Reading and seeding, and a dirty wet dog

When I was sick I couldn't read much, my attention span and reading comprehension were not good. Watching TV was okay, and reading the news on the internet was okay too, so they became my obsessions when I wasn't out walking with Hapi. But when all the news was the same I eventually lost my obsession with it, going hours at a time with not looking or even thinking about it. I carried on phone conversations with a few friends that were largely about telling jokes and making funny. That was good, sometimes I got off the phone hurting from laughing so much. My magazine subscriptions sustained me because the articles were short, I could put them down after only a few moments of reading.

When I got better the weather did too so I was out getting my garden ready for planting, which won't start seriously until mid-May. I started some seeds indoors and all my south and west facing window sills were littered with a mish mash of plastic containers of seeds. I save seeds year over year but I had to order a few new ones. As it turns out a whole lot of people who never gardened before are now getting ready to garden so the seed companies are inundated with orders. 

Usually I buy Vesey's seeds and they are readily available at a couple of local animal feed stores and farm markets. But this year Vesey's focussed on individual online orders and did not send any seeds to the usual stores so I had to go online too. They are over a month behind in fulfilling orders and yesterday when I went onto their website to see where they were at with shipping, there was a notice that they were no longer accepting orders. They cut it off only three days after I placed my order, so I am just barely in under the wire. I knew they'd be slow so I didn't bother ordering anything that had to be started right away.

Some of the seeds that I started were over five years old (I bought them in 2015, which means they are from the 2014 crop). Every last one of them sprouted! I wanted three plants so I planted nine seeds, and now I have nine seedlings. Yesterday I hauled a shelving unit out of the basement that I had previously attached grow lights to. It took most of the day to set up but now I can put most of the seedlings under the grow lights instead of constantly moving them from south to west windows and back again. A bit more expensive and it makes my tiny crowded living room even tinier and more crowded, but hopefully less work.

After two days of being cooped up due to very bad weather Hapi and I got out for two walks yesterday. She drove me crazy over those two days. She likes to stay outdoors during the daytime even in bad weather, but towards the later afternoon she gets very impatient with me not coming out for a walk so she is constantly at the door, in and out, tracking the mud and snow in with her. I had several towels on drying racks because each time she came in I'd try to wipe off the worst of it and the towels got soaked. It was a huge relief for both of us to get back to walking again.

Over those two days I called some friends on the west coast that I hadn't talked to in a long time. They were wanting to know about our recent mass shooting, and whether I lived near where it happened. Lately in the news they refer to it as "the rampage", which I think is an apt term. So I think I will start using it instead of "mass shooting". April 2020: the pandemic and the rampage. 

Yesterday I got a surprise phone call from another friend out west who I had neglected to call, that was really nice. She is an odd bird, but we have a lot in common and can sit around having odd conversations endlessly. She also had been sick for a long time, about a month earlier than I was. We compared notes and thought we both had the same thing but didn't know whether it was covid or not. She said that because she lives with one of her daughters and two grandchildren she wore a mask the entire time she was sick and stayed in her bedroom as much as possible. Nevertheless her daughter and grandkids did eventually come down with it too. But she said that what was odd was that while her daughter was just as sick as she was, it hardly affected the young grandkids at all.

Oh yes, I started out talking about reading and where I intended to go with that was to mention a book that I am reading now called The Invention of Yesterday, which I am very much enjoying. The author, Tamim Ansary, is an old Afghan-American hippy with a very interesting perspective on the history of human civilization, and also a good sense of humour and casual style of writing. My brother told me about this book, and I am recommending it to anyone who has an interest in such a topic.

Pandemic questions

There is a push on now to reopen economies worldwide. China was the first, other countries are eager to join them. I find this interesting.

First of all, the idea of an "economy", and that it is so important that we need to get back to the way it was before, even if it puts our health or the health of others at risk.

Second of all, in parallel with this push is the speculation or discussion of how we could do things differently, since the pandemic has highlighted some serious flaws in our "economies".

Among those flaws are:
- the economic inequalities that make some people more vulnerable to disease and death (homelessness, lack of access to healthcare, domestic abuse, the struggles of low income single mothers to survive, not to mention all the other low income folks, etc),
- the way we care for our elders (nursing homes as hotbeds of disease due to inadequate care, isolation and low paid care workers), and
- the inadequate preparation for almost any kind of large scale emergency (lack of both equipment and protocols), even though we have had plenty of learning opportunities in the recent past.

I'm sure there's more. But the point is that many people are hopeful that now that those flaws and inadequacies have been exposed, we will work toward addressing them. A lot of solutions have been proposed. Universal basic income, better funded universal healthcare, much better funded social housing, better urban public transportation systems, better this, better that.

What I wonder is, in our rush to get back to the way things used to be, how much room is there really for any kind of reform? I seriously doubt that there is any room at all. We want our economies back to the way they were, people working and spending to support business, with a little extra toward public amenities.

During this pandemic we have seen a resurgence of the natural world and an improvement in levels of pollution and environmental damage. We are not driving and burning carbon-based fuels nearly as much and that is a positive in the battle against human-caused climate change. But really, how do we make room for continuing those improvements when all we really want is "to get back to normal"?

