My Little Princess

I never thought I'd end up with a little yappy dog with entitlement issues, but here we are. She comes from Elderdog (a dog rescue agency that tries to match older owners and dogs), from a rather unpleasant background. A 13 year old Pekinese/Lab Retriever mix with a few minor health issues (for now). Princess is pretty much the antithesis of Hapi.

I always thought that while Hapi made people around her very happy, she wasn't really a happy dog herself. Not unhappy, just more reserved and independent. And Princess confirms that, she is definitely a happy dog despite her background. She makes me laugh, she likes to cuddle, and she sleeps in (on my bed). She will never replace Hapi, but she is the right dog for me now. 

With Hapi I could look up Malamute behaviour and she fit it to a T, but Princess being a mix I can't really do that. Sometimes I can say, "oh that's the Pekinese in her" or "that's the Lab in her", but I've only had her now for three weeks so I'm still getting to know her. She has definitely made herself right at home here; she's landed on her feet and she knows it.

Princess is a bit of an energy draw though, she loves going for walks and she can move much faster and further than I can, even with her limp and tiny legs. The limp gives her a kind of rolling gait which is cute. She would dearly like to play with the bigger dogs at the Reservoir, but her tiny legs can't keep up with them.

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Big snow storm on Friday with about 5 or 6 cm on the ground on Saturday. My guy came to shovel in the afternoon, he was very slow but he got the job done, with some direction from me. Finally I can lay off the snow shovelling!

I had to do a stress test last Monday, I was half hoping that I would get at least one test that showed an abnormality, but this wasn't it. Tiring but not significant. But between hauling a load or two of firewood in and walking the dog every day, I am always fatigued and dizzy and brain fogged. Started LDN for the second time, no side effects this time but no positive effects either. However they say it can take up to a year or more to start seeing benefits, if any. I'm just happy the worst side effects last time—nausea and depression—are not there now.

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In November?December? I watched a Netflix fantasy series called The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself. I thought it was really good but Netflix decided not to renew it. Then they changed the title, now it's called Half Bad, which is the book series it is based on. The library has the book series so I am reading that. 

YA fantasy literature is often not that well written but this one is, the author Sally Greene is older and I guess a better writer than many YA authors. She says she likes the Hemingway style of writing and tries to emulate it. I finished Half Bad and am on to the second book, Half Wild. I can see that while the Netflix series was more or less true to the main characters and the overall plot, it definitely made a lot of changes in timing and specific plotlines, also dropping a few to make it less complicated.

Greene revised her novels based on some of the things she learned from the screen version. Nothing serious, but she saw the racist implications in what she originally wrote that the Netflix version changed to something more neutral, so she did too. I got the first book as an online book with her revisions, but the print versions the library has are older and still contain the problematic language.

It is the rare author who writes a novel that can be directly translated into a screenplay. A novel is a different storytelling medium from theatre or big/small screen video; novels don't always work so well in strict translation, or vice versa. Very much depends on the talent of the writers and directors involved. 

Lazy days of autumn

Wet spider web at Tai Chi class

It's been a while but I am still here. I spend a lot of time on my daybed, reading, surfing and watching shows in the evening. I am currently ploughing through Mick Herron's Slough House series. I get each book at the library and since right now this series is very popular (thanks to Slow Horses on Apple TV+), I am not reading them in the proper order. I put holds on the ones I want to read and it's luck of the draw which one comes first. I still haven't read the first book in the series, but I have read the most recent (Bad Actors, 2022). I am currently reading the penultimate, Slough House. In the TV series Gary Oldman plays Jackson Lamb so when I read that's how I picture him. Likewise for some of the other characters.

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Hurricane Fiona did a lot of damage here but one good thing came of it, a few friends faraway texted and emailed to see if I was okay. As a result I have reconnected with a couple of old friends I haven't been in touch with for a few years. One of them has a similar illness to me and we both are rather restricted in what we can do and who we can talk to. So it's nice, we're kind of on the same page. We used to joke around a lot, and that hasn't changed.

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I got a Handicapped tag for my truck this week, I no longer have to worry about finding a parking spot close enough to the grocery store. I still hate that I have to drive everywhere, but at least it is less frustrating. Today I drove to the Reservoir to go for a walk, I did not park in the Handicap spot because it wouldn't have made a difference. No ducks on the pond but a nice walk. There's a look off point where you can see the Minas Basin and Cape Blomidon, I sat on a bench there for a while. Someone walked by with their little dog, the dog stopped to say hello. That was nice. I love the smell of autumn, not to mention the colours. Just a lovely day for a walk. I am still holding out hope for more ducks, they cheer me up.

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Next month will be full of appointments. I will be assessed by the Home Care Coordinator to see if I am eligible for services, and at the Balance and Dizziness Clinic to determine the cause of my dizziness and what treatment, if any, will help. Also see my doctor. She does the only one symptom at a time thing, so last time I went it was about my cough. I tried to bring up the dizziness (yet again!!! so frustrating!!!) and she said not now, next appointment. Earliest appointment available was in six weeks. So I went through the Nurse Practitioner at the Chronic Conditions Clinic and she made the referral immediately. 

At some point I am scheduled for a CT scan to see if I have lung cancer due to being a former smoker. My doctor's idea. But through a combination of prescription drugs and over-the-counter meds, I have the cough more or less under control, and I don't think it is due to lung cancer, or any of the other lung ailments caused by smoking. Also, out of the blue, I got called by an organization that tests your memory to see if you have dementia. I had gone in for a free assessment a year ago, and now they want to offer me a DNA test to see if I have genes for dementia. What the hell, why not. At this point I really don't care one way or the other. 

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Still going to Tai Chi but it is getting more difficult by the week. I am finding out just how short my short term memory is. The instructor says this is normal, but it doesn't feel normal.

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I put my birdfeeder out early this year. It is mobbed by the blue jays who literally guzzle down the seeds. But the chickadees, cardinals and nuthatches manage to get in between mobs. 

One day a nuthatch came and the feeder was not up. It flew around and around where it should have been, perhaps thinking it just hadn't looked hard enough (I know the feeling!). Then it flew away, but a few minutes later it came back and landed on a potted plant nearby. It dug up a sunflower seed and flew away with it. Ahah! Now I know who is burying seeds in my potted plants! 

