Still here

It is very hard for me to get things done. I thought I should start some kind of 'to do' list on my phone, since that is usually close at hand, but the couple of apps I downloaded for that purpose were not what I had in mind. I wanted something like my Mealime app which keeps my grocery list. Finally I decided to just use Mealime, prefacing each 'to do' item with the words "to do". Mealime files them under "Other", works for me.

I vaguely had the idea that I would post to this blog after I got a new computer, since the old one seemed to be failing. Well, I got the new computer but the process for setting it up is proving to be complicated. It is still on the To Do list, but falling further down as other items become more urgent. So I am posting this from the old computer just to say "I'm still here."

Worst winter ever. My illness is worse and as I am 3 years in now, I have no prospect of improving. I know this to be Long Covid but cannot get diagnosed because there is no bio-marker nor is there any agreed-upon criteria for diagnosing it. In fact, most doctors around here do not admit to its existence. Until there is a diagnostic bio-marker most doctors will tell you that it is all in your pretty little head (meaning psychological not neurological) and take an antidepressant for it.

My GP referred me to a psychiatrist who asked me two questions: How do you know Dr. P (at the beginning of the hour) and Have you any questions for me (at the end of the hour).

He told me:
1) post-viral syndromes don't exist and he knows this because he grew up in Ireland and Brucellosis (I thought that was a disease of cattle?).
2) Brain Fog doesn't exist.
3) I should quit chasing specialists for a diagnosis.
4) When I told him that my experience with antidepressant side effects was pretty awful, he said, Well even Tylenol has side effects. 

Since he never asked me any questions about why I was there or my state of mind, I assume he got all of his knowledge of me from my medical record. Great.

Now that many countries are funding research into Long Covid, a lot of potential causes and bio-markers are being suggested. Maybe sometime soon (i.e., within the next couple of years) they will narrow down on one cause and one bio-marker. Here in Nova Scotia it will probably entail investing in new technology to detect that bio-marker, so say another couple of years. That means Long Covid will go from being a syndrome (a collection of symptom criteria) to an actual disease, as MS did when the MRI came into play.

But that's not a cure or even a symptomatic treatment. So another decade or so. I am 75. In 5 years I may get my illness recognized, and in another decade and a half there may be a treatment. Right.

One day on FB (I rejoined in order to access some support groups) FB recommended I join a group dealing with The Afterlife. That made me laugh. With the tinnitus, brain fog and dizziness I don't feel like I am part of the real world, I am observing from inside a bubble constant noise, inability to think properly and unsteadiness, The BesideLife.

There is no outward sign of illness. I ace tests of my memory and executive function, but cannot follow a recipe or even remember the order of steps to make my breakfast. Words escape me. My longterm memory feels like old lace rotting away. I spend most of my time on my daybed, with breaks to take Princess for short walks and the occasional shopping trip.

I got an Accessibility tag for my truck and I bought a wheel chair. It was okay, but I need something with more features so I am sending it back to get a more powerful and more flexible chair. I am looking at my e-bike and kayak wondering if I should sell them. I've started VON Frozen Favourites delivered to my door at a very reasonable price. I now have a twice-monthly house cleaner.

I am gradually eliminating things from my life. The garden is probably going to go. I stopped making my bed. I don't socialize. My opinions and views on this disease are a bit too strong for most of the LC support groups I joined so I am slowly eliminating them as well. They say that when you live in isolation your brain gradually rewires to accommodate that, making re-entry into the world of people more difficult. It just feels like too much work, too much bother. I have one friend that I try to visit regularly, and according to my Garmin watch 'Body Battery' time spent with her is as restful as a sound nap; I guess the effort to maintain some kind of social persona is work, and I don't have to do that with her.

Yesterday I was in my driveway and my next door neighbour came over to ask how I was, in a concerned tone indicating that she really wanted to know. It was a bright sunny warm day and I am now quite sensitive to light and I was leaning against my truck in order to talk to her. You know how you feel when you have the flu with a high fever? It was like that, a real struggle to gather my thoughts and figure out what to say and what not to say, all the while clinging to the truck to stay upright and closing my eyes against the sunlight.

The snow is gone and temperatures have warmed up. I see young able people running and cycling and walking briskly, even swimming (the ponds are still way too cold for us older folk but for young people it is great for scampering in and out screaming about how nice it is while clutching their chests in what looks to me like extreme coldness). Princess has discovered her inner lab and goes crazy in the water chasing sticks and wanting to be part of the crowd of young people having fun. She caught their frisbee in mid-air and ran off with it, obviously hoping for someone to chase her and throw the frisbee again.

Given that this is my new life, I would like to re-invent myself within the confines of disability, but I don't really know where to start.

Five ships a sailing

One day this month I was wondering if I could remember how to fold a paper boat. I can't do much else these days so I looked it up on the internet, and successfully folded myself a little boat from the card that is inserted in New Yorker magazines to sign up for new subscriptions. I had a bunch of magazines lying around so I shook out the cards from all of them and have started to fold my fleet of New Yorker boats. A relatively simple craft I can wrap my deteriorating brain around.

