Easter, happy or otherwise

Interesting weekend, although nothing happened and I didn't go anywhere except the grocery store on Saturday. I commented to the greeter at the store, a young man, about the length of the line up to get in and he responded that his mother always planned well ahead for Easter so that she didn't have to shop between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I said, yeah, good plan, although sometimes there's a last minute item you absolutely have to have right away (for me it was a sweet potato; I know, not really a must-have but in my mind it was), he agreed and we laughed. So that was pretty much all the excitement for the long weekend.

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Hapi keeps changing her schedule, each change involves more sleep time, she just rearranges her day to accommodate the increased amount of sleep time. So these days she sleeps from supper time to noon or later, has a midday or early afternoon meal and then a walk and then her late afternoon supper. She does some 'sundowning' after her supper, I try to grin and bear it although sometimes I lose my temper when it goes on and on and on. Her bedding is stinky which means my bedroom is stinky.

I used to have scent-free laundry detergent but the last purchase was excessively scented. Since I hang my laundry to dry indoors, well, between overly-scented laundry detergent and stinky dog, it's quite overwhelming. Let's just say that I can't wait till the weather improves enough to hang laundry outdoors. I may have to cave and toss the heavily scented stuff for some expensive unscented detergent.

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I've been doing some online reading about the little bit of research done on long Covid. Emphasis on 'little bit'. This morning I completed a detailed questionnaire about my own experience for a research survey on long Covid, being run by some 'citizen scientists' (i.e., not degreed medical researchers but interested citizens with research skills) out of the UK. It took more than an hour to complete, fortunately they warned in advance that it was long. The weather is crappy and the dog is asleep so I didn't have anything more productive to do.

What I think is interesting is that 'patients' have lost patience with doctors and are taking things into their own hands. When AIDS first reared its ugly head no bona fide medical scientists gave it credence; it took activism on the part of the patients to push them into doing the research. Now there is a diagnosis and a treatment but no cure. When Chronic Fatigue Syndrome appeared, same thing. Even today there is resistance to that diagnosis and no agreed upon treatment. There's not even an agreed upon definition of CFS (several 'official' ones but no solid agreement). So now, long Covid is going through the same process, trying to get medical people to recognize it and research possible treatments.

But this time it's different. This time the patients are doing the research. Thanks to social media and more open access to scientific research papers, the people who have the disease are doing the work. Some scientists came up with the name 'post Covid viral syndrome' but that didn't stick, 'long Covid'—a name first used by a person with the disease on Twitter (#longCovid)—did. They call themselves 'long haulers' and the scientific research community has kind of been forced to use the same terminology. There's still a long way to go, but I think it is a step in the right direction. One of the scientific papers I read last night commented that scientists need to consult with the real experts on the disease, namely the people who have it. You'd never have seen a scientist saying a thing like that even a year ago.

I think there is a sea change in people's attitudes toward complex disease syndromes. It used to be you had to wait for some degreed medical researchers to recognize it, devise a means for diagnosis and then research possible treatments. Now, people who have these unrecognized complex disease syndromes don't want to wait for degreed scientists to pay attention, nor do they want to wait for funding from official government sources. Covid has made it abundantly clear how a bunch of sick people can gum up an economy, paying attention to young sick people is starting to be a thing. [agism still works against old sick people, it'll be a while before that changes, in my opinion]

The UK seems to be making headway with this and I expect the US is too. They are further along in Covid infection rates and vaccination rates than we are here in Canada so they have more to work with. More manifestation of the disease, more recognition of its existence, more research work on it.

Covid test

I had to get a Covid test last weekend. The results came back negative Tuesday morning, 36 hours after the test. It was relatively quick and easy to do, any discomfort was on a par with getting a needle: unpleasant but brief.

The local university required students returning after the Christmas break to quarantine for two weeks and get a Covid test around the 7th day of quarantine. Last September they were requiring quarantining students to get three tests at the beginning, middle and end of the quarantine period but this time only one test was required. So one student in residence did as required and the first day after his quarantine period he went grocery shopping. As it happened so did I, within the same time frame. A few days later the grocery store was declared an exposure site, I checked my grocery store receipt and booked the Covid test. I didn't have to self-isolate because they said it was a low risk exposure due to everyone being required to wear masks at the store and only a certain number of people allowed in at a time. I've never found it crowded.

At the Reservoir I told a couple of people and they all said they never shop at that grocery store, they go to an out-of-town farm market instead. Students generally don't go to farm markets. All well and good so long as you don't need something that only a grocery store carries. I guess I could have ordered stuff for delivery but it's a pain and you don't always get what you want. I try to keep a grocery list but that week I went to the grocery store three times because I kept forgetting to add stuff to the list.