The mourning dove is back too, hoping for messy eaters to drop seeds on the table below the feeder. The blue jays have cleaned up their act, they don't drop so many seeds any more. I take pity on the very patient dove and scatter a few seeds on the table for it. 

My friend that I reconnected with was telling me about the bears that visit her area. And the coyotes. She enjoys their visits. I think I would too, but not a lot of bears or coyotes here. Rare visits by pheasants is as exotic as it gets.

Rovelli, Zanny and Arkady

ebikes, big and small

I just wanted to make note of the book I am currently reading: There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness, and other thoughts on physics, philosophy and the world, by Carlo Rovelli (2018, translated 2020). It's a book of short essays, accurately summarized by the title. A gem of a book, imminently readable no matter what your level of understanding of physics/philosophy/the world.

The last essay was written in Italy near the beginning of the pandemic (April 2020), in which he talks about his observations of what is happening, in Italy and elsewhere. The last paragraph is probably the best last paragraph of a book of essays that I have read so far:

"We are not the masters of the world, we are not immortal; we are, as we have always been, like leaves in the autumn wind. We are not waging a battle against death. That battle we must inevitably lose, as death prevails anyway. What we are doing is struggling, together, to buy one another more days on Earth. For this short life, despite everything, seems beautiful to us, now more than ever."

I recommend this book, no matter what your level of understanding of history, poetry, science, philosophy. The essays are short and easy to read, but you will need to allow yourself extra time to muse about them. 

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As a subscriber to The Economist, I get to listen or participate in their zoom calls on the War in Ukraine and its implications. Each episode is one hour long, with three or four Economist editors, including the chief editor Zanny Minton Beddoes, on a Friday afternoon. For one episode two of the editors, Zanny and Arkady Ostrokov, travelled to Kyiv to interview Volodomyr Zelensky. 

Another episode included Arkady in a vehicle somewhere in eastern Ukraine reporting first hand on the eastern front of the war. That was a somewhat tense episode since it was live and they were unable to connect with Arkady until the last 15 minutes of the hour, due to internet connectivity issues (but since he was in the middle of a war there was some speculation as to whether his lack of connectivity was due to more ominous problems). 

One can actually submit one's own questions which the Economist editors field and attempt to answer on air. I have not tried to do so, but I guess it's an option. One participant asked why Arkady was in a car without a seatbelt, which Arkady assured the world was because the car he was in was parked on the side of the road (on the eastern front). 

The Zelensky interview was very interesting to watch, Zelensky switched from English to Ukrainian to Russian randomly and without a hitch. The start of the interview was delayed somewhat due to the absence of the translator who was busy translating elsewhere, Zelensky commented that it says something when the President must wait on the availability of the President's translator (strictly speaking it was interpretation not translation; translation pertains to written language). 

During the interview we saw Arkady, Zanny and Volodomyr in the same shot; the look of awe on Zanny's face communicated very well her sense that she was in the presence of a great man. She commented later that as a journalist she would leap at the chance to interview Putin, but knew that going to Moscow to interview Putin would be far more risky and dangerous than going to Kyiv to interview Zelensky, her employer would never allow it. Still...

Sunny Days

Last few weeks have been terribly busy, and I have probably been pushing myself too hard. I am keeping lists of things I have to do, and as each item gets checked off two more get added on. I am not making progress.

A pile of turtles

Went kayaking, it was fun (and exhausting). As it turned out, the second Covid booster seriously set me back. I almost didn't go kayaking, I felt so sick. A full week after getting the shot I think I recovered, but the first day of kayaking left me almost too dizzy to function. It was only a bit less than two hours of an easy paddle up a quiet meandering river. We saw piles of turtles. Literally piles, they were perched one atop another on floating logs in the sun. The second day of paddling was much better, I had recovered from the booster shot and was able to spend the whole day out on the water. 

There were six of us in a three bedroom cottage, ranging in age from early sixties to mid-seventies. The difference in energy level between the three in their sixties and the three in our seventies was pretty stark. The other two seventy year olds were recovering from bouts of Covid in April, so they were in only slightly better shape than me. On the second and third days we split up into two paddling groups, the younger women wanted to go further faster. They even went swimming!

It felt good to be out in my kayak again, the trip was so worth it.

Shortly after I got back, the roofers arrived to reroof my house. The idea is to have brand new shingles under the solar panels. In three days they had most of it done but there are some ridge shingles missing because of shortages; none to be had in the entire province. They'll be back to finish the job when the ridge shingles are available again. I warned them about my crow family, but there was no conflict, the men and the crows did not bother each other.

I called the solar panel installer after the roof was done to get an estimate of when he planned to start. Turns out some document or other got lost so there is a delay. Surprise surprise. He thinks he will start in 3 weeks, and it will take about 6 weeks. I am not holding my breath.

Then I put my car up for sale, it sold within a couple of days. I priced it at an amount that I wanted, then after it sold I looked on the internet to see what it should be priced at. I was about $500 under what they said it was worth. Even so, the guy who bought it tried to talk me down in price. I am pretty sure he knew it was already underpriced, he just wanted to see if he could get an even better deal. Nope.

My next big job is to get the house painted. I had already lined up a friend to help me do that, and she wanted another person to do the ladder work. A friend of hers has a son with a mental illness that pretty much prevents him from getting a steady job, she arranged for him to help, after running it past me of course. But she can't start until June and I had the idea that the young man could start this month doing cleaning and scraping. So he's been here for the past few days. He's a good worker, he just has difficulty relating to people. That's fine with me. He has some experience with this kind of work so I don't really have to supervise him. I know his mother from the dog park, she used to have a border collie that Hapi liked, which says a lot because Hapi didn't much care for border collies.

New garden frames and transplants-in-waiting

Since coming back from kayaking we've had beautiful sunny weather and I've been working in my garden. It is slow going because it's heavy work and I am tired and dizzy. I'm not making progress as fast as I would like. My transplants are huge and desperately need to be planted, but strictly speaking it is too early yet and I haven't got the beds ready for them. I did manage to get peas, spinach and some potatoes planted.

I love seeing the goldfinches and cardinals flitting about, and the male cardinals are quite noisy now, declaring their territories. Pinky and Big Red are still fighting, I saw them in a showdown in my neighbour's driveway. But they saw me watching and flew away before they really got into it.Traffic at the bird feeder is dropping off, but I keep it up because the cardinals always come in the evening and I like seeing them.

