The start of the second hundred days has been a combination of the routine–a little of the old, and a little of the new.

After a busy day yesterday, I opted not to do my usual evening Zoom call, but instead opted to play a new (to me) board game, Raiders of the North Sea.  I lost, but it was a learning game, so the point was more to see how it worked so hopefully I play on my own without help the next time.

Today,  I had a busy morning starting to coordinate a move out for the about 70 employees who joined us last September–they’ll be coming by their old office in July to pick up personal stuff, pack up other files to go to offsite storage, and dispose of anything else. Eventually, they’ll move into our 1 York building, but not quite yet–we haven’t started moving people back at all yet, and probably won’t for another couple of months.  I also got the results from the yearly ultrasound I had on Monday, and it’s status quo for my little friend (the ovarian cyst I’ve had for what seems like forever), which means we do it all again in a year.  Unless it’s growing or causing pain, we just leave it be.

I took a half day off so that we could run to Toronto for some errands.  We also stopped by Teddy’s, our favourite Oshawa comfort food restaurant, to pick up some turkey dinners.   This was Toronto’s first day in Stage 2, and as we drove by Yorkdale, it seemed to be doing a brisk business.  On the way back, as we started to hit rush hour, traffic was steady, with a couple of short slowdowns, but the Red Hill in particular was still very clear for this time of day.  This is the first time we’d been east of Toronto since this all began.  It all looked about the same–except the GO train lots, which are maybe 20% full, which is spooky.

Then, this evening, I watched the last online Tafelmusik concert — lovely violin and cello music by Bach, and a fabulous solo violin sonata by Tartini that was not the fairly-famous ‘Devil’s Trill’ but is clearly a close cousin.  (I may have to find a recording of those Tartini sonatas.  They’re such fun).   Then, inspired,  25 minutes of viola practice, in which I discovered that–OMG–I might actually be able to do vibrato.  A good vibrato was always my bane as a violinist, but I gave it a whirl tonight because one of my exercises suggested it.  It’s not consistent and very wobbly, but if I practice it, I might just get it.   Then an hour watching the now nearly five week old kittens I’ve been visiting via Zoom for the last four weeks, and then finally, some writing time.  Tomorrow, I’ll be going into Canadian Warplane Heritage for training, and Sunday, I’ll be back doing my Sunday morning tour guide shifts.  It’ll be nice to see the airplanes and the Sunday morning gang again.  I’m looking forward to having that little slice of normality back, even if we’ll be wearing masks and, for now, the multi-seat aircraft won’t be running member flights.  But our Lancaster will fly on July 1 with new nose art to honour the Snowbirds team, particularly Jenn Casey, who was killed in an accident a couple of months ago.

Today’s thought:  The difference between compromise and finding common ground.  They aren’t the same thing at all.  Compromise, too often, involves giving up things to come to a resolution that makes no one happy.  Common ground, on the other hand, means starting with finding what the parties can agree on, and working to build out from there.   Finding common ground does require that both parties be willing to do the work, of course, to get there, but sometimes finding things that we can agree on may help us to address those things we cannot.