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.