I hope that there are enough vocal activists to clamour for lasting change.
I hope elders will resist harder to being pushed into inadequate nursing homes.
I hope healthcare and personal support workers will push for more adequate pay, given how necessary their work is.
I hope governments will wake up to those concerns.

In this emergency governments have spent massively to get through it, large amounts of public money are being spent on things that only a few months ago politicians and public service administrators would have told us were just not possible, we just couldn't afford it, not even on a temporary basis.

The thing about government budgets is, it depends on your priorities and public values. Do we keep business on life support, or people? Do we recognize the real dangers of inequalities or do we pay lip service, saying that "these things take time"?

I think we don't have time on our side. We have used it all up.

April: Sun, Mud and Teeny Tiny Flowers

My front lawn is covered in little blue flowers and a single wild violet. They weren't there last year but they are now. Covid blues.

It was one of those weekends, prefect warm sunny weather. It always strikes me as odd when we have summery warm weather but the trees are still bare of leaves. An April phenomenon.

Since they moved the date to change over from Standard to Daylight Savings time, March is kind of like that too; it seems odd to have sunlight in the evening when there is still snow on the ground.

On Saturday I thought I'd take Hapi out onto the dykes, I called a friend to see if she wanted to come too with her dog. As it worked out she wasn't available until the evening so I ended up going twice, in the morning and the evening.

On the morning walk we ran into one of the Reservoir dogs and his owners. Owen is a Newfoundland/Bernese Mountain Dog a little younger than Hapi but much bigger and in a more critical state of health. I recognized him from a distance, his 'Mom' always wears a red winter coat and he's a huge black dog: hard to miss. Owen saw us and plainly was very excited. He started lumbering towards us and then became so overwhelmed by excitement that he started howling. It was amusing and endearing.

It seems that everyone wanted to go out on the dykes this weekend, lots of people trying to maintain a safe physical distance. Since there is a fairly wide path on top of the dyke and a parallel road along the land-side of the dyke, it is not that hard to do but it does mean you have to be constantly on the watch for people approaching you and which side of the trail or roadway they are walking on.

Of course, all bets are off with the dogs, even on leash they hunger for contact with their fellows and have no understanding of social distancing. Owen and Hapi had a brief reunion and then acted as if they didn't know each other at all, a fairly common doggy behaviour.

Later I met my friend and her dog in a parking lot near the dyke and we set out. I thought it was going to be a fairly brief walk but we ended out being out there for a long time, following a circuit that we knew existed but hadn't been on before.

Hapi found not one but two mud holes to wallow in. When she emerged from the first one she had changed her colouring, instead of a white-ish underbelly she now was completely black from her midline down. The second mud hole at first looked promising as a clear water pond that she could clean up in, but instead she got stuck in the mud under the water and I had to go down and drag her out. Oh boy.

When we got home she was really stinky, muddy and wet, and she went to bed in the basement right after her supper because she was so tired from the long walk. In the morning her bedding was as stinky, muddy and wet as she was the night before. Laundry time.

Usually I would get her groomed in late March/early April but since that didn't happen her fur is thick and too matted to brush out now. So I spent an hour cutting the muddy matted fur out, chasing her around the back yard with my scissors. The job was exhausting, I quit after an hour not because we were done but because I physically couldn't do any more. It doesn't look too bad, but there are enough missed tufts of fur sticking out that I will probably tackle it again when the weather gets better.

She looks less shaggy but she's still stinky.

Malt Bread II

I baked the Malt Bread last night, had a toasted slice this morning. Needs a bit more sugar, as my brother's partner had written in the margin of the recipe.

Yesterday we got two (!!) Emergency Alerts from the RCMP, warning us of another shooting incident and then telling us it was over. As it turned out there were actually 4 incidents around Halifax that they had to investigate, 3 were false alarms and the 4th ended with a couple of arrests but no injuries or deaths. But at least they seemed to have learned something from last weekend. I'll definitely put up with Emergency Alerts even if they are false alarms. Hapi's afternoon walk got postponed as a result but that's okay, for me at any rate. Hapi wasn't so happy about it.

There was a virtual vigil last night, I listened to part of it. There's only so many speeches and so much sad music that I can deal with. When I did take Hapi for her walk around the neighbourhood I wore a red bandanna face mask in honour of mourning and saw many red hearts and flags hanging from or displayed in windows. Several people hung out Nova Scotia tartan scarves by their doors.

Last week I was so happy to be well again and able to get out of the house and enjoy the beginnings of Spring, this week it's been shock, anger and grief. I don't know what next week will bring.

I've been listening to a lot of John Prine lately, sad loss to Covid-19. Here's one of my favourites:

That's How Every Empire Falls

NovaScotiaStrong

Satisfactory communication

Yesterday I listened to a radio interview with someone with expertise on RCMP history who was discussing how the RCMP handled the April 18-19 shootings. Unfortunately I did not catch the name of the person being interviewed but he seemed to know what he was talking about. He discussed problems the RCMP has within its organization and how that may have impacted policing of the incident negatively. A lot of people here believe that too many victims lost their lives because the RCMP used Twitter to broadcast warnings about the killer on the loose, and hardly a single person in the area regularly tunes in to Twitter. This is not a Twittering culture here.

