April Buddy Recap

I was trying to remember when in March the world changed – when covid went from ‘in another country’ to ‘Toronto epicentre.’ I’ve arbitrarily picked March 13, 2020 at the day as this was when city community centres were closed. Now some 60 days later rumour has it that some social restrictions will be loosened.

So April has been a month of adjusting to this new reality – one that isn’t going to change quickly even if the spread is contained – covid19 joins the ranks of diseases we will never be rid of. I’ve followed social distancing though I have not been isolation – I’ve met with friends for social distant walks, I’ve maintained some intimacy with a work-at-home fwb who drives – no ttc contamination risks.

I did cut back on my walks though – Mon Wed Fri became home isolation days to do deep housework – by deep I mean going through papers, drawers, boxes & purging endless things out of the house. It give be great joy to the the recycle bin emptied & that energy taken away.

Over the month my TOpoet.ca following blog grew to 390! The April WP map show my hits have come from 29 countries around the world. That USA & Canada now top the list, darn that covid19, but that India, Bangladesh & Kenya are still in the top 10 is a surprise. South Korea! Serbia! My Tumblr is at 265. Twitter up to 224 followers.

Picture Perfect continues to roll out. I’ve posted just over 25,000 of it so far. In the deep purge I did earlier in April I found manuscripts of my first two novels, written when I was living in Cape Breton. I’ve been slowly inputing, Allan Time, the oldest of them. I can manage two pages a day. Resisting edits is hard though. I will post it when I’m done with some comments The clearest thing is that my major writing style influence was the Buddy series (1929-37) by Howard R. Garis 🙂