It’s been all multiple offers all of the time, in recent years. The industry in Kingston has changed dramatically. Given that competition is so ubiquitous now, shouldn’t we give some thought to whether everyone is getting a fair shake?

September is going to bring a whole new set of worries to an already exhausted population. How on earth will we cope?

Here’s what’s bugging us right now, practices we think just aren’t smart, or fair.

Open houses are okay again, says the Ontario government . We think they’re making a mistake.

The reorganization of lower Princess St is well-intended, and some form of it may well be necessary for our public health and the economic well-being of the city’s commercial core, but what’s there now is a disaster.

One blazing hot day I came upon a beast, a slab of black bear big as a garden shed, in a clearing of gorse and sand I don’t know where, like something out of nightmare or myth…

Everyone has a take on the news, a position. I just didn’t expect (and why, I’m not sure) for The Globe’s to be in such stark opposition to the plain facts.

The third in a series of microfictions in which I try to give an alternative life , a new story, to something lost or abandoned in the Inner Harbour neighbourhood. It’s found art, sort of. And this one has ghosts in it.

The world seems to change almost hourly. Things are fluid, as they say. Yesterday I listened to Doug Ford's announcement that stores in Ontario can re-open next Tuesday. I was sitting on my front step looking out at the empty street, wondering if it might rain, and I’ve got to say that right then it seemed a mighty dramatic step. To be honest, I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it. But it does mean, I’m positive, that the real estate world will become instantly much more active.

I don’t know how this recliner love seat got down beside the K & P trail. Just dumped over the fence of one of the Montreal St houses that back onto this stretch, is a distinct possibility. But sometimes it’s going to be richer than that.

I’d hoped to write much more than I have the past six or seven weeks. But the attention span just isn’t there. The drive to sit down at a desk for hours and to sustain a mood, a space. And so I’m settling for these wind sprints. Settling isn’t the right word, perhaps. I like this exercise of linking a narrative to an image. Of trying to have it feel real and alive. To take on unfamiliar voices and place them front and centre on a site that’s supposed to sell houses.

We’ve all settled by now into new (and completely alien) routines. Some of us are handling it better than others. Some of us despair, and some of us never want to go back. We all agree, though, that it’s pretty damn weird out there.

Here are our latest thoughts on the essential service designation granted to realtors. We think that people should be staying home except in urgent circumstances. The ground is shifting under our feet every day is how it feels, and this is no time for complacency.

Sadiqa de Meijer has a new collection of poems - The Outer Wards. And it’s something special. I’ve had it on the arm of a favourite chair for a couple of weeks now. It reminds me of what I’m missing out there on the streets of this very special neighbourhood.

I listened a lot to Baxter Dury’s dad, Ian, back when I was a kid trying to hang tough in a village just outside Oxford. If you’d told me then how forty years I’d be a million miles away listening to this stuff and flogging houses, I’d have looked at you funny.

Christ, so much has changed in the last few weeks. Hell, the last few hours. I think often these days on how all over the world we’re sitting around our kitchen tables with our kids and/or our loved ones every night and having pretty much exactly the same conversation.

I’ll get right to the point. Cheri and I will not be showing any more houses, or listing any more houses, until this crisis eases. We just don’t think there are safe ways to conduct business at the moment. And we think that unless there is some absolutely critical reason you have to buy or sell, then you should sit out this spring market.

When I was a kid my parents often took me and my sisters over to Shotover Hill on weekend mornings, not far from where we lived in Oxfordshire. It’s an ancient forest and hill, with a decent view of the shire. A Royal Forest too, whatever that is, until the 17th Century. And when they were in season, we’d pick blackberries up there.

The Everly is Kingston’s newest downtown restaurant. And one of its best. A midcentury theme and an impressive menu has transformed an old bank building, softening the space into something resembling the room you’d eat in every day in if you could.

The snow is throwing itself around outside the office window. And while we should be filing paperwork and proofing copy, instead we’ve been playing each other songs and videos from our youth.