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It has been so hot and humid, with half the rain we usually get this past month. Longest heat wave ever (I looked up Environment Canada records for our local area). Some parts of my garden are doing well, others not so much. I am now overwhelmed in food processing: garlic, green beans, green peppers, tomatoes and soon potatoes. The onion crop does not look good, I may end up with a bunch of onion sets that I can try to plant next year. However I chopped a bunch of the onion greens off and found a recipe on the internet for onion top pesto. Don't think I will ever make basil pesto again, the onion greens pesto is so-o-o good! I already harvested the garlic that I planted last fall, and the garlic that I planted in the spring is dying off. That was just an experiment so I am not surprised it is not faring well. But I planted enough in the fall to have leftover garlic cloves to replant this fall.

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I've been re-varnishing my kayak, it's almost done. I just have to give the hatch covers a final sanding and then replace the deck fittings. Right now the kayak is sitting upside down in the crow family flyway, they've made a total mess of the hull so I will have to wash that off as well. Looks like I won't be kayaking this year, maybe next year. It's quite depressing: no paddling, no swimming, no cycling, no nothing.

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I may have a concussion. I hit my head hard on the corner of a table in May or June—I didn't write the date down, why would I—and aside from a very painful bruise I didn't think much of it. But in mid-July I was feeling like things were worse and in particular I had a headache that seemed to be increasing in intensity. The dizziness and fatigue were worse too but I just assumed that was my underlying illness. Also it was getting harder to read or watch TV. I don't know how I clued into the concussion possibility but when I looked it up I realized that given my existing symptoms it could easily have passed under the radar. 

I spoke to the NP at the chronic conditions clinic and she started talking about going to an ABI clinic (Acquired Brain Injury), but that's in the city and I have been avoiding driving or riding my bike for that matter even short distances, never mind to the city and back, so I don't think that is in the cards for me. Nevertheless the NP recommended that I get assessed by my doctor and at least get it logged into my medical chart.

In a way a concussion diagnosis would be a good thing because it would mean that my worsening symptoms were due to something else altogether. That would mean that a recovery might be a possibility. Assuming of course the concussion is just mild. When I told a friend about it she then recounted the story of her father's concussion and how because of his age the doctors assumed he was demented and chose not to do anything. But one of his daughters was a doctor herself and she insisted that there was no way he was demented and they should operate. He had a large hematoma pressing on his brain, they successfully drained it and he returned almost to normal. So you just never know.

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I asked my painter guy to take the rest of the summer off, I just couldn't hack having to wrap my schedule around his anymore. When he only works a couple of hours a day it takes forever. The power company inspected the work done so far on installing the solar panels, the next step is installing the actual panels and then one final inspection after that. That inspection is already scheduled for August 11 so they have to have the panels installed by then. 

The solar installers told me an interesting story about my panels. So, they were manufactured and shipped from China. They were supposed to come by ship to the port of Vancouver, but Vancouver is so clogged up that the ship captain decided to dock in Halifax instead. Long way to go for an alternative port but the solar installers thought that was great; they could just pick up the panels from the port themselves. But no, that's not the way things are done. The shipment had to be processed in Edmonton so they offloaded everything into trucks to drive back to Edmonton for processing. Then they loaded my panels—and whatever else was intended for the east coast—onto more trucks and drove them back to Halifax.  

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I recently bought a Fitbit, on sale with a one-year Premium membership thrown in for free. So now I am obsessing over it, checking my heart rate and sleep records and so forth. It has a feature where I am supposed to drink 64 oz of water every day and somehow it is very motivating, I am trying ever so hard to meet that goal, getting a certain hit of satisfaction every time I add another glass of water to my score. A couple of days ago I mowed my lawn, which just about killed me in the heat, and the Fitbit promptly congratulated me on my aerobic exercise achievement. It thought I was out there cycling up a storm when really I was just slogging back and forth over my lawn. I think I even got a "badge" for it. Never have I ever been rewarded for mowing the lawn!

The sleep thing was the real reason I got the Fitbit and that part is quite fascinating. It tells me how much time (and when) I spend in REM, deep sleep and light sleep. It also tells me how much time (and when) I was awake during the night, most of which I have no memory of. The manual explains how it determines this stuff and quite frankly I am a little sceptical. The awake time is based on my heart rate and the amount of movement my body makes (apparently it has a motion detector?). I think a lot of that is just me kicking around in my sleep. When I was a kid there were occasions when I had to share a bed with my mother and that was her chief complaint about sleeping with me. There are a couple of other things it will measure, but it needs at least a month's worth of data to do that.

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It rained today and the temperature stayed relatively low, but it will be back to sun and heat tomorrow. My friend (daughter of the man with the concussion) suggested we do a day trip somewhere and I leaped at it. She will do the driving and it will be a chance to get out of town for a few hours. How my horizons are reduced! But then deciding when and where took us awhile. She wanted to go to a beach and Nova Scotia has a ton of beautiful beaches, but do you think we could find a list or map on the internet? 