I am being referred to an internal medicine guy and I am supposed to go to the Chronic Conditions centre for a NASA Lean Test. That's to see if I have Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). If I have POTS then I guess it means my heart has been affected, but not sure how much. Not even sure I have it, but it would explain the two years of dizziness and fatigue. It's also a known complication of Long Covid.

I am reading an interesting book, A Primate's Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky. It's about his years in Kenya studying a troop of baboons. He obviously has a deep fondness for his study subjects and a wicked sense of humour. At the start of the book he says that the tragic last chapter is completely true, but he did change a few names. My curiousity caused me to read the last chapter first, and it was so tragic I almost couldn't go back and read the first chapters. Who knew you could be so fond of baboons? Stuff I've read about baboons suggests that the males run the show and females are completely under their control, but it turns out that is wishful thinking on the part of (male) animal behaviourists. As usual, things are a lot more complicated. However, because Sapolsky's research involved taking blood samples, and the females were mostly pregnant, lactating or generally taking care of children, he couldn't take samples from them. Taking a sample involved darting a baboon, waiting for it to fall unconscious, carrying it back to his vehicle where he took the sample and then returning the baboon to where it was when it fell unconscious. Since he couldn't really do that to a female who couldn't afford to spend time away and unconscious, most of the baboons that he knew up close and personal were male. 

All the lovely sunny weather we are having does not bode well for summer crops. The land is unusually dry. It is supposed to be a La Nina summer which is unusual too, and that means more hurricane activity. The large number of snow storms we had this winter were due to a La Nina winter. Not sure what unusually dry ground and unusual hurricane activity will add up to, not much good I guess.

A special horror

Politics is like bad cinema—people overact, take it too far. When I speak with politicians, I see this in their facial expressions, their eyes, the way they squint. I look at things like a producer. I would often watch a scene on the monitor, and the director and I would yell, 'Stop, no more, this is unwatchable! No one will believe this.' ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 2019.

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I  crashed hard after last Friday's snowstorm, shovelling on Saturday triggered it. I am also in a cognitive behaviour therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) zoom program, at this stage we are restricted in how much time we can spend in bed. The combination of restricted sleep and post exertional malaise (PEM) did me in. My sleep time (we have to keep sleep diaries) plummeted from 6 hours to 3.5, and by Tuesday I was damn near suicidal. 

Had a major meltdown in the zoom meeting on Tuesday, in front of everyone. One of the participants suggested that the facilitator—a psychologist—and I deal with it after the meeting. I thanked her for saying that. Anyway, clearly I am not in good shape. 

The following morning was my weekly 'coffee date' with a neighbour and I told her about it. She has a chronic—ultimately fatal—illness and she recounted how it was for her when she realized that this was her life from now on; all her plans for her future were gone. I think that I am just coming to that realization; after almost two years of illness there is no firm diagnosis, no treatment and no hope of recovery (based on what I know of other people's experience). Not to mention a doctor who needs hard evidence in the way of medically approved tests before she'll say or do anything. She kind of twisted my arm to go into this CBT-I program and so far, more that halfway through, I feel worse rather than better. Probably one of the worst winters I have ever had.

I am mostly flat on my back except for necessary activities like grocery shopping and food prep; about all I can do flat on my back is read or use my iPad. And hey, have you been watching/reading/listening to the news lately? Enough said. Here in Nova Scotia we have the added pleasure of the Portapique Massacre enquiry going on. That's like reliving it all over again, only now you get to see/hear the gory details you didn't know about at the time. I have one image now stuck in my mind: four little kids from two different families hiding in one basement after both sets of parents have just been shot to death. It gets worse from there. 

This has been two years of unbelievableness, it's hard to imagine that things will get better. The major crises happening now are only obscuring the crises waiting in the wings, assuming the current crisis doesn't precipitate a nuclear world war. This isn't over, not by a long shot.

This morning I read a book review in the New York Times (they offered a great deal for a one year subscription so I took it) of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke, 2022. There were some good quotes from the book which I definitely relate to, and my local library has ordered the book so I've put a hold on it. Turns out I'm first in line.

"It felt as if my body were made of sand, and as if molasses had invaded my brain." 

Totally. This is the one quote I think does a really good job of describing what it's like. Symptoms change, effects are physical, mental, emotional. Not only am I losing my physical capacities but my mental ones as well. I feel like I can't speak properly anymore, a kind of aphasia. Better not to even try.

"My ability to accumulate information felt like the only control I still possessed." 

Absolutely. I've become obsessed with consulting PubMed and a couple of other websites I trust for the latest in research and information. The one tiny part of my remaining life I have any control over.

"...the special horror of being not only ill but also marginalized — your testimony dismissed because your lab work fails to match a pre-existing pattern." 

Yup. So far all lab work and other tests show that I am completely healthy, so maybe a malingering drug addict with mental health issues?

"The illness was severe but invisible. And that invisibility made all the difference — it made me invisible, which itself almost killed me." 

Before this illness I was very active, and I had a great social life built around that activity. Both have vanished. When I spoke with my neighbour yesterday she described what that felt like in her life. For me, I am afraid to appear in public anymore because I just don't want to deal with people's responses, and she said she used to lurk in forest trails around her small northern town rather than walk down the street in public. Where she lived there were wolves, her husband really didn't like her forest lurking at all.

"Your need, when you are sick, can squeeze up inside your chest, balling its way up and out of your throat. I pictured it as a thick, viscous, toxic gel that slid out of me at moments when nothing else could."  

Exactly how I felt when I just lost it on the zoom call: utterly toxic.

"The entanglement of self and sickness became a mirrored distortion, a fun house I feared I was never going to escape…" 

I hallucinated the other night, wide awake and enthralled in this fun house kaleidoscope of colourful sparkly weaving/slithering/flashing shapes, I could see my thoughts embedded in it, hopelessly entangled, like little birds in a mist net.

"There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. … I will not say the wisdom and growth mean I wouldn't have it any other way. I would have it the other way."  

If this is how one obtains wisdom and growth, then I'd just as soon be stupid and stuck, thank you very much.

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It's a good thing I have past experience of copy editing, otherwise this post would be utterly unreadable. Can't speak, can't even type. Took hours of retyping.

