On my camera roll

Red peonies

Iris

Mallow?

I thought this one was a weed but I left it alone to see what kind of weed it was. Now it is covered in these pale pink delicate flowers.

The last lilac flower

Tree, saved from the chainsaw

The parks maintenance guys were clearing out trees to beautify the park, but we dog walkers asked them not to clear out this one. The bald eagles sometimes like to perch here to get a better view of the fish.

A pandemic summer in the city

I had an interesting phone conversation with my son in Toronto last night. He has two sons who each graduated this spring, one from elementary and the other from high school. The older boy is wildly successful, he has landed two jobs for the summer and been accepted into his first and third choices of universities. He is even offering to contribute toward his family's household expenses. One job he does mostly for fun (many of his friends are there so it is an opportunity to hang out) and the other is a renovation job that will allow him to learn a bunch of useful skills.

The other son is struggling with emotional issues, and the enforced isolation of pandemic times in a big city has exacerbated some of his problems. But at the same time it has pushed the boy toward attempting to find solutions on his own since the usual fallbacks of counselling and therapy are just not there anymore. His parents are frazzled but starting to see a glimmer of hope.

Like many, my son is working from home and finding it stressful, but at the same time he is settling into it and now dreading returning to the office at the end of the summer. Their usual summer getaway plans have all been foiled, local cottages are either unavailable or wildly expensive, and travelling to the Maritimes to visit a family cottage is not really feasible. So they must make the best of a summer in the city.

When they first settled in downtown Toronto my son and his wife invested in an old 8mm film projector to show movies outdoors on summer evenings. They lived on a street that was really a kind of back alley, across from all of the houses was a row of garages, so they projected movies they borrowed from the library onto a garage door and the audience sat on the kerb across from it sharing popcorn and ice cream.

I expect the old projector has been retired and they now have something a little more digital, the movies are now projected onto a large bedsheet hung in such a way that neighbours in adjacent backyards can view it as well. My son was describing the latest movie they watched which he said was "iconic" but I had never heard of it. He said that even though he is a director of a film industry company he was embarrassed to say he had never watched this particular film and felt he had to rectify that shortcoming.

We compared TV and movie watching menus. My son has a taste for dark-themed thrillers which I can barely stomach, however he says he can't watch that kind of thing anymore, mostly he watches comedy now. I guess reality has surpassed fiction and one most look elsewhere for relief. Currently he is watching "Community" on Netflix. I don't know if his change of taste is pandemic-related or age-related, he will be 50 next year. I've been watching very old TV shows that were always running in the background when I used to visit B in her basement apartment. They're corny as all get out.

My son's family have a new dog: when their previous dog Dobby (see my previous post) died, they swore they'd never get another one but less than a year later they did. The new dog is a young mixed breed female of medium size. Its antics are both comic and stress-inducing. The other day it captured a baby skunk in the back yard and attempted to throttle it to death. The dog got skunked, up close and very personal. The baby escaped and hopefully the dog learned a lesson, she was lucky that the parent skunk did not intervene.

Toronto has designated one of its less popular beaches as an off-leash area for dogs, so the whole family piles into the car on hot evenings to drive there. It's the closest thing to a summer vacation at the beach now.

Good ol' Main Street, there she goes

There's an interesting controversy going on here right now. With little fanfare or warning the town council is setting our Main Street as one direction only, starting July 1st. A parallel street will be set as one way only in the opposite direction. I heard about it at the Reservoir one day and went online to find out more and there was nothing. Not even on Facebook or the official town website. However I did read a comment on the Facebook page for the town about there being a petition against this new policy and already it had 800 signatures. Someone else commented that in a town of our size that indicated that hardly anyone was against it, but considering how few of us actually knew about the change let alone that there was a petition against it, kind of argues against that. Anyway, I've not heard anyone say they think it is a great idea, most people I've talked to think it is a disaster in the making.

Initially I agreed that it was a stupid move but when I thought about it a little more critically I couldn't really come up with a logical argument against it, other than that a big sudden change is going to cause a lot of initial confusion. I just wish it had been made more public further in advance. But in these days of Facebook and Zoom, everybody goes public in those venues and if you're not there, well, too bad for you. Maybe the town council should be posting decisions at the Reservoir, haha.

Something else I heard at the Reservoir was that the town did post about the change on Facebook, but the negative reaction in the comments was so overwhelming that they deleted the post. I have no evidence to support what that person said, because if it was there before it is gone now.

It is supposed to be a pilot project so we will see how it goes.

I was looking for a photo of Main Street in my collection to illustrate this post, but I couldn't find it, it might not be scanned in yet. However, I did find this photo of the family dogs when they all came to visit back in 2011. Hapi ended up staying but Hiro and Dobby returned home.