We know they are out there but O.M.G. the Tourism folks are too busy extolling the virtues of trails and package holidays and tours. We found a webpage entitled "Beaches of Nova Scotia" and it was a list of parks and trails, no beaches. Another website touted as a map of Nova Scotia beaches had no map and only one or two beaches listed amongst all the package tours you could sign up for. There are a few famous beaches that are jampacked with people and a whole lot of others that you only hear about by word of mouth: miles of white sand beach and hardly any people! I guess we'll have to do a bunch of asking around.

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.

My new daybed and other new things

I did not get Covid. The crows' eggs have hatched. The daybed arrived and I have assembled it. I am getting better. Next week I am going on a 3-day kayaking trip, based at a Lodge so no camping. My garden is progressing in spite of bad weather.

One morning this past week when I was still in bed, I could hear a Mourning Dove cooing. One of the new baby crows was replying to it, too cute! The roofer has not arrived yet even though he promised 'in a couple of days.' The weather has not been good for roofing. With a bit of luck, he'll get to it before the solar installer comes calling, but after the baby crows have fledged.

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The daybed actually arrived a week early, and coincidentally my neighbour said he was coming by to install new hemlock garden frames in my garden. So I had a rather strenuous weekend assembling the bed and helping to install the frames. I also had to take out the old couch and move some furniture around to accommodate the daybed. Clean Up Day (or rather Clean Up Week) was this week, so having the daybed arrive early meant I could get the old couch out on the kerb in time for Clean Up. I saved some of the cushions from it so it was not complete, nevertheless someone eventually nabbed it before the Clean Up garbage truck came by. 

I am happy with the daybed but it does have a couple of drawbacks. One is, it's so high that my feet dangle. Another is, it's so wide that even with the old couch cushions along the back I can't lean against them when I am sitting up. There was one non-critical defective piece and Wayfair promised a replacement by tomorrow. 

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Yesterday I got my second Covid vaccine booster shot (finally!). Last night I had a roaring earache and this morning I had a sore arm and felt very tired. I think an ear infection was brewing before the shot, and once my immune system engaged with the vaccine, the infection took off. It's still there but not as painful.

In spite of all the activity I feel like I have turned a corner, the post-exertional malaise was relatively mild and short-lasting. Just two weeks ago I was having second thoughts about going kayaking due to low energy, but this week I feel excited about it. And, as it turns out, three of the women (six of us in all) had Covid in the recent past and are still feeling dragged out by it. So I secretly feel happy about that, it means that I won't be the only one going slow. They will understand exactly what Covid fatigue feels like.

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Sometime shortly after my birthday I had a long phone conversation with one of my sons. One of the things we talked about was ADHD. He's pretty sure he has it, his brother and two nephews have already been diagnosed. He can't get diagnosed because he doesn't have a doctor and going through private channels is just way too expensive. It is causing problems for him at school (he's halfway through a B.Ed.). We talked at length about how that was for him, and I just saw way too many similarities between his experience and mine. They say it is hereditary, my sons have different fathers so the common link is me. 

After that conversation I went looking for information on the internet, and now I am pretty sure I have it too. It was kind of a shocking discovery, especially in how it complicates any chance of recovery from my illness. Also in how it has affected my entire life. If I had had an early diagnosis things might have been very different. When I told a friend she said, Now you know that what happened is not your fault, you don't need to feel ashamed of your past. You should be proud instead.

I've just started reading ADHD 2.0 by Dr. Edward Hallowell (2021). He more or less says something similar. It is encouraging. I don't know whether pursuing an official diagnosis is useful or not. My sons say that the medication that they have been using has a downside, sleeplessness. Consequently they only use it in situations where they really need it and can afford a night or two of sleeplessness. My son at school uses the medication (he doesn't have a diagnosis therefore no prescription) on the occasional Saturday morning to get through a project due the following week. The other son (diagnosed, with prescription) uses it to get through very busy times at work (his work involves periods of extreme activity followed by periods of rest and lowkey activity).

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The photo above is my homemade indoor greenhouse, currently full of transplants. I planted peas and spinach outdoors this week (in one of the new garden frames!) but the transplants need warmer weather to go outside. I may have to get my neighbour to come in to water them while I am away kayaking. They are sucking up a lot of water and I don't think they will make it through 3 days without watering.

Crowsnest view

Many years ago, back in the '80s, I planted a dozen pine trees along the north edge of my property, but only two remain. When I moved back in 2010 there were three, but one of them showed signs of disease and I had it cut down before it infected the other two. 

At the tippy top of the one you see in the photo above, there is a crows nest. First time ever. I can't really see the nest, it just looks like a dark spot at the top of the tree, but there is always one crow up there and it calls pretty much incessantly. Yesterday I caught sight of "the changing of the guard," as one crow left and the other arrived. Whichever crow is not in the nest is very busy foraging.

Unfortunately I am having the roof redone this month, and that will be directly below the nest, probably just as the eggs are hatching. I don't know how that will go and I can't reschedule. I hope the crows don't get their knickers in a knot but manage to maintain the nest and nestlings in spite of the commotion. I will warn the roofers.

