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.

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.

Conspiracy theory and other news

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I was scheduled to pick up the truck in the afternoon and I had to go to the bank in the morning to get the cash. My bank is not in my town, I had to go down the road, and since I was there anyway I did a bit of 'essential' shopping on the way.

Picking up the truck involved getting a ride with J to the truck owner's house and then hanging out for an hour or so just yakking. It was a nice sunny day so hanging out was not so bad except that I really had to go to the bathroom and was thirsty as all get out. J is diabetic and was overdue for his pills so we both had 'personal problems' being there, but I guess it was part of the deal. The truck owner loves the truck and is very reluctant to see it leave, but he needs the money. J told me that the only reason he sold it to me was because J assured him I would take care of it the same way he did. That could be just a line but I believe J, I felt the same way about my old S10.

When I got home J came by after taking care of his own issues and installed the radio in the truck. It never did get an oil change so I scheduled one for next week. I called around about insurance, I was thinking of going with CAA because they offer a cheaper price than my current insurance company, but I spent so much time on hold just trying to get a quote that I thought better of it. The extra cost is worth it to have a local broker who answers the phone without resorting to a complicated menu of options, not to mention lengthy on hold times.

So now I have two vehicles in the driveway and am thinking of keeping both, one for summer and one for winter. The underside of the truck is in pristine condition, it would be a shame to expose it to Nova Scotia road salt.

It stays light so late now that after supper there were still hours of daylight left in the day and I hadn't gotten much exercise so I went for a walk. I visited my Bubble buddies about a 20 minute walk away and sat in their backyard watching their new puppy at play. The puppy is much bolder now and her teeth are needle sharp. She definitely needs puppy training but nothing is open at the moment. The vet also recommends waiting until all her vaccinations are in effect before she socializes with other dogs. Same as people.

Then my friend said something surprising. He mentioned reading an article about how the SARS-Cov2 virus (aka Covid-19 virus) is more than likely to be lab-generated. Among all us anti-Trump types that is a positively heretical thing to say, and I asked him what the evidence was. He said he was not science-oriented so he couldn't really say but he thought if I looked it up I might be able to understand the argument since I have a science background. He couldn't remember off hand what the article was and I didn't want to go in his house to see his computer since I have spent the last few days hanging out with non-Bubble friends. So I went home to look it up.

Well, the jury is still out, but when Trump said the virus might have originated in a Chinese lab, he definitely had access to suggestive information. He just kind of shot his mouth off about that without naming sources or verifiable facts. Because, if true, then American military and scientific organizations are also implicated, not just Chinese. Also, the PCR test used to identify Covid infections came so fast after the pandemic started (like, about a month) and is so specific and was so quickly peer-reviewed and published, that the origins of the test are also in question.

Anyway, I found a couple of articles in two different places that have describe such a scenario. The sources are not rock-solid virtuous tellers of the truth, but they are interesting and suggestive. I provide links below, look them up, look up the authors and the websites and make your own decisions. These days that's about all you can do.

We are all mostly aware that 'the military-scientific complexes' of several (if not many) countries engage in biological terrorism research. With the ability to not only sequence genomes of many different organisms including viruses and the technology to modify such genomes, scientists now can and do create genetically modified organisms (GMO). All over the world there are labs for doing so, some benign and some not so benign. Depending on how dangerous the research is considered to be, biological labs have different levels of lab safety protocols in place, ranging from BSL1 to BSL4. BSL4 is the most restrictive and therefore the most protective; the chances of an accident happening in a lab certified at BSL4 are very small.

However.

Scientists are human, every last one of them. One of the things we humans do is cut corners. BSL4 is uncomfortable and slows your work down by a lot. It involves wearing spacesuit type coverings and going through elaborate cleaning rituals and being tethered by air tubes and wearing gloves that make handling things difficult and headgear that make seeing things difficult. Not to mention hot and sweaty and awkward. There have been accidental releases of pathogenic viruses from BSL4 labs ever since that kind of research started, including a smallpox release that resulted in a number of illnesses and deaths. For the most part these accidental releases have been covered up and the resulting damage contained.