Hiro, Hapi and Dobby at the Reservoir, 2011

Unfortunately Hiro and Hapi ganged up on Dobby and he returned home temporarily injured. A couple of years later Hapi and I visited Dobby's home in Toronto and Dobby let Hapi know that she was not welcome on his turf. Their relationship was civil but not friendly.

Another vet visit, another dollar

Hapi, 8 years ago

Hapi had her annual check-up at the vet's a couple of days ago. I also picked up a big bag of special dog food for her at the same place, and between that, the vaccinations and a blood panel, the bill came to well over $400. I mentioned that to a couple of people who reacted in shock about how much vets charge, but my answer to that is that since we never see our routine medical bills we probably would be paying that and thensome for routine healthcare for ourselves. The vet bill is probably on a par with what we would be paying if we didn't have healthcare coverage. But I digress.

I really only wanted one vaccination (for lepto, because she drinks dirty water), but the vet talked me into several others. The blood panel was so I could get another prescription for an NSAID for her arthritis. Six months worth of the NSAID is cheaper than the blood panel she has to have in order to get the meds. I go to this particular vet clinic because I like the owner veterinarian, I find her a nice mix of compassion and pragmatism, but her partner is the one I saw and she is a whole other kettle of fish. Note to self, don't do that again!

Aside from any bad news it takes me a couple of days to recover from the encounter with this particular vet. It is mostly how much she talks, you can't get a word in edgewise and after fifteen minutes of listening you are exhausted. Most of what she says is pretty uninformative, so just when you are drifting off into a daze she mentions one important thing in passing and if you've fallen asleep you miss it.

The vet said she couldn't renew the NSAID prescription without positive bloodwork results, so I was kind of dreading that. And because they are so busy it took the vet a couple of days to relay the results to me. I used to get the results within hours of the office visit. The results turned out to be slightly negative, but not negative enough for the vet to cancel the prescription. Hapi has elevated liver markers and slight anemia, along with worse arthritis, muscle wasting and hair loss. Since the vet said it might be more serious if she showed loss of appetite and/or lethargy, I decided not to mention the lethargy. But definitely no loss of appetite.

Hiro and Hapi, 10 years ago

Anyway, not a clean bill of health but I wasn't expecting one either. The bloodwork results could all be explained by simple aging, or they could be signs of the same cancer that killed Hiro. The vet talked about doing further tests and all I could see was $$$. She's old! Something's going to get her! Do I need to spend $$$ just to find out what exactly that will be? I'm sure not putting her through chemo or surgery! Just her anti-tick medication knocked her sideways for a day or two. I sure wish they'd told me beforehand that old dogs do better with the skin-applied stuff than the oral stuff.

I'm just venting now. I think I had non-stop dreams last night due to that vet visit. But Hapi will probably never have another vaccination, except maybe for lepto if she is still here next summer. The bloodwork has to be done again in six months time, I will make a point of getting an appointment with her regular vet for that. Otherwise I'll have to go to another vet clinic, or else switch her to CBD oil which I don't need a prescription for.

Various life threads

I started working on a new(-ish) weaving project yesterday and I'm sure feeling it today! Last fall I wound a warp and tied it to the back beam of the loom and just left it sitting there. I'd walk by the doorway and see the warp hanging off the loom and then look away, not now, not today. But two days ago I thought, maybe now, maybe today. Yesterday turned out to be the day.

Threading the warp through the heddles and reed is the most difficult and time-consuming part. Bending over the loom to do it is the back-breaking part, being able to see the threads and slots clearly enough to actually do the threading is the difficult part. This warp is 320 threads wide and that means threading it through 640 tiny slots in the heddles and reed: the time-consuming part. I did 80 yesterday and my neck and back feel very stiff and sore today. It is 2-ply cotton, very fine threads, but I couldn't resist the colours so I bought a whole bunch of it.

While working on it I was thinking about my last weaving teacher, I really should email her. She was making a living selling her work and teaching, so I'm guessing she took a massive hit in income this spring. I hope she is okay.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The heat wave is supposedly still going on but around here it backed off two days ago. There was a moment in the mid-afternoon when instead of climbing yet another couple of degrees the temperature suddenly dropped a couple of degrees, and never quite regained its momentum. So for the last couple of days Environment Canada's forecast has been rather inaccurate. Not complaining!