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I quit the Pacing program after the second session. The second session was run by a student OT as the first OT had left for unspecified reasons, and the third session was going to be run by another OT. Each session so far has consisted of an hour and a half or more of Powerpoint slides, and the third session OT sent an email with the slides for the session attached. 47 slides! I emailed back that that was way too stressful, and she responded that if this did not serve my needs I should phone to cancel my participation. I did that.

Who does that kind of thing?!? Even for healthy people at an in-person workshop an hour of Powerpoint is more than enough, and for unhealthy people using Zoom, an hour and a half is absolutely over the top. I used to teach the effective use of Powerpoint and other methods of information delivery, a twenty minute presentation is more than enough. I realize OTs are not trained in online teaching but, ... O.M.G.

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J came by yesterday and we took the cover off my truck and started her up. It was lovely to see it again, instead of a yellow blob in the driveway. The battery needed a bit of a kickstart but other than that the truck is fine. J is replacing the tires and rims on his truck next week, then he will give me his old rims and he will mount my new tires on them and the truck will be ready to go. He has lined up a buyer for my Mazda as well.

The Mazda is a kind of soccer-Mom minivan in nondescript grey, but it has run well through the winter and it transported Hapi everywhere after I sold my old truck, so I will kind of miss it. But having two vehicles in the driveway is inconvenient. The "new" truck (it's actually older than the Mazda) is a bit small which is a good thing and a bad thing. No extended cab so no big dogs can sit in it. But the roof of the cap on the box is low enough that I think I can manage to get my kayak on it by myself. I already figured out the method on the old truck and this one will actually be easier. Better be, the muscle wasting that has occured since I became ill is quite shocking.

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I ordered a daybed for my livingroom. My sofa is great for sitting on but not so much for lying on, and I do way more lying down than sitting up these days. I wanted a bed I saw on the IKEA website but they wouldn't deliver and going into the city to pick it up seemed daunting. I checked Walmart and Wayfair, their beds weren't as nice or as economical but they did deliver. 

In reading a lot of customer reviews I realized that all of these beds have to be assembled by the customer and assembling wooden beds appeared to be a very frustrating experience, no one mentioned frustration with the metal bed frames. So I looked at the metal beds and found one on Wayfair that I thought I could live with, at a reasonable price. They say it takes 30 minutes to assemble but all the customer reviews said it was more like 2 hours. No one wrote that it was frustrating, just that it was important to read the instructions carefully. I look forward to its arrival.

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I visited some friends earlier this week and it turned out they had Covid. So I was exposed, having walked in maskless without checking. I immediately left, went home and washed up as best I could (even a nasal rinse and salt water gargle! not that that would make a difference, but you never know) and then went grocery shopping to stock up in case I got it. Today is Day 3 after exposure, so far so good but I read that symptoms are not likely to appear before Day 3. According to the CDC in the US, I should test on Day 5, and if symptom-free test again on Day 7. So the next few days will be the critical ones.

I later talked to one of those friends on the phone; he said it was like a very bad cold. His wife got it first and she is already out and about, she had a mild case of it. He's still "under the weather." He advised me to stock up on ready-made food, that it's important to keep eating even though your appetite is gone. Since I am already ill, I don't want to guess how getting another bout of this will play out.

B got Covid in her nursing home, now the home is in lockdown. B is okay, I've talked to her a couple of times since she got sick. A bit spacey but okay.

Nova Scotia used to be one of the best for low case counts and adherence to mask mandates; now that the mandates are all removed we are the worst. The Omicron is rampant and I know way too many people who have or have had it.

Sign seen on campus

No marbles or spoons in the bowl

You have to be honest, so that people believe you. You don’t need to try. You need to be yourself. And maybe, after you show who you are, maybe people will love you more than before, because they see that you are not so strong or are lazy at times. No, each time don’t lie and show people who you are exactly. And it’s important not to show that you are better than who you are. 

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, March 2022.

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It's been awhile, not a great time. I completed the CBT-I course. On paper, according to my sleep diary, my sleep "efficiency" improved a lot and the amount of time I spent sleeping improved marginally. In reality all my illness symptoms got worse and I continue to wake up exhausted, "unrefreshed" as it were. I guess the facilitator gets bragging rights about my improvement but from my perspective it was a complete disaster that I am trying to recover from. Good luck with that.

A week after the CBT-I course ended I started an Energy Management (Pacing) program and so far, it feels like yet more disaster in the works. The facilitator, an occupational therapist, said that it would be "hard work", and that some of us will only see survival as the outcome. I question whether survival as an outcome is worth yet more hard work. I drafted an email to that effect and sent it to the OT, but got back an immediate response that she was out of office and would not be back until the next Pacing session happens. So do I show up for it or not?

If I am going to work hard, I'd rather do it in my garden, there at least there will be a positive outcome to hard work. My Wednesday coffee buddy's husband has a business doing cabinetry and finished carpentry, he is going to make garden frames for his wife and he said he'd make some for me too. Mine are disintegrating and it sounds like the ones he will make will be way better. He has started attending our coffee dates but he only stays for a short while, just to take a break from his work.

