My little tunes session has a problem: our youngest member, Lauren, has an obsessively over-protective mum who has turned out to be an anti-vaxxer. The rest of us are now forbidden to mention the V word, or indeed even to discuss the pandemic at all, because Lauren is "stressed". I just bet Lauren is stressed; she's a bright kid and, much as she loves her mum, I'm sure she knows that, in this case, Mother does not Know Best.

I foresee a great dust-up in the future of that family, with much hurt feeling and assertions of best intentions.

It's garbage day with recycling, so I hauled out a month's worth of newspapers and the collection of boxes and packing materials that had accumulated in the garage over the summer. It makes quite a stack, but nothing like the mountain across the street, where we have new neighbours. There's nothing like moving house to generate waste -- except, of course, renovations.

Speaking of renovations, I have an idea about my inconveniently shaped small bathroom. At present, it has an undersized 1973-vintage mustard yellow bathtub that I can get into but not out of (due to flex-proof ankles), and is too shallow to provide a decent soak. The obvious solution is to replace it with a nice, big shower stall, but one side of the window intrudes into the space. I have just learned that Japanese bathtubs are deep, and typically have a built-in seat, but they are typically free-standing (not a good choice -- think of cleaning behind it), and they cost a bomb.

Such bathtubs were not uncommon in Germany 40 years ago ... but the past is a foreign country where they do things differently. Dang.