During the last big rainstorm (eons ago) I collected as much rainwater as I could from downspouts off the house and shed, I am down to the dregs now. A lot of seeds I put in the ground just peeked above the soil surface, withered and died. The old standbys, tomatoes, onions and potatoes are doing fine, peas and beans look like they will survive too. Squashes are looking iffy. Already harvested all the spinach and replanted that plot with some rapini and bok choi; that's a third attempt for both of them so we'll see how it goes. I may plant some carrots, I don't know. Not a big fan of carrots. Sadly my cherry tomatoes are not doing so well. I love them, they are like candy. Not this year I guess.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My next door neighbour rents the house out to students and periodically shows up to do repairs. He wants to dig up along one side of his shed which borders my property. Have at 'er I said. There's a huge rosebush in there that I quite dislike. My horse chestnut is scraping his shed roof, he wants to trim that back too and that's also fine by me. The tree used to have a lovely ball-shape, but I've trimmed some of its branches to bring in more sunshine for my garden so it's already a bit lopsided.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It has been almost two weeks since there was a new case of Covid-19 in this province, currently there are no active cases. It has been well over a month since there was a case in my health zone. We never had any cases in nursing homes in this area. My friend B comes out of quarantine tomorrow and she will be allowed visitors outside the building, so I will need to book a visit for Hapi and me. She has not seen Hapi since Christmas and she always asks about her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This afternoon I went out for a drink with a neighbour, we went to a local pub that has a very nice patio. Before entering we had to answer a couple of health and travel related questions and then wash our hands. The tables were all well-spaced. Not quite back to normal but close enough. We discussed the various styles of face masks and where to buy them, the state of our gardens and our dogs. Her dog loves people but hates all other dogs. I forget the breed name but it is one of those lapdog breeds that don't just get their fur trimmed but styled. My neighbour said she looked at pictures on the internet of various styles for this breed and picked out one she liked. She showed me pictures but warned me I was going to laugh. She was right.

Oh well

For some reason I can't get it out of my head that today is Friday. I know it's not, but it sure feels like it is.

We are having a heat wave now. I look at the weather forecast and think, only a couple more days. And then the next day it is still 'only a couple more days'. Who knows when it really will end. The weather network is forecasting a hot dry summer. They are often wrong, maybe they'll be wrong about this too, but I doubt it.

I take Hapi to the Reservoir and she heads straight into the pond. She only walks around the pond because I do, if she had her druthers she'd stay in the pond till she couldn't stand up any more and then she'd go home to sleep. But they say 'keep 'em moving' so I do. Yesterday a bunch of young dogs came to play in the pond, Hapi enjoys that. I think she'd like to join the fun but also she just wants to stand there in the cool water. She has taken up her title of Pond Lion once again.

I've been using CBD for aches and pains and it seems to work, but at the cost of constant tiredness. A friend tells me I am taking too much, I should cut back the dose. Also, he thinks Hapi should be getting some too. So maybe I'll give her half of mine. It's too bad that doctors and veterinarians don't dispense that kind of knowledge or even seem to have it, one has to ask around of one's friends.

I was given a couple of plants so I am going to try my hand at growing it. A brief search of the internet tells me that it is oh so complicated, but I suspect that is because the people handing out growing advice are aiming for maximum strength, which I am not. Since the plants were a gift, I can be experimental about it. If they keel over and die, oh well, hopefully a lesson learned.

Standards

I was chatting with a friend on the phone the other day. She had recently been in phone conversation with her thirty-ish daughter on the far coast. Lovely girl, very attractive and sociable, very smart, expert horsewoman and loves to hike the mountain trails. For most of her life she and her mother did not get along well at all, she was definitely Daddy's Girl. But somewhere along the line things shifted, now they chat regularly and when she comes home to visit, my friend says it's like heaven on earth, she can hardly believe in it.

Anyway, daughter recently broke up with boyfriend. Not really news, she does this regularly. But this guy looked serious, maybe this time it would go somewhere. However, when he suggested they move in together, daughter balked.

"Mom, I have standards. You don't just move in together and see how it goes. We have to date for at least a year and then maybe we'll get engaged."

Friend and I were silent for a moment, remembering our pasts. A year?

"What did you say to her? Nothing, I hope."

"I said, 'Right! Who does that s***?'"

"Certainly nobody we know!"

We laughed.

The other thing was, he was anti-social and had a temper. A temper?

"But Mom, he's never laid a finger on me!"

Right. We know where that goes. A year, eh? And he didn't like that so they broke up.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We talked about the pandemic.

"We're the lucky ones," she said, "retired with pensions, no mortgage, no kids to support. And we live in one of the best places."

"I know, eh? Sometimes I just sit on my back deck and think to myself, 'Oh wow! Oh wow!'"

I was pulling up weeds yesterday and my neighbour came out into his backyard with a cup of coffee and commented on weed pulling (mine) and lawn mowing (his).

I said, "But aren't you glad you have a back yard?"

He agreed and thought about it for a moment and then said, "Aren't you glad you're not thirty with kids right now?"

