Covid weather predictions

The other day we went for an evening walk on the dyke, I took some photos. A lot of students are back, Main Street is getting busy. A couple of American girls refused to wear masks at the grocery store so the owner called the cops and they were fined and made to leave. Considering that the police office is right across the street from the grocery store, it was kind of a foolish thing to do.

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Today I thought we were finally going to get a good rain, or that was what the weather forecast said. I thought it was going to be a good rainy day to get some indoor stuff done. I didn't water the garden because we were supposed to get a thorough downpour, and I had a whole lot of tomatoes to can (since there is no room for them in the freezer), so it was going to be a canning day. Canning tomatoes is hot messy work, not something I really like to do on a hot sunny day.

So guess what, no rain, just a hot sunny day. And Hapi had wet all her bedding, between being incontinent and wanting to sleep in the basement after a soak in the pond. So there was laundry to do. Once I started prepping the tomatoes for canning I realized it was not going to rain after all. In fact, it was a hotter day than it had been in a while. There was no turning back, it was too late to just pack it in and do it another day. So I canned and did laundry and was royally pissed off at the weatherman for being so wrong.

As soon as the canning was done I turned off the stove, grabbed the dog and my bathing suit and hurried over to the Reservoir for a swim. There was hardly anyone there, I guess everyone stayed home waiting for the rain. Swimming on my back I watched the clouds. The wind had picked up quite a bit and there were heavy clouds on the horizon blowing by. The sun was still out though, it stayed sunny until I finished swimming and drove home. I had hardly hung my bathing suit and towel out on the line to dry when the sky got quite dark. I guess it was going to rain after all.

Sure enough, just as I was sitting down for supper (tomatoes, beet greens, zucchini and rice) it got very dark and and thundery and the rain poured down. Hapi was scared of the thunder, she kept so close to me that I was tripping over her. It really only lasted about half an hour but she was at my feet for a lot longer than that.

I got 5 quarts of tomatoes canned and 2 freezer bags full of grated zucchini done. All Hapi's bedding got washed and dried, although she is down in the basement now getting it all wet and dirty again. My two rain barrels are full to overflowing. It was so hot today that less than an hour after the downpour the road was dry. But the temperature has dropped by almost 10C and supposedly it's going to stay cool for a while. Says the weatherman who predicted the rainy day.

Acedia and lightheadedness

I learned a new word today, or rather I learned the meaning of a word I'd seen before but didn't really understand. Acedia.

Acedia was described by the Desert Father John Cassian in the 4th century AD as an illness specific to monks. A monk diagnosed with Acedia would find it impossible to read, although perfectly capable of reading. The monk would instead attempt to distract himself with gossip and would be unable to connect to his fellow monks or his surroundings except with a feeling of disgust. 

"He looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of his brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness."

In other words, a kind of depression. I think if we substitute an endless perusing of the internet for the latest news for "gossip", and self isolation for being a monk, we could be talking about depression brought on by pandemic.

The proposed cure for this diagnosis is: "...he should be reproved a first and a second time. If he does not amend, he must be subjected to the punishment of the rule so that the others may have fear." So, first public criticism and then physical blows; psychic pain must be driven out by physical pain lest the contagion spread.

I learned this from a book I am currently reading, The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt.

Another thing I learned is that you can do some serious damage to yourself by practicing the breast stroke while swimming. I learned this one the hard way. 

I am not a great swimmer so mostly I do a combination of breast stroke, side stroke and back stroke. The back stroke is my favourite because it is very relaxing and I get to look up at the sky in a comfortable way. The only problem with it is that I go swimming in the late afternoon and the sun is right there in my view so unless I am swimming westward, I can't gaze at the sky. 

I had a back ache, I thought due to gardening or some such thing. Then I had lightheadedness, which was a real bother and I couldn't think what was causing it. Was I dehydrated? I started drinking a lot of water and taking an electrolyte supplement. It didn't help. Then last night, while indulging my Acedia on the internet I came across a reference to dizzyness caused by neck injury, possibly from swimming. This morning I looked into it more closely and sure enough, it is a thing. And the back ache is related.

