Brain fog, experts and good neighbours

Third heat wave of the summer, although it being late August the nights are a bit cooler so it is not quite so debilitating.

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A while ago I quit Facebook, but then re-upped in order to join a couple of groups related to Long Covid and ME/CFS. There have been some very helpful, to me, discussions there about these disease syndromes, their symptoms, and the various drugs, supplements and remedies people have tried. Also a lot of comments on how helpful or unhelpful various healthcare professionals have been.

Recently there was a discussion of "brain fog", a symptom of both LC and ME/CFS. If you consult Dr. Google it is generally described as mental confusion, cognitive and memory deficits. These are all true, but that doesn't nearly describe what it actually feels like. So in this discussion, one fellow described it as like a concussion on a bad day and a hangover on a good day. A woman described it as like having a concrete block in her head and another like someone has poured concrete into her skull and it has set solid. I especially like that last description but they are all pretty good. I often have to lie down just because my head feels so heavy… like a concrete block. I have never heard a healthcare professional describe it as anything other than cognitive and memory deficits (in other words, dementia).

I have had no luck getting anyone to understand what I mean when I say I feel dizzy, and I am thinking maybe I should use the concrete metaphor instead. More and more I agree with Michael J Fox when he says that the true experts are those with the condition themselves.

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I set off a bit of a firestorm in town this week. Over the weekend I had a rather unpleasant encounter with a local landlord who accused me of driving away all his tenants by my constant complaining about noise. Funnily enough, I had given up complaining and his tenants were going elsewhere to party after 10pm which suited me fine. Anyway the encounter was very upsetting, so I wrote an email to the Town Council about it and I told a friend who writes a weekly newsletter for the Good Neighbours Association (a group of residents living in the student part of town who are having to put up with a lot of student and landlord bad behaviour).

A whole lot of people are horrified by my experience, including the Mayor. I am going to be interviewed this afternoon by a town employee looking into town/gown issues. A lawyer in the Association wants to know who the landlord is. He is not above pursuing such matters within legal limits.  

I am not interested in going after this guy, he's unlikely to change his opinion and not being friends with him is not a huge loss. He is just an ignorant bully with no power. What I do want is for the Town to wake up to the bad behaviours of landlords, not only in how they treat the neighbours but also in how they treat their tenants (some student houses are very badly maintained and packed to the gills with young people who don't know any better).

What the Good Neighbours Association wants (among other things) is for the town to keep a registry of all landlords and require them to have business licences. I would hope that being registered would hold them accountable for complaints about how they run their businesses.

November arrives late

November rainbow

November weather finally arrived: wet, cold and grey with a touch of frost and snow. Up until this past week we have had almost idyllic weather all summer and most of the fall, but it had to come to an end sometime. Meanwhile western Canada has been hit by phenomenally bad weather: a summer heatdome, lots of forest fires, and now intense rain, wind and flooding. A once-in-a-lifetime Very Bad Year weather-wise. But here we had an awesome year. I don't often use that word, awesome, but it applies this time.

Locally we're seeing a surge in Covid cases and deaths, thanks in part to "faith" gatherings where the participants did not see fit to follow Covid health guidelines. One pastor had the gall to comment that the subsequent deaths were unfortunate but just part of God's plan. Initially the provincial government was lenient, saying that they were more focussed on education than enforcement, but apparently the God's plan comment put our premier over the edge. When the powers-that-be give you a pass you don't go all smug about it.

Some participants in the gathering thought they were adhering to the guidelines, that since church services do not require vaccination passports being checked, therefore a much larger gathering involving many hundreds of participants from far and away should also be allowed to go maskless and passportless. Dr. Strang said that was not so and the guidelines were clear about that. However, I will say that when I checked the guidelines with respect to another gathering I was involved in, the guidelines were not clear at all. I came away wondering what exactly was supposed to happen. So I will give the organizers of that faith gathering a little benefit of doubt on that score, but the God's plan comment was kind of over the top.