For us retired folks self isolation and physical distancing is not a lot different from normal life, but I have no doubt it is very hard on younger folks with busy lives put on hold, livelihoods evaporated and kids forced to stay home.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My friend and I discussed Hapi's problem with the basement stairs. She had all sorts of suggestions around blocking the stairs and I was the one balking. I spent most of the rest of the day sorting out my objections to the idea. I think there are two things. One is selfish, if I block her access then I will have to move upstairs too and I don't want to. The other is quality of life vs quantity. She really wants access to the basement and I don't want to refuse her. She knows she has a problem with the stairs. For now, I am going to let her deal with that on her own terms. It's a risk, I know and I may regret it, but that's how it stands today. We'll see about tomorrow.

Scrambling toward oblivion

In the middle of the night I woke to a funny scrambling noise. I thought it must be Hapi getting up and changing her sleeping position on the slippery laminate floor of the basement. Due to the summer heat I sleep in the basement now too. But the noise went on longer than I expected so I turned on the light and saw Hapi crawling across the floor toward the stairs. Apparently she couldn't stand up. She finally reached a blanket I had put down for her to sleep on, and which she avoided at all costs normally, and was able to get enough grip to stand up. She headed for the stairs.

Reluctantly I got out of bed. If she had that much trouble just getting onto her feet then climbing the stairs was going to be problematic. Sure enough, she could not do it. Her front legs were fine but the back ones were like useless appendages. I came up behind her in hopes of supporting her rear end while she attempted the climb but she did not welcome the intervention. I could feel her whole body trembling. She made the attempt several times, each time her rear legs turning to spaghetti when she tried to put her weight on them.

One final attempt and she made it, all the way to the top without pause or incident or help from me. First to the water bowl in the hallway and then to the back door outside. She spent the rest of the night sleeping in the grass.

Ideally she would realize that sleeping outdoors was her best bet, but she does love the basement, especially now that I am sleeping there as well. Outdoors she never knows when some idiot neighbour is going to set off firecrackers which scare the daylights out of her. Apparently there are people nearby who don't wait for auspicious holidays to have firecracker fun. I have a friend (fortunately not nearby) who admits to having a lifelong fascination with firecrackers and likes to set them off in the night, even now in his mid-sixties.

She does not consider sleeping upstairs indoors an option. She rarely spends any time there at all, except when her water bowl is in the hallway and she needs a drink. If I pet her she'll pause for a bit on her way out, but that's it. Definitely not a place she would consider laying down in. It's a difficult situation, clearly getting more difficult as time goes by.

On our way to the Reservoir yesterday I ran into some friends I had not seen since before the pandemic, I honestly thought they were in Mexico. But no, they were just holing up. They told me that they had just had their dog euthanized, a dog a little younger than Hapi. They decided that watching the dog deteriorate was just too painful. I said that I had done the same with my previous dog and was quite overwhelmed with guilt at having deprived him of the life he clung to. They said they were having that experience too.

We know the inevitable outcome, they do not. They still believe they have more life in them, when they do not, not really. Those damn basement stairs are going to be some kind of turning point I think. Even for me they are difficult.

A tale of a cat

I've just moved to the next level of pandemic self-isolation, the car is in the garage.

It has been making funny (not ha-ha) noises all spring, gradually getting worse until last week it was a full-blown exhaust system set free. I had friends tell me that some young men would pay good money to have a car that sounded like that, but I found the noise most troublesome at the deepest levels of my physiology. I don't know which was worse, driving with the windows open or closed, but opted for open in case there were dangerous fumes associated with the roaring and sputtering noise.

About the only thing I use the car for these days is to drive Hapi to the Reservoir when I think she's not up for the walk to get there, and occasionally to drive down town to pick up something or other than I can't fit into my backpack. My mechanic, B's son, gave the car a good looking-over and determined that this was a job for a licenced mechanic in a bona fide garage, and recommended one that is out of town. Last week I called to make the appointment, was told I could bring it in Monday afternoon but since I thought I was going to be busy that afternoon the appointment was made for Tuesday morning. A day or two later my plans for Monday fell through and I called back to see if I could get the Monday appointment since Tuesday morning was a tad less convenient. The guy said sure.

What I didn't know was that he had made an appointment for someone else but right before I called that someone else had cancelled so the Monday afternoon time slot had reopened. However Mr Garage Guy forgot to write my name into the time slot so when I arrived there yesterday he was puzzled, aren't you supposed to be here tomorrow? But no matter, he still had the open time slot he just wasn't prepared to fix anything then. He'd take a look and see what parts he'd have to order. With the car up on the hoist he showed me the source of the problem, the catalytic converter hanging by a rusty thread, so to speak. Then he noted my bald tires. I knew about that, I was just hoping that I could make it through the summer with the small amount of driving I now do. He did not agree.

The upshot of it all was that he would keep the car over night and see what he could do about rounding up a replacement "cat". He also told me of a dealer in used tires who he thought sold reasonably fit tires if I wasn't in the market for brand new ones. I'm not. This car only has to last as long as Hapi does, after that it's toast as far as I am concerned. Under normal circumstances he would go online and order the cheapest cat he could find, but these days delivery of online goods is so delayed that I might have to wait a couple of weeks or more. That would entirely depend on Hapi remaining healthy enough to walk to the Reservoir in hot weather and her health is so up and down that I can't predict that. Getting a ride with someone else is not in the cards with physical distancing and all that. So he's going to try to find one locally.