With the kerfuffle over vaccine production happening in Europe, vaccination rates here have come almost to a halt. Canada stopped manufacturing its own vaccines back in the day when it was deemed not cost effective to make your own when you could just order it from another country. Ha. I see that my age group will now not get vaccinated before the summer, if then. Having everyone vaccinated by September is looking overly optimistic, probably only achievable if we all get it in August. Ha.

I am starting to have some sympathy for conspiracy theory believers, reading the official news about the vaccine is starting to sound more and more like double talk. I try to keep my head down and not think about it.

I've been skating regularly but because this is an uncommonly mild winter the ice quality is poor. I am very grateful I got out on the ice when it was fresh because it was near perfect then. The fact that Hapi is not afraid to walk on it is an indicator of how bad it is, not slippery at all. I debate taking up X-country skiing instead but frankly I barely have the energy for skating, I know for sure skiing would wipe me out altogether.

Second round, nobody learns

Gaspereau Canal, 2017

On our walk yesterday along the Gaspereau Canal I was briefly distracted talking to another dog walker and Hapi slipped away down a steep bank into the water. I knew she'd never get out on her own and asked the dog walker to stay for a few minutes to help me get her out. He was very kind, said not to rush, he was in no hurry to go anywhere. Fortunately he was wearing high rubber boots and was able to get right into the water to grab Hapi's collar and guide her out of the water. Once again we dragged/pushed her up the bank. This time the man was doing the pushing so it went a lot faster and Hapi was less traumatized by the experience than the last time. Almost as if it was a normal part of a walk. Damn dog.

Hapi in the canal, when she could still get out on her own

At every step of the way the man asked permission to touch her, he was very gentle. His wife held their own dog away from the scene since it was an over-eager six-month old retriever pup.

Saw the homeopath this week, came away feeling uplifted and hopeful, a far cry from how my GP makes me feel. Homeopathy may be scientific bunkum but if it makes me feel better, however briefly, then I will keep it up for as long as I can afford it. There's more to healthcare than so-called evidence-based medicine.

Covid is rising in a second wave across the country and has breached the bounds of the Atlantic Bubble. Premier McNeil is once again vocally annoyed at careless spreaders, the city is being put on stricter conditions. Not exactly lockdown, but close. So far no positive cases in my health region, but we are close enough to commute to the city that it's just a matter of time. A friend is planning an in-person trip to Costco next week and I've been watching the daily listings of exposure points on CBC. Some of them are awfully close to the Costco store. Personally, I think I would give it a pass.

I watched the daily Covid briefing with McNeil and his chief medical officer Dr Strang. They do a good cop/bad cop act: Strang is the reasonable good cop explaining what is going on and why, NcNeil is the bad cop glowering and looking threatening over Strang's shoulder. McNeil has already turned in his resignation from politics so he has no worries about being re-elected. Going out on a high, I'd say.

I don't think any of us will forget his mantra: Stay the Blazes Home!

What a day

I don't know why but yesterday was exhausting. I didn't think I was unusually busy but perhaps I was.

First thing in the morning, after my usual coffee and toast of course, I drove to the Kenny's Farm outlet to buy fresh strawberries. They are only there during strawberry season, it's a small barn in somebody's back yard. They used to sell their berries from the back of a big cube truck but now they have access to the little barn once a year. Unfortunately I was there an hour too early so rather than drive home I took Hapi for her morning walk on a nearby trail. It was still cool and quite lovely, I hadn't been there since some time last year. Hapi waded in a small brook under a footbridge.

The walk back to the car was hotter, the clouds had burned off and it was shaping up to be another hot humid day. We got back to the strawberry barn just after it opened and I negotiated for some strawberries. It was cash-only and I had forty bucks which was more than enough for one flat (eight quarts) but not enough for two, and they didn't like to break up flats. However they did have one half-flat for $14, I had $12 leftover after buying the first flat, so they sold me three quarts from the half-flat. These strawberries were on sale because they were picked the afternoon before and left in the barn overnight. A bit bruised but still in pretty good shape. I drove home.

I started processing the strawberries for freezing right away, washing and trimming and spreading on cookie sheets to freeze individually before throwing them in freezer bags. It takes about 15 minutes a quart, so almost three hours all told. I did 7 quarts right away and had some lunch. Later I checked the garden to see if anything needed emergency watering in the heat of the day, the squashes and lettuce looked a bit wilted. Hapi's walk was enough activity for her so she spent the time sleeping under a big clump of Solomon's Seal.

I phoned my dying friend on the west coast and we had quite a long chat, she is feeling much better than she did the last time I talked to her. Her meds have been changed and that has helped. She was getting palliative care but that has stopped because she is doing so much better. She thinks she might make it through the summer, she is feeling so good. I used to kind of resent our relationship, she does all the talking and I hardly get a word in, so we end up talking about whatever is on her mind, hardly ever what is on mine. Now I just let her have at it. I have lots of time to say whatever I want to, she probably does not.

