Odds and Ends

Unexpected landscaping issues, don't ask

I started buying a dog food kibble called PC Nutrition First Sensitive Skin and Stomach, and Hapi seemed to tolerate it well. I asked the manager of our local small grocery store if he could start carrying it, he asked how much I would buy in a month and I told him, then he had his son check to see if he could order it. He can and he will, one bag a month just for Hapi. On the front of the bag is a picture of a dog which at first I thought was a Husky. But one day while examining the picture more closely I realized it was not a Husky but a Malamute, I recognized the yellow-brown eyes and the "snow nose" (black with a pink stripe in the middle). How cute I thought, she gets dog food with her picture on it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My brother called to tell me that our eldest maternal cousin had just died, peacefully in his sleep at age 77. First of my generation in this family to go. Who's next? I don't keep in very good touch with cousins, nor they with me, so it's good that the brothers keep me up to date. It just so happened that my brother called me when I was doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation of my current financial status. My thinking is, if I have ms then my life span is shortened, by an average of 7 years according to the internet. Also according to the internet (I use that phrase to indicate how tenuous and suspect such "facts" are) the average life expectancy for a woman with ms is 77 (the sevens! all those sevens!). I'm 72, 77-72=5, all of a sudden I am rich! Relatively speaking.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I got quite depressed on Saturday, racing circular thoughts driving me deeper into that morass. I thought I'd like to have a nice glass of wine to short circuit the racing circles but had to read my homeopathic instructions to see whether I was allowed. A brief moment of glee when I read that alcohol was about the only exception to the restrictions, as long as it was moderate of course. Of course! One glass of wine is enough to put me under the table, one glass is moderate, right? So I did. Early enough in the evening that I could go to bed reasonably sober. Now I have a whole open bottle of wine (less one glass) to deal with. 

I spoke to a dog walking friend the next day about it. I only know her and her husband through dog walking, we otherwise have no connection to each other, but somehow we have gotten close enough that we actually talk about some pretty serious stuff in our lives that we might not discuss with anyone else. She laughed at my one-glass-of-wine binge.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Autumn colours peaked last week, we're now into the "here-comes-winter" part of autumn: colder, greyer, much shorter daylight hours. Hapi couldn't be Hapi-er. She prances again, tail flag high. But sleeps a lot and is really slow to get going in the morning, we're lucky if we manage to get to the Reservoir before 10.30 am.

Speaking of which, the other day I saw a man by himself there just sitting on a bench with what looked like his cell phone in his hands. Looking closer I realized it was a controller and he was flying a drone over the ponds. He started to leave as Hapi and I were leaving and I asked him about his drone. He was quite excited to tell me about it and when we got to the parking lot he gave me his Youtube name on a slip of paper so I could look up some of his drone videos.

Here's one he did at the Reservoir earlier this summer. I've looked at some of his other videos, he obviously loves living in this area, and also playing with his toy. The pond I was swimming in appears on the left at 0:35 and 1:27 min, and also at 2:18 min.  At 1:27 you get a sense of the size of that pond, I was doing up to 4 lengths in that one. The other smaller pond with the little beach is where Hapi likes to go.