A whole bunch of stuff I want to tell you

Let us settle something first before we get into other parts of the diatribe.  My ego is such that I hope that you are all wondering how I am doing in this coronavirus season.  There are a whole bunch of rules were set down by the Ontario Retirement Communities Association (ORCA).  We have them all in effect as well as a few directives is coming right from the Ministry of Health.  We received an email from the ministry overnight indicating that, unless a resident is very very ill, only healthcare workers, including PSW's, can enter our building at all.  We can have no outside entertainment of any sort; our newly hatched chickens have been whisked away. For now, at least, there is not even an exercise program in the mornings.

Personally, however, I am doing very well.  I have a very large room; I have a lot to read; I have my computer.  I have the luxury of knowing that my urinary tract infection which started last November is now completely cleared up.  I am a healthy man and I can only say to COVID19, I may be part of your target demographic, but you won't get me.

That being said, I do miss the fact that every outside diversion has closed down.  I particularly miss going to McWheelers, the wheelchair gym at McMaster University which I attended two or three times a week.  I will also miss a choral concert and a philharmonic concert which I had hoped to attend this month.  But all of humanity must fight this thing together and there will be light at the end of the tunnel.

About ten days ago I saw a film.  I saw it in an old-fashioned movie theatre which has had a complete restoration to the way it was when it opened in 1935, the Westdale Theatre in the trendy Westdale section of Hamilton.  I am very impressed with this theatre.  It has pretty well all of the attributes of the old theatres that I used to go to as a child.  You enter from the street to an Art Deco lobby complete with a place to buy popcorn.  There are 350 seats in this theatre, so it is unlike those which happy cut up into two or more screens.  It was a lot of fun.  The movie I saw, Parasite, was okay.

Did you know that the movie chain, Cineplex, is being sold to foreign interests?  A number of films that are made with Canadian government support get that grant money on the basis of a guarantee from Cineplex that they will show the movie.  A lot of producers are worried.

I received a whole bunch of books for Christmas and I have started them all, but it takes me a long time to read a book and so I have not finished most of them, yet.  My friend Hal Mattson, doesn't actually give me books but reports to me that he has read a book that I just have to read because he keeps thinking of me all the time he's reading it.  I guess that is a complement.

One of the ones he recommended to me is "The 100-year-old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared" byJonas Jonasson.  It was written in Swedish but I read an English translation because my Swedish is not very good.  It is hilarious.  I laughed openly on a number of occasions. 

It is a story of a 100-year-old man who climbed out the window of his old age home in order to avoid his 100th birthday party.  He proceeds to meet a number of strange people and in the process of a few days manages to commit a couple of relatively violent homicides.  This story is interspersed with the story of his life, between the years 1905 and 2005.  It turns out that he, without any planning whatsoever, lived a Forest Gump -type life, travelling around the world east to west and then west to east.  Because of a drinking binge that he has with Harry Truman he gets to meet all the great leaders of the twentieth century in similar circumstances.  As I say, it is hilarious and, because it is a relatively old book, written in 2006 , practically everybody who I speak to about it has already read it and that is kind of neat.  We can reminisce about it together.

Well as I often say on occasions when it's time to say goodbye "write if you get work".