The proper safe way to do the breast stroke is to keep your neck and back straight, which means you are spending a lot of time with your face under water. I watched a couple of videos explaining the technique, it looks complicated enough that I don't think I am going to try to learn to do it. They recommend a swimming coach.

So, …well I'm not sure what to do about that. Do I have to quit swimming or what? Will the lightheadedness go away on its own or do I have to do something about it? And if the latter, what? One of the few pleasures remaining with an old dog in hot weather during a pandemic, and it turns out it's dangerous. Can't win for losing as my father would say.

First rainy day all month

Hapi and beach friends

It has been a week of dealing with garden harvesting and heat. The tomatoes have really enjoyed this weather, I have a bumper crop as do many others in this area. Green beans keep coming, and no matter what you do to avoid this there is always way too much zucchini. My freezer is almost full and I am looking at ways to cram yet more food in. I should have canned the tomatoes but freezing them is so much easier and I just did not anticipate the quantity. I've been eating a lot of tabbouleh and tomato salads…

Hapi and I visited her best friend Ava the other day, Ava was not feeling well. Her owner said the vet had discovered "a mass" in her belly that could be very serious. At the moment she is on antibiotics, steroids and water pills, so hard to say whether she is not feeling well because of the mass or the medication. I thought Ava would long outlive Hapi, but maybe not.

A local guy died last week of a massive heart attack, he was a bit of an icon around here. A little bit older than me, he ran a shop on Main Street that was infamous in its heyday, he dealt in psychedelic paraphenalia. The place was a little warren of stuff: smoking gear, incense, posters, record albums, etc etc. The little bit of light that came through the big front window hardly made it more than a few feet into the interior. He also dealt in used furniture and his main customers were students looking to buy for the school year and sell at the end of it. Most of us parents had kids who hung around that shop. He also kept doberman pinscher dogs, he loved that breed. He sat out front of his shop in an old wooden swivel office chair with one of his dogs lying at his feet whenever the weather was good; he was a street fixture. In later years he had health issues that made him grumpy, he sold the business to a young guy who radically revamped it and we hardly saw him on the street anymore. After his last doberman died suddenly he did not get another one. But news of his death travelled fast, in spite of his disappearance from street life he was definitely not forgotten. 

I visited B on the weekend. The nursing home schedules the visits now, you just have to show up. B was in an ornery mood, she'd been chastised by a worker at the home and she was annoyed about it. Group living is hard. But otherwise she's okay. She says she'd rather be living in her old apartment where she has a little more freedom, but she can't really take care of herself and she'd be trapped there as much as she feels trapped in the nursing home. In the home they don't allow people to play cards because of the pandemic, but at her old apartment she'd have nobody to play with anyway.

Beach decorations

The heat wave seems to have broken, maybe temporarily or permanently, hard to tell. At any rate yesterday was quite lovely and today it is raining. It's not really a lot of rain but it is definitely welcome. Hapi perked up quite a bit with the cooler weather, instead of going straight to the pond to soak yesterday we went instead for an explore on the bike trails in the woods. She hasn't wanted to do that in many weeks. Watching her prance down the street later in the evening I felt like she was back to her old self.

In honour of the cooler wet weather I am doing a bit of cooking today, bread and bone broth. And of course tabbouleh with lots of tomatoes. Last night I sat outdoors chatting with neighbours, one of them had bought corn earlier in the day. We debated who grew the best corn, two of us plumped for one farm, one for another. We'll have to do a taste test.

And finally, my car's exhaust system is broken yet again. Each time it is a different part, and each time the part is so expensive that my mechanic has tried to replace it with something less expensive. I hope he succeeds one more time.

More heat wave

The pond I swim in

I gave up on keeping Hapi out of the water. I had started going back to the Reservoir just because I missed my dog buddy company in the mornings, but I kept Hapi on leash whenever we were near the water. I would stop at the beach and let her get her feet wet but not the rest of her body. It was a bit of a tug of war, she really wanted to go in deeper.

