My major achievement so far today - it's 1:30 - is ironing six shirts. Five and a half actually. The sixth had already been ironed, but I didn't notice until I was well into it.
I find ironing meditative, calming, the way brainless physical activities often are. (But, note to son-in-law: this does not mean I will iron your work shirts when I'm staying with you.) In order to get the meditative benefit, I have to iron several shirts at a time, so that's what I usually do: save up the ironing and binge.
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Speaking of said son-in-law, it's so far so good on the Covid front. Bob was apparently "a little better" today, Caitlin the same as yesterday - neither, that is, really sick. So far. Bob was gardening, and we received a brief video of him kicking a ball back and forth with Louis in their tiny back garden.
As Caitlin points out, it could take up to 14 days for the symptoms to really kick in, but she says she's feeling optimistic - which with anything to do with her health is a rare thing.
Louis seems to have made another leap forward with his language recently - as children will do. He seems now to speak entirely in complete sentences, and speaks much more clearly. And a lot.
He also has a new thing where he appends the person's name to almost everything he says to them. "Yeah, mummy, it's a new ball for me." (It actually wasn't.) "Yeah, Daddy, I'm going to send it to you." (He did.) Here's the video I'm quoting.
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The population of Iceland is 356,991 - or was in 2019. I'm guessing it's not growing by leaps and bounds. For perspective, the population of London, Ontario - which is growing by hops and skips - was counted at 404,699 in 2017. It's probably close to 450,000 by now.
So how is it that a country with a population smaller than that of the mid-size Canadian city where I live can produce world-class television better than pretty much anything we produce in Canada?
Karen and I have been watching the second season of Trapped, a Nordic noir set in a small town in the north of Iceland. While it's arguably not quite as good as the best British equivalents - Broadchurch, for example - or the best of similar shows from mainland Scandinavia, it is very, very good. Apparently the first season received a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
The characters seem like real people, there is a convincing sense of the tightness of the small, remote community, the police procedural side is a bit slow-paced but done well, and the cinematography is spectacular. It almost makes you want to go to northern Iceland. Almost. The weather there is so extreme in winter that the crew a couple of times were trapped in Siglufjörður, the real town where the series was filmed.
Highly recommended for all but those who can't abide subtitles. (Although, that said, you can, with Netflix, watch it dubbed into English. That ruins it as far as I'm concerned - the acting is typically shite and the lack of synchronization between visuals and soundtrack is distracting. But that's just me.)
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I mis-spoke myself earlier when I said I'd achieved nothing else but ironing by 1:30. I had done 35 minutes on the stationary bike earlier - while watching a BBC doc series on Netflix called Genius of the Ancient World, featuring historian/presenter Bettany Hughes. The first episode is about the Buddha.
It's well produced and Hughes is engaging enough, but I didn't think it was particularly well-written. I've had a long-term interest in Buddhism, or at least the Zen version of it. As I listened to the presenter and her interview subjects, I kept thinking, what would people with a low tolerance for new-age-y la-la-land thinking make of what they're learning here about Buddhism - and concluded too often that they'd think it sounded like obscure nonsense. Which it's not.
My long-time favourite on the subject is Buddhism Without Beliefs by the British writer Stephen Batchelor. As Batchelor argues, part of the original point of the Buddha's teaching was to throw out accepted religious dogma and teaching of the time, throw out priests - throw out religion. Buddhism in its purist, original form is as much about psychology as religion, in fact, more, Batchelor would say.
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We did get some sun very briefly today, but by the time I went out around 3:30, it was mostly cloudy, if mild at 7C. I went away from the centre for a change, walked over to Gibbons Park and took pictures of trees. I've been photographing the gnarled old willow trees between the pool and the river for years. They're amazing. There's something human-like in their agedness - something with which I definitely identify.
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