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I have started some seeds but so far only a few have sprouted. I am trying to start onions from seed as I have had poor luck with onion sets. Unfortunately I think I added way to much water to the tray of seeds so I may have drowned them. Hope not but we shall see. 

On Tuesday I drove a friend half way down the Valley to her new home. She wanted to take a load of stuff and I wanted to see her new place. Her place is marvelous, a small one bedroom apartment on the ground level in a kind of motel-like building. She has a front door, a back door, a private patio (with a view of a small forest) out back and two parking spaces in front. I met her new landlady who is very nice. In these days of rising housing costs she is actually going to reduce her rent by almost half, thanks to a seniors' subsidy. 

The only down side is that she doesn't know anyone in her new town, all her friends are here. But she is a very sociable cheerful kind of person, I am sure she will do well. She made me leave my deck chair at her new place so that I would be obliged to come visit. The problem is, that after I got home I collapsed; an hour and a half of driving, lunch out, and a tour of the local shopping mall utterly did me in. My chest hurt and I was winded, dizzy and spaced out all the next day. There is a bus, but it takes almost two hours one way.

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Today I did a bit of yard work. I had to cart in some firewood and while doing that observed all the things that need to be done this month. It was very hard to resist tackling it right away even though according to the Pacing program I should not. They use a lot of metaphors in this program that sound descriptive but when you break them down they're not so helpful. 

We were supposed to imagine that we had a bowl of marbles when we woke up and each time we engaged in an activity we spent a marble or two. Some people know it as Spoon Theory. The OT asked us to describe how we spent our marbles. I drew a complete blank on that and then asked, "What if there are no marbles in the bowl when you wake up?" I just couldn't picture it, the metaphor made no sense to me. 

Another one was about activities that "recharge our batteries". What activities this week have recharged my battery? Again, not able to picture it. The reality for me is that I am not a very meditative person, I like to be active, gardening, paddling, swimming, etc. These activities are what give me pleasure but now they are draining. So do they "recharge my battery"? Or do they run it down to the nub? 

I don't think I'm going to be a very good program participant. After the CBT-I experience I am hypercritical of programs that supposedly are going to improve my health. I am in a space now where I feel that since I am no better now than I was two years ago when I first got sick, it is highly unlikely that I will ever improve. My age and the lack of decent medical care are working against me. I see that they are working on changes to MAID, one of them is Advanced Directive. That's where you can be approved for MAID even though your illness is not fatal, just no hope of recovery. At this point that is hopeful news to me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But to end on a positive note, I am extremely grateful that the CBT-I program is over. I was happy to see that a few of my seeds have sprouted. I'm thinking about getting a puppy.

Don't complain camp in the rain...

Long time, no write!

Been busy though…

I did go on the kayak-camping trip last week, Monday through Friday. The first day was solid rain and then we had three days of sun and cloud, with rain on the final day of packing up and leaving. I have to say the rain made things quite difficult. 

Shelter from the rain

We were extremely grateful that our first campsite included a shelter, so we decided not to pitch tents but sleep in the shelter. That was okay although I didn't sleep very well. The next two days we had to move to two more campsites, which involved a lot of packing up, unpacking, setting up tents and taking them down again. That part of the whole trip was utterly exhausting, at least for me. I think the other two fared better: they shared a tent and were probably in better shape than I was for that sort of thing.

On our last day, one person was packed up and ready to leave before the other two, I was ready but stayed behind to help the third person into her sprayskirt. They get caught on the life jacket behind you and it often takes a helping hand to get it unstuck. She left and I tried to leave but got stuck between a rock and the shore. Rocking the kayak did not free it but did end up letting water into the cockpit. Then I got out to guide the kayak away from the rock, only to get two boots full of water. So by the time I left the shore I was soaked and sitting in a puddle of water inside the kayak.

The other two were waiting for me offshore but they had their backs to me and did not see my futile efforts to get launched. One of them asked me what I was doing and I told her. She was sympathetic, but the other woman laughed.

I guess I don't like being laughed at when I am in difficulty. I said, "I know it sounds funny, but it doesn't feel funny."

We paddled back to our starting point and I kept my distance from the others because I was seething. 

There were incredible moments of joy and beauty during the trip. One of our campsites was up a river and the trip there and back was absolutely magical. At that campsite, every time I looked at the river I was completely in awe of it, completely entranced.

But overall it was utterly exhausting, not from the kayaking but from the camping. A friend said she would have an awful time sleeping on the ground but for me that wasn't it. It was the packing, unpacking, packing again and erecting and dismantling of the tent and tarps over and over again. It absolutely killed my back. Also the fact that the other two women helped each other but I was largely left to fend for myself. I guess three is an awkward number, unless you have a spacious three-person tent.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My town has recently embarked on an ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions by assisting homeowners to get climate-friendly upgrades. I contacted the plan organizers and they got me started on a project to install solar panels on my house. In the past I have resisted this because it is costly and the breakeven point on upfront costs is about 15 years from now, when I may very likely be dead. However, the town's plan involves offsetting the costs through home equity. In theory I can install enough solar panels to cover all my electrical needs without spending a dime of personal money.