It is bad enough to have such a horrible thing going on at such a horrible time, but to add lives lost due to bungling is just too much to bear. Yesterday at the RCMP news conference about their ongoing analysis of the incident, when asked about why Twitter was used, Chief Superintendent Leather said he was satisfied with how the RCMP conducted communications with the public. He said they were preparing to use the national Alert Ready system when the killer was shot dead and there was no further need to communicate. I don't know how he can feel satisfied with the police communication with the public when hardly any of the affected public got the message. He said that the RCMP use Twitter because that is the best way to communicate with "the media" who can share the information. As if getting the message out to residents to stay inside was the responsibility of the media, not the police.

According to the interviewed person yesterday (oh how I wish I'd caught his name!) the RCMP have a lot of internal problems to deal with, low morale and understaffing being among them. He said he had no criticism of the officers involved who were doing their best to cope with a dysfunctional organization and to actually "serve and protect" the communities they were assigned to, but they were seriously hampered by lack of resources and bungling at higher levels of the hierarchy of power. Corporals Stevenson and Morrison should never have had to face the killer without backup. Communication was most definitely not "satisfactory".

April is the cruelest month

I'm feeling groggy this morning. I should be out with Hapi but I am still trying to wake up. The rain has stopped and now it is windy and cold, after a really lovely weather day yesterday.

I am trying not to dwell on recent events but it's hard. Right now people are angry that the RCMP used Twitter to warn folks about what was happening, but only a few people around rural Nova Scotia use Twitter. Some people died because the more widespread national Alert Ready system was not used, or even Facebook. This province has the lowest rate of internet access in the country; most of the inaccessibility is rural and in particular the area where the murders took place. So why Twitter?

Some local people took it upon themselves to go on the phone and call as many people as possible, but they did not know the crucial piece of information that the killer was dressed as a Mountie, so they said things like "don't open your door to anyone except a cop." How frustrating!

In other news, the crows are completely absent now. Busy elsewhere raising families. The two blue jays that were scarfing down half the birdseed at the feeder have relaxed a bit, now they just take seeds for themselves. I hope that means their hungry offspring are now grown up and not that they are gone for other more unfortunate reasons.

A local grey squirrel has been coming by, but whenever I see it I chase it off with a broomstick. It's not that I object to grey squirrels, but that it tips the feeder over and dumps half the seed on the ground. I kinda do object to grey squirrels—they are crowding out the native red squirrels—but it's not really their fault, they just do what they have to do to survive.

A friend sent me a link to a Roy Zimmerman parody of The Lion Sleeps Tonight called The Liar Tweets Tonight, a bit of humour in a bitter time. From there I ended up watching a video of Bonnie Raitt and John Prine singing Angel From Montgomery last November. Unrelated, but bittersweet.

May day May day

The human world was more or less normal just a little while ago. We were rampaging through our environment destroying habitats and living things at our usual pace, a few among us were warning of dire trouble if we continued in this way. We worried about the economy and profits and wages, somehow that seemed way more important than the burning of the Amazonian rain forest or the warming of our oceans or the melting of distant glaciers. This was life as usual. One day we would all have solar panels and wind turbines and the destruction would halt, we would save all those poor animals. And the wars, well, it was ever thus. Refugees should mostly go home and face the music, we could only afford to take a few of them in.

In January we heard there was an epidemic of some sort in China, the other side of the world, and they were locking up whole cities. Those Chinese! How extreme! In February it was creeping out of China, it had a name, Covid-19, because apparently it first appeared in 2019 and we were just unaware of it. We were starting to take it seriously, this might be a game changer. In March it was here. People were scrambling, local governments were scrambling. Okay, now it's a pandemic.

Meanwhile, a bunch of oil-producing companies decide to have themselves a little trade war. Trade wars have become popular of late, so why not? Locally we benefit from lower gas prices, a nice bonus in a worrisome time, although I don't think the people in the oil-producing provinces saw it like that. Albertans were already underwater with house mortgages and job losses, a price war definitely was not a bonus for them. But hey, the people battling against pipelines running through their lands could relax a bit, it was now too expensive to build those pipelines, protests or not.

The pandemic settles in bigtime. Physical distancing, self isolation, shortages of personal protection equipment in hospitals, shutting of borders, daily talks from our political leaders admonishing us to stay strong, and so on. Then the bad news, Covid-19 running wild in nursing homes, elders dying like miserable flies, all alone and separated from families. The care they received was barely adequate in the good times, woefully absent now. The careworkers paid so badly that they have to work multiple jobs to stay afloat, thereby spreading the contagion amongst the most vulnerable. Whoops. Is our social system not working so good? Someone said you can measure a civilization by how well it takes care of its most vulnerable (or words to that effect)… is that what's happening here?

Here in my little corner of the world all hell breaks loose over the weekend: a lone gunman kills a bunch of people, some with malice aforethought and some very randomly, wrong place wrong time. A trail of devastation, burned houses burned cars and so many hearts utterly broken. They initially said they had him in custody but that wasn't true, they shot him dead and thensome. Is it any wonder?