I walked downtown to pick up Hapi's pain meds at the drugstore, ran into a friend outside the store and chatted a bit, then returned home. On the way home I stopped at a home-made ice cream shop and got a salted caramel ice cream cone to eat as I was walking up the hill. I can only buy an ice cream cone when Hapi is not with me because she goes bananas for ice cream and I have to share. I probably should share since one ice cream cone is really too much sugar for me, but I don't like to.

The walk home up the hill wiped me out, I had to stop a couple of times to catch my breath. That's not normal. Was it all the sugar in the ice cream cone? At home I sat down and read for a bit till I felt recovered and then in the late afternoon I took Hapi for a walk around the block. She insisted on stopping by a friend's place, it is as if she is my social director making sure I get enough socializing during the day. The friend had had a hectic day and wanted to have a beer with me to relax but I said No, I still had 4 quarts of strawberries to process before the end of the day. And I wanted a bath.

Between the ice cream cone and all the strawberries I ate while processing them I was not hungry for supper, I just had some corn chips and guacamole. There was rain in the forecast but these days the forecast is so unreliable that I watered the garden anyway. It rained. Hapi had an early supper and went to bed in the basement, later I got her up for one last pee before I went to bed. One of her rear legs wasn't working properly so she slipped on the stairs. I was right behind to catch her so no harm done, but it is gut wrenching to watch that happen.

She returned to the basement on her own and I left the back door open so sometime in the night Hapi let herself out again. She was asleep in the grass this morning, drenching wet.

A walk in town

Saturday: a foggy day at the Reservoir

This morning I went down town with Hapi. First we went for a long walk on the dyke which in retrospect was a bit too much, I didn't bring water for Hapi and it was warmer than I expected. The only water out there is muddy ditches and ponds which I didn't really think she should be drinking from. I finally relented about one pond because I felt I was putting her life at risk in the heat, and then later took her to "the duck pond" (no ducks) to wash off the stinky dyke mud. Next time, bring water and bowl!

Duck asleep in the fog

All the shops are open now and some of the bars and restaurants for dining in. I think as a result of things opening up over the weekend a lot more people are wearing face masks. For the first time I went into the natural food store but I have to say I didn't really feel safe there. I liked it better when you just placed an order through a window. Then I went to a convenience store that Hapi wanted to visit because they give treats to dogs. The owner made a big fuss over Hapi because he hadn't seen her in a while, gave her two treats and hugged and cuddled her. I was a tiny bit appalled. He said he thought people were making too much fuss over the virus, that his kids were on him all the time about it. Then he told me about another dog that had just had a stroke and died the day before.

There are certain dogs in town that everybody knows, and Hapi is one of them. A whole lot of people know her and greet her when they see us, a lot of them are strangers to me. She's just famous. The dog that died yesterday was also famous, his name was Willy. I had just seen Willy at the Reservoir a couple of days ago so I was quite shocked to hear that he was gone. I told the shopkeeper that he had just ruined my day and he apologized, but I assured him I was joking, I was just shocked was all.

Willy was rarely on leash, he stayed close to his owner all the time. Willy and Hapi were friends in the end, but Hapi did try to provoke Willy into fighting with her (she'd steal his bones) when she was younger. Willy just wasn't that kind of dog, he ignored her provocations so Hapi gave it up and they became friends. His owner is a young man who was kind of at loose ends when he first came to this town, but one of the Main Street shopkeepers took him under his wing, was kind of a surrogate father to him. Often the young man left Willy with the shopkeeper when he went to work. Willy sat or slept on the sidewalk outside the shop waiting for his owner to return, so everybody knew Willy. Later the young man got a job where he could take Willy to work with him. Willy was well behaved in public, but apparently he had a bad habit of chewing things up when left alone at home.

Good bye Willy, sorry to see you go.

How I purchased a new rain jacket

Can you see it?

It rained most of the day yesterday. I have a rain barrel but it is not really big enough to get through a prolonged dry period so I thought that since I had a few empty plastic garbage bins I'd put them out under a few eavestrough downspouts. I have a total of five downspouts, one already goes to the rain barrel and I placed garbage bins under three others. One of them filled up very quickly so I got some pails to bail it and when it filled again I reattached the part of the downspout that directs the flow away from the foundation. Now I have lots of water for the gardens.

