Ever since COVID-19 hit, I had a feeling that there would come a day when I would be locked in for a 14-day quarantine. That day has come. Our son is attending university in Halifax NS, and the Canadian Maritime provinces have imposed an Atlantic Bubble. This means that anyone coming into the bubble from outside (like from Toronto) has to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival. Since we wanted to spend Thanksgiving with our son, we came out at the end of September and are now in lock-down.

Because we knew we’d have to go through this, we rented a place in downtown Halifax that’s about 10 blocks from his university and close to lots of restaurants and grocery stores that deliver. We found a cozy home that has a small yard, and is also on two floors.

That means my daily walking routine consists of a series of micro-walks. It’s about 60 steps for me to circle the garden, so if I do about 15 laps then I cover just over a km in about 10 minutes. My goal is to get 30 minutes of walking in per day, and 15 flights of stairs, so every hour I get up and do some laps around the house and up the stairs, and once a day I go outside and circle the garden for 15-20 minutes. Over the course of the day I can get in around 6000-7000 steps.

As I write this, it’s only day 4 of my 14 and when this is published I’ll still have a week to go. I’m also taking advantage of the enforced sit-in to catch up on some reading and to do a little armchair learning. I’m just hoping we don’t have a solid day of rain, because it would be really tedious circling the garden in mud, but so far so good.

The reward, of course, is that when this quarantine ends we can have a family meal and celebrate. Till then, I’ll be going round and round, and round and round, and round and round …..