In the mornings we write.

After lunch (omelets, or toasted bagels with cream cheese, or oatmeal with fruit) writing and/or chores. Michael usually does some organizing, which he loves. Yesterday he carefully sorted out dead pens, discarded batteries and other odds and ends from his desk drawer. I’m finding it easier to concentrate on my writing now that this new “normal” is settling in, so I wrote a little more, then did some computer housekeeping, moving much of my manuscript to google docs.

Later in the day, phone calls, checking in on family and friends.

Around 3:00 pm, exercise. No roof access, sadly, but I run fifty laps every day where I can. Then Michael does some. (He’s only up to twenty.) If it were sunny today, I’d go down the backstairs to the little fenced-in garden and run my laps there, but today I’ll likely have to run from the dining room entrance, around the table, through the kitchen, down the hall, back into the dining room…

5:00 pm, reading on the couch commences. Michael is reading Hammett’s The Glass Key. I am reading The House of Government, a massive book about an apartment building for privileged Soviet officials during the Stalin era. I’m about at the point where they all start disappearing into Siberian labor camps or worse.

Supper. (Lentil soup last night.) Then decisions about what to watch. Last night Michael had to see a film streamed on his computer, so it was only the cat and me in front of the television. I have finished the first season of a Swedish prime-time soap opera called The Restaurant. The next two seasons require me to pay, and I’m not interested enough to find out (SPOILERS):

…If Calle’s love will bring Nina out of her coma, or if Peter is transforming from an idealistic young lawyer into a hard-edged semi-gangster with a wife who smokes cigarettes in long holders, or if the pathetic-but-villainous Gustav has truly been put in his place…

to shell out money for it.

Instead I watched one episode of Kingdom, a Korean Netflix series about an outbreak of zombism in 16th century Korea, and after that a few episodes of Fleabag, which is about being young, female, messed up and horny in 21st century London.

Fleabag is pretty funny, but disconnected from our current reality, given that it includes conversations between people standing less than six feet apart and scenes in crowded restaurants.

God help me, Kingdom feels much more realistic at this point, especially for a modern American viewer. Like most zombie films, it’s both horror and social satire. One reviewer a year ago described it as “a mordantly funny epic about how large-scale governmental mismanagement is amplified by class inequities.”

Enough said.