There is a type of research called Gain of Function, which involves adding a pathogenic function to an otherwise relatively benign organism. This means that, say, a coronavirus that is incapable of infecting humans, or causes only mild illness, is genetically modified to be lethally infectious and contagious in humans. The virus is weaponized. Once the deadly virus has been created the scientists then work on a vaccine for it. President Obama banned such research in the US, however there is an escape clause in the ban that allows some research to continue to be funded, particularly by the Pentagon.

So, what if such Gain of Function research was being done in a lab far far away but partially funded by an American organization interested in such things, but due to the BSL4 protocols being so onerous, there were lapses. What if that lab was, as many of these labs are, located in a densely populated city at the centre of a highly active air transportation network?

On the other hand, what would it take to get a virus from a bat cave hundreds of kilometers away to the city where the illness first occurred in humans? Especially since so far no one has yet to isolate SARS-Cov2 in the wild? Yes, SARS-Cov2 is very similar to coronaviruses that infect those bats but are not infectious or contagious in humans. But the necessary evolution from a bat virus to a human virus is complicated, at least as complicated as creating a pathogenic virus in a lab and allowing it to escape into the local human population.

SARS-Cov2 contains a small structure called a furin cleavage site in the spike on its outer coat that is the means of breaking through human cell membranes. Without the furin cleavage site the virus would be harmless to humans. The furin cleavage site on the SARS-Cov2 virus is fairly unique in its genomic structure, it is not seen in any coronaviruses related to SARS-Cov2. However other forms of furin cleavage sites are seen in viruses that are contagious and infectious in humans. Scientists have the ability with CRISPR technology to create and insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus. It could have evolved naturally, but so far there is no evidence of that.

China has sealed the lab records of the scientist at the head of such research in the BSL4 lab located in Wuhan, so we will never know for sure. Chinese scientists and officials have been cooperative to a certain extent, but vigourously deny culpability. Many other scientists and public figures have denied categorically that this happened, or could have happened. Because, if it were known to have happened, then public outrage would be pretty darn, well, outrageous.

Trump may not have understood the scientific or political details, let alone the need for secrecy, but he would have had access to this kind of information. He was inclined to say publicly whatever he thought played to his electoral base, and conspiracy theories definitely play to his base.

My sources are linked below. The author of the first link has a checkered past but is not altogether unreliable. I have not found any critical reviews of this particular article, but since it is relatively recent that may come. It is long and technical and far more specific and detailed than I have been, so read at your own risk:

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038

The following link gets a middling review as reliable. Again, read at your own risk:

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ecohealth-alliance-has-hidden-almost-40-million-in-pentagon-funding/

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.

At the special care home

The picture today is of the garden in front of our local post office. Those three balls look to me like the coronavirus, every time I see them that's what I think of. They are past their prime now, they used to be purple, but they still look like giant virus particles to me. They are called Ambassador Alliums.

I went to see B today, first time in over four months. The special care home she now lives in is about a half hour drive away. Her son called me last night to say that I could come with him and his sister for their scheduled visit, I think because B insisted. It is really hard to get a visit there, it can take up to a month just to get an appointment, and the visit time is just half an hour in the gardens surrounding the home.

It was certainly a lovely day for it, the gardens are at their peak of beauty. I didn't get to see all of it because the property is quite extensive. A PSW meets you at the parking lot and takes your temperature and asks a bunch of health and travel questions. B's son and daughter did not want to wear masks and I had forgotten mine, but the PSW offered me one and I took it. Then he escorted us to the pavilion where we would meet B. We saw another PSW pushing her wheelchair from the building to the pavilion and we waved.

I could not bring Hapi but B thought that later they might start allowing dogs to visit. She talked a mile a minute, as if she'd had fifteen cups of coffee before we arrived. She is so happy there. She says the staff are all very nice and her roommate is just the nicest person one could imagine. They laugh a lot and B says they torment the staff. The PSW pushing her chair stayed for the visit; she is a high school student who is looking forward to getting back to school in the fall. She's had enough of home schooling.

Later the supervisor came by to make sure we were all comfortable. He said it was okay to hug B as long as we had masks on and used the hand sanitizer sitting on the little table. I don't know what the home is like inside but B says it's very nice. I am so glad she is happy there, she seemed far better than she has been in the past year. With her oxygen tank and her wheel chair she is quite happy and she has taken up knitting again.

Her roommate is 91 years old and loves Christmas and angels. When B was still in quarantine the PSWs were telling her all about who her roommate would be and when they described her passion for Christmas and angels, B said, "She's not a religious nut, is she?" Well, she's not, she just loves the stuff that goes with it. B is very impressed with the angels.