The other gathering I attended was the first in-person meeting since before the pandemic of an organization I belong to. I went to it just because I was thinking I'd get to see some people I hadn't seen in that long since I haven't been attending Zoom meetings. Apparently at least half the membership was thinking the same thing and so there were many more people in attendance than had been planned for. Where we usually got a dozen or maybe a couple dozen attendees in the before times, I am sure well in excess of 50-70 people showed up at this meeting. Passports were checked and everyone wore masks, but at a certain point the president of the club suggested that people could take their masks off. I thought, Nothing doing, mask stays put. I'd only just gotten my 'flu shot and didn't want to chance even getting a bit of 'flu.

We had a speaker that night as we usually do and her topic was the story of Abraham Gesner. You may or may not be aware that Gesner invented kerosene, and that he grew up not far from my town in Nova Scotia. I only knew that because there is a country road intersection with a stop sign not too far from town where there is a monument and plaque honouring him. It's kind of out in the middle of nowhere, the monument stands at the edge of a farm field. Every time I stopped at that intersection, which is not frequently but maybe once a year or so, I wondered who the heck is this guy. Well, now I know. 

Our speaker was a retired history professor who has written a book about Mr. Gesner and she had a lot to say about him. So much so that she went overtime and people were fidgeting and growing quite restless long before she finished. A vice-president finally stepped up and told her that time had run out. It was an unfortunate end to an otherwise interesting talk.

Briefly, Gesner grew up on a farm in the early 1800s but was not in the least talented at farming. He met and courted a young woman who was the daughter of a prominent physician, and the prospective father-in-law encouraged young Abraham to get trained as a doctor, since it was obvious he would never be able to support his daughter by farming. Abraham ended up going to London England for his medical training. In those days medical training was a loosey goosey affair, Abraham took a variety of courses including geology. It turned out that his real passion was for geology, not medicine or farming. Nevertheless he completed his medical training and returned to Canada to practice medicine in New Brunswick. He made lots of home visits around the countryside since that is what doctors used to do, and on his travels he collected rocks. Lots of rocks. Eventually he switched careers to become a geological surveyer and then his travels expanded to almost the entire province of New Brunswick.

Unfortunately Mr Gesner ran into trouble advising the province that they had coal deposits suitable for mining when in fact the deposits were entirely unsuitable. He lost his job. He experimented with liquefying coal to use as a replacement for whale oil in street lamps. He was eventually successful and came up with kerosene ("coal oil"). He opened a factory in New England for the manufacture of kerosene but ran into business trouble and was sued multiple times. I don't know the details but I rather gather it was bad luck, ignorance and the highly competitive market that he was operating in that was his downfall. He returned penniless to Nova Scotia. He did manage to secure a job teaching at Dalhousie College in Halifax, but before he could take it up he died, in his early 60s.

Nowadays kerosene is made from petroleum but Gesner's process of converting coal to kerosene saved a lot of whales. It was in fact the beginning of the end for the lucrative 'Boston coast' whaling industry. That industry revived somewhat when it was realized that whalebone was very useful in women's undergarments (corsets and such), but kerosene was definitely the first nail in that coffin.

Gesner firmly believed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, as Bishop Usher had proven through his biblical studies. He was not to be deterred, he argued firmly in the defense of a youngish Earth. However towards the end of his career and studies he came to admit that perhaps it was not so, perhaps the Earth was millions of years old. I admire that he defended his beliefs so vigourously but in the end changed his mind in the face of overwhelming evidence. He was scientifically inclined and willing to change his mind with enough evidence for doing so. He died before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species but the writing was already on the wall with the revelations of geological strata associated with a progression of fossils toward modern species. Darwin's big discovery was not so much about evolution but the natural mechanisms facilitating evolution.