Swimming and reading

My swimming companions

Since getting home from my kayaking expedition at the beginning of the month I've been swimming at the Reservoir, almost daily. I swim with a woman who seems to be an amazing source of local gossip. Some of it good, some of it not, some about people I know and some about people I don't. I occasionally have gossip tidbits to exchange, but not very much really. The main benefit of all this gossip is to keep me swimming; I can do 4 laps while listening and at best 2 laps while not. So, there's that. 

She has a neighbour who sometimes shows up to do serious swimming (the crawl, with flippers, goggles and ear plugs), it turns out he is also a serious kayaker. So I mentioned to my swimming companion that I am always looking for fellow kayakers and she said she'd pass that along, which she did. So we shall see. I've pretty much decided that I don't want to combine kayaking and camping any more, at least not the way we have been doing. Maybe a single base camp for a 4-day trip, but not changing campsites every day or even every other day. So what I want is people I can do day trips with, sans camping.

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Today is a wet stormy day and after today the temperature will take a downturn, so I may not be swimming anymore unless we get a mini heat wave in October. Not likely. Today I am doing more or less nothing. This past week, besides swimming I also did some rather strenuous yard work so doing nothing is my idea of a rest. I watched the storm outside the window, I read, and got caught up on bills.

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I just finished reading an interesting book which I can recommend: The Premonition, by Michael Lewis. I'd never heard of Lewis before, and on the back cover of the book is a review comment: "I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it." I absolutely agree, it was an enthralling read and I learned a few things, albeit rather depressing things. But no matter, he writes in a very upbeat style leaving one with hope and a little faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings. The book is a pandemic story, specifically about Covid19, but it starts in the early 2000s, under the G.W. Bush presidency. I learned that Bush did one good thing during his presidency, he read John Barry's book about the 1918 Flu Pandemic and it scared him into creating a committee to come up with a pandemic plan for the USA. The membership in this committee was brilliant, they did their homework and they came up with an official pandemic plan that—had it ever been implemented—would have changed the course of the American experience of the 2020 Covid Pandemic. Sigh…

Lewis focuses his book on a half dozen individuals, some of whom were original members of that committee, and some of whom were latecomers to the party. All of them brilliant in their own ways, all of them heroes who went above and beyond in their attempts to stem the carnage of the pandemic in the USA. The book reads like a thriller, you get inside the lives and heads of Lewis's subjects, and in the process you learn a thing or two about how bureaucracy works. That latter bit leaves me a little depressed, but it's good to know that heroes exist.

Lewis says an interesting thing about government in general. He says that the federal government—and I think this applies to any federal government—is a manager of a portfolio of existential risks, whether natural disasters, financial panics, military, energy or food security, and so forth. It is the job of government to be ready for any of these risks and to jump into action when they happen. To that end they maintain a stable of experts, a host of disaster plans, and a cohort of people ready to act according to plan when disaster occurs. But that's expensive, and it means a whole lot of people being held at the ready for such a disaster to materialize, and people who are against the idea of Big Government just want to eliminate all that. It makes the cvil service look wasteful. A couple of things that happened when Covid exploded in the US were that the plan was forgotten or ignored and it turned out the supplies necessary for addressing a pandemic weren't there, they'd long since expired and not been replaced.

We hear a lot about how Trump sabotaged the Covid response but Lewis does not dwell on that. He talks about a whole lot of other failures that contributed, and how his little team of heroes tried to mitigate them. These heroes did not have job titles reflecting their importance, they were what one person referred to as "L6": so far down the hierarchy of authority that they should have been inconsequential, but they weren't. They really took the ball and ran with it, regardless of the consequences to their careers. Few of us get that opportunity, but these people did and their stories are inspiring.

A birthday and an adventure

On Thursday it rained in the morning with thunder and lightning, so we did not go paddling. Instead I got myself caught up on various chores and in the afternoon went to a birthday party at a local restaurant.

The birthday girl was celebrating her 80th and she invited a couple of other women who also were celebrating birthdays in July. 

Altogether we were six. Since the weather was a bit iffy, we chose a restaurant that had a fully covered patio so we could be outdoors without getting soaked (or baked, if the sun came out). It's a marvelous restaurant specializing in Turkish food. The owner lives around the corner from me and is a single father, I often see him in his apron walking down my street to his restaurant, with two young boys in tow.

We had a lovely meal and greatly enjoyed this being our first restaurant meal since the pandemic started, we showed off our funniest fanciest facemasks. You have to wear a mask when you are moving about but can take it off when seated at your table, and all of us were double vaccinated. Near the end of the meal the owner came to our table bearing a plate of baklava made in-house, with lit sparklers in honour of our birthday party and the fact that several of us had birthdays in July.

"Here in our restaurant, we all have birthdays in July!" he said.

Afterward we retired to the birthday girl's home for more wine and celebration.

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One day this past week the kayakers booked in the afternoon instead of the morning because one person had a dental appointment in the morning. I decided not to go. But as luck would have it I did end up kayaking with someone else I had met at the Reservoir while swimming there. She had bought an inflatable kayak and wanted to learn to use it but was reluctant to go out on her own. I said I would accompany her in my own inflatable. We chose a lake close to town, Lumsden's Pond. There's a provincial picnic park and tiny beach there. 

After unloading all our gear and lugging it down to the beach, I realized that I had locked my keys inside the truck. J, my companion, thought we could go back to my house to get the spare key and then return to Lumsden's in her car which she had left at my house. Then she remembered that she left her car key in my truck. She had her phone and thought she could call CAA (my phone was inside the truck), but it turns out there is no cell coverage at the park. J said never mind, we will cross that bridge later.

I've used my kayak a couple of times already this summer so the process of getting it ready for the water is properly memorized; time-consuming but not confusing. J had no experience at all and her kayak was brand new. Also very cheap. It really took a while to figure it out, even with both of us reading the instructions a couple of times. But eventually we got it water-ready.

J couldn't figure out which end of her kayak was the bow, we had to guess and my guess was opposite to hers. She went with her guess. As it turned out, she was wrong and the kayak was very unmanouverable. She couldn't paddle in a straight line if her life depended on it! So after all that frustration we went back to shore after a very short paddle. Once onshore we turned her kayak upside down to see which way the keel was pointing, and then turned it right side up again to see if there was anything on the bow end that was different from the stern end so she would know the next time. We packed up the kayaks and then tried to figure out how we were going to get my truck unlocked.