When the time was up the PSW who took our temperatures came by to tell us. Another resident was lined up for her family visit in the little pavilion. It was a nice visit, I look forward to doing it again.

Weeds and errors

The "weed" in yesterday's post is Musk Mallow—Malva moschata—and it is considered an invasive weed. It grows on dry but fertile soil, flowers profusely and is considered an edible "wild salad" plant. It was brought to eastern North America by early European settlers. It is a relative of the hollyhock. 

Years ago I had a small clump of daisies by the driveway, and it has since spread all along both sides of the driveway and into the back yard. I've let that one go too, this daisy is not the cultivated variety but the wild one, I see it everywhere. So between the forget-me-nots, the daisies, and now the mallow, my property is being overrun with wildflowers. There are also buttercups, dandelions and yellow hawkweeds growing in the lawn; years of lawn mowing have encouraged these plants to flower low to the ground, below the level of the mower blade. Smart plants. 

And then there's the Creeping Charlie, once that gets onto your property you're done for, it can't be exterminated without heavy duty chemicals. I've got it everywhere. The only weed I actively try to control is the False Bamboo, which grows all over this town. I pull it up every time I see it (on my property or growing right in the road nearby) and if I can't pull it up then I strip off its leaves in hopes of starving it. Somebody introduced that plant thinking it was a nice ornamental, but it chokes out everything. Like the Creeping Charlie only much bigger. I'm prepared to live with Creeping Charlie but not False Bamboo. Unfortunately my neighbour has a big clump of False Bamboo which they allow to go to flower, I think that is why I am fighting off an invasion of the stuff. I politely suggested they cut it down but they are from out of town and don't really see how invasive it is, they like the flowers. I wish we had False Bamboo Police that I could complain to.

I got all the threading done on the loom and the next step is to wind the warp onto the front roller. Unfortunately I discovered two threading errors late yesterday afternoon; I decided not to tackle them at the time because of the receding light and my growing tiredness and hunger. I know where they are so that will be the major task for today, to get those threads sorted without breaking them. It's annoying to have to backtrack, but it's also to be expected. 

When this project is completed, I'm thinking about moving the loom into my living room, that way I can continue to weave in the winter time. The loom room is not heated in the winter. It'll look kind of weird but not being a big home entertainer that shouldn't matter. I've done some measurements and it will fit if I move some other furniture into the loom room.

Nova Scotia had its first new case of covid-19 in three weeks yesterday. It's so easy to let down one's guard when there have been no new cases in that long. I was telling my son that our provincial premier is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, very risk-averse, cautious and conservative. Never thought I would hear myself saying this, but I like him for it.

On my camera roll

Red peonies

Iris

Mallow?

I thought this one was a weed but I left it alone to see what kind of weed it was. Now it is covered in these pale pink delicate flowers.

The last lilac flower

Tree, saved from the chainsaw

The parks maintenance guys were clearing out trees to beautify the park, but we dog walkers asked them not to clear out this one. The bald eagles sometimes like to perch here to get a better view of the fish.

Odds and ends

Dad on ice

I took down my birdfeeder the other day, I had to stay away from that window for awhile because I couldn't watch the birds who came and were puzzled by its absence. A father cardinal and its youngster came together and I felt especially sorry about them. Also the two chickadees and one nuthatch who came.

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My needlework group had an email debate about whether or how to get together, in light of recent changes in covid-19 protocols. One person offered her backyard (bring your own everything) for up to 10 people and I have tentatively accepted the offer. We shall see how it goes. Usually well over 20 people came to these get togethers before the pandemic. What I like about the group is that everyone is doing different kinds of work involving hooks or needles, you get to see all sorts of interesting stuff. The conversations range from mundane to extremely interesting.

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My peonies are getting set to burst into flower. Something I've always been curious about is the ants that crawl all over peonie flower buds. This spring I accidentally broke off one stem with a small flower bud on it so I brought it in and stuck it in a vase with water. I don't think it is going to flower, the bud is too undeveloped to be saved. But what I have noticed is the droplets of liquid forming on the surface of the bud, I bet that is what attracts the ants. I wonder if the plant gets anything in return, it must be secreting those droplets for a reason. Usually nectar is secreted after a flower opens in order to attract pollinators.