Of course, like all such programs, it involves a lot of paperwork, talking to contractors, getting quotes, and who knows what else. The upside is meeting and talking to interesting people who tell you interesting things, the dowside is consuming a heck of a lot of time and mental energy. The plan spokesperson thinks I can be all done by Christmas, but at least one of the contractors I spoke to is saying probably next summer for completion. That sounds more realistic. There are a lot of unresolved issues and questions, but I guess it's kind of exciting.

Yesterday and today I am digging up potatoes, so something complicated but somewhat exciting to think about is welcome. As I told one friend, digging potatoes is as backbreaking as my previous week of camping, and given how cheap potatoes are to purchase, I wonder why I bother to grow them.

Lots to think about…

Kayaks and rodents, and trucks

My truck and J's

It looks like I won't be posting much this summer, too busy. It seems I had more time on my hands last summer to keep posting here, but this summer not so much.

My main activities are kayaking and swimming, with a little gardening on the side. July is my low gardening month, I fertilize and plant in May, weed a lot in June, and then in July I figure my plants are established enough to let the weeding slide. Whatever is not doing so well I shrug my shoulders and think, "I guess it's a bad year for <whatever is not doing well>". And I start picking and eating whatever is doing well. So far it is peas and green peppers and a single cucumber. Green peppers! I have never successfully grown green peppers! Makes up for all the lettuce, kale, chard and squash that failed to sprout or grow.

The garden is overrun by volunteer potatoes, apparently my potato harvest last year was not so efficient. Even so I got a lot of potatoes and had enough left over in the spring to replant this year. The potatoes may be why the squash failed to grow, their alloted space was taken over by the volunteer potatoes.

A friend and neighbour has been organizing daily kayak trips. The county bought a bunch of little plastic kayaks and set them up at a public beach on a local lake for county residents to use for free. All you have to do is book a one-hour time slot and then show up for it. My friend is a great organizer (if she was a dog she'd be a border collie!) so she books the kayaks a week in advance and then herds a bunch of us to the lake to paddle. We carpool because it is a 45-minute one-way trip. My friend does not have a car but she also gets a ride out of it to her favourite golf course on the way home from kayaking (busy girl!).

All told we are in the car for an hour and a half every morning for one hour of paddling. You may think that much driving is not worth it, but it is. It is glorious to be out on the water in a tiny little kayak! On really hot days we go for a swim afterward. At that hour of the day the beach is not crowded, and it is nicely set up with change rooms, port-a-potties, a little kiddie playground, and lots of grass and picnic tables, some of them under cover for shade or shelter from the rain. The beach is more pebbly than sandy so most people sit on the grass when not in the water.

In the junkyard

Lately my afternoons are taken up with my truck project. J found a cap for my truck at a local junk yard, so we went there to buy it and the junk yard guys helped transfer my tonneau cover to J's truck and install the cap on mine (photo at top: my truck and J's with the tonneau cover transferred to J's truck). J has no money but wants to pay for the cover which he says is worth $100 or more, so he's going to pay it off with work on my truck. 

Isn't she handsome?

I now need a slider window at the front of the cap and a roof rack. I won't find those at a junk yard so I will have to pay a bunch for them new and wait a while for them to come available. In the meantime J is going to clear coat the cap and do a couple of small repairs on it, it is otherwise in very good condition. It was pretty filthy when we retrieved it from the junk yard, but a couple of good rain downpours and a bit of scrubbing has done wonders for that. It had been sitting on the ground for at least a year so stuff was starting to grow on it and at least one critter had made a home for itself inside.

Speaking of critters making homes for themselves, I've been finding holes in my potato patches. It looks as if something was trying to dig up my potatoes, but no potatoes showed any damage. Also tunneling into the compost bin. Then one day last week J and I were in my driveway discussing next steps on my truck project when J spotted a critter diving into the window well of one of my basement windows. I looked into the well and saw that there was another tunnel dug in there. A few moments later a head popped up at the edge of the window well. It was a chipmunk! It spotted us a few feet away and immediately dove back down. Since then I have seen it running between my garden and the window well a couple of times.

I am not going to chase out a chipmunk. If it was a grey squirrel or a rat I'd take steps immediately, but a chipmunk? Can't do it. I will put up with its ravages in my garden.

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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

So tired

I am so tired. I feel like I could sleep for a couple of days and maybe that would fix things, but I can't sleep so I can't fix things. Lying awake at night is like torture, my eyes are too tired and sore to read so I just have to lie there, awake but unable to do anything.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

Two of my sons and I are using the Watch Party feature on Prime Video to watch a TV series we all enjoy. We usually watch it on Wednesday evenings, then talk about it and whatever else afterward on Zoom. This past Wednesday we all had to tear ourselves away from the news (The Washington Capitol riot) to watch. I was talking to a dog walking friend about how just when I was starting to wean myself off near constant watching of internet news, this happens. Apparently 2020 is not over yet, I think maybe it is going to last at least another 6 months if not more. A happier 2021 is a fading dream.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

The picture above is the corner of my living room that I spend a lot of time in. There's the comfy chair that opens into a lounging chair. On the footstool in front of the chair is a cushion I use when the chair turns into a lounge to put my legs on, since the chair itself is not well cushioned. The footstool also doubles as the place I sit when I am tending to the fire. On the left of the chair is my little greenhouse. I am growing arugula, romaine and cilantro there. The greenhouse LED lights also serve to provide bright light in the morning to ward off depression due to winter darkness: it seems to work. On the right side is a small table that is normally piled high with books and a computer, but at the time I took the photo I was using it to hold another planter near the window. That planter had the tail end of my arugula and romaine crop from the summer garden in it, but that's been harvested and eaten now.