Mr Garage Guy drove me home. First time I've been in someone else's car in months. He had a super big truck, it had an extra step just to get into it, and we drove with the windows open. We chatted about all sorts of stuff including haircuts, roadwork (it's started) and family members living in the States. He'll call me today to let me know what the situation is with the cat.

There's a shop in the next town over that sells peanut butter that I really like. I hope I get the car back before I run out. I usually get my drinking water from a spring on the other side of the Ridge but I have already run out of that and am drinking town water (flouridated, not tasty). And eggs. I won't be able to go to the farm to buy fresh eggs, I'll have to make do with store-bought. Oh the trials and tribulations of a pandemic!

Another indigenous life lost to police action

The police continue to kill racialized folks and they continue to defend their actions as "necessary force". Here in Canada we get one police force to investigate another police force when that happens, no civilian oversight whatsoever. If an RCMP officer kills an indigenous person, then that person's community is expected to carry on as usual, sitting on the sidelines waiting for whatever verdict the investigating police force comes to. And since they all subscribe to the same philosophy of brutality against people of colour, the community knows what to expect, yet another justified homicide by a police officer.

When was the last time a police officer shot and killed a violent white supremacist? They generally get a get-out-of-jail-free card except for one crime, killing an officer of the law. Then all bets are off, they fall into the same category as the person of colour resisting arrest. In Atlanta a man of colour was dragged out of his car (he was sleeping) and in the kerfuffle he managed to grab an officer's taser and run away. At a certain point apparently he aimed the taser at an officer and was immediately shot and killed. I could understand that reaction if the man had grabbed a loaded gun, but a taser? Supposedly tasers are non-lethal, that is the whole point of using them. Having your taser grabbed and aimed at you is certainly no fun but it is not supposed to be life-threatening. Or if it is, then we in the community have been sold a bill of goods when the police justify using them because they are non-lethal. But in the eyes of the police a non-lethal weapon becomes lethal in the hands of coloured person.

Yet another indigenous person was killed by police in New Brunswick, only a week or two after the indigenous woman killed by police during a "wellness check". They shot him after a stun gun failed to bring him down, he was armed with a knife. A knife can be lethal, a stun gun is probably appropriate in the circumstances, but killing him? The incident is being investigated by another police force, which incidentally is not known for its pacifist responses to problems with indigenous folks. We can expect yet another whitewashing of police action.

You can lead a horse to water but we learn over and over that you just can't make it drink. You can shout out to the police about their brutal use of force against the community but apparently you can't get them to listen. Even when it is coming from the Prime Minister of the country himself.

Witness to a brutal war

This morning I watched a video of Alberta Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam being arrested in a casino parking lot. In the course of the arrest Chief Adam was beaten and choked by at least one RCMP officer. He is now facing charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a peace officer. The whole event was apparently due to an RCMP officer observing that Chief Adam's wife was driving a vehicle with an expired registration. The video was recorded by an RCMP dashcam.

In the video several uninvolved people are shown filming the event with their phones, at least one of them is seen discussing it with Chief Adam's wife. The attack on Chief Adam was sudden, by an officer suddenly appearing from 'stage left' and tackling the Chief, bringing him down to the ground out of view of the dashcam. Immediately a host of other RCMP officers come into view and several of them pile on. When next Chief Adam's face comes into view it is seriously bloodied. He is not a large man.

The lawyer for Chief Adam wanted to release the dashcam video to the public but the RCMP said no, it was evidence and could not be released publicly. The lawyer decided to do it anyway as he thought it displayed undue police violence in arresting an indigenous person. Senior RCMP officers have reviewed the video and determined that it "did not meet the threshold for an external investigation."

The alarming part of all this to me is that the senior RCMP officers did not see this as worthy of investigation and tried hard to suppress the video. That senior RCMP officers deem this kind of incident normal and acceptable behaviour in dealing with infractions of the law by indigenous people of this country is just chilling. Apparently the woman in charge of the RCMP is having a hard time wrapping her head around the idea that the RCMP might be fundamentally racist, but after viewing this video Prime Minister Trudeau is telling her that it is.

