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.

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.