I have been laid up all week with a pain in the arse. Literally.

Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice: under no circumstances allow your digestive tract to get old even if the rest of you does. The distal end of mine is currently in rebellion, bleeding and throbbing and generally wretched. I actually went to the doctor, quite an accomplishment under the provincial lockdown order. The cream she prescribed, cleverly compounded just for me, turned out to be too soft to be shoved past the sphincter to arrive in the area where the pain lives. So I sallied forth again, much against my will, to buy some old-fashioned over-the-counter suppositories. Dipped in the cleverly compounded cream, they seem to be doing the job, but not nearly fast enough.

Now that I can actually sit, I read about Dorothy's snow-removal and home-heating issues and decided that my existence is relatively blessed. A tractor from Nix Snow-Removal woke me up this morning at some ungodly hour as the nice young fella behind the wheel scraped my driveway clean, and a little later another lad arrived with a shovel and cleared the path to my door and the porch. Luxury. Also, the furnace is performing very nicely.

Stratford is covered with another blanket of picturesque-as-all-hell snow, but the weather is still not particularly cold, at least not by my -- and Dorothy's -- standards. So getting around can be a bit awkward, but not functionally miserable. To while away the hours until we are allowed to poke our noses out again, I purchased a year's subscription to the television streaming service that brings HBO content to Canada. TV is definitely better than it used to be, if you know where to look.

When the lockdown is lifted, I shall declutter the basement of the four bookcases that are now surplus to requirements and buy myself some plant-nursery trays with grow lights. When that was Edmund's television sanctum, there was no room down there, or anywhere else in the house, to set up the six-foot folding table and make a mess with potting soil. I shall start a parsley grow-op, and maybe branch out (see what I did there?) into cilantro.

But for now, I'm content to be able to sit long enough to do the New York Times crossword puzzle. The Friday one is usually a pleasantly twisty challenge.