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One of my sons has a BA in philosophy and psychology, and is working on an MA in philosophy. We have interesting phone conversations on philosophical aspects of current events, he quotes people I have heard of but never understood what they were talking about. People think that academic philosophy is rather esoteric and useless, but when you hear it in relation to what's going on around us it gives historical context for why we think the way we do and it opens up possibilities for changing our automatic responses to events. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. A knowledge of philosophy opens up the possibility of not acting insanely.

Anger is a funny thing

Yesterday I was talking to a friend on the other side of the country who is dying. Can't visit except by phone. She's at home in palliative care with her husband taking care of her, she qualifies for MAID whenever she decides she wants to pull the plug. Right now she's trying to cope with a new set of drugs; every time the doctor switches her to something different there is symptom havoc until they get the right dose or discontinue. She said she was feeling sad and also angry to have her life cut short before she had what she felt was her rightful lifetime. Also a close friend of hers is angry that she is losing her best friend. So I've been thinking about anger and also about how I feel about what is happening with her. She's only a year older than me so I certainly understand her feeling about this being way too early to die.

We have been in and out of each other's lives for over half a century, I first met her living in residence at college in my first year. It was my first experience of living away from my parents home and she was certainly a good "partner in crime" so to speak for the kind of shenanigans one gets up to in those circumstances. We both left that college after only one year, she to another college in another city and me to a year in France. We met up again and had a few "drug experiences" together, then I met a guy and moved away to the other side of the country with him. A few years later the guy and I and our first kid were living in a log cabin back of beyond, and in the middle of the night she and her husband and dog showed up on our doorstep. They had hitchhiked and somehow managed to track us down although we had not exchanged any contact info since the last time we saw each other. They stayed a day or two and then hitchhiked on, I didn't see her or have any contact with her again until I was living here, on the opposite coast to where we met up in the middle of the night. Once again, no warning, no contact info exchanged, just here we were again. After a slightly longer visit we continued our lives in different directions in different places, and did not meet up again until decades later, on another coast as usual. By then, email and internet existed so tracking each other down was more doable. We continued to be in and out of each other's lives over the years, but at least now when we wanted to make contact we could do it a lot more easily.

I think Kurt Vonnegut's concept of a karass best describes the relationship.

Anyway, anger and sadness. I rarely feel angry these days, but I used to. I used to think I had "anger issues" which I had most likely inherited from my Dad, who in my opinion was also a very angry person. Although now I wonder about that.

Anger is a funny thing. Mostly I feel like we get angry when something bad happens that we have no control over, feel very frustrated about it, and end up trying to find someone or something to express that frustration at. Like when you hit your thumb with a hammer. Or when you can't extract yourself from the bad things that happen due to poverty or prejudice or injustice. You get overwhelmed and try to find a target for what you are feeling. Nine times out of ten the target is either misplaced or useless, the vented anger does nothing to change the situation, although maybe you feel a bit better for having expressed it. That's a big Maybe though. As often as not the expressed anger is just plain useless or actually makes things worse.

For me, the situation that I suppose was the cause of all my anger just changed, evaporated. No trigger, no venting. And then after a while I began to realize that I wasn't really a fundamentally angry person, just someone in a bad situation venting uselessly. That was probably my Dad's experience as well.

I do feel sad that I am losing a friend, and that there will be no opportunity to get together one last time, except by phone. I feel a little sad that I didn't make more effort to stay in touch, but at the same time grateful that I made contact before it was too late. Which it could so easily have been. Anger doesn't enter into it for me, but I can understand that her closest friend would feel that way.

Anger is a funny thing.

After the Sun

We just had a week of sunshine and warm weather, and I haven't written a thing here. I also have not responded to email, which is bad, I had at least one enquiry as to how I was doing which I should have responded to. I am doing great.

I've been working in my garden, walking with Hapi, and spending social time at the Reservoir in the morning and on the grass in front of a new friend's building (building is old, friend is new) in the late afternoon. Not every single day, sometimes I just want to stay home and putter or read or whatever. But it has been a good week, a welcome relief to the previous two weeks of rain, snow and cold wind.

