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!

Memory work

A couple of weeks ago I bought a painting. It's very Maud Lewis-ish, but I like it. I have another painting by the same woman, I told the saleslady that when I bought it. She said the artist will be thrilled to hear that someone out there is actually collecting her stuff.

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First major winter storm last night coincided with doctor's appointment first thing the following morning, necessitating getting out early to shovel snow. Not a fun time. On top of that, last night I was sifting through paperwork trying to find something or other and while I never did find whatever I was looking for, I did find the receipt for having paid the last installment of my property tax and noticed for the first time that the low income seniors rebate had not been applied to it. I then hunted for evidence that I had in fact applied for the rebate, and found none of that either. Not even a form that had been left unfilled and undelivered, just nothing.

So after the doctor appointment I trekked over to town hall to see if they had any evidence that I had applied for it and of course they did not. As the clerk said, they would have applied it if I had submitted the form. Well, I knew I was suffering from brain fog and memory issues, but this was one expensive memory slip. Sometime back in the early days of the pandemic I had requested that my bills be emailed instead of mailed, and that went okay for the first year but in the second year I was late paying two bills because I forgot, and I never applied for the tax exemption. I requested to go back on paper billing, so much for saving trees. The clerk muttered that she could never do online bills.

My doctor suggested that I get my memory tested, there's a local company doing some kind of study of dementia and looking for people to do memory testing on. My doctor doesn't think I have dementia but it might be useful to see how much the CFS has affected my memory. She also recommended a couple of other things which I asked her to write down for me otherwise I would never remember them. I've already forgotten what they were, but I have a piece of paper that she wrote on!

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I am not recovering very well from my mini-vacation, there seems to be way too much stuff to do to prepare for winter and I am not sleeping well. The bout of snow shovelling this morning has flattened me, I spend way too much time in a recliner. I have books to read but no energy to pick them up.

I was joking with someone else who has insomnia, we were talking about our evening "cocktails", how every night we look at an array of pills and herbals and whatnot and try to guess which combo will work tonight. So far, I am not guessing very well at all. 

I received an email last night from a friend who said she hoped I was more relaxed now, that got my back up. I fired off a reply saying relaxing was not my problem, imagine having a bad 'flu for months/years on end and maybe that would convey a little of how I feel. Saying that to her feels like crushing baby bunnies, I know she means well she just misses the point. But I'm tired of it.

Okay, I remember now one of the things the doctor thought I should do: apply to get CBT-I (cognitive behaviour therapy for insomnia) at the regional hospital. And get my blood sugar checked, I am apparently now in the "pre-diabetic" range. Still can't remember the final thing, or at least I think it's the final thing. Good thing I have that piece of paper … somewhere.

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...

On my camera roll

Red peonies

Iris

Mallow?

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

The last lilac flower

Tree, saved from the chainsaw

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