I think I find this man interesting because he tried his hand at a number of different things, some successful and some not, and he loved exploring. He was training in England at the start of the Industrial Revolution and very interested in the potential for change it portended. He came back home to Canada fired up about the possibilities and in the end he made a contribution. As I said, he saved a few whales and provided an affordable source of light before electricity became the norm. Having myself depended on kerosene for light at a certain period of my life, I think that is notable.

Up all night

I got maybe 2-3 hours of sleep Friday night. It was a warm evening and the students next door (all boys) partied on their back patio until around midnight. That would have been not great but okay, except that they resumed the party at 4 am. I had previously made an agreement with the landlord to not call the police but to call him instead, and I didn't really feel like doing that at 4 am. I had also previously spoken to some of the boys and asked them to keep the party indoors after 10 pm, which is when the municipal noise bylaw kicks in. I was mad enough that I couldn't get back to sleep. I texted the landlord this morning and he says he'll deal with it after the student reading week. If there is a second occurrence in the meantime, I will definitely be calling the local police. I am not good at napping so Saturday was pretty much a write-off.

Last weekend was the local university "homecoming" celebration and boy did the students celebrate. Many hundreds of them in residential streets whooping it up, vandalizing property and generally keeping the neighbours up all night. Police were called but they said there was a limit to what they could do given the huge numbers of drunken students in the streets. Our little town made the national news as a result. Needless to say, citizens, town councillors and the mayor are not pleased. The university offers apologies and wrings its metaphorical hands, making vague promises of disciplining culprits. A neighbour had a conversation with the university president, who offered the excuse that first year students did not get adequate socializing in high school because of pandemic restrictions on high school social activities. The university bans alcohol on campus, so guess where students go when they feel like having an alcoholic celebration. The same neighbour told me that the female students living next door to her had to call the police because male students were trying to break into their house to party. They were really scared.

I was lucky last weekend, the students next door kept their celebration indoors, or else they participated in the street ruckus elsewhere. But not so lucky this weekend. The students seem to think that because they've been forced to stay home for a year and a half and because they are mostly all "double-vaxxed", that they deserve to party hearty now. What's a little Fourth Wave and Delta Variant? And who cares about the neighbours who don't care for rap music in the middle of the night? The university seems to take the position that because the partying was not on campus they have no responsibility. The town has to identify "the culprits" before they will do anything.

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The weather on Friday was quite lovely, I went for a long walk downtown to collect my mail (in this town we don't get home delivery but have to go to the post office to pick up mail, which makes it a bit of a social occasion), then through town to a ravine that leads up to the Reservoir. 

I met a neighbour at the beach and we chatted for a bit. She said her husband had gone to the city to see the opening of Dune. She asked him if he had read any reviews before he went and he said no he hadn't, he planned to see the movie regardless of what critics said about it. She was a bit mystified by that, why would you not care? I laughed; if you're a Dune-fan then you really don't care what the so-called critics have to say about it. I told her that lately I've been looking at "puppy porn" online, pictures of dogs available for adoption. Of course I particularly look at the Malamute puppies. She wondered if I was one of those people who favoured a particular breed, I said not really and the Malamute is absolutely the wrong breed for someone like me. But they all look like Hapi and Hiro and I guess I'm kind of imprinted on them.

Later she sent me a Facebook link to a video about New York dogs. The city has banned dogs on the subway unless they fit in a bag, so ingenious New Yorkers have bundled their dogs up in all kinds of bags to take them on the train. Dogs as big as Golden Retrievers have been bundled into bags, and some dog owners cut leg holes in their dog-bags so the dog can walk onto the train. 

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As noted in a previous post, my birdfeeder is up but now the squirrels have discovered it. So I bought a squirrel-proof birdfeeder and put that up. Apparently it is more than squirrel-proof, the blue jays and cardinals can't use it either. Yesterday I watched a frustrated downy woodpecker pecking away at it, it clearly couldn't get at the seeds but was determined to peck its way through to them. The chickadees are okay with it but the goldfinches still haven't shown up. I am hoping that when the weather gets a little colder the squirrels will hibernate and I can put the old birdfeeder back up.