I think pandemic social distancing suits me, I feel like I have settled into my Real Self. I always knew I was a funny mix of laziness and busyness, never more so than now. I am constantly surveying my little Queendom here to decide what needs to be done next. Then I am in my recliner reading and ignoring the list of things I should be doing. Hapi is okay with it all as long as she gets her daily walks. I think she enjoys dozing in the back yard, occasionally opening one eye to see what I am up to now. She's okay with my new lawn mower since it is less noisy than the old one.

I put off shopping for as long as possible because that is the only stressful part of my life. Some shops have really good protocols in place, others not so much and you really have to practice a kind of self-defence to deal with it. They changed the bubble rules, now I could bubble with a close friend. I've had one request which I am considering. She's a nice person but I haven't known her a long time. She's quirky and entertaining, I enjoy her company but I have a few reservations. She asked me if I had a car and when I told her that I did she made her request. She wants to go to a beach and the only way to go is by car. It's tempting. I'll have to consult with Hapi, hot days in the sun are not her favourite thing, but she does like water.

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I've been binging on the books of Tamim Ansary, who I have mentioned before. He has two memoirs and three histories. I am halfway through one of the memoirs, have completed one of the histories and am more or less halfway through the other two. The histories are from such a different perspective than that we grew up with in Civilized Western schools that they seem like a peek into a completely different world. Which they are, really. One of the books is about Afghanistan, where the author lived with his family until the beginning of his teen years. I am at the point in the book where Ansary can bring in his own family's role in that country's history, the 1930s and forward. In the other history I am only at the time of the Crusades, as viewed from a Middle Eastern perspective. 

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Last night I read an article in the Guardian newspaper about the likelihood of a Covid-19 vaccine. They take a very pessimistic view. On the one hand there is the difficulty of learning about the virus and its weaknesses, developing an appropriate weapon against it and then getting that weapon into mass production. And on the other hand there is the very real possibility that no vaccine is possible at all, or if possible only one that gives very weak protection. They note the number of viral diseases that have never been tamed via a suitable vaccine, and the fact that coronaviruses are among the group of viruses that cause what we call the common cold. There has been no successful vaccine against that, although fortunately the common cold is not considered a serious illness unless you  have a compromised respiratory system. The main difference between a coronavirus cold and Covid-19, if I am correctly understanding it, is that the former is caused by a coronavirus specific to humans, and the latter by one that is not. It is conceivable that SARS-Cov2 could become adapted and its impact considerably lessened, but that is not likely in the very near future.

Here in Nova Scotia the strategy is to keep the lockdown in place for the time being but in the background businesses are gearing up for loosening of restrictions. Each specific type of business is expected to come up with a plan as to how they will open up while maintaining pandemic safety. A dogwalking friend was telling me about her acupuncturist daughter's involvement in that aspect of things. Her professional association is coming up with guidelines that will be approved by the provincial government for reopening and in the meantime the daughter is getting her office prepared for opening. She has a few friend-clients lined up who will test-run her practice to see what needs to be ironed out before opening to the general public. I think this is going on with all sorts of business associations in the province.

New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island are in talks about opening up their border (the Confederation Bridge) to each other, as they have very low infection and mortality rates and almost no new cases. They have said they will consider opening up to Nova Scotia as well, but first we have to get our numbers down as they have. Nova Scotia has had much higher infection and mortality rates than they have. Newfoundland is doing very well too, but their main connection to the rest of Canada is through Nova Scotia, so they will have to wait for us to get it together.

More May Snow!

It is snowing today. I think we have had more snow so far in May than we did in all of April. The pattern of two days of precipitation for every sunny day still holds. Yesterday I was particularly grumpy about it all. I am running out of wild bird seed and a grey squirrel keeps raiding my bird feeder so I am getting very annoyed with him or her. I rap on the window when I see it and it stops to look at me but then carries on with its raid. I have to put my boots on before I can go outside to stand under the feeder to yell at it. I used to take a broomstick with me but that proves to be unnecessary, the squirrel runs away when it sees me advancing toward the tree the feeder is hung in. I think it has made the calculation about how long it takes me to get out there and has decided to keep stealing seeds as long as it can before I get too close.

Hapi fell on the basement stairs twice yesterday, her rear end is weakening. She still wants to go down there so as much as possible I have to escort her, particularly coming up the stairs which is when she is most likely to fall. My mechanic's dog died as a result of a broken back from falling on a staircase so I am very conscious of that danger. In addition to falling she also had a "bowel accident" in the night. I am carrying on as usual but not thrilled about the possible implications.