Okay, this incident pales in comparison to the fighting going on in other parts of the world. Yemen is still at war, terrible things are happening in India and elsewhere, exacerbated by pandemic. Last night I heard that the price of oil dropped below zero, well below zero. Oilmen are paying people to take the so-called black gold off their hands, we are drowning in the stuff. Governments are literally printing money to pay people to buy groceries and other necessities. Amazon is hiring a hundred thousand new employees to keep up with their vastly expanded online business. I have an Amazon Prime membership which is supposed to entitle me to 2-day delivery service (around here that's more like 4-day, but who's counting), now I am lucky to get 2-month delivery service. As if Jeff B really needs the money.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, it is absolutely hysterical. Who'da thunk a bloody virus would lay us this low? And this fast? Can we say House of Cards? The doomsayers said it would be our dependence on oil bringing on dramatic climate change and a devastated environment that we would succumb to. Well, the environment is doing just fine now, thank you very much. Left field, left field, we're all out in a left field.

May Day is just around the corner, Happy May Day!

So much for peace and quiet

Well this was a helluva weekend. I am not sure what to say about it, all of a sudden the pandemic takes a back seat. They say this was the largest 'mass shooting' event in Canadian history, not an historic event you really want to be part of.

All of the Atlantic provinces are small, none of them much larger in population than a small city. We are less than a million here, mostly rural or living in small towns. Also, this is probably one of the oldest European settlements in North America, being one of the more easterly locations and all. So old rural settlements being what they are, everybody knows everybody, one way or another. It's just one big small town.

I knew nothing about what was going on when I took Hapi for her morning walk. But in the middle of it I got a text from the young student living next door to me, E, who asked if I wanted some turnips. We carried on a text conversation from there, this that and the other thing. I went to buy eggs from a local farm. Just as I got home she texted that maybe I shouldn't take Hapi out again, but just stay home. She included a photo of the killer and his car, who was still on the loose and headed more or less in our direction.

As soon as I got home I turned on the radio. Gone was the non-stop Covid-19 reporting, even the Prime Minister's daily talk was off the local airwaves. Now it was the blow-by-blow police chase with warnings to stay home, go hide in the basement if necessary. E texted me that a cop get shot in front of her boyfriend's mom's house. Very shortly after that the radio reported that the man had been caught. There were multiple victims but the RCMP would not be talking about it until 6pm.

I went on the internet, and sure enough, there were already reports in the UK and the USA about what was happening in our little province, a lot of speculation and precious little hard facts. The CBC said they would only report what they could verify was actually true, but there was plenty of speculation swirling around.

So this morning they are reporting at least 17 dead, including one RCMP officer and the killer himself, in a broad swath over half the province. What a horrific tragedy!

As far as the pandemic is concerned, many provinces are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, the numbers of positive tests and dead are starting to flatten or diminish. Our province is still peaking, although not as badly as some others. Like some other provinces, half or more of the dying are in nursing homes, pointing out the glaring need for reform in how we care for elders. A lot of holes in the fabric of our culture are coming to light in the glare of the pandemic.

But a mass shooting is unfathomable. Perhaps it points to yet another hole in the fabric, I don't know, too soon to tell. But it surely adds to the already big burden of shock and grief around here.

Hapi is better and other news

While Hapi had a bit of a slow start yesterday, she was her old self on our walks, morning and afternoon. However, she did not poop and I was concerned about her gut being not quite up to snuff so I withheld her food. By early evening she was beside herself trying to communicate how hungry she was, dancing around on the deck, making playful lunges at me and twirling around on the spot, all the while making pointed glances at where her food bowl should be. Quite comical.

I kept telling her that until I saw her doing a healthy poop, I was very reluctant to feed her. Finally I relented and gave her one cup of food (she normally gets four cups). She gobbled it down and continued with her demonstrations of hunger, I had to go inside and try not to look out the window at her, she was being so relentless. But finally she went out into the backyard and did a little poop. I immediately gave her another cup of food as a reward.

It was kind of funny, the malamute website I had been consulting mentioned malamute humour, how they maintain it right up to the very end, and I think I just saw a demonstration of that. Her efforts to communicate her feelings to me made me laugh, not at her hunger but at her good-humoured method of showing me what she wanted.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We were walking down the street yesterday and I stopped to chat with a woman I am 'nodding friends' with. She still has a job but is feeling the stress of isolation. This was by far our longest chat ever. I kind of relate to her because she is the single parent of five boys, most of whom have grown up and moved out. We talked about the second oldest who is planning his wedding for next year. I know him because he used to do snow shovelling for me and I am happy for him, a sweet boy.

