Sunny days, the birds and the bees

Finished varnishing the kayak, have moved it back to under the house since it is unlikely I'll be kayaking in the near future. But it does look good now. Had to take a few photos because otherwise I won't be seeing it again for another year. Sigh.

Dances with Whales

Traditionally one carves a fish or sea-going mammal into the bulkhead of a wooden kayak to help it stay afloat.

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The solar panels are now installed and running, but of course there's been a major weather change to rain and cloud for the foreseeable future. On a solar energy discussion group I saw that people with already up-and-running solar panels are ecstatic about all the sun they got in May and July. I missed out entirely. Might get a bit of sun in the fall, but by that time the sun will be much lower in the sky and sunlight will be shorter in duration. This year is a write-off. 

A little stress around my heat pump. Turns out the heat pump company installed it in the wrong place, and as a result the power company failed my solar installation. The solar guys told me if I could get it moved in the next few days there was still hope, and if needs be they would move it for me. But the heat pump people said that would void my warranty, and lucky me, they had a cancellation so they could slot me in the same day the solar guys put up the panels. 

Two guys came to move the heat pump, after a half hour of standing around waiting for head office to get back to them about what exactly was the problem and where they were supposed to move the it to. A couple of days later I got the bill, $200 for two guys to stand around waiting for a callback and then maybe twenty minutes moving the heat pump.

Not supposed to block access to power meter

I called the company and said, look, this is your fault not mine, you installed it in the wrong place as per the Electrical Code of Canada, you should have known better and there was plenty of space to install it elsewhere. They said they'd call me back, and an hour and a half later they did call to apologize and tell me the bill was being reversed. 

I don't believe for one second that this was news to them, they just tried to see if they could get away with it. But according to my new Fitbit, the stress of waiting those ninety minutes was equivalent to a half hour jog with respect to my heart rate. Got all my cardiac exercise for a couple of days in one shot.

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As I mentioned earlier I may have given myself a concussion and was slow to realize it because the symptoms are so close to what I have with long Covid. However, I've been looking into things people are doing for concussion, besides the usual stuff that doctors tell you. One of the things I happened on is creatine (not to be confused with creatinine). Body builders and athletes love the stuff, it helps them to build muscle fast. But more recently there has been some research into using it to treat concussion. 

I started thinking, if my symptoms overlap concussion symptoms, maybe this stuff will help me? Because the local university is big on athletics, there's a lot of athletes in town and guess what, a shop called Supplement King that caters to them. So I went there to enquire about creatine. 

The very buff owner was happy to tell me what he knew. Yes, he's been using it for a couple of years, no side effects but it's not recommended to people with kidney or liver problems. I told him why I wanted to try it and he was very supportive, even telling me that there's a prof at our university researching creatine for concussion. So I bought 300gms of the stuff and have started taking it. So far, no side effects, but no positive effects either. Not that I am expecting instant results, the research I have read suggests that it might take a couple of months.

If I could rid myself of only one symptom, it would definitely be the dizziness. Two years of it is depressing, and it has totally wrecked my social life. If it weren't for my garden and the birds, well, let's just leave it at that.

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In yet more boring health news, my doctor is on about my blood pressure again. When I measure at home it is fine, but when she measures at her office it is through the roof. Why am I not surprised. Anyway, she wants me to take a bunch of readings over the next couple of weeks or so, and gave me an instruction sheet and form to fill in. Problem is, I have a chronic cough, have had it from the get-go, and now it is much worse. I suspect allergies have kicked in. Well it turns out that when I am having a coughing fit my blood pressure rises into the hypertension zone, not as high as when I am in her office, but high enough to make a liar of me. 

I've started doing various things to get the cough under control, which sort of help, and I am dispensing with her instructions. I am supposed to sit up straight in a chair but that's the perfect position for a coughing fit too. So, I take the reading lying down. 

It's all very annoying having to do this. I feel like the pharmaceutical companies are pushing hard to get all old people on medication one way or another, and lowering the threshold for what is considered hypertension is one good way to do that. When I read all the potential side effects I just want to stay away from such meds if at all possible. Even if it means acquiescing to the prescription and dumping the pills down the toilet.

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Okay enough about that. In other news my onion crop is a bit of a failure, I am going to end up with bags of onion sets but not much else, maybe enough onion greens to make another batch of onion greens pesto. Tomatoes are coming along like gangbusters, I am freezing all the ones I don't eat; I have no energy for canning. Lettuce greens are a bust, and the broccoli did not do well, too dry in July. But still holding out hope for the brussels sprouts. Potato plants are dying so soon I will be digging them up, I think they will do okay. 

I got a few blueberries but the two resident song sparrows got most of them. It wasn't nearly as good a crop as last summer anyway. Green beans did great, froze most of them. I've left the bean plants in place because sometimes I get a second crop in the fall. I already notice new flowers on the bean plants. Green peppers are doing well but the peppers, although prolific, are just long skinny things which I don't like.