The brutality being made evident has been complained about often enough, but the widespread protests filling streets all over the world because one man was murdered in Minneapolis have been phenomenal. The number of videos documenting the brutality and racism involved are just flooding both social media and quality news sites. I am not on social media unless you count this blog, I saw this particular video and others like it on the CBC news website, which is a pretty middle-of-the-road news source. TV cop shows portray cops as benign forces for good, protecting the larger community. We accept that to do that they must carry guns and wear bulletproof vests, as if there is a war going on in the streets and they are the good guys. Too often the bad guys in these shows are brown or black-skinned, setting a norm of crime as a coloured problem. The percentage of people of colour filling our prisons is out of proportion, as if most crime is committed by black and brown people and it truly is a war out there. Thank goodness for the heavily armed white policemen protecting us white people! [I'm being sarcastic]

More and more the police are deemed the appropriate authorities to deal with mental health and social issues of poverty, homelessness and domestic violence. An indigenous woman shot and killed by a cop who was performing a "wellness check" on her at the request of her brother. A young black man with mental health issues shot and killed because he called the police for help (the officer who shot him has refused to submit his notes to police authorities and he has the right to do that). Sexual harrassment by cops of teenage women in the streets, harrassment of women and men in northern indigenous communities. Too many civilians shot and killed in the execution of policing duties. Near complete lack of accountability for their actions by the RCMP and other police forces. Anyone of colour is fair game, not deserving of the respect white people take for granted.

Some good news

I spoke to B a couple of days ago and she told me that she would be moving into a nursing home the next day. She has been languishing in hospital for over 5 months now. While it was probably the safest place for her to be it was also extremely boring. She hated the food and there was no TV or any kind of recreational activities. She is not computer literate and she doesn't read much.

Her health was up, down and sideways, on more than one occasion the doctor told her son that this was it and did he want to see her one last time. Her son said No. He told me that if he had special permission to go into the hospital to see her that she would know what was up and freak out. He didn't want her to know that she was dying. That sounded kind of cruel to me but in retrospect he might have been right.

She is now well enough to go into a nursing home and she sounds much better on the phone than she did even a week ago. Needless to say she was over the moon about the news. She has to spend two weeks in quarantine after the move out of the hospital and then she will transfer into her new digs, sharing a room with another woman.

"I don't care if I have to move in with ten other people, just get me outa here!" is what she said.

She has lost 40 lbs over five and a half months in the hospital, which she could well afford to lose. The nursing home rep told her she would lose even more once she moved in with them because they would have her out walking in their gardens every day. This particular nursing home is known for its gardens. They told her about the various activities that would be available to her once she completed the quarantine and she zeroed in on their cribbage tournament.

"Watch out! I'm gonna beat all those guys!" she said in anticipation.

I called her today, she is in the nursing home in a large room all by herself on the top floor. The food is no different from the hospital, but she does have a TV now. She hopes the two weeks of quarantine will speed by. She looks forward to seeing Hapi again, even if it is just through a window. This nursing home does window visits, you have to pre-register for it. It is about 20 km from where I live and a 20 minute drive away by highway.

Odds and ends

Dad on ice

I took down my birdfeeder the other day, I had to stay away from that window for awhile because I couldn't watch the birds who came and were puzzled by its absence. A father cardinal and its youngster came together and I felt especially sorry about them. Also the two chickadees and one nuthatch who came.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My needlework group had an email debate about whether or how to get together, in light of recent changes in covid-19 protocols. One person offered her backyard (bring your own everything) for up to 10 people and I have tentatively accepted the offer. We shall see how it goes. Usually well over 20 people came to these get togethers before the pandemic. What I like about the group is that everyone is doing different kinds of work involving hooks or needles, you get to see all sorts of interesting stuff. The conversations range from mundane to extremely interesting.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My peonies are getting set to burst into flower. Something I've always been curious about is the ants that crawl all over peonie flower buds. This spring I accidentally broke off one stem with a small flower bud on it so I brought it in and stuck it in a vase with water. I don't think it is going to flower, the bud is too undeveloped to be saved. But what I have noticed is the droplets of liquid forming on the surface of the bud, I bet that is what attracts the ants. I wonder if the plant gets anything in return, it must be secreting those droplets for a reason. Usually nectar is secreted after a flower opens in order to attract pollinators.

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One of my sons has a BA in philosophy and psychology, and is working on an MA in philosophy. We have interesting phone conversations on philosophical aspects of current events, he quotes people I have heard of but never understood what they were talking about. People think that academic philosophy is rather esoteric and useless, but when you hear it in relation to what's going on around us it gives historical context for why we think the way we do and it opens up possibilities for changing our automatic responses to events. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. A knowledge of philosophy opens up the possibility of not acting insanely.

A walk in town

Saturday: a foggy day at the Reservoir

This morning I went down town with Hapi. First we went for a long walk on the dyke which in retrospect was a bit too much, I didn't bring water for Hapi and it was warmer than I expected. The only water out there is muddy ditches and ponds which I didn't really think she should be drinking from. I finally relented about one pond because I felt I was putting her life at risk in the heat, and then later took her to "the duck pond" (no ducks) to wash off the stinky dyke mud. Next time, bring water and bowl!