She told me a bit of street gossip—I'm always the last to hear that sort of thing—about a resident of one of the low-rent apartment buildings who allegedly has been diagnosed with 'the corona'. It was a particularly nasty story, and it brought home to me the shame involved in being diagnosed with 'the corona', like being diagnosed with a venereal disease due to 'promiscuity'. She also talked about her struggle with smoking and how it was particularly difficult at this time. She figures it costs her close to twenty bucks a day, which she can ill afford. Boy I'm glad I quit that habit when it was still relatively cheap!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I made a round of calls to friends as a kind of check-in, one friend owns one of Hapi's oldest and best friends Ava, a Formosan Mountain Dog ('Taiwan Dog' or 'tugou'). We decided to get together for a dog walk on a trail that was wide enough for physical distancing so that the two dogs could get together. We are relaxing the rules a bit to let the dogs have some social time together, they can't very well call each other on the phone.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There are two blue jay parents that come to my bird feeder now and just hoover up the seeds. They don't stop to crack them open, they just fill their gullets and fly away. Watching the two of them is like watching a couple of jack hammer operators drilling through concrete sidewalks. They look frantic. I had a bit of a conversation with one of them the other day, it was looking in the window at me and started doing the head bobbing thing that birds do when they are courting. I bobbed back and we did that a couple of times before it went at the birdfeeder. Maybe it was making sure I was okay with its jackhammer routine?

The street is very quiet now that the blue jays are too busy feeding youngsters to stop and call and the crows have temporarily vacated. There are a couple of singles still around but all the couples are busy with nests at their roost in the next town over.

Heroes and others

Without a doubt healthcare workers and personal support workers are doing heroic work, and deserve recognition for their courage and efforts.

But let us also be clear that heroes won't save us, it takes all of us doing the unsung work of physical distancing and self isolation to defeat the pandemic.

Governments support us and encourage us in that work, but governments won't save us either. It is all of us, individually and together, who will save us.

Physical distancing is complicated, it takes effort and perseverance and careful practice to carry through relentlessly. Self isolation is hard work for a fundamentally social species and hard on us physically, emotionally and spiritually. Carrying on in the face of physical, financial and emotional difficulty takes a kind of heroism in itself.

Let's keep in mind that our hard work and suffering is not in vain, it is important work.

Just past the peak

And from an interesting covid-19 website, some good news: the world may have peaked in deaths due to covid-19 on April 13, 2020.

Not a good time

Hapi gave me a good scare last night. She was fine all day, we did a long walk in the morning and a short walk in the late afternoon and then around about suppertime I saw that her rear end was a bit of a mess. Lately she has started straining to poop. I tried to clean her up. I don't know if I made matters worse or she was upset with my interference, at any rate she went into her dog house and wouldn't come out.

Later in the evening she wanted to go into the basement which is her usual routine after supper, but just before my bedtime I tried to get her to come upstairs and go outside for one last pee. She just lay there staring at the wall. I went back upstairs, poured myself a drink and browsed my favourite malamute website looking for advice.

This morning I coaxed her outside but she returned to the basement after relieving herself. It is a cold but sunny day, she normally wouldn't come inside again until evening. Now I am watching her closely. Is she really sick or just a little sick?

On the one hand I want to call the vet, and on the other hand I want to let her be for awhile. But it's Friday, if I don't call the vet today my next chance won't be until Monday. The malamute website said that mals want to stay in control at the end of life and as much as possible we should let them be. Don't call the vet unless it's really necessary, and they will let you know when that is.

Last night when she wouldn't come upstairs my mind was running through worst case scenarios, it was not pleasant. This is not a good time to lose her, as if any time is a good time.

After a bit of a lie-in this morning, Hapi was good to go. We went for a long walk on the dyke and Harvest Moon Trail in a cold wind and she trotted along happily as if nothing had happened.

Evanescence

I don't know how this works at all.

The last couple of days have been really nice weather-wise, sunny with temperatures around +13C. Not exactly summer-warm but definitely not winter-cold. I've been getting better by leaps and bounds, my old energy levels coming back, the scary chest pain receding (my neighbour wanted me to get it checked out but I will never ever again go to the hospital to get chest pain 'checked out' unless I am in the midst of a full-blown heart attack), and the little tiny flowers emerging from the ground.

I made my first foray into a store (wearing one of my fancy masks). It involved a twenty minute wait outside in the sunny parking lot and then being admitted and served by two staff members, like I was royalty. All I wanted was some potting soil, I felt a little guilty when one of them said, "That's it? That's all you want?" I scanned the entire store behind the two gentlemen and wished I'd brought a list. Silly me.

Then another stop at a store where the owner cracked the door and asked what I wanted. I did have a list for that store, she recorded my list in her memory and closed the door to go fetch it all. A few moments later a shopping basket of my goods was placed on a stool outside the door and I was invited to tap the little machine through the window with my card. How amazing!

I love the way the purple grades to blue

Hapi wanted to visit the man in the used bookshop next door so we went in there too. We have a bit of a tradition; he offers her an organic dog biscuit and she turns it down. This time she took the biscuit and tried to bury it under a low bookshelf. She doesn't do organic.

After a walk on the dyke, where we met a man with a great dane puppy that towered over Hapi, I drove home with all my goodies, including the barley malt syrup for malt bread.

What I don't understand is the sheer joy of it all.

It comes and goes, but all day I just kept having these moments of sheer peace and joy. When I was talking to the bookshop man I was trying to explain it but couldn't really do it. He said he'd had so many anxious people stop by that it was nice to hear that someone was doing okay with it all.