I planted a few scarlet runner beans, not knowing that that's what they were. Hastily set up poles for them to climb and they produced a profusion of bright red flowers that the hummingbirds love. One day while picking green beans I heard a familiar whirring sound just behind my head. I turned to see a hummingbird hovering not five feet from me, trying to decide if he was safe to feed on the flowers. In the end he decided not, but I have since seen a hummingbird (maybe the same one?) at those flowers and then later perching on my laundry line to scan the garden. Wow! Definitely will plant those again.

I was picking tomatoes the other day and unfortunately a bumblebee crawled up under my shirt. I was not aware of it until I got indoors, a kind of creepy-crawly sensation that caused me to try to shake it out of my shirt. Bad idea, the bee stung me. Bumblebees can sting multiple times, they don't have barbs on their stingers like honey bees do, so they can withdraw the stinger without injury to themselves. However, this bee was definitely injured and died soon after I shook it out of my shirt, I must have hit it. Poor bee. But now I have a very large angry red sore under my armpit, swollen up to egg-size. Have to be more careful next time I'm in the garden.

And that's all for now…

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.

Solar eclipse and window blinds

There was a solar eclipse early this morning, I made a pinhole camera to view it but it didn't work. However I photographed some shadows on nearby houses that sort of display the eclipse: the sunlight filtering through leafy trees that serve as excellent natural pinhole cameras.

I've spent the last week on a rampage of cleaning, painting and installing window blinds, and am now in the midst of moving furniture. The energy ran out yesterday, so I may not accomplish anything today. By late afternoon I just could not get enough air, I felt quite oxygen-deprived. But I got a lot done.

I used to have a lovely maple tree in front of my house that cast excellent shade on the large west-facing windows of my living room, but the tree had to be cut down and the last couple of summers have been murderously hot in that room. So I determined to try to fix that artificially with new windows that blocked some of the heat and new cellular blinds that cut some more of the heat without blocking the light. Otherwise I would have to use the thermal curtains which leave the room in darkness all afternoon and early evening. 

As I described in a previous post the windows got replaced a few weeks ago. Then I went to Home Depot and picked out the cellular blinds I wanted. I decided to get new regular blinds for the rest of the windows at the same time. Money is cascading through my fingers and down the road like a waterfall! But before I could install the blinds I needed to paint the new window frames and touch up the old ones: two coats of primer and another two of the semi-gloss finish paint. Oh my!

Installing window blinds involves screwing a lot of hardware to the upper surfaces of the window frames, that means a lot of standing on various stools and step ladders holding a screwdriver over my head. The wood of the new windows is relatively soft but the old window frame wood is not, so pressure needs to be applied. I have an electric drill but I thought that holding it steady overhead was going to be more than I could manage so I screwed all the hardware in manually. I was in a race against time, a heatwave was coming and I wanted at the very least to get the west-facing cellular blinds up before it started. I did that, but only just barely. I spent the two-day heatwave (30C+) installing the rest of the blinds, moving around the house just ahead of or behind the sun. 

The new paint on the window frames made the baseboards of my house look terrible; they have not been painted let alone washed since I moved in over ten years ago, and they look it. So I determined that they needed cleaning at the very least and maybe if I had the energy I would paint them too. And then I had the brilliant (not) idea of moving my bedroom from the west to the east side of the house. Fortunately, I am now sleeping in the basement bedroom (cool and dark for the summer) so the chaos of moving furniture is confined to rooms I am not currently using on a regular basis. So I can take my time about it. But once I get started it's hard to stop, I keep thinking, just one more thing. Hence the utter exhaustion yesterday afternoon.

My winter firewood arrived and is blocking my driveway; I have a young friend who has offered to help stack it and I need to contact her about dates and times. My garden is all planted and mulched, but the straw mulch is full of seeds (oat or wheat, not sure which) that are now sprouting and all of the promised rain has never materialized, so weeding and watering are now required. Not to mention weekly lawn-mowing.

My son's father-in-law died suddenly last week, I wanted to send condolences to my daughter-in-law and her stepmother, now a widow. He died as he had lived, helping out a neighbour. It was one of those freak accidents that probably could have been prevented but when you've been doing this stuff for years sooner or later it catches up with you. Hopefully his death was quick and painless, but it was surely devastating for all of his family. 

These things were weighing on my mind, I really must stop moving furniture and attend to them! And the Reservoir ponds have warmed up enormously and everyone is swimming, I badly want to go swimming too. I have no doubt that all of this contributed to the exhaustion, the frustration of putting off stuff I either needed or wanted to do was mounting.

Finally, I have been invited on an afternoon kayak trip on Friday (tomorrow) and I think I have to rest up a bit before I can go, so today no work is scheduled. Last night I dreamed that I smashed up the bow of my kayak and it sank, I was tremendously relieved to wake up to the realization that it was only a dream, the kayak is safe and sound.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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'.

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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.