Things are by no means back to normal. But there are some small things to bring a little needed joy to grab on to now.

A few days ago, we learned that the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum will reopen on June 26. I’m currently waiting to confirm that I’ll be on the list to resume my tour guide duties on Sunday mornings. The museum is a large space with lots of space for physical distancing, and they’ll be limiting numbers, requiring masks, and we won’t be taking people to sit in any cockpits, so I’m pretty confident it’s a fairly low risk environment. Best of all, we’ll get to see planes flying again—the two-seaters to start with, but on July 1, our wonderful Lancaster bomber will finally be back in the air for a flight commemorating the end of WW2, as well as honouring the Snowbirds pilot killed a few weeks ago. Hearing those Merlin engines again will be good for the soul.

And today, my husband and I took advantage of the new allowance to expand “social circles” to visit some of our oldest friends. We got to see the wonderful new house they moved into earlier this year, eat tasty homecooked food, pet kitties, and enjoy good conversation that didn’t involve a Zoom room. We’ll be doing it again in the near future.

We also discovered that the Keg is now doing takeout food. While it won’t be immediate, it will be nice to enjoy some tasty beef in the near future again.

And I’ve finally felt the urge to resume a craft project—this one for the Trillium Exchange, which I co-founded several years ago. I finally decided on what to make and will be starting work on it this weekend. While I likely won’t be able to give it out at an event, I am looking forward to making something that definitely fits the bee-related theme of this round of the Exchange.

Tomorrow, we may just finish the game my husband and I have been playing remotely with two friends. Last week’s session involved punching a dragon. It’ll be interesting to see where this week takes us.

Had life flowed as planned, we would have been in Columbus tonight at the Origins game convention, so no, life is not back to normal. But I’m still going to bed content tonight. It’s not so much a light at the end of the tunnel—it’s more that the tunnel itself has skylights to give us a little bit of illumination as we travel towards that still-hidden exit point.