Today is The Annuciation. This is the day the Archangel Gabriel appeared to The Blessed Virgin Mary to tell her she would conceive and bear a son, who would be The Messiah. All that was required was her assent. And her answer was, “Let it be done according to thy word.”

I know my readers are everywhere along the faith, spirituality, religion spectrum. But today is about hope. And deliverance. It has only been 90 days since Christmas. But the hope and excitement and love that I felt then is returning at a time when I need, we need to hear and experience the message.  Even in dark times, we are not alone.

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In The Church, the Marian Feasts track almost independently from the other Feasts and Solemnities. As my faith has grown since I became Catholic ten years ago, my trust and devotion to The Blessed Mother has deepened. I am not at all reticent to call her my Protectress.

There are several long-term care and assisted living  facilities in my neighbourhood. One of the facilities had two COVID-19 fatalities in recent days. I have no contact with the facility in question. Still, the losses are hitting closer to home now.

Wait, there’s more. Turns out my friend E, the single mom who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over het head, had COVID-19. She thought it was the flu. She got through it. Thank God.

We don’t think in terms of abundance. There is plenty. My refrigerator is full. My freezer is full. My pantry is full. And yet, I have thus nagging fear that I don’t have enough, whatever that means. I don’t need to go anywhere to get anything. There are businesses that will deliver, should I run out of anything.

Now this pandemic could last longer than what the epidemiologists estimate. We don’t need to face that for quite a while.

I’ve always been aware that our fear of running out drives a good deal of the economy. The Toilet Paper Phenomenon bears witness to this. The Seinfeld episode The Stall comes to mind. ” I don’t have a square to spare.”

Fear of scarcity and viewing our neighbors as threats seem to dominate our thinking. Now we shouldn’t be naïve, but don’t have to be cynical either. But we fluctuate from one polarity to the other, without spending a whole lot of time in the middle ground.

Well I felt really tired after my post-walk shower. I must admit it was an enormously satisfying shower. I went up and lay beside J. The next thing I knew I was asleep. I was so sleepy at that moment, I didn’t even care that she had a Hallmark Channel movie on the telly.

But I awoke. I checked on some slow cooker chicken soup I had going. On impulse, I added potatoes, mushrooms, an onion and garlic to the soup, deciding against the chicken with egg noodle I had planned originally. The potatoes felt a little less firm than I like and decided to peel and add them to the soup, rather than let them get any more “sketchy”, as #2 son would say.

Now I’m blissfully blogging. Looks like J and I might be entering a phase of more togetherness soon. However, she is debating whether to take paid quarantine leave or not. J has no basis to think COVID-19. won’t hit her, as if our house is divinely protected in some modern take on Passover.

It is ironic that we all think someone else could be taken ill and then succumb to this virus. But the virus doesn’t care. The virus just wants to replicate on a host animal. That animal could easily be you or I.

But obsessing about this little mofo is pointless. I just hope the soup turns out well.

So I did another fritatta variant today, with mushrooms, spinach, part skim mozzarella cheese, and topping it with parmesan cheese.The fritatta was well received. The fruit salad, fresh strawberries, pineapple and bananas, accompanied it.

I did a 3.2 mile walk, finishing just as the street light came on. Not too many people were out. We kept our social distances. One attractive woman was walking her dog.

J has been offered an opportunity to take 30 days paid quarantine leave. She is debating, taking it. I tell her I want her to take the paid leave. She has to think about it. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. All I can think is that she is afraid of intimacy. Not just sex, but being with me nearly 24/7.

We shall see what comes of it.

Cannot keep eyes open. Night all.

Right about now Spring is ready to begin in my little corner of the Northern Hemisphere. It is closer to New York than Miami. We get snow here most winters. We scrape frost off the windshields, the whole drill. But it can and does get warm, but the progression to HOT comes around June 1, not before Easter.

And our high temperature today was 86°F (30°C).  It will cool down tomorrow to a more reasonable 57°F(14°C). That will be a noticeable drop.

But for now, I am sweating. J ‘s lunch is ready. The house might not cool down for a while. All in all, not bad, all things considered.

The closed pool necessitates resorting to walking to replace swimming for my cardiovascular exercise. Walking is a different experience and to compare one with the other is always a challenge.

I walked two miles Tuesday, then 3.2 miles yesterday and again today. I’m working on building up my strength and endurance, but I can easily recover.

One day the pool will reopen. And perhaps I will devise a system to both swim and walk. Maybe weight work and stretching too. Already the arthritic hip is responding well to walking.

The activity is precisely the complement that my Weight Watchers nutrition guidelines require.

Life is good.

I knew the day would come when the YMCA would have to close in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. So swimming is out for a while. I’m going back to power walking. Today I walked 2 miles over my hilly course in 31:55. It is the loop outside my house.

I had been wanting to see if the walking would improve or aggravate my arthritic hip. I would say it helped today.

I went shopping today, for food. It took two stores but I found what I wanted and needed. BJ’s was picked over fairly completely. Food Lion had what BJ’s lacked.

Self-quarantine. One of my neighbours is receiving chemotherapy. Reducing risk for her is what this is all about.

I’m going up in a bit.

I’m in good shape here.

Way back when I fancied myself a film “buff”, I saw a film called Things To Come, an early dystopian, sci-fi flick starring Raymond Massey. It was an adaptation from an H.G. Wells story. The world is afflicted by a global war and other troubles, with the ultimate being a plague where people walked around, as if auditioning for The Walking Dead.

Given that that was the last straw, a new utopian age then arrived, and everyone was happy and there were no cigarette butts or gum wrappers littering the streets. And the movie thenceforth had this beatific glow about it.

I feel like this is what’s happening now. I know we will go back to “normal”, but the new “normal” won’t be like the old. Kinda like the world after the 9/11, 2001 attacks. We are now going to have live with a new normal where pestilence is a distinct threat, from the natural world or through human activity. The truly paranoid among us will suspect that the age of “germ warfare” has arrived. During World War II, the Japanese did bacteriological warfare experiments with pathogens, anthrax, I believe, and the test subjects were Chinese.

Under the guise of an “accidental” release, is this Coronavirus release, a test to assess the potential damage of a germ warfare weapon? What will the next incident involve? And who will be responsible?

Lack of sleep causes strange things to happen, such as this post.