With this relentless heat wave I wanted to go swimming but that meant I had to leave Hapi at home by herself in the heat since I can't trust her indoors any more. She might have a pee or poop accident or worse, fall down the stairs. So I was starting to feel really sorry for myself, stuck in the darkened house in a heat wave. It often gets hot and humid here in the summer, but not for so long.

One of my dog buddies said I should try letting Hapi get wet and then combing her out with a hair conditioner. So I bought some hair conditioner and tried it. Hapi was so happy to be allowed in the water! But the conditioner didn't really make any difference. Once I let her in the water that once, I felt it would be mean to go back to not letting her go in the water, she wouldn't understand. And besides, I could go swimming too if she came along.

Hapi at the beach in the morning

So now, I go to the Reservoir in the morning for a walk with the other dogs and their owners, and then mid-afternoon I go back for a swim. In the afternoon the little beach is full of kids and their parents, Hapi wades in with them. Most of the parents and kids already know Hapi, the kids all want to pet her in the water. Hapi is very patient with kids, she lets them surround and pet her, and although I tell the parents, "She's friendly," they just nod as if they already know that. I go in the water with her and as much as she can she stays with me, but she won't go out any deeper than where she can keep her feet on the ground.

After a few minutes of that I go in the other pond, the big one. There's no beach, you have to climb down a short rocky path to get into the water. Hapi is too unsteady on her feet to manage that anymore so she just stands on the shore watching me. I swim the length of the pond and back. It is so wonderful to be in the water surrounded by the trees. I'm a poor swimmer but I have stamina, I alternate between breast, side and back strokes, occasionally just treading water if I get tired. But two lengths of the pond is not enough to tire me out so I don't do a lot of water treading. My favourite thing is the back stroke, looking up at the big sky with clouds drifting by. I can only do that when the sun is behind me so on the first length I have to look downward at the shoreline but coming back I can look at the clouds.

When I've completed my two lengths Hapi is there to greet me coming ashore, then we go back to the beach on the small pond for one last dip for her. We usually get home by 4pm and the swim is so refreshing that I don't start feeling the heat until hours later when it is starting to cool off anyway. Hapi has her supper and goes to bed, two swims a day tuckers her right out. By the way she walks I think she is in constant pain, standing in the water alleviates that some. I tell people it is her hydrotherapy. Her fur is going to get messed up again, but I think she may not last long enough for that to become a great issue. That's what I tell myself anyway.

Yesterday I ran (swam) into a single parent with her little boy. We were chatting about the heat and the water and we both agreed that it was so nice to have these ponds so close to where we live. There are ocean beaches and lakes nearby, but this is the best because it is so close by. She is from Chile, she asked if it is always this hot here. I said yes and no, it usually gets this hot at some point but it doesn't usually stay hot for so long.

I had been talking to a carpenter in the morning, he was working on the house next door and he said that he used to have a job in Calgary where it often got very hot but it was a dry hot, not humid like here. The humidity just drains you. He had his young son along with him, the whole time he was working he was telling his son what he was doing and why, and giving his son little tasks to do with him. I was thinking, lucky boy, to be able to work with his Dad.

I asked the carpenter what he knew about generators and we talked about mine, which I think I have a problem with. He offered to help me with it and spent a few minutes getting me set up to drain the fuel from it. I left gas in the generator over the winter and that is not a good thing. It took the better part of the day to get it all out but I am relieved that I finally tackled the job. I told the carpenter that I was looking for someone to do some work on my place but I was waiting till after Hapi, he gave me his card and told me about his dogs. He had just had to put down the oldest one.

A pheasant went for a stroll

Morning of the fourth day post-anti-depressant pill: a bit of a headache and I'm tired, but not much else. Yay! If I ever want to go on a three-day drug trip I guess I know what to do, and it is prefectly legal!