As luck would have it a young woman and her child were just heading home, they stopped to greet us and we asked the big question: would you drive one of us to town? And also back to the beach again? At first she said she was happy to take one of us to town but not back again, and we hesitated as we tried to figure out how we would get back, then she said never mind she would drive us back too. She didn't mind the driving, she was just concerned about how her young daughter was going to take it.

I went back with the young woman and her daughter who was fine with it all, she sat in her little car seat smiling until she fell asleep. We had a nice chat, it turns out I knew the woman's parents and we talked about a variety of things, from travel out west to Toronto weather to whether or not to invest in solar panels. She turned down the offer of a bottle of wine for her trouble saying it was her pleasure to help out. Of course my house key was also locked in the truck, but I keep a spare outside so I used that. Note to self: spare truck key somewhere outside the truck cab!

First thing I did was unlock the truck and get J's bottle of water out as I was pretty sure she was quite parched by now. Then we went for a swim. We swam across the lake and back, a much longer swim than I am used to but we were chatting so much that we didn't think to turn around until we reached the other side. I didn't sleep so well that night due to neck pain because of the long swim, but it was otherwise a very interesting day that ended well.

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J mentioned a book she was reading, Why We Swim. I looked it up on our local library website and the e-book version was available so I borrowed it. Looks interesting. In the first chapter the author writes about the earliest known record of human swimming, dating to over 10,000 years ago. There are cave paintings of swimmers in the Sahara Desert! In those days there was a whole chain of lakes full of fish, and in addition to the cave paintings there are old harpoons buried in what was once a lake bottom. I can't get those ancient swimmers out of my mind, the idea that where they once swam is now a complete desert.

Checking in...

Rock painting of Hapi

Well it certainly has been a while since I last posted here, seems like the longer you go the longer you go. Hard to get back into it. 

Hapi, summer 2020

Heat wave, second one this month. Heat waves are like rainy days, I just want to stay indoors. With my new windows and cellular blinds it stays a bit cooler, but not a lot. Last year I used the air conditioning on the heat pump and ended up with mould growing inside it, so this year I want to keep that to a minimum. Just the really bad days. But so far the new windows and blinds seem to be doing the job I hoped they would. So now heat wave days are like rainy days, I just want to hide indoors till it passes.

Nothing terribly exciting or upsetting these past couple of weeks, other than getting my second Covid shot. Knocked me sideways for a couple of days, but I'd heard that was possible so I planned for it. 

Got all my firewood stacked away, I should be good for a couple of winters now, if the weight of the wood doesn't collapse the woodshed, LOL. They delivered wood that was 2" longer than what I requested, so hopefully that won't be a problem. Although I think that some of the thicker pieces might be. My woodstove is not that big.

Garden is progressing, the squash and cucumber took forever to germinate and the romaine lettuce never did. I'll try again in a couple of months, I think it is too hot now. I got a flat of really ripe strawberries (8 quarts) from a local farm market really cheap ($24) and have processed them all into frozen berries, except for a quart for eating fresh. Strawberry season is still going so I'll probably buy another couple of quarts for eating. I have some frozen berries left over from last year so I think I'll turn them into jam, if and when the weather cools.

I've been swimming a couple of times a week, kayaking the odd time or two, and walking with friends and their dogs. One Friday I noticed that Hapi's ornament at the Reservoir had disappeared and that threw me into a weekend of mourning. I had debated taking her ornament down and bringing it home, but it didn't seem like a great memento so I didn't. Then it disappeared. I found out later that someone had vandalized it and left it lying on the ground in the parking area; some other dog owners saw it and decided to get rid of it because they didn't want me to see it like that.

After that weekend a neighbour stopped by to give me a rock painting she had done of Hapi (see above). She said she had hung on to it for awhile, making improvements, but finally a friend told her, "Enough, just give it to her." Her timing was impeccable, it cheered me up enormously.

Am reading an Elizabeth Kolbert book called Under a White Sky which is kind of interesting. She talks about several human attempts to save various endangered species or control invasive species and in every case there is the problem of unintended consequences. Then she talks about geoengineering solutions to climate change and the concomitant danger of unintended consequences. But she likens it to chemotherapy: no one in their right mind would consent to chemo if there was something better. Geoengineering is like chemo for climate. 

Another fact she points out is that what they have learned from Greenland glacier ice cores is that the last 10,000 years have been unusually stable climate-wise, and that is probably the reason human civilization developed. Humans have certainly had the intelligence and ingenuity to create agriculture and various other civilizing technologies long before that, but the climate was way too unstable for a sedentary way of life to be of lasting value. Better to just hang out as hunter-gatherers and take whatever the planet dishes out. While current climate change and species' extinctions are largely human-created, sooner or later that 10,000-year stable period would have ended anyway. But with all of our technology, great cities and huge population, that climate change is almost certainly going to be devastating. Makes climate-chemo look like a chance worth taking.

And speaking of heat waves, here's a link to a video for constructing a cheap DIY air conditioner...

Life battles

The last few days I've been feeling quite knocked out; I guess it's payback time for the accomplishments of the last couple of weeks, in the garden and so forth. Also, I am tapering off some sleep medication and I've reached the point where getting enough sleep is problematic. I will persevere, but it is not fun. There was a couple of weeks when I was feeling quite proud of myself for tapering off so easily, but now it is a slog.

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I am in a battle with a rat. After Hapi died I threw a very old bag of dry dog food in my compost bin. It was too old to give away to another dog owner, so I thought it would be good to add to my garden compost. The rat agreed. It started digging tunnels into my bin and I started blocking the tunnels with rocks and bricks. Then it learned how to open the hatch at the top of the bin, so I weighted it with more bricks and rocks. Then it pried off the lower hatch for removing the finished compost. I blocked that with roofing shingles. 

At that point I thought it was time to resort to more serious measures so I went to the hardware store to buy rat poison. The clerk there suggested that a rat trap was better so I got that instead. The first night the rat set off the trap without harm and dug a tunnel beside the trap. I filled in the tunnel and reset the trap on top of the tunnel site. Last night it again set off the trap without harm, but I'm guessing it scared itself because it did not dig another tunnel. I'll try it again tonight. A friend wants me to use a live trap and maybe that is the best idea, I'll try that next. In the meantime it has probably managed to make off with half the dog food so soon there will be nothing left in the compost bin that it wants. 