Duck asleep in the fog

All the shops are open now and some of the bars and restaurants for dining in. I think as a result of things opening up over the weekend a lot more people are wearing face masks. For the first time I went into the natural food store but I have to say I didn't really feel safe there. I liked it better when you just placed an order through a window. Then I went to a convenience store that Hapi wanted to visit because they give treats to dogs. The owner made a big fuss over Hapi because he hadn't seen her in a while, gave her two treats and hugged and cuddled her. I was a tiny bit appalled. He said he thought people were making too much fuss over the virus, that his kids were on him all the time about it. Then he told me about another dog that had just had a stroke and died the day before.

There are certain dogs in town that everybody knows, and Hapi is one of them. A whole lot of people know her and greet her when they see us, a lot of them are strangers to me. She's just famous. The dog that died yesterday was also famous, his name was Willy. I had just seen Willy at the Reservoir a couple of days ago so I was quite shocked to hear that he was gone. I told the shopkeeper that he had just ruined my day and he apologized, but I assured him I was joking, I was just shocked was all.

Willy was rarely on leash, he stayed close to his owner all the time. Willy and Hapi were friends in the end, but Hapi did try to provoke Willy into fighting with her (she'd steal his bones) when she was younger. Willy just wasn't that kind of dog, he ignored her provocations so Hapi gave it up and they became friends. His owner is a young man who was kind of at loose ends when he first came to this town, but one of the Main Street shopkeepers took him under his wing, was kind of a surrogate father to him. Often the young man left Willy with the shopkeeper when he went to work. Willy sat or slept on the sidewalk outside the shop waiting for his owner to return, so everybody knew Willy. Later the young man got a job where he could take Willy to work with him. Willy was well behaved in public, but apparently he had a bad habit of chewing things up when left alone at home.

Good bye Willy, sorry to see you go.

The calm before the storm

My grandparents with toddler, probably my Dad

As I write, Hapi is still in bed in the basement. She sleeps a lot. I just went down there to check on her and she dutifully got up and came to the foot of the stairs as if to go up. But she stood there for a very long time, apparently weighing the pros and cons, and finally decided to go back to bed.

I envy her the ability to lie in bed, I really do. At 6am I wake, and within seconds my mind is racing and feel I have no choice but to get out of bed and start my day. She still wants to spend a couple of hours a day out walking, with or without me. To avoid complications I go with her, but those hours of walking with her take their toll, I just barely have the energy to get done all the other things that need doing in the course of the day, especially now that gardening and lawn mowing season is upon us.

I have dreams of painting my house, it's looking a little worn and faded, but where on earth I would find the time and energy to do it myself or even the money to hire someone else, I don't know. So mentally I consign that project to some distant future when I no longer spend hours a day walking. Assuming I'm still fit enough in that distant future.

I have a bike that I used to love riding, but have hardly taken out into the driveway let alone on a bike trail in the past couple of years. A kayak, ditto. Two kayaks actually. Kayaking is absolutely out of the picture now because it involves being away for most of the day and coming home exhausted. Which would be okay if I was alone but not when I have duties of care for someone else.

Never mind the pleasures of biking or paddling, my house is in need of a massive cleanup. I mentally blank out all the dog hair and wood chips strewn around and consign the cleanup to that distant future. If I wrote down all the things I have consigned to the future I think I would be appalled, so I don't.

There's a grey squirrel that raids my birdfeeder regularly and when I see it I chase it away. I really should take the feeder down but I still enjoy seeing the birds at it. Anyway, this morning I chased the squirrel away and caught sight of her swollen nipples. Oh dear, she is feeding babies and I am depriving her of much needed food. Can't win for losing as my Dad would say.

Yesterday I must have pulled a muscle or something in my upper back, it is painful enough to make sneezing or coughing or even breathing deeply quite unpleasant. I hoped it would be gone by today but it is not, so I am not in a good mood. Sitting around thinking bleak thoughts is about all I am capable of.

How I purchased a new rain jacket

Can you see it?

It rained most of the day yesterday. I have a rain barrel but it is not really big enough to get through a prolonged dry period so I thought that since I had a few empty plastic garbage bins I'd put them out under a few eavestrough downspouts. I have a total of five downspouts, one already goes to the rain barrel and I placed garbage bins under three others. One of them filled up very quickly so I got some pails to bail it and when it filled again I reattached the part of the downspout that directs the flow away from the foundation. Now I have lots of water for the gardens.

In the process of doing all that I realized that my Gore-Tex rain jacket has outlived its usefulness; I was getting wet. I went online to see if I could find a replacement. There's a shop in town that deals in that sort of thing but it's kind of expensive and I haven't seen anything there that I liked. I looked at the Mountain Equipment website which is currently offering free shipping, but again, I didn't see anything I liked as much as my old jacket, even at double the price I was prepared to pay. So I went to the website for the shop I got my old Gore-Tex at and they still sold them for more or less the same price as the old jacket (on sale due to Covid) but not free shipping. The shop is in Vancouver, they don't have any other locations, but all their jackets are made right there in Vancouver. I know the quality is good because I have had two of them before (first one purchased in 1998).