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The greens sprouting indoors

I started my winter indoor greens crop: arugula, leaf lettuce and romaine. They are all up and doing well. 

The greens taking in the sun

On good days I put the planter outside but otherwise it resides under a grow-light. 

I can start another planter under a second grow-light (lower shelf in photo above) but I am holding off on that, I may just bring in a couple of pots of chives and thyme instead. 

I still have greens in the outdoor garden, they will probably survive into November. By then the indoor greens should be big enough to start harvesting. 

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I finally upgraded my Macbook to a newer operating system. I've been putting it off for a over a year because I have to do a clean install, involving deleting all my files and then replacing them afterward. I was afraid of losing stuff, of having the clean install go terribly wrong and not being able to recover from it. But it was getting harder and harder to put off because my browser was no longer supported in the old operating system and was not functioning properly. I finally bit the bullet and did it. Mostly it went okay but my latest photos are not reappearing. That means until I get that sorted I may or may not be able to include photos with this post. 

Later: As you can see I did manage to post some photos but the there is still an unresolved problem with the photos updating on my computer. Apparently it is frustrating a lot of users but so far (two years now) Apple is not offering a viable solution.

More swimming

Yesterday I went swimming a bit earlier than usual. I've been trying different meds the doctor prescribes for insomnia; the current one leaves me quite lethargic during the day. However I am addicted to the swimming so I keep it up in spite of the lethargy, and yesterday I went early because I was afraid if I waited until later I would lose motivation due to the lethargy.

I did four laps, up from my usual two. Somehow the minute I hit the water the lethargy disappears and I am capable of amazing feats :-). Just kidding.

The local eagles have been very active lately, gliding in the updrafts. Before I left home for the Reservoir I watched three of them circling the University, two of them were circling so close to each other they almost touched wingtips. Then they'd whistle at each other, "stay back! stay back!". Later while swimming I watched another five overhead. One of them swooped down and skimmed the treetops by the pond. It was so close we held our breaths afraid that it might hit a tree and fall down. The fish were jumping like crazy too. Lots of tiny flies right above the surface of the water that they were going for. A man was out swimming with his dog, they didn't swim as far as us but pretty far for a man and a dog. The dog was right at the man's side without actually hitting him.

When we got out of the water we stood or sat around drying out and warming up in the late afternoon sun. We chatted about this that and the other thing. One of the women, C, asked me for my cell number, I gave it to her and she recorded it on her phone. A few days before I was so tired—someone set off fireworks at 3am and I got up to check on Hapi and never got back to sleep again—and I had a backlog of tomatoes to can, so I decided to stay home and do tomatoes instead of swimming. C had waited around for me to show up thinking that I was just late so now she wanted my number so she could check on me if I didn't appear. I gave her the number and asked her to text me so I would have her number too. 

The tomato patch, still chugging along

When I got home after swimming there was a voice mail waiting for me on my cell (I don't take the cell with me when I go swimming), from an unknown number. I played the message. At first I thought it must be a pocket call because there was no recognizable message, just a bunch of background noise, but I didn't know who it was from because I didn't recognize the number. I listened to the noise for awhile to see if I might recognize who it might be.

I heard myself, it was us swimmers chatting in the sun after our swim. The message continued on for over 5 minutes, I think it only cut out when there was no further room for it in my voicemail. Then the test text came in from C. I texted back that I had just been listening to a voice message from her phone with all of us in it. She said she never sent that message. I think when she was recording my number on her phone, her phone decided that she wanted to call that number and so placed the call. It felt strange to be listening to a recording of myself and a few others just chatting.