Now I am reading "Like Shaking Hands with God", a conversation with Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer about writing. A bit dated but pleasant. Kurt talks about faxes as if they are the latest technology, which I suppose they were at the time. Although I remember going to a talk about the future of technology around about the time this book was written and the fellow was saying that CDs and faxes were a thing of the past. I guess he was ahead of his time, they are still around. Maybe they should be a thing of the past and people still cling to them. But it is hard to find a laptop computer these days with a CD player or fax card.

As it turns out Kurt and Lee are good at aphorisms, there were a couple I wanted to underline.

Kurt: I go home. I have had a one heck of a good time. Listen: we are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!

Lee: It's a struggle to be human. I mean, if you really look at it, we wake up every day to an alien environment. Certainly not the environment man was created in…So to me it is very much a struggle to be human, not so much a struggle to do something else, but a struggle just to feel human.

I think that is one way (two ways?) to sum things up. I agree with Kurt, we are here to fart around, and I agree with Lee that sometimes it is a real struggle just to be human in an alien world. Saving the world is just too massive a job to get hung up on, and getting more massive all the time. One local activist I know who spent a lifetime trying to make the world a better place, got herself into a helluva depression when she thought about the fact that she hadn't changed a thing. Although lots of people do make a difference, it's being the right person in the right place at the right time, with plenty of backup. And it is not something you can control without doing some damage to yourself. I don't envy the ones who manage it.

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So our local controversial experiment ended abruptly. They turned Main Street into a one-way street and a couple of weeks later they shut it down and it went back to two ways. I've heard a couple of reasons why it ended early (it was supposed to go on to the end of September), so take your pick. One is that the town council finally heard the merchants screaming about loss of business, the other is that there was an accident on the local freeway and traffic was diverted through our town. The big trucks couldn't make the turns necessary in the new one-way route. 

I can just imagine what that would have been like, there were four turns they would have had to make on roads never designed for that kind of traffic. Anyway I was down town a day after the reversion and it no longer seemed like a ghost town, the constant traffic made it feel busy. I liked it. I admit that it was kind of nice to walk across Main Street without having to watch for traffic, but it was also kind of weird. And one business man on the side street that traffic was being diverted to referred to it as Highway One. Crossing that road was a little more tricky.

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Friday was Mask-up Day. Everyone has to wear a mask in public indoor spaces from now on. It's on the honour system, you're not supposed to harass people who are not masked. We had two new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday, but they had just returned from travelling and were already self-isolating when they tested positive. So it goes. There were rumours that we were going to open up to non-Maritime provinces, but the premier said that was not happening soon. He did say that we would have to in the near future, that we needed to recover our economic health as well as our medical health.

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After a one day respite we're back to heat wave again. Yesterday was nice, I didn't have to shut myself indoors with all the curtains closed. I did a spot of gardening, planting a second crop of peas, carrots and greens and throwing some "fertilizer" (coffee grounds and eggshells) on it. I visited a friend and had a coffee with her and then held the ladder while she climbed up to hack off some branches in a caterpillar-infested tree. 

She has a dog that is Hapi's best dog buddy here. Ava is a very small dog, but tough. She lived on the streets of Taiwan before coming to Canada. She met Hapi and Hiro one day at the Reservoir and assessed them instantly. She walked up to Hapi and bit her on the nose. We can be friends but don't mess with me, she said. Hapi never has and they are.

Good grief, a rant

This is a bit of a rant and if you don't care to read about other people's health issues, then best to skip this one. And I don't blame you.

I've had an ongoing battle with insomnia, worsening as I get older. The sleeping pill zopiclone works for me, more or less, but almost universally doctors don't like to prescribe it longterm. I've managed to read a couple of medical journal articles saying that for lack of anything else workable it's okay, but most of them say don't do it no matter what, and trot out statistical studies about falling down, dementia, etc etc. For me, it's the first thing I've tried that has no side effects and leaves me more or less refreshed in the morning. I can eke out 6-7 hours of sleep from one tablet. I'd rather have 8 hours, but so it goes.