I couldn't decide about size. The size tag has long since worn off my old jacket (it is 12 years old) and my measurements are at the high end of one size and the low end of the next size. I looked up their phone number and called. No answer. Tried both the local and the toll-free numbers, no answer. But they had a Contact Us page to fill in your info and send a message, so I did that. The page warned that it could take up to several days for them to get back to you, but I had hardly hit Send when my phone rang, it was the shop calling me.

The caller identified himself as Paul, said he didn't know why my call hadn't reached him, maybe he was away from the phone at that exact moment. We discussed my size issue. In the end I decided to go with the smaller size since Paul told me that the jackets tend to be quite roomy. So then we went through the process of making a phone order. English is not Paul's first language, he apologized for asking me to repeatedly spell out my billing and address info but I appreciated his effort to get everything exactly right. He told me that he would have to calculate shipping and taxes later, then asked me what the sales tax was in Nova Scotia. I told him: 15%. He was flabbergasted, couldn't believe it was so high.

What can I say, it is what it is and when you've lived with it for long enough you just suck in your breath and pay the bill. A local friend pointed out to me that what takes away the pain is the fact that all of it, every last penny of it, goes toward provincial healthcare. I don't know if that is still true or not but I know it used to be. I once went to a local Dairy Queen and when told the bill for whatever I had ordered I muttered something about exorbidant taxes and the owner of the DQ just about leaped across the counter at me, reprimanding me for criticizing a tax that paid for my healthcare. Alright! Never do that again!

Anyway, the jacket is ordered, I got an email confirmation of the total cost and a postal tracking number, it's on its way. And it was a pleasure doing business with Paul in Vancouver.

The rain stopped and I took Hapi to the Reservoir. Someone told me there was a baby owl in a tree near the trail and I saw it and took a picture. It is the little blob in the middle of the photo above. It is only about a foot tall and it is a Barred Owl which is actually quite a large owl, so this one has to be a youngster. It seemed happy to be photographed, sitting quite still and staring down at the various cameras pointed at it. Barred Owls are common around here.

Sanity is kind of funny too

Contemplating sanity

Yesterday I watched a video of Justin Trudeau trying to answer a question put to him about the current situation in the USA. He was silent for a full 20 seconds. Long enough to look totally flummoxed by the question and to make you wonder if he was even going to respond at all. It was actually a rather slyly worded question that made almost any response a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't decision, so the 20 seconds of dead air was kind of understandable.

I felt sort of the same after my previous post about anger, how it somehow said absolutely the wrong thing for the time but wasn't what I intended at all. Who knew. Anyway, I didn't know what to say after that.

Today I started reading Trip by Tao Lin, which is the author's thinking about Terence McKenna, a fairly controversial proponent of the value of psychedelics. I started poking around on the internet for stuff by or about McKenna (he died in 2000 of a brain cancer) and among other things came across some stuff he wrote about a "world soul". He postulated that the world has a soul that is aware that one day our sun will die and the world with it, so it—the world soul—is looking for a way to move elsewhere, but all it has to work with is protoplasm. From a protoplasmic perspective there is still loads of time to figure it out, but from a world soul perspective, time is short. Anyway, McKenna's theory is that all of world history is about that, the world soul working toward moving somewhere else before the sun dies.

I have no ideas or personal experience to support or refute this theory so I'm not going to say anything about that. However, taking the long view on current crises (multiple at the moment), what I see is humanity struggling to figure it all out. How do we live together without destroying ourselves or all of life on this planet? How do we resolve conflict without doing irrevocable damage? How much suffering is necessary to get to the other side?

For some, the answers are simple and straight forward and the fact that we are not doing the simple and straight forward thing is evidence of our colossal stupidity. Or meanness, or short-sightedness, or whatever your favourite term for it is. But in the time scale of evolution we are a brand new species encountering dilemmas no other species has had to deal with and very little in the way of precedent experience or knowledge to draw on. We argue a lot.

I know what I would like this world to look like, what kind of world I think would be peaceful and livable. But I have no idea how to get there from here, without a whole lot of struggle and suffering that may not make the effort worthwhile. I suppose there could be a miracle, but the essence of a miracle is that it is unexpected and unconventional, not something to be relied on.

Another quote from McKenna was about sanity and the paradox of parenting. He said that sanity involves being well-adjusted to your environment and culture. But if your environment and culture are insane, do you really want to be well-adjusted? And if you are a parent, what kind of outcome do you want for your children? To be "insane" or to be well-adjusted to an insane culture?