He mentioned that because of his business he was on facebook and sometimes that really depressed him. I told him that I had quit facebook before all this happened and now was glad to not be exposed to it. He said you're right, you really don't want to know what's going on there.

Not to say that it's all evil, I'm sure there is a lot of good going on too. But I failed utterly to filter out the evil when I was on it and now staying sane is so precarious that battling evil is just not something I want to do.

I really like my little peace-and-joy world. Temporary for sure, but one shouldn't dismiss something just because it is temporary. Everything is temporary, even us.

Malt bread

Memories of malt

It's been a week of birthdays, starting with mine and going on to a brother, a friend, a daughter-in-law and a son.

On my brother's birthday I phoned him and he mentioned that his partner had just made some malt bread remarkably similar to the malt bread our mother used to buy on weekends. I asked for the recipe and a few days later he sent me a photo of the recipe, marked up with his partner's adjustments and comments. I have all but one of the ingredients in stock, I will have to go on a bit of a hunt to find the missing ingredient, to wit, the malt for which the bread is named. Strictly speaking the bread should be baked in an empty apple juice can but it will work in any old bread pan.

Locally we have a malt house where they actually make malted barley which they then sell to craft breweries; they also sell to customers at their small brewpub (now closed). But their malt is a dry powder and the recipe calls for a liquid extract. I could probably find out the equivalency, but first I'll look for the liquid version. Apparently you can buy it at wine and beer kit stores, but in much larger quantities than I really want. And I don't even know if any of them are open for business now, it seems unlikely. My brother suggested a natural food store, I'll try that first.

I can't wait to try it out.

Later: I called the local natural food store. They didn't have malt extract but they did have barley malt syrup. Dr. Google says, 'same-same'.

Crows at work

The main purpose of this post is the photo above. I went out on my back deck a couple of days ago when the weather was kind of cold, grey and windy with periods of showers and flurries. Behind my fenced yard there's a field, half of which gets mowed and half of which doesn't, my view is of the unmowed half. So right now there's lots of tall dead grass flattened by winter storms.

I saw a crow walking around out there and after a few moments realized it was looking for nesting material. I'd seen it fly by earlier with a hank of grass and now I was watching it harvesting the grass. It seemed very picky, tugging at one grass stem after another looking for whatever qualities it deemed perfect for a nest.

Keyhole view of the field out back, sans crow

I then thought, 'Oh, I should photograph this,' but of course by the time I had gone into the house to get my cell phone and then returned, the bird was done harvesting. Just as I aimed the camera it flew off behind a garage. I quickly aimed the camera at the sky on the other side of the building and caught the bird flying away a beakful of grass.

At this time of year the birds are endlessly entertaining. Sometimes the birds find me entertaining; they hang around the branches surrounding the feeder staring in my window at me.

Cardinals are much shyer and really don't want to know who puts the seeds in the feeder, but the jays and finches are definitely interested.

Chickadees aren't curious because they already know; they consider it their job to whistle at me when the feeder is empty.

I hope I have enough birdseed to last until the parent birds start bringing their offspring around to teach them about bird feeders.

Easter Sunday

The traditional greeting is Happy Easter but I am going to refrain. Some of us are happy, some are not, and both are appropriate. But Easter is about hope being fulfilled, there will be a good future ahead of us, so I will add my voice to that sentiment even though not all of us feel that way.

On the plus side, we have a temporary reprieve from environmental degradation, air and water pollution are temporarily on hold allowing for nature to regroup. On the minus side, it is temporary, virtually unopposed climate change marches on.

On the plus side, we have governments worldwide reconsidering political and social values, and how we might go forward honouring those values. On the minus side, many political entities are flailing around making things far worse.

On the plus side, people are really working together to be helpful and supportive and there are many amazing acts of kindness going on. On the minus side, some folks still haven't gotten the message and they are depressing and outraging the rest of us. Not to mention some supreme acts of selfishness.

On the plus side, it is Spring in the northern hemisphere and we can feel it. On the minus side, covid-19 restrictions prevent many Springtime traditions and activities from being carried out.

On the plus side, if you're reading this you're still here! On the minus side, … [fill in the blanks]

A lot of jokes and funny comments on life with covid-19 are making the rounds, and I appreciate it. A book club friend emails dark jokes on a regular basis, a psychotherapist friend has been collecting and emailing psychotherapist jokes around the topics of grumpiness and frustration.

I'll leave you with a sample:

My Self-Isolation Quarantine Diary 

Day 1 – I Can Do This!!  Got enough food and wine to last a month!

Day 2 – Opening my 8th bottle of Wine.  I fear wine supplies might not last!

Day 3 – Strawberries:  Some have 210 seeds, some have 235 seeds.  Who Knew??

Day 4 – 8:00 pm.  Removed my Day Pajamas and put on my Night Pajamas.

Day 5 – Today, I tried to make Hand Sanitizer.  It came out as Jello Shots!!

Day 6 – I get to take the Garbage out.  I'm So excited, I can't decide what to wear.

Day 7 – Laughing way too much at my own jokes!!