The other very annoying thing this rat does is dig up my seed potatoes. Apparently it does not like potatoes because it leaves the dug up potatoes on the ground beside where they used to be buried.

In the photo above the black box in the upper left is the compost bin, you can just make out a couple of the bricks I put on top.

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I am reading A Life of One's Own by Marion Milner, first published in 1934. The author went on to become a distinguished psychotherapist, but the book is based on a life experiment she conducted in her 20s. She wanted to learn first hand what her life purpose was, how she should conduct her life, what principles she should live by. Should she "follow the herd," or abide by what the experts (at that time, mostly the Church) told her, or follow her own inclinations? And if she was to follow her own inclinations, what were they exactly? She decided to study her own life and to that end she began to keep a diary. 

In the beginning, her diary appalled her. It seemed that she could only write about very superficial things, and when she tried to look at what exactly she wanted from life, it was not very inspiring. At one point red shoes were high on her list of most wanted things. I had to laugh a little bit to myself reading her early entries, it sounded so much like my own attempts at a diary. I started a diary (or a journal, as we liked to call it when we were seeking those kinds of answers in life) on several occasions and each time that I actually read what I was writing I found it so embarrassing that I immediately quit. Nobody—not even me—wants to know what goes on in my mind on a daily basis. Ms Milner had pretty much the same reaction to her own diary, but she persevered.

Each chapter of her book starts with a literary quote, most often from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. She looked on her seven-year experiment as a kind of exploration similar to Crusoe's on his desert island. After all, we are born into bodies and families and situations not of our own choosing and must somehow make a go of it. Crusoe explored his island in order to ascertain what his situation was, what resources he had at his disposal, and how best to survive and perhaps escape the limitations of his lonely exile. Milner had the same idea for learning how to conduct her life.

When I was writing my embarrassing diaries I had the naive idea that the simple act of writing down what was happening or what I felt about what was happening would somehow be enlightening. It was not. Milner had the same doomed hope, but over time she perceived patterns that were enlightening. The things she learned in the course of her seven-year experiment it took me many more years to discover, and some of it I still have not discovered. So I admire her systematic and bold experimenting with her own life. More importantly I admire that she actually wrote down the stuff she learned.

Thoughts from my weekend of reading

I am reading The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larsen. It is a very large book (over 500 pages fine print, no pictures) about one year in the life of Winston Churchill, spring of 1940 to spring of 1941. As Mr Larsen says, this is the year that Churchill became Churchill, the bulldog of a man we think we know. Very detailled, quite engrossing. Mr Larsen draws on several personal diaries of the time, notably John Colville's (The Fringes of Power, 1985), who was Churchill's personal secretary and privy to most of Churchill's political and personal life. Of course, a book set in that period of time cannot ignore The Battle of Britain or any other notable events of the time, up to and including the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It is a fascinating view into that period of World War II.

Something that interests me is how Adolf Hitler is portrayed, both in this book and elsewhere. When we think of Churchill and Hitler, we conjure up stereotypical images of heroes and villains, believing one to be All Good and the other to be All Evil. I've certainly heard evidence that Churchill was not entirely the stereotypical hero, plenty of people have good reason to be disturbed by his role in hiistory. In this book Larsen only focuses on Churchill's moment of heroic glory, but he does not deny Churchill's lesser qualities. But what of Hitler?

In videos I've seen of Hitler's famous speeches, he appears as a fervent madman. Yet in this book Larsen quotes reporters who attended such speeches as to how genuine and convincing Hitler seemed. He was a master of rhetoric, not in the fervent madman sense but in his command of the stage, his intuitive sense of timing and his ability to convey facts and emotions in a convincing manner. It is hard to square the two impressions. 

I think we make a mistake in portraying the man as solely an evil madman. He was the right man at the right time. Germans were very much hurt and suffering from the Treaty of Versailles agreed upon at the end of World War I, he addressed that suffering and offered a righteous solution to it that Germans could embrace. He of course blamed 'The Jews' as the ultimate source of German suffering, but he was not so different from many others who harboured that prejudice at that time. The fate of the St. Louis is a case in point. When other countries declared war on Germany, it was not out of outrage at the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews, but rather the very real fear that Germany under Hitler was capable of conquering all of Europe and then proceeding to conquer North America.

Like Churchill, Hitler was a great leader, he encouraged and mobilized Germans to address their social and economic distress, he made them proud to be Germans. My opinion is that we should look on Hitler as we do Churchill, a man of both good and bad qualities. If we think of him as a madman then the damage that he did is considered almost impossible to repeat, after all it was done by a madman and a psychopath and we have mechanisms in place to deal with such people. 

If on the other hand we realize that he was actually an ordinary man who managed to get his hands on the levers of power, then we also realize that it could happen again, it is not so far fetched. He did after all do some good for some people, he did care about the fate of his people and much of his motivation was not out of hate but out of desire for revenge for very real hurts. A lot of people could fill those boots, it is not an extraordinary circumstance.

Reading and trade offs

Hapi seems to be having some difficulty with pain, I discussed it with her vet and the vet prescribed gabapentin. She warned that the gabapentin would make Hapi "loopy". Coincidentally my own doctor prescribed something for me to combat nerve pain, and I have to say it's making me feel "loopy" too. I am thinking that almost any medication for nerve pain is going to have that side effect. Personally, I'd rather deal with pain than loopiness. My level of pain is relatively low, perhaps if it was much higher I'd be more willing to accept loopiness. I don't know how Hapi feels about that trade off.

We were late arriving at the Reservoir yesterday (due to loopiness); several dogs and owners were just leaving as we arrived. Hapi insisted on following the crowd back to the parking lot. One owner commented that Hapi just wanted to hang out with the other dogs, I said that it was more likely that she knew some of those dogs were going to be fed treats when they got back to the cars and she wanted to be in on that. I let her follow her nose and she managed to scarf up a few treats before everyone left and we went for our walk in the park. The trails are getting icy but the pond is no longer skatable.

