Bravo Macron

Went to bed last night with earplugs in because of the raucous party across the street. Unfortunately, removed them in the night, was awakened at 7.15 a.m. by workmen unloading a truck also across the street. They're doing a renovation there, as well as in a house at the end of my garden, hammering, shouting, drilling all day. @#$ city living.

Right now, however, 8.30 a.m., silence. Birdsong. Nan sleeping nearby, as she does 23 1/2 hours of the day.

The family and best friend Holly left in their swish rented van at 7 a.m. yesterday -

and made it to Quebec City by 5. Anna wrote to say the kids were troupers during a ten hour drive with few stops. She'd rented at a motel with a pool, so straight into the water they went. Today, heading for New Brunswick.

Another fearless traveller: President Macron.  My friend Juliet, in the blog to the left, writes that her French friends grumbled about his trip to Beirut, but the world community applauds it and so do I. Leadership, compassion, and courage - not something we see much of, these days. Bill Maher interviewed an army man last night, and they speculated about what the U.S. army would do if Trump loses, refuses to leave, and calls on his rabid followers, with their many millions of guns, to take to the streets. How many neo-Nazis in the American army? they wondered.

What a time of madness. But particularly there, to the south of us.

Thursday was madness around here. The plumber was destroying the basement to get his camera into the pipes to check for trees roots, and much else was going on, when the power went out. A crane had fallen on wires nearby and a small part of Cabbagetown was the only section of the city affected - for most of the day. I had a tenant moving in Friday morning with chaos in the basement and no power, no computer, phone running out of battery. Finally the plumber went to get his noisy generator and finished the job. It cost me $1000 to find out there are hardly any tree roots in my pipes. "Worth it for peace of mind!" he said cheerfully. Perhaps.

But yes, there's a massive Norway maple a few feet from my front door, one of the biggest trees in Cabbagetown, and my basement did flood with sewage twice, a long time ago, because of tree roots in the pipes. A nightmare. So you can understand my anxiety.

So dependent on this little silver Mac - nearly went crazy without it during the blackout. Though the machine itself is driving me crazy in another way: something is wrong with my trackpad's cursor, it leaps about with a mind of its own, jumping many times as I write or deleting at random. Enraging.

Thursday night, I had a ticket to a Music Toronto concert online: the Miró Quartet playing a late Beethoven string quartet, Op. 130. I was able to cast it to my television and lie on the sofa watching a superb quartet play one of the masterpieces of Western civilization. Unfortunately, before the end of the piece, during the famous Grosse Fuge, it cut out; the little circle went round and round, and the concert was over. But it was a treat. They're online playing this piece; I will finish the concert sometime soon.

Will we ever go out again? Or will we spend the rest of our lives in pyjama bottoms, on Zoom?

Yesterday, Day 14 of the Zoom exercise program I signed up for, I finally did a bit of exercise from Day 5. Will try to catch up. I've discovered it's fun not to exercise - more time for sitting around reading. Isobel just sent me this marvellous poem by Barbara Kingsolver. Yes!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/08/poem-of-the-month-how-to-do-absolutely-nothing-by-barbara-kingsolver