Day 8 – Went to a new restaurant called "The Kitchen".  You have to gather all the ingredients and make your own meal.  I have No clue how this place is still in business.

Day 9 – I put liquor bottles in every room.  Tonight, I'm getting all dressed up and going Bar hopping

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Day 10 – Struck up a conversation with a Spider today.  Seems nice.  He's a Web Designer.

Day 11 – Isolation is hard.  I swear my fridge just said, "What the hell do you want now?"

Day 12 – I realized why dogs get so excited about something moving outside, going for walks or car rides.  I think I just barked at a squirrel.

Day 13 – If you keep a glass of wine in each hand, you can't accidentally touch your face.

Day 14 – Watched the birds fight over a worm.  The Cardinals lead the Blue Jays 3–1.

Day 15 – Anybody else feel like they've cooked dinner about 395 times this month?

P.S. - The garbage was collected on my street at 2.00 pm yesterday, seven hours late. It wasn't really anyone's fault, the change was mandated back in 2019 and who knew that an extra week of garbage would be so huge? Most students left town in March after the last garbage collection, and landlords had to clear out the garbage they left behind. Usually there is a "Dump and Run" event at the university in late April or early May where a lot of that stuff is disposed of by the students themselves in a more orderly manner.

Feed the crows

So they changed our garbage collection day on us, to save money. We had to wait an extra week—normally collection is every two weeks— and change the day of the week too. But because our new weekday is Friday, and because the first collection on the new schedule was going to fall on Good Friday, the first new collection day was set for today, a Saturday.

Needless to say, some people didn't know about it and set their garbage out on the old regular day (a week ago Thursday). Some other people knew that it was now on a Friday so they set their garbage out last Friday. And finally, not only did they change the date they also changed the time, from 8am to 7am. Where formerly it was illegal to set your garbage out the night before (but many people did), now we are required to set it out the night before.

Well!

We all did that, including the formerly confused folks. And here it is 11am and all our garbage is still sitting out there with nary a garbage truck in sight.

The crows are having a field day.

A Four-Eagle Day

Yesterday another friend emailed that she was making cloth masks to give away and would anyone like one. I said I'd love one, two if she had enough. This morning we spoke on the phone and I told her I was sick and she said she'd leave the masks outside her front door. I went over to pick them up, now I have three sewn masks and a bunch of bandanas I can use so I have a great selection. Pandemic fashionista!

Hapi doesn't like walking up hill and neither do I for that matter. Since the university campus where I have been taking her is on a hillside it means we are both very tired when we get home. Today I took her in the car to the far end of the local dyke and we walked there. This is the perfect time, no wind, not cold, no bugs yet, and the grass on the dyke is dead and flattened by the winter, making for easy walking.

The sight lines were great I could see other people—if they were there—miles away. Not a single person in sight, I got to walk mask-free and Hapi was off leash. She did manage to find a pile of manure in a field which could have been a disaster, but for some reason she chose not to roll in it (whew!). I walked pretty slowly but even so I came home exhausted.

Eagle nest in tall tree, centre

On the road to the dyke you pass under a big tree with an eagle's nest in it, the nest has been there for a very long time. I saw one of the eagle parents sitting in the nest, another brood hatching. Later when I was walking on the dyke I saw four eagles circling in a column, the highest one looked like it could almost touch the sun. Wish I could have photographed that.

My brother's birthday was yesterday, I called him and we chatted for awhile. It seems you can't talk to anyone without bringing up you-know-what. Later I called a dog-walking friend and she said she had seen me out walking earlier in the day and had yahoo'ed at me but I didn't hear or see her. She is healthy and still goes out shopping at local small markets. She says all the markets have protocols in place to enforce physical distancing and she always meets people there to chat with from a distance. She is a firm believer in homeopathy and is taking a homeopathic remedy that she says will prevent you-know-what.

You'll see, she said, I am protected.

Okay, I said, We'll see.

When I told her my birthday was a couple of days ago, she wished me happy birthday and said, Now you're almost as old as me!

I laughed. She's past 85. I may never make it that far.

To test or not to test

My illness may be Covid-19. Turns out I may have been exposed 2-3 weeks ago, I don't know that for sure but it does explain a few things if I was. I had a phone appointment with my doctor and she said that while there is no longer a requirement for having travelled or been in close contact with someone who has travelled in order to get tested, there is still a requirement for having a fever greater than 38C and a cough. Since I don't have either symptom right now I probably could not get tested on my own, but as my doctor she could insist on me getting tested.

I said that I would rather not get tested. The reason is, if I test positive then I can't walk my dog and neither could anyone else. I would prefer, for purely selfish reasons, to continue to go for walks with her. My doctor said that as long as I was practicing physical distancing and I was self-isolating as much as possible then she was okay with that. However if any of my symptoms worsen, or new ones appear, she wanted to hear from me immediately. She also wanted me to let my neighbours know so that they could check on me as needed. That's okay by me.

I made a mask, and someone else also made a mask for me. So I now have enough masks for two walks a day. They're not N95 quality by any means, but I think that wearing a mask will alert other people to be careful around me. I see a few other people around town also wearing masks. I think it is a good idea, provided one is also practicing physical distancing and not going away from home unnecessarily.