In the process of doing all that I realized that my Gore-Tex rain jacket has outlived its usefulness; I was getting wet. I went online to see if I could find a replacement. There's a shop in town that deals in that sort of thing but it's kind of expensive and I haven't seen anything there that I liked. I looked at the Mountain Equipment website which is currently offering free shipping, but again, I didn't see anything I liked as much as my old jacket, even at double the price I was prepared to pay. So I went to the website for the shop I got my old Gore-Tex at and they still sold them for more or less the same price as the old jacket (on sale due to Covid) but not free shipping. The shop is in Vancouver, they don't have any other locations, but all their jackets are made right there in Vancouver. I know the quality is good because I have had two of them before (first one purchased in 1998).

I couldn't decide about size. The size tag has long since worn off my old jacket (it is 12 years old) and my measurements are at the high end of one size and the low end of the next size. I looked up their phone number and called. No answer. Tried both the local and the toll-free numbers, no answer. But they had a Contact Us page to fill in your info and send a message, so I did that. The page warned that it could take up to several days for them to get back to you, but I had hardly hit Send when my phone rang, it was the shop calling me.

The caller identified himself as Paul, said he didn't know why my call hadn't reached him, maybe he was away from the phone at that exact moment. We discussed my size issue. In the end I decided to go with the smaller size since Paul told me that the jackets tend to be quite roomy. So then we went through the process of making a phone order. English is not Paul's first language, he apologized for asking me to repeatedly spell out my billing and address info but I appreciated his effort to get everything exactly right. He told me that he would have to calculate shipping and taxes later, then asked me what the sales tax was in Nova Scotia. I told him: 15%. He was flabbergasted, couldn't believe it was so high.

What can I say, it is what it is and when you've lived with it for long enough you just suck in your breath and pay the bill. A local friend pointed out to me that what takes away the pain is the fact that all of it, every last penny of it, goes toward provincial healthcare. I don't know if that is still true or not but I know it used to be. I once went to a local Dairy Queen and when told the bill for whatever I had ordered I muttered something about exorbidant taxes and the owner of the DQ just about leaped across the counter at me, reprimanding me for criticizing a tax that paid for my healthcare. Alright! Never do that again!

Anyway, the jacket is ordered, I got an email confirmation of the total cost and a postal tracking number, it's on its way. And it was a pleasure doing business with Paul in Vancouver.

The rain stopped and I took Hapi to the Reservoir. Someone told me there was a baby owl in a tree near the trail and I saw it and took a picture. It is the little blob in the middle of the photo above. It is only about a foot tall and it is a Barred Owl which is actually quite a large owl, so this one has to be a youngster. It seemed happy to be photographed, sitting quite still and staring down at the various cameras pointed at it. Barred Owls are common around here.

Evanescence

I don't know how this works at all.

The last couple of days have been really nice weather-wise, sunny with temperatures around +13C. Not exactly summer-warm but definitely not winter-cold. I've been getting better by leaps and bounds, my old energy levels coming back, the scary chest pain receding (my neighbour wanted me to get it checked out but I will never ever again go to the hospital to get chest pain 'checked out' unless I am in the midst of a full-blown heart attack), and the little tiny flowers emerging from the ground.

I made my first foray into a store (wearing one of my fancy masks). It involved a twenty minute wait outside in the sunny parking lot and then being admitted and served by two staff members, like I was royalty. All I wanted was some potting soil, I felt a little guilty when one of them said, "That's it? That's all you want?" I scanned the entire store behind the two gentlemen and wished I'd brought a list. Silly me.

Then another stop at a store where the owner cracked the door and asked what I wanted. I did have a list for that store, she recorded my list in her memory and closed the door to go fetch it all. A few moments later a shopping basket of my goods was placed on a stool outside the door and I was invited to tap the little machine through the window with my card. How amazing!

I love the way the purple grades to blue

Hapi wanted to visit the man in the used bookshop next door so we went in there too. We have a bit of a tradition; he offers her an organic dog biscuit and she turns it down. This time she took the biscuit and tried to bury it under a low bookshelf. She doesn't do organic.

After a walk on the dyke, where we met a man with a great dane puppy that towered over Hapi, I drove home with all my goodies, including the barley malt syrup for malt bread.

What I don't understand is the sheer joy of it all.

It comes and goes, but all day I just kept having these moments of sheer peace and joy. When I was talking to the bookshop man I was trying to explain it but couldn't really do it. He said he'd had so many anxious people stop by that it was nice to hear that someone was doing okay with it all.

He mentioned that because of his business he was on facebook and sometimes that really depressed him. I told him that I had quit facebook before all this happened and now was glad to not be exposed to it. He said you're right, you really don't want to know what's going on there.

Not to say that it's all evil, I'm sure there is a lot of good going on too. But I failed utterly to filter out the evil when I was on it and now staying sane is so precarious that battling evil is just not something I want to do.

I really like my little peace-and-joy world. Temporary for sure, but one shouldn't dismiss something just because it is temporary. Everything is temporary, even us.