I was talking to a friend on the phone the other day and she was telling me about a mutual friend who was tired of all the social distancing restrictions and didn't believe they were necessary. The mutual friend was saying that she was no longer paying attention to it all. My phone friend was thinking to herself, Okay! Good to know! We laughed and agreed that the mutual friend was someone we would definitely be physically distancing ourselves from, as much as we otherwise liked her. Frankly, as much as I previously disliked and disrespected our provincial premier before all this, I hugely respect his overly cautious approach to the pandemic. I don't know if I would vote for him again, but he would not be the worst choice especially in a time like this.

From my reading of current statistics and of the history of the 1918 pandemic, the overly cautious approach seemed to prevent the most deaths in both the short term and the long term. As well, after the 1918 pandemic local economies bounced back much quicker in jurisdictions that imposed greater restrictions for longer periods of time.

The main problem with trying to take lessons from 1918 though is the dearth of reliable information. The gathering and analysis of statistics was not that great in those days. In addition, all countries involved in The Great War were suppressing that information as much as possible; the only countries that allowed information about the pandemic to leak were neutral countries, such as Spain. Which is why it is often called the Spanish Influenza: Spain was one of the first countries in which the media were covering what was really going on. But the estimates of the death toll from that pandemic range from a few millions to well over 50 million (possibly up to 100 million), which gives an idea of how difficult it is to draw any definitive conclusions from the available statistics.

Already we are seeing the same thing with this pandemic. There is wide variation in symptoms and not a lot of mass and repeated testing. So we really can't say for sure how many people have contracted the disease or died of it or what the death rate really is. Our ability to gather that evidence is far greater than it was in 1918, but still we have a problem with it.

The tulips in the picture are from my garden, their stems broke before they could open up. One of them is supposed to be a red and white tulip in honour of Canada's 150th anniversary in 2017, but as you can see it is not. But it is a lovely colour nevertheless.

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.

Evanescence

I don't know how this works at all.

The last couple of days have been really nice weather-wise, sunny with temperatures around +13C. Not exactly summer-warm but definitely not winter-cold. I've been getting better by leaps and bounds, my old energy levels coming back, the scary chest pain receding (my neighbour wanted me to get it checked out but I will never ever again go to the hospital to get chest pain 'checked out' unless I am in the midst of a full-blown heart attack), and the little tiny flowers emerging from the ground.

I made my first foray into a store (wearing one of my fancy masks). It involved a twenty minute wait outside in the sunny parking lot and then being admitted and served by two staff members, like I was royalty. All I wanted was some potting soil, I felt a little guilty when one of them said, "That's it? That's all you want?" I scanned the entire store behind the two gentlemen and wished I'd brought a list. Silly me.

Then another stop at a store where the owner cracked the door and asked what I wanted. I did have a list for that store, she recorded my list in her memory and closed the door to go fetch it all. A few moments later a shopping basket of my goods was placed on a stool outside the door and I was invited to tap the little machine through the window with my card. How amazing!

I love the way the purple grades to blue

Hapi wanted to visit the man in the used bookshop next door so we went in there too. We have a bit of a tradition; he offers her an organic dog biscuit and she turns it down. This time she took the biscuit and tried to bury it under a low bookshelf. She doesn't do organic.

After a walk on the dyke, where we met a man with a great dane puppy that towered over Hapi, I drove home with all my goodies, including the barley malt syrup for malt bread.

What I don't understand is the sheer joy of it all.

It comes and goes, but all day I just kept having these moments of sheer peace and joy. When I was talking to the bookshop man I was trying to explain it but couldn't really do it. He said he'd had so many anxious people stop by that it was nice to hear that someone was doing okay with it all.

He mentioned that because of his business he was on facebook and sometimes that really depressed him. I told him that I had quit facebook before all this happened and now was glad to not be exposed to it. He said you're right, you really don't want to know what's going on there.

Not to say that it's all evil, I'm sure there is a lot of good going on too. But I failed utterly to filter out the evil when I was on it and now staying sane is so precarious that battling evil is just not something I want to do.

I really like my little peace-and-joy world. Temporary for sure, but one shouldn't dismiss something just because it is temporary. Everything is temporary, even us.