, well, it’s my birthday). After lunch I helped Oliver make me a birthday cake (lemon cake from the kitchen of Betty Crocker, with improv chocolate frosting using icing sugar helpfully provided by Catherine).

As the cake was chilling we had round one of gift opening, a nap, a little work, and then dug in to fulfill Oliver’s dream of cooking a “medieval vegetarian supper,” which ended up being navy beans and shallots stewed in broth, mushroom soup, and English muffins topped with cheese. Those medievals and their brown food!

We organized an impromptu birthday cake reveal Zoom at the very last minute, and had drop-ins from California, Ontario, PEI and Sweden (thank you all!). A second round of gifts were opened.

I’m now just coming down off the sugar shock and might tuck into a rousing game of “Set: The Family Game of Visual Perception,” which rode in on round one.

If you’re going to have a birthday during a fucking pandemic, this was a pretty good birthday to have.

Here’s Oliver’s take on the day.

Photo of Trubarjeva cesta 54 in Ljubljana by duncan c
Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Because, fuck the pandemic, I’m ordering six pain au chocolat.

I’ve been chewing on an idea I’ve called First and Last for a many years now; my 54th birthday, on Sunday, amidst a pandemic, seems as good a time as any to try it out.

The original idea was to rent a theatre once a month and to screen the pilot and series finale episodes of a television show, separated by a thematic intermission (“Newhart Martinis”), and followed by some sort of group discussion.

Given that we’re all storm-stayed until whenever, with Oliver’s help I’ve reimagined First and Last for the digital realm.

Want to join in?

The first show I’ve selected is The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran from 1970 to 1977—between the ages of 4 and 11 for me. In its original run, and then, later, in reruns, the show was frequently watched in our household.

• The pilot episode (alternate link), Love is All Around, aired September 19, 1970.
• The series finale (alternate link), The Last Show, aired March 19, 1977.

Watch both (it will only take you 48 minutes), then discuss in the comments here. Did you watch the show when it ran? Did it play a role in your life? Does it stand up? What happened over those seven seasons? Is this a good idea?

I inherited Catherine’s iPad, and find myself using it more and more: I watch TV, edit photos, browse the web, FaceTime my mother. And I write blog posts, like this one, via email.

I haven’t used an iOS device regularly for a long time, so I’ve become rusty on iPad text editing niceties; this helpful guide from Apple taught me a bunch of things I didn’t know, especially about the different ways to move the cursor (“insertion point” in Applespeak).

It’s time we all upped our video chat aesthetics game; designer and filmmaker Tom Ford has some simple advice:

Put the computer up on a stack of books so the camera is slightly higher than your head. Say, about the top of your head. And then point it down into your eyes. Then take a tall lamp and set it next to the computer on the side of your face you feel is best. The lamp should be in line with and slightly behind the computer so the light falls nicely on your face. Then put a piece of white paper or a white tablecloth on the table you are sitting at but make sure it can’t be seen in the frame. It will give you a bit of fill and bounce. And lots of powder, et voilà!

Longtime readers may recall my 2013 remix of a Vinyl Café episode, wherein I took advantage of the pause-filled speaking style of the late Stuart McLean to take apart and reassemble the audio into something completely new. The result sounds like it should make sense, but it most certainly doesn’t.

I get the same sense watching the “deleted scenes” videos from The Office, like this one. Unlike the Vinyl Café, these are the bits that ended up on the cutting room floor, the bits we never got to see. Stitched together they end up as “episodes” that seem like they should make sense, but don’t. As if The Office writers were incapable of writing plot.

Catherine was very much of the “we might need this someday” school, where “this” could be gift bags, kebab skewers, random nuts and bolts, or bits of ribbon. As a result, our house has not only one, but several junk drawers, junk shelves, junk buckets, junk nooks, junk boxes. Oliver and I have been using this fallow time to deal with these, using this guidance from The Guardian as our guide:

This is the time to be ruthless. Empty it out, says MacKenzie. Give the inside of the drawer a vacuum and a wipe with a damp cloth. Then “only put back the things you use. If you think: ‘I might need that one day,’ no, you won’t because you haven’t used it in the last year. I used to have a dish full of keys and I never knew what they were for. One day I just threw them away. Did I come to any grief? No.” Rehome items to the places they belong.

I ventured off-world today to grocery shop for the first time in ten days, proud of my ability to feed myself and Oliver, with little food waste and optimal leftover usage, for as long as I did.

Since I was last at Sobeys, systems were updated: a makeshift border wall has now been constructed out of overturned shopping carts, and we shoppers were guided to line up, 2 metres apart, each of us waiting for one person to leave the store before one person was allowed in. At the entrance we were presented with pre-sanitized shopping carts, and a new iteration of keep-your-distance signage was evident.

Inside the store there were new directional arrows taped to the floor that were only partially adhered to, but everyone kept their distance, and waited patiently for people to move along. Cordiality was in abundance.

I did lose my head a little, what with the “I may never shop again” feeling coursing through the air. Peri peri sauce ended up in my cart why, exactly? Just in case I need to whip up some Portuguese chicken? But otherwise I stocked up on the things we truly need, and I figure we’re good until at least mid-April as long as Purity can keep me in milk and Receiver can keep me in coffee and bread.

I left the reusable bags at home on purpose, opting for paper bags instead (which appear to be free now). Sobeys is on an everyone-bags-for-themselves plan now, and I will be downloading Tetris later today so that I am better at this next time.

I was in and out in about 20 minutes, back on the home planet in 30.

Oliver has declared today Friday Fun Day, so now that the groceries are all packed away, let the hilarity ensue!

In my pants pocket this morning I found a Greek 100 drachma bill.

I have never been to Greece.

Greece has not used the drachma since 2002.

I suspect sleepwalking involving time travel.

If you Google your local grocery store–Sobeys, in my case–one of the things that Google Maps will show you is when the store is typically busy on any given day, and how busy it is right now. Useful information to have when you’re trying to minimize contact with other shoppers.

Here are snapshots of four Prince Edward Island Sobeys for a Friday; don’t use these as an actual guide, because they’re evolving and will be inaccurate in the future:

Because this is Google, and thus closed and proprietary, there’s no way of knowing the sample size–the number of mobile devices that Google is detecting at each location to develop its approximation of busyness–and the charts are only useful in a relative not an absolute sense. Also, the data was gathered during a time when Sobeys was open longer hours; hours are now 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., and that means that visits are distributed differently now, even more so with so many people not working and so able to shop at unusual times.