Son #3 comes home

Peony time!

My son just left this morning to return home. It was a very good visit, we seemed to be on exactly the same page as far as activity level and need for alone-time. I was pleasantly surprised at how good-looking he is becoming as he ages, I almost didn't recognize him when I went to pick him up at the airport. 

Mind you, that wasn't completely due to handsomeness. With his knitted cap, sunglasses and mask he looked like an alien. Towards the end of the week he talked about how much he was enjoying this and how sorry he was he hadn't booked a longer visit. After so many years he was afraid that a week was about as long as he could stand.

I bought tickets for us to go to a concert together at a local community hall. I thought it was a great concert, he was more critical. He thought the band's sound system and/or how the sound was being managed was lousy. Lousy enough that he didn't want to venture an opinion about how good the band actually was. 

Before we went into the hall we met some friends of mine and there was a lot of joking about how many friends/neighbours had Covid, how many last minute cancellations there were due to Covid. My son forgot his mask but I had two. We went in and shared a table with some more friends of mine, and they too joked about how many people they knew with Covid. Initially my son took has mask off to imbibe the drink he ordered, but quickly put it on afterwards. I asked him later about the fact he wore his mask for the entire concert when hardly anyone else (including me!) did.

He said, Are you kidding me? This place is a cesspool!

I had to admit he was right. The longer since the mask mandate was removed, the laxer we all got. The rate of infection and number of deaths have come down since April, but they are still much higher than previous waves. They say it is so bad here because we never got any herd immunity. We were so strict about the rules that we all stayed safe, but once the mandates were removed we all went a little crazy and ended up with one of the worst rates of infection in the whole country.

While here my son reconnected with an old friend. They hadn't seen each other in over a decade and a lot has happened in both their lives in the interim, so I think they were a little reluctant to meet since they didn't know if they still had a relationship. Turns out they very much did. They had several very long conversations while hanging out together and one of the things that came up was that neither could remember a time when they didn't know each other. They became friends before their memories kicked in. 

It's true, they were very young when they first met, and they only met because their parents were friends since before either of them were born. In spite of long periods living in different parts of the country, they had some remarkably similar life experiences. On his last night here the friend took him on a quick tour of the area, they hit several beaches and some other places, after dark. I thought that was pretty cool of the friend to do that.

My son was a little apologetic to me about how much time he was spending with his friend. I said, Don't worry, I'm not jealous. Spending an intense amout of time with anyone—even a beloved offspring—still takes its toll on me and I am happy for a bit of a break. I would have been very happy if he had booked a longer visit, but at the same time I don't know whether I would have had the stamina for it.

One morning he was up before me and he wanted to make coffee for me. But he took one look at my fancy espresso machine and decided otherwise. He referred to it as my Junior Chemistry Set that I call a Coffeemaker.

We had to be at the airport two hours before departure time, and it takes over an hour to drive to the airport. We had to be up at 6.00am and leave without breakfast. I was giving him directions (he drove), but normally he relies on Google for directions. I got distracted and we overshot the highway exit for the airport and had to drive an extra 25km to get back. I said something about there being highway signs but then realized that he probably never looks at the signs because he relies on Google to tell him. I am old school, I even keep a paper map of the province in the car.

So today I am so exhausted that I am just killing time till I can go to bed. Not so good at napping.

Hi Jerry's Mom!

Now I am in self-isolation, hopefully just for a couple of days. Came down with cold symptoms (runny nose, headache) but to be safe I got a Covid test and have to self-isolate until I get a negative result. I've booked a Covid booster shot for 4 days from now and I really don't want to cancel it because the next available slot around here is not until late January. Hopefully it's just a cold, but even so, nobody wants a cold now. 

Covid is roaring back, thanks to a recent event in another university town and the high mobility of students and their parents at this time of year. From last Thursday until Sunday night I was ushering for several Christmas-themed musical events, mostly on campus. I felt lousy on Sunday and tried to beg off, but the organizer said they were short of staff and needed me. He called me this morning and was shocked to hear that I'd gone and gotten myself tested today; he had not thought of the risk, since everyone was masked. 

One of the events—a Matt Anderson concert—was sufficiently big that a lot of people came up from the City (another area of community spread) to see him. He does an excellent show, I'm glad I got to see/hear him. Since he lives locally, he chatted casually about local irritants, which was fun. And he gave a shout out to our local grocery store which has been handling the pandemic really excellently. Got a round of applause for that one, they really have. He had with him another local, Kim Dunn, a set of black gospel singers and a couple from Newfoundland (don't remember their names), and a great bass player whose last name might be Dixon. The gospel singers called him 'Uncle Baby' because he was the youngest of a large family and was already an uncle at the moment of his birth.