In a way, finding out that I may already have the virus is helping to lower anxiety. I don't have to worry about it any more, it's already here. That may not actually be true, but it feels true so I am going with that. Who needs anxiety.

In other news, the doctor gave me the results of my sleep study test a couple of months ago. Turns out I have severe sleep apnea, but only when I am lying on my back. I have 'positional sleep apnea'. I actually already knew that and have done my best to not sleep on my back, but apparently during the test I spent an hour on my back. I'm kind of shocked by that. I don't need a CPAP machine but the doctor thinks I should try to arrange my bed so that I don't flip onto my back while asleep.

Yesterday was my birthday. My eldest son organized a zoom call and it was great, I really enjoyed it. Then later in the day I got email birthday wishes from someone I never expected to hear from again, and that was good too. Happy birthday to me!

My friend B who was in hospital was supposed to be transferred to a nursing home, but that didn't happen. Instead they moved her to another hospital quite a ways away. She is of course miserable about that but I talked to her the other day (she has a cell phone) and tried to tell her how much the world has changed since she first went into the hospital. You would be no better off anywhere else I said. Everything is changed, you would hardly recognize this town now I told her. Doesn't make her happy to know that but what can you do.

Sick thoughts

Somewhere out there, a young Goldfinch couple

I am tired of being sick, really tired of it.

A couple of days ago I noticed the 'Service Battery' notification on my laptop and started the process to do something about it. Among other things it involved running the battery down to nothing and leaving the laptop off overnight. Since I did not time things well, that meant a large part of one day and the following night. Now it's recharging but the 'Service Battery' notification is still there. Maybe it will go away when the battery is fully charged.

Having the laptop out of commission for most of the day I dug out a recently purchased but as yet unused Chromebook and started configuring that. Among other things it meant configuring my email and so I was more or less tied to email for the day. I have to say I am really tired of all my friends who crow about the amazing stuff they are doing in isolation. I feel like telling them all to just shut up.

One friend sent an email with pictures of the face mask she rigged up and I did kind of jump on her. Then I walked the dog and came back and wrote an apology. Haven't heard back. Think I'll stay away from email now that the Chromebook is setup and I'm done recalibrating the laptop battery.

The news is appalling. It's amazing how quickly the big issues of the day disappeared from the media, turns out they weren't so big after all. We're living in a century of huge life changing issues now. The pandemic is obvious, totally unexpected by all those predicters of future trends. Climate change was the one that was supposed to knock us off our feet, and in various localized ways that is happening. But the pandemic is everywhere, sudden, and having far reaching effects. It's not just people getting sick and dying, it's mass unemployment, markets crashing, politicians and medical experts taking over the airways, so on and so on. Maybe my parents' generation experienced something like this with the Great Depression followed by World War II, but that was kind of sequential, over a period of almost two decades. This is the whole nine yards all at once.

While writing this I am also corresponding with an old friend on the west coast who is a bit of a night owl. It's 8.30am here and 4.30am there. She has an online home business and she's an artist, her husband does kitchen installations and they live in a really nice coastal rural neighbourhood. Each home lot in the neighbourhood is over half an acre and surrounded by tall evergreen trees, the beach is a short hike away and there are lots of old logging road trails. So she's relatively well situated for self-isolation but she's living in a province that is pretty hard hit. She just told me a friend has Covid-19 and the friend's husband is in the ICU with it. You can live in paradise and still be vulnerable.

I phone another friend who lives in that same coastal rural neighbourhood and she has an underlying health condition in her lungs which will ultimately kill her. I won't be able to visit her again, so we talk on the phone regularly. I think I am suffering a bit of an oxygen deficit because after the call I am exhausted and out of air. Seems more tiring than walking the dog.

Anyway, she's a fairly devout Christian, if a bit eccentric about it, but she does firmly believe in an afterlife and feels sorry for people who don't. I keep quiet about my own beliefs, and I don't feel sorry for people who don't believe in an afterlife. Sometimes I think it would be nice to carry on in a brand new life after death, and sometimes I think, Oh give me a break, I'm done! Nighty-night.

She said she was pretty much reconciled with quitting this life except for one thing, she can't seem to get rid of her negative feelings about Trump. He really upsets her and she can get into quite a rant every time Trump says something obnoxious. I on the other hand think he is behaving according to expectation and only once did he upset me, after the Ukrainian flight was shot down over Iran and he said no American lives were lost. But that was personal (for me, not for him) and he didn't say anything unexpected.

In some ways he is a very stupid person and in other ways he is incredibly smart. I think that's what irritates people. I think a lot of what he says is deliberately done to keep folks off guard and he is wildly successful at that. Being ignored or treated as though he was inconsequential is the worst thing for him, so I try to maintain that attitude. He is consequential alright, but only because of his position, not because of any innate qualities. I try to explain my position to my friend but I don't think it helps, she still struggles with her perceived negativity. She wants to die in a state of benign acceptance and right now she can't do that.

Isolation does that to me too sometimes. I can spend days feeling benign acceptance and then suddenly descend into paranoia and upset. It's tough to claw your way back up again all by yourself. We're not really built for that.