Today is probably the coldest day of the year. The thermometer is in deep subzero territory and the wind is at blizzard levels. Not a lot of snow though. Yesterday was (relatively) warm and wet so between the rain and the melting snow we now have lots of ice. I took Hapi out for a walk early this morning because the forecast was for falling temperatures and rising wind speeds. Sure enough, lots of icy trails. I tried to stay in the woods to avoid the worst of the wind. I am grateful for Lee Valley Icers, the old lady's (and old man's) friend.

Hope for Wildlife emailed me that my blue jay does not have a broken wing or foot but appears to be suffering from head trauma. Now I am thinking that I did not run over it with my car after all, but that it crashed into one of my house windows near the bird feeder (and driveway). No blue jays have shown up at my bird feeder since then, I think they now consider it too dangerous. I met a friend on the street who lives a few blocks away, she says that recently there are twice as many blue jays at her feeder and they are eating her out of house and home. 

I just finished reading Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of Mind (2020), by Peter Godfrey-Smith. The evolution of consciousness, or mind, is a theme Godfrey-Smith also wrote about in in his previous book, Other Minds: the Octopus, the Sea and the Origin of Consciousness (2016). In the earlier book Godfrey-Smith focuses on octopus consciousness and how that might have evolved; in the more recent book he looks at the evolution of consciousness in general. He discusses what consciousness is and whether non-human animals have the same kind of consciousness that we have, and if not, how does it differ. 

I like his writing style, his apparent scientific knowledge particularly of the theory of evolution, his philosophical slant on that knowledge and the huge resource of his scuba diving experience on the Australian Great Barrier Reef. Of course he includes photos taken on some of those dives. His focus is on the early development of life in the sea, he gives short shrift to more recent development of modern land-based animals. I like that because so much of writing about biological evolution is focussed on land-based animals which is really a relatively recent development. Most of our modern biological processes were first developed in an ocean environment and only much later modified and adapted for land-based life.

Octopuses

My brother sent a link to my blog post about Covid politics to some of his friends, one of them wrote to me about his concerns in that regard. Among other things he referenced an article about how the second highest mortality rate (after seniors in long term care facilities) is among seniors over age 60 living in the community. The two groups together account for more than 95% of Covid mortality. And I just heard that some of the vaccine doses intended for my province are being diverted to the northern territories.

So, to distract myself from negative thoughts, today I am going to talk about octopuses. Have you seen the Netflix documentary "My Octopus Teacher"? It is endearing. I am a sucker for underwater cinematography so for sure I enjoyed it. However, my son wasn't quite so enamored of it, he pointed out that the narrator seemed to count himself a friend to the octopus in question and yet he filmed a horrific scene of 'his friend' nearly being killed in a fight with a shark. He did not interfere. With friends like that…?

I just finished reading Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. The author is a professor of philosophy and a scuba diver. He spent quite a bit of time observing octopuses off the coast of Australia, in a location he calls Octopolis. Octopuses are normally considered to be solitary creatures, only getting together for purposes of procreation. However, Octopolis is a kind of underwater city of octopuses. Since these creatures are not really evolved to be sociable, they do a lot of fighting amongst each other. The thing that is most notable about them though is their intelligence. They are comparable to some birds and mammals in that regard. 

From an evolutionary perspective, it is highly unlikely that the common ancestor of birds, mammals and cephalopods (the animal group that octopuses belong to) was all that intelligent; the intelligence of cephalopods developed independently of that of birds and mammals. There are some common features but one interesting difference is that octopus "brains" are distributed over their bodies, an octopus tentacle is as brainy as an octopus head. Some people speculate that cephalopods are really descended from aliens, but Godfrey-Smith says that although their intelligence may seem alien, they are as much of the Earth as we are. Just different.

Another thing about them is their incredibly short life spans. We are used to intelligent species being long-lived, relatively speaking, but octopuses live two short years. In those two years they learn so much and exhibit so much craftiness and intelligence, and then they die. It seems such a waste.

In 2008 I went snorkelling in the coral reef off the coast of Belize and had my own encounter with an octopus (actually two). I won't say it was life-changing, but it was certainly one of the more amazing experiences I have had.

Loneliness II

I'm coming back to a subject I touched on earlier: loneliness. I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject and trying to formulate this post in my head. Principally, I've been reading Loneliness (2008) by John Cacioppo and Lonely (2010) by Emily White. Cacioppo is a social neuroscientist (a field of research that he founded) who describes the results of his research on the subject; White is a Canadian writer who describes her experience of loneliness in the context of that research. I found White's book the more interesting of the two simply because of its very personal nature, but Cacioppo's book is interesting because of the objective science he brings to the subject. Both writers refer to another scientist, Robert Weiss, who wrote about loneliness in the 1970s; White calls Weiss's book the Bible on Loneliness. He overturned some prevailing opinions on loneliness through his meticulous research studies. Unfortunately, those prevailing opinions are still very much in vogue.

Humans are an 'obligatorily gregarious' species, which means we need to live in groups in order to survive. We are biologically determined by our need for others in that being alone is not only dangerous but bad for our health. Some mammals are adapted to the single life (orang-utans and bears for example) and others are not (chimpanzees and baboons). The health effects are numerous and borne out by research. You die younger. It compromises your immune system and sets you up for cardiac and neurological problems. 

Cacioppo suggests thinking of the role of loneliness in our lives this way: humans first evolved in a relatively harsh environment (the African savannah) and going it alone was simply not an option for survival. But if you belong to a tribe and for some reason you are ostracized and kicked out of that tribe, then you are in danger. So there you are, out on the vast savannah all alone, and you see on the horizon another tribe of humans approaching. At first you might think, Oh good, I can just join up with them and everything will be fine again. But then you realize that it might not be that simple, they would see you as The Competition for limited resources, and you are only one while they are many. Maybe approaching them is not such a good idea, maybe hiding is the better option. You are in a difficult position, potentially risking death by staying alone or almost certainly risking death by attempting to connect with strangers.

That is how loneliness operates. You don't really want to be alone and it is ultimately bad for your health, but there are strong forces within you cautioning you to avoid contact with others. Unlike depression, it's not something you can bootstrap yourself out of. It's also not age-dependent, it's not strictly a problem of old age, although we like to characterize it that way. And it is becoming more pervasive across all ages. Just in the past few decades statistical surveys have shown that it has and is growing immensely as a serious social problem. But the stigma attached to it makes it very difficult to deal with socially. It is far easier to admit to being depressed than to admit to being lonely.