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I don't know how much longer Hapi will last. She's not eating as much, probably because she sleeps all the time. She's given up on the basement, she spends the night outside. Her fur is a mess, her bald patches are becoming noticeable. I now have to use the towel sling to help her into the car to go to the Reservoir in the morning. The couple who own Owen say they always look for Hapi, and are amazed that she is still coming for a walk. Mind you,"walk" is a relative term. She walks slowly to the pond, immerses herself and then just stays put. One day I walked all the way around the two ponds by myself because she didn't want to get out of the water. Then she walked back to the car by herself, because I was still on the far side of the pond. Another dog walker followed her to make sure that she didn't wander off, but she knew where my car was and just waited there.

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The long weekend was kind of crazy here, the returning students were "packing" as the Premier put it, going around in huge groups unmasked and tightly packed. At least one kid was fined for it. I hope they settle down soon. Of course it's only a minority who are misbehaving, the majority are staying safe. But I am sure that the fireworks at 3am over the weekend were a student "prank".

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I talked to my son who has been waterbombing fires out west all summer. Actually he spent very little time actually flying, the summer started out cold and wet so there were very few fires this year. But he did go down to Washington state to fight fires there. Because he is considered an essential worker he doesn't have to quarantine when he crosses the border. Nevertheless he was in an area hard hit by the pandemic so the firefighters were staying away from town in their base camp as much as possible. 

He told me that in the nearest town people were taking the pandemic very seriously, social distancing and wearing masks. He said the rate of infection there was something like one in a hundred (this province's rate is around one in a thousand, and that's the highest rate in the Atlantic Bubble). Now he is laid off for the winter and debating whether to look for a winter job or just do "Daddy Daycare". He said they were further ahead financially if he just did the childcare, so he's looking for a hobby to occupy himself. He bought two guitars for his daughter's birthday, he intends to sign his daughter and himself up for lessons. What a good daddy!

Covid weather predictions

The other day we went for an evening walk on the dyke, I took some photos. A lot of students are back, Main Street is getting busy. A couple of American girls refused to wear masks at the grocery store so the owner called the cops and they were fined and made to leave. Considering that the police office is right across the street from the grocery store, it was kind of a foolish thing to do.

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Today I thought we were finally going to get a good rain, or that was what the weather forecast said. I thought it was going to be a good rainy day to get some indoor stuff done. I didn't water the garden because we were supposed to get a thorough downpour, and I had a whole lot of tomatoes to can (since there is no room for them in the freezer), so it was going to be a canning day. Canning tomatoes is hot messy work, not something I really like to do on a hot sunny day.

So guess what, no rain, just a hot sunny day. And Hapi had wet all her bedding, between being incontinent and wanting to sleep in the basement after a soak in the pond. So there was laundry to do. Once I started prepping the tomatoes for canning I realized it was not going to rain after all. In fact, it was a hotter day than it had been in a while. There was no turning back, it was too late to just pack it in and do it another day. So I canned and did laundry and was royally pissed off at the weatherman for being so wrong.

As soon as the canning was done I turned off the stove, grabbed the dog and my bathing suit and hurried over to the Reservoir for a swim. There was hardly anyone there, I guess everyone stayed home waiting for the rain. Swimming on my back I watched the clouds. The wind had picked up quite a bit and there were heavy clouds on the horizon blowing by. The sun was still out though, it stayed sunny until I finished swimming and drove home. I had hardly hung my bathing suit and towel out on the line to dry when the sky got quite dark. I guess it was going to rain after all.

Sure enough, just as I was sitting down for supper (tomatoes, beet greens, zucchini and rice) it got very dark and and thundery and the rain poured down. Hapi was scared of the thunder, she kept so close to me that I was tripping over her. It really only lasted about half an hour but she was at my feet for a lot longer than that.

I got 5 quarts of tomatoes canned and 2 freezer bags full of grated zucchini done. All Hapi's bedding got washed and dried, although she is down in the basement now getting it all wet and dirty again. My two rain barrels are full to overflowing. It was so hot today that less than an hour after the downpour the road was dry. But the temperature has dropped by almost 10C and supposedly it's going to stay cool for a while. Says the weatherman who predicted the rainy day.

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.