My doctor is not happy with me using this drug. She keeps suggesting alternatives, most of which I have already tried or just don't apply. She sent me for a "sleep study" to see if I have sleep apnea, but I don't so no CPAP machine for me (thank the gods). Last week she said she wanted to switch me to an anti-depressant with a drowsiness side effect. I said I had run out of zopiclone so could I get a few more and I would try the anti-depressant, which she agreed to.

The doc also said she wanted to see me in person because she was worried about my blood pressure (high twice on office visits earlier in the year) so I should make an appointment, I agreed to that. However the doctor is part of a clinic that is moving office, and as these things do, it has gone horribly awry. Long story short, I can't get through to the receptionist to make an appointment, and after a bunch of attempts I gave up. The doc phoned in a prescription for three months worth of the zopiclone and a handful of the anti-depressant pills to try, so I figured I had a bit of time before I needed to make that appointment. Also I borrowed a friend's blood pressure monitor and tried it; all the readings were normal, averaging 130-135/75-80. High end of normal, but nothing to get excited about.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, there was a notice posted on my door that they would be shutting off the water the next morning to do repairs on a broken water main valve, and I should stock up on water for the day. Fine, no problem, I can do this. I took the first half-tablet of the anti-depressant that night, figuring that I would do the stocking up in the morning because I usually rise at 6 and the shutoff wasn't until 8. What could go wrong?

First of all, I slept in. On seeing the time I rushed out of bed to start filling buckets and jars with water, but the water pressure was down to a trickle, apparently they didn't wait until 8 to shut off the water.

Second of all, the anti-depressant knocked me for a loop. I was physically awake but pretty non-functional. That in combination with the lack of tap water (or toilet water or anything) made breakfast prep a gong show. Everything that could go wrong, did. I finally managed a piece of toast and a small cup of really bad coffee.

On the upside, they turned the water back on after only a couple of hours. I talked to one of the town maintenance guys and he said there were two broken valves and since they didn't know what they would be getting into until they dug down to them, they thought they would tackle them one at a time. The first one was an easy fix, they would be doing the second one the next day.

We're in a heat wave, actually a whole series of heat waves. My heat pump serves as an air conditioner and normally I don't use that function much, but this year I have. So, since the water was back on I thought it was time to clean the filters, a monthly task that I had kind of neglected. To my horror there was black mould growing on them. Frantically I am calling the company that installed the heat pump to get it "deep cleaned", they are not answering their phone and I go straight to voice mail. I call another company and they make an appointment for me but it's not until mid-August because they say everyone around is running into this problem, it has been an unusually humid summer. Then the first company calls me back and they make an appointment for me at the end of August, same reason. I decide that whichever one gets here first I'll go with, they both promise to slot me in if a cancellation comes up.

Then I think, oh, I am really stressed, I wonder if it will show up on the blood pressure monitor. Sure enough, 158/86. I took a few more readings over the afternoon and after several hours it was back down to normal, 135/80. But the anti-depressant, oh my gods, that is just getting worse. I am in a daze, dizzy, light-headed, lethargic, burning eyes sensitive to light. Every time I sit down I just want to nod off. I can just barely get the motivation together to take Hapi for her morning walk. And the time just drags, the first day after taking the anti-depressant was the longest day ever.

The second morning was not much better. I did my water stocking up the night before, but they never turned off the water the next day. Turns out there was another water main emergency elsewhere that took precedence so they never got back to the second broken water valve, and won't until sometime middle of next week. With the tap water still on I was able to make breakfast without incident but I really had to concentrate to do it. Things that I normally do automatically just weren't happening. In the late afternoon I stopped by a friend's place and sat on her front porch staring at the trees while she got me a glass of water. The trees danced. Oh my gods, I am hallucinating. By evening I had a headache, still dizzy, still light-headed, still lethargic. I have to be careful turning my head, if I do it too quickly I lose my balance, the world just whizzes around me.

The headache is still there this morning, my eyes aren't exactly burning but they feel funny. I am still light-headed. All this from a half-tablet three days ago. But it's true, I can sleep like the dead now, just not sure the cost is worth it.

One of these days I'll try to get an appointment with the doctor, maybe the clinic's move will settle down soon.