In spite of being right in the front window, this chair provides a fair degree of privacy. The only drawback is that it puts me with my back to the birdfeeder outside the window. All day long there are blue jays, chickadees, finches and other bird visitors there. I should say there are two drawbacks to this chair: my inability to see the birdfeeder and my inability to get out of it. Well, I am physically capable of getting out of it, but when I am so tired and it is so comfortable, getting out of it is really hard.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I haven't taken any photos of this but Hapi had a second grooming session. The groomer took all of her remaining fur this time, except for a little bit on her face and between her ears. She went from looking like a little white lion to looking like a goat with a husky face. I am so used to how she looks now that I have a hard time remembering her old look. Some people think this must be humiliating for her, one person actually said that to me, but I am pretty sure it is not. Her old matted fur was like shackles on her back legs, she has a lot more freedom of movement now. Plus, due to old age the muscles around her tail are weaker and the weight of the fur on her tail prevented her from being able to wag it. But now, fur-free, she raises and wags her tail much more than she used to.

I like that she is an indoor dog now, I like petting her and having her emerging from her new den—aka my bedroom—frequently just to check on me. She likes being petted, I like feeling the warmth of her body which was formerly well insulated under thick fur. Her coat is growing back, she is starting to show some "five o'clock shadow" where the darker hairs of her outer coat are growing in. So now she looks more like a dirty old goat than a snowy white goat.

There's a golden retriever at the Reservoir about the same age as Hapi who also has been shaved. That dog looks almost like a puppy now. The owner thinks his dog is much happier with her short haircut and he was congratulating me on doing the same for Hapi. Hapi's black and fuschia overcoat makes her much more visible in the woods now and we get a lot of compliments on our matching outfits. One guy said we were stylin'.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My son out west has taken up stained glass as a hobby. This picture is of a Christmas gift he sent me, which only arrived a couple of days ago. He and his 10 year old daughter designed and put it together. For me it is a reminder that one day things will be better, and I will go kayaking again.

We go for a walk and see a rainbow

This morning we went for a walk with a walking group. I rarely go out with them these days but they were going to the Kentville Ravine, an old favourite of mine and Hapi's.

That's me on the right, green beret and black and green jacket.

A bunch of the walkers were going really fast, a few were going really slow, and I was somewhere in the middle. At a certain point the hike went uphill rather steeply and the slow walkers decided to turn back. Hapi decided to turn back with them, even though I was forging ahead. At a certain point I realized she was not going to follow me so I turned back too. That was probably the first time I've seen her choose to go with someone else rather than me. She made the right decision.

Hapi is keeping an eye on me. And yes, that's a sprinkling of snow on the ground, first snow of the season.

The other day we had funny weather, rain and sun at the same time. So briefly we got a rainbow.

I had to clear a bunch of greens out of my garden yesterday because it was going to get too cold for them. I rather hastily dug up some arugula and romaine and plopped them in a planter box which I brought indoors after dark. The romaine is okay but the arugula is looking pretty iffy, I hope it recovers.

On one of our late afternoon walks I stopped to talk to a man who keeps a vegetable garden near the sidewalk. I always admire the garden, his veggies are huge. Anyway we chatted about tomatoes and rats (they eat his tomatoes! He thinks there's something going on that rats are eating tomatoes) and weather and such, and he gave me a big tomato. It's called a Brandywine; he said I should save the seeds to plant next year.

I cooked a big batch of chicken in red wine to use up the remains of the bottle I opened last week. I also made an apple-tomato chutney that called for wine vinegar, but I didn't have quite enough vinegar so I made up the difference with the wine and some cider vinegar. The wine was almost vinegar anyway.

Today I canned the chutney. There's a big shortage of canning supplies due to Covid, so last month I bought the last box of teeny tiny canning jars because I needed the lid rings. Or thought I did, turned out I didn't so I canned the chutney in the teeny tiny jars. I guess they'll make good gifts.

That's a lot of activity and I am exhausted. A friend who does odd jobs and such to make up her pension offered to do some stuff for me (paid of course) and at first I said I'd wait till Hapi was gone but later thought better of it so she's going to come over to assess what needs doing. My house has become a bit of a pigsty because I am putting off doing anything about it till 'after Hapi'. Hapi has other plans.

Swimming in tomatoes

Yesterday afternoon I walked with Hapi around the town harbour. It is quite tiny, once advertised as the smallest ocean port in the world. But since it has not been dredged in decades, it is far from being an ocean port now. 