Until relatively recently we treated depression as a personal defect too, people didn't want to admit to it because of the stigma attached. But now we see depression not as a personal shortcoming but as a kind of illness that can be treated with various therapies, whether prescribed by a doctor or psychologist or self-administered. Loneliness still very much has a stigma attached to it, lonely people are seen as somehow defective, perhaps lacking in social skills, basically unlikeable, or deliberately self-isolating for wrongheaded reasons. The lonely person herself will wonder what is wrong with her that she can't make friends, enjoy an active social life, or attract a lover or mate. There are no proven treatments for it, a doctor or therapist won't diagnose it nor recommend treatment for it, other than to get out there and socialize. See the alone-on-the-savannah story above.

Weiss was the first researcher to show that lonely people do in fact have entirely adequate social skills and are just as attractive as anyone else. Many lonely people do have lovers and mates, even active social lives. He suggested that there were two kinds of loneliness, social and emotional. Social loneliness is the lack of a satisfying or adequate social network, emotional loneliness is the lack of intimate contact with at least one other person. Cacioppo goes on to show that there is a further breakdown into longterm chronic loneliness and shortterm circumstantial loneliness. A significant majority of longterm loneliness is triggered by parental divorce or separation. A person grows up experiencing a deep insecurity about relationships of trust that they can never quite shake.

There is a genetic component as well, some people have a higher need for social interaction than others, and that appears to be genetically determined. That doesn't mean that those people are more lonely, just that they may be predisposed to loneliness if that need is not met.

White ends her book with the development of a personal loving relationship in her life. She says that her own efforts to deal with and end her loneliness did not help, it was the sheer luck of finding someone to love and be loved by. Both White and Cacioppo contend that loneliness is a big social issue and really only has social solutions, it takes other people to bring the lonely person back into social connection. White describes some organizational efforts in that direction, loneliness reduction programs that attempt to bring lonely individuals into the fold. Not simply with other lonely people, but other lonely people that they have commonalities with that will ease the development of social connectedness.

White wrote a second book Count Me In (2015) that follows up on her life after the period described in the first book. In the second book she is single again after the love relationship of the first book ended, and describes her concerted efforts to reconnect socially. I've read some but not all of it so won't comment now about her conclusions.

Given the rise of loneliness in our modern culture and the past year of pandemic isolation, I can't help but believe that social loneliness may have reached a tipping point. I see in the news that mental health and isolation are now seen as serious side effects of this pandemic. How we will address that is going to be interesting.

Sometime after I moved back to Nova Scotia someone suggested I join the local Newcomers Club (part of a national organization). At the time I wasn't really looking for ways to engage socially, I already had an existing network of old friends here. However my membership in the club has proven immensely beneficial, I now count people I have met through Newcomers as my major social network. I still have previous friends and acquaintances, but Newcomers is a way to have a constant pool of new friends to draw on and social activities to participate in. The structure of the club is almost tailor-made to address potential loneliness. You join at a monthly meeting and sign up for any 'interest groups' that look promising to you. If you don't see your particular interest represented then you can create a group. We have groups for eating together, hiking, cycling, needlecrafts, book reading, games, discussion and social outings. People who are new in town see the club as a way to kickstart a social life here. 

This year the membership fee has been waived and several of the groups are on hiatus. The outdoors groups still meet (outdoors) and a couple of other groups have gone to Zoom. Admittedly our club skews to older people, young people don't often stay when they see all the grey hair around. Newcomers Clubs in other locations are more or less successful, have more or less restrictions on membership. One club is restricted to women only, another boots you out after a specified number of years (three I think). Ours is pretty loosey-goosey, we don't even require you to be new in town or to live within the town when you join. And you can stay as long as your heart desires, no pressure.

Poor old dog gets a pedicure

This is a photo of my favourite tree at the Reservoir. It waits to turn brilliant yellow after all the other trees have finished, it is outstanding. It's been windy this year but in less windy years it drops its leaves directly below so it looks like a spotlight on the trail. 

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I am reading "Bright Eyed" (subtitled "Insomnia and its Cultures") by Richard Vaughan, a Canadian poet who died last month (October). If insomnia is a thing for you, I recommend it. Won't provide any cures or even hope, but it's pretty bang on. I'd never heard of RM Vaughan before his death made headlines last month, but I think I will go looking for more stuff he's written. Reading reactions to the news of his death, he sounds like quite a guy, wish I'd known him.

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A few days ago I gave Hapi a long cow rib bone. I get a shopping bag full of raw bones from a local butcher for $3, and she's been chowing down on these things for as long as she has lived with me. However this will be the last one. She went to town on it, there was nothing left of it by the time she was done. Then she spent the last three days barfing and pooping bone bits. Some of them up to 2" long. O.M.G. She had her first "normal" poop this afternoon, I really hope she has not sustained any internal damage. She acts like she's okay now, although the first couple of days she looked a bit iffy.

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More or less at the same time one of the other Reservoir dog walkers told me she had a dream about Hapi, that I had neglected to trim her toenails and now her nails were so long they were causing her pain.

"Look at the way she walks, she's in pain," this dog walker said.

Well, yeah.

"Look at her toes," she instructed.

Hapi's feet are covered in long hair so I couldn't see her toes without trying to pick up her paw, and of course Hapi wasn't going for that.

"See, she's in pain, not letting you pick up her paw is a sign of pain."

Oh brother. Just seems to me that with two weak rear legs, me trying to lift any of her paws off the ground was going to leave her a little precarious, of course she would object. Anyway, Hapi now has a pedicure appointment at the vet's next week. I really have no idea whether her toenails need it or not.

The person who took the photos of Hapi in my previous post also put them up on Facebook. Someone commented on how terrible she looked: was she lost? neglected? abused? I didn't see that, but another friend saw the photo and responded to the comment that she wasn't lost, neglected or abused, she was just old. And well-loved.

It is true that her fur is a mess, thanks to her daily wades in the pond and my inability to groom her. She lies on the ground and expects me to crouch over her while brushing or trimming her fur; my back just doesn't permit more than a few minutes of that. So yeah, she does look kind of scruffy.

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.