I have not been reading. I have not been writing. But I have been doing enough research for a new book: Coping with Costco.

My daughter-in-law has been making weekly runs to Costco and to Loblaw, to keep Matt and me isolated and provided with food. Matt, of course, has doubled my food requirements and cooking but Costco offers (insists) on more than that. I am receiving an overage that is difficult for two people to consume. I find myself looking up zucchini, for heaven’s sake, to find out more ways to deal with it.

First, I have to convince my search engine that I really want zucchini and not some remote town in Italy or some sort of bowling game. This didn’t happen but when I looked up salmon I was offered a city in California and when I specified salmon with dill I was given salmon with molasses. One has to be adamant and persistent. so…zucchini:

Our favourite, most recently, has been zoodles. I have a manual spiralizer (cheaper) and Matt has been my very patient motor.We like zoodles with shrimp and pesto with lots of basil and garlic—no hardship to use the large economy size of pesto that Costco sells.But the problem was with the zucchini. We normally use two large or three medium size zucchini (and 4-6 large shrimp each) but that left us with a large bag of the vegetable still to use. That’s when I began googling for more cooking ideas. Years ago I had a Z cookbook and I have made pancakes and bread and muffins but I don’t want that many carbs or calories. I found patties without sugar and a minimum of Panko and made a side dish to accompany sliders. Then I made a large frittata that gave us brunch and leftover lunch a day or so later. You could make a quiche but again, it’s more carbs and cals.

Erma Romberg defined eternity as “two people and a ham.” I have applied her definition to cauliflower and cabbage, each often with a head bigger than mine. Costco excels in large heads. Cauliflower is easy now with ricing for stir-fry and mashing for the topping of Shepherd’s Pie,, plus roasting whole or in flowerets. You think you know all about cabbage because there’s the boarding house special, cabbage soup, also a Weight Watchers favourite, with zero calories, points or guilt. Oh, and then there’s holopochis (Ukrainian cabbage rolls). I didn’t make any of those. I made a dinner - yes- - with steamed cabbage and poached eggs, inspired by a long-ago diet. I love eggs and the egg yolk oozing over cabbage was to me delightful, served with roasted parsnips. Then I remembered coleslaw, the Jewish recipe with vinegar not mayo and it came in handy because I was out of romaine or spinach for a fresh salad. I still have some slaw left and I’m going to add grated apple (chopped in my mini-Cuisinart) and pecans, maybe a bit of honey, for a dessert salad because I’m also out of fruit.

All this is very time-consuming, and you know that it is anathema for me to throw out food. But I’m not ready to write a new cookbook.

Believe me, I am trying to hang on. Time has assumed a different quality, especially the finding of it. Normally at this time (whatever normal is) I will have had my swim at 6, followed by breakfast, be dressed and ready for a quick nap before I start work. Of course, before I swam, I will have checked the email and my lists, as i planned the day. Some days I even wrote my blog before swimming, depending on when I got up, between 4 and 5 a.m. Now the bad/good news is I am sleeping more. But I don’t seem to have more energy, less in fact, much less. I don’t seem to have the energy - or the interest—to take advantage of the wonderful cultural and intellectual treats available on all our techie services. I save them to refer to “later’ but I dont’ get around to them.

A friend tells me I can get an opera every evening. My head hurts too much constantly to focus on it nor on the weekly viewings of (filmed) Stratford Festival productions. Apart from my head, what would my son Matt do while I isolated myself from him for 3 or 4 hours? He has a limited attention span and a low threshold of boredom. I must keep him occupied, at my cost. In the past when he lived with me, I spent a lot of time teaching him (see The Book of Matthew (date) We were both younger, and my energy lasted longer than his did, so I could work around him, up to a point. He is the main reason I used to go on retreats to find unbroken time to read, think and write. I think if he had continued to live with me I would not have lived as long as I have and i would not have written much at all, except maybe a suicide note!

I was reconciled to it, I thought, because I had some control of my life and work. Art is not forgiving. If you produce, fine; if you don’t, who cares? Not that I could claim to be an artist, but I enjoyed being creative and there were ideas I wanted to play with. In my spare time.

I am guilty of a dreadful deadly sin.

Acedia (Latin, acedia "without care" (from Greek ἀκηδία) is the neglect to take care of something that one should do. It is translated to apathetic listlessness; depression without joy. It is related to melancholy: acedia describes the behaviour and melancholy suggests the emotion producing it. In early Christian thought, the lack of joy was regarded as a willful refusal to enjoy the goodness of God; by contrast, apathy was considered a refusal to help others in time of need.

(Acedia is currently defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as spiritual sloth, which would be believing spiritual tasks to be too difficult. In the fourth century, Christian monks believed acedia was not primarily caused by laziness, but by a state of depression that caused spiritual detachment.)