The tide was high and the water dead calm. A small flock of sandpipers was playing there. They would fly in amazing patterns close to the surface of the water so that their reflections made it look like there were twice as many. After a few minutes of flying they would all land on rocks or mud at the edge of the water for a few more minutes to rest before rising into the air again. They flew together, sometimes breaking into smaller groups, circling and crisscrossing the harbour. There were two larger birds flying with them but I couldn't make out what kind of bird they were. Not ducks or gulls. It was fascinating to watch.

I've been swimming every day. It's exhausting and gives me a backache and dizziness, but I do it anyway, it feels good at the time. There are about half a dozen of us who swim at more or less the same time. At first I took Hapi with me but now I leave her behind so I don't have to deal with smelly wet dog at night. She's getting weaker and tireder anyway. The last few mornings I've had to coax her a lot to get her to go for a walk with me.

Owen the Bernese Mountain Dog is back at the Reservoir, I hadn't seen him all summer and feared he had passed on, but not so. His owners took him to PEI for a bit and they've been staying away from the Reservoir in the heat of the day. But it's cooler now so they're back. He is one of my favourite Reservoir dogs. Ava is still with us but getting sicker and not eating well. She wagged her tail when Hapi and I came by for a visit but Hapi wasn't so interested. I think she knows what is going on and doesn't want anything to do with it.

I haven't been writing much because I've been busy and tired. Harvesting the garden, processing tomatoes, swimming. Everybody has way too many tomatoes. A friend was giving away buttercup squashes and I said I wanted one; when she came by to drop off the squash she tried to get me to take a pint of tomatoes too. I turned her down. When I go swimming we trade tomato recipes. Today I picked a basket full to overflowing of tomatoes, I ate several while I was picking. I had tabbouleh for supper and tomorrow I'm going to try a recipe another swimmer described, a Caprese pasta dish.

There's maybe one more week of swimming weather, it's getting cooler and I am not such a stalwart swimmer as to go swimming in cold water. Cool yes, cold no.

First rainy day all month

Hapi and beach friends

It has been a week of dealing with garden harvesting and heat. The tomatoes have really enjoyed this weather, I have a bumper crop as do many others in this area. Green beans keep coming, and no matter what you do to avoid this there is always way too much zucchini. My freezer is almost full and I am looking at ways to cram yet more food in. I should have canned the tomatoes but freezing them is so much easier and I just did not anticipate the quantity. I've been eating a lot of tabbouleh and tomato salads…

Hapi and I visited her best friend Ava the other day, Ava was not feeling well. Her owner said the vet had discovered "a mass" in her belly that could be very serious. At the moment she is on antibiotics, steroids and water pills, so hard to say whether she is not feeling well because of the mass or the medication. I thought Ava would long outlive Hapi, but maybe not.

A local guy died last week of a massive heart attack, he was a bit of an icon around here. A little bit older than me, he ran a shop on Main Street that was infamous in its heyday, he dealt in psychedelic paraphenalia. The place was a little warren of stuff: smoking gear, incense, posters, record albums, etc etc. The little bit of light that came through the big front window hardly made it more than a few feet into the interior. He also dealt in used furniture and his main customers were students looking to buy for the school year and sell at the end of it. Most of us parents had kids who hung around that shop. He also kept doberman pinscher dogs, he loved that breed. He sat out front of his shop in an old wooden swivel office chair with one of his dogs lying at his feet whenever the weather was good; he was a street fixture. In later years he had health issues that made him grumpy, he sold the business to a young guy who radically revamped it and we hardly saw him on the street anymore. After his last doberman died suddenly he did not get another one. But news of his death travelled fast, in spite of his disappearance from street life he was definitely not forgotten. 

I visited B on the weekend. The nursing home schedules the visits now, you just have to show up. B was in an ornery mood, she'd been chastised by a worker at the home and she was annoyed about it. Group living is hard. But otherwise she's okay. She says she'd rather be living in her old apartment where she has a little more freedom, but she can't really take care of herself and she'd be trapped there as much as she feels trapped in the nursing home. In the home they don't allow people to play cards because of the pandemic, but at her old apartment she'd have nobody to play with anyway.

Beach decorations

The heat wave seems to have broken, maybe temporarily or permanently, hard to tell. At any rate yesterday was quite lovely and today it is raining. It's not really a lot of rain but it is definitely welcome. Hapi perked up quite a bit with the cooler weather, instead of going straight to the pond to soak yesterday we went instead for an explore on the bike trails in the woods. She hasn't wanted to do that in many weeks. Watching her prance down the street later in the evening I felt like she was back to her old self.

In honour of the cooler wet weather I am doing a bit of cooking today, bread and bone broth. And of course tabbouleh with lots of tomatoes. Last night I sat outdoors chatting with neighbours, one of them had bought corn earlier in the day. We debated who grew the best corn, two of us plumped for one farm, one for another. We'll have to do a taste test.

And finally, my car's exhaust system is broken yet again. Each time it is a different part, and each time the part is so expensive that my mechanic has tried to replace it with something less expensive. I hope he succeeds one more time.

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.