Rather ironically, my job was to check people's vaccination status at the door. So every single person attending got to stand in front of me, in close proximity, while I examined their ID and vaccination proof. It was cold outside and there was a long line-up to get in so the outside door was kept open and my hands froze. After a while of reading teeny tiny print my eyes were watering and I couldn't read at all. Not to mention the discomfort of wearing a mask with a runny nose and a headache, and the reflection of the overhead lights on the plastic IDs. The concert was delayed by half an hour due to us being so diligent about checking vaccination proof, a couple of people thanked us for being so careful. 

I had the official app on my phone for scanning the vaccination proof, but it worked haphazardly. Everyone had different versions of proof, some paper some plasticized, some big some small, some with a scan code some without. Some even from out of province. It was actually faster just to eyeball the documents rather than try to scan them.

People were trying to show me their driver's licence photo, thinking that that was what I was looking for. But it wasn't, with everyone masked a driver's licence photo is useless. I just needed to check that the name on the licence or other ID was the same as the name on the vaccination proof. It's a small town so a lot of people I recognized anyway.

One person said, "Hi! I'm Jerry's Mom!"

Jerry's mom?!? Who the heck is Jerry? Then I remembered. Jerry is a dog and I used to walk with Jerry and his 'Mom' when Hapi was alive. But by the time I remembered she was gone.

Hi Jerry's Mom!

Malt Bread II

I baked the Malt Bread last night, had a toasted slice this morning. Needs a bit more sugar, as my brother's partner had written in the margin of the recipe.

Yesterday we got two (!!) Emergency Alerts from the RCMP, warning us of another shooting incident and then telling us it was over. As it turned out there were actually 4 incidents around Halifax that they had to investigate, 3 were false alarms and the 4th ended with a couple of arrests but no injuries or deaths. But at least they seemed to have learned something from last weekend. I'll definitely put up with Emergency Alerts even if they are false alarms. Hapi's afternoon walk got postponed as a result but that's okay, for me at any rate. Hapi wasn't so happy about it.

There was a virtual vigil last night, I listened to part of it. There's only so many speeches and so much sad music that I can deal with. When I did take Hapi for her walk around the neighbourhood I wore a red bandanna face mask in honour of mourning and saw many red hearts and flags hanging from or displayed in windows. Several people hung out Nova Scotia tartan scarves by their doors.

Last week I was so happy to be well again and able to get out of the house and enjoy the beginnings of Spring, this week it's been shock, anger and grief. I don't know what next week will bring.

I've been listening to a lot of John Prine lately, sad loss to Covid-19. Here's one of my favourites:

That's How Every Empire Falls

NovaScotiaStrong

April is the cruelest month

I'm feeling groggy this morning. I should be out with Hapi but I am still trying to wake up. The rain has stopped and now it is windy and cold, after a really lovely weather day yesterday.

I am trying not to dwell on recent events but it's hard. Right now people are angry that the RCMP used Twitter to warn folks about what was happening, but only a few people around rural Nova Scotia use Twitter. Some people died because the more widespread national Alert Ready system was not used, or even Facebook. This province has the lowest rate of internet access in the country; most of the inaccessibility is rural and in particular the area where the murders took place. So why Twitter?

Some local people took it upon themselves to go on the phone and call as many people as possible, but they did not know the crucial piece of information that the killer was dressed as a Mountie, so they said things like "don't open your door to anyone except a cop." How frustrating!

In other news, the crows are completely absent now. Busy elsewhere raising families. The two blue jays that were scarfing down half the birdseed at the feeder have relaxed a bit, now they just take seeds for themselves. I hope that means their hungry offspring are now grown up and not that they are gone for other more unfortunate reasons.

A local grey squirrel has been coming by, but whenever I see it I chase it off with a broomstick. It's not that I object to grey squirrels, but that it tips the feeder over and dumps half the seed on the ground. I kinda do object to grey squirrels—they are crowding out the native red squirrels—but it's not really their fault, they just do what they have to do to survive.

A friend sent me a link to a Roy Zimmerman parody of The Lion Sleeps Tonight called The Liar Tweets Tonight, a bit of humour in a bitter time. From there I ended up watching a video of Bonnie Raitt and John Prine singing Angel From Montgomery last November. Unrelated, but bittersweet.