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.

I've been told

Crow family on the roof

Quite depressed now. This month I am way sicker than I was same month last year (July 2021), which was worse than the same month the previous year (July 2020). Not a good trend. Between pandemic isolation and now isolation due to ongoing illness, I feel like my once very satisfying social life is now dead in the water and I lack the ability or energy to try to revive it. 

I went out for coffee yesterday and after about an hour I was reduced to gibberish. I was trying to respond to a topic we were discussing and was at a loss for words, which very quickly degenerated to not even knowing what I wanted to say or even what the topic was in the first place. All I could say at the time was, I'm done, I need to go home. Fortunately my friend understood my illness and agreed that it was time to go home. She's all that is left, I get so tired of explaining to people that even though I look fine I am not fine at all, but she gets it and we don't have to waste our time time talking about it.

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Had an interesting experience on Canada Day. I went for a 30 minute walk with an 88 year old friend and her golden retriever M at the Reservoir. M knows me well and is always happy to see me. About 20 minutes in M suddenly went kind of crazy leaping up into my face. She'd just been in the pond so she was one big wet dog and I quickly became one small wet woman. M's owner tried to call her off, I tried to ward her off using my hands and saying sternly "Off!". Finally M's owner leashed M because she just wouldn't stop and we walked back to her car that way. On the drive to my house M continued her strenuous efforts to get into my face, I would say she was quite frantic. However, as soon as I got out of the car she settled right down as if nothing had happened. Afterward, M's owner and I discussed what had happened, since this was very unusual behaviour for M.

We have sometimes joked that M must have been a nurse in a previous life, she reacts quickly when she thinks someone is ill. Shortly after this incident, maybe a couple of hours or so, I crashed big time, I could hardly move or even think. I was already quite sick, starting maybe a couple of weeks before this incident (I say "starting" loosely, more like "intensifying"); that 30 minute walk put me over the edge. I've been instructed in pacing, but since symptoms of "post exertional malaise" (PEM) don't kick in until hours or even days after, it's hard to know when enough is enough. But I think M just told me: 20 minutes.

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We are having such nice weather and about all I am capable of is sitting in my recliner gazing out the window. I leave the back door open so I can hear the birds in my back yard: a couple of song sparrows, several cardinal couples, a bunch of starlings (big batch of new ones this year), and of course the crow family (see photo above). One whiney teenager and two very patient parents. The whiney teenager is the sole survivor of three, I had to pick up and dispose of the bodies of its siblings. One got trapped in my woodshed and couldn't get out, the other got sick, returned to the nest and died.

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Step one: rails and inverters for solar panels

Finally they are starting to install the solar panels on my roof. It is a long drawn out process involving multiple inspections by the electric power company before proceeding to the next step. I will be lucky if it is all completed by mid-August, so not a lot of solar energy will be generated this year. 

At this point the mounting rails and inverters have been installed, the next step is for an electrician to hook up the inverters to my electric panel. Then an inspection, then on to the next step, hopefully the installation of the panels themselves.

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My painter has completed most of the exterior wall painting, he is now working on staining the front porch and the back deck. Then it will be the exposed concrete basement and the trellis work in the front of the house. I have purchased a welded wire fence and T-rail posts for along the north side of my property, the painter has said he can help install that. Bye bye money. I don't particularly enjoy having workers around even if they are as unobtrusive as they can be. I look forward to very rainy days when none of them can come.

Sunny Days

Last few weeks have been terribly busy, and I have probably been pushing myself too hard. I am keeping lists of things I have to do, and as each item gets checked off two more get added on. I am not making progress.

A pile of turtles

Went kayaking, it was fun (and exhausting). As it turned out, the second Covid booster seriously set me back. I almost didn't go kayaking, I felt so sick. A full week after getting the shot I think I recovered, but the first day of kayaking left me almost too dizzy to function. It was only a bit less than two hours of an easy paddle up a quiet meandering river. We saw piles of turtles. Literally piles, they were perched one atop another on floating logs in the sun. The second day of paddling was much better, I had recovered from the booster shot and was able to spend the whole day out on the water. 

There were six of us in a three bedroom cottage, ranging in age from early sixties to mid-seventies. The difference in energy level between the three in their sixties and the three in our seventies was pretty stark. The other two seventy year olds were recovering from bouts of Covid in April, so they were in only slightly better shape than me. On the second and third days we split up into two paddling groups, the younger women wanted to go further faster. They even went swimming!

It felt good to be out in my kayak again, the trip was so worth it.

Shortly after I got back, the roofers arrived to reroof my house. The idea is to have brand new shingles under the solar panels. In three days they had most of it done but there are some ridge shingles missing because of shortages; none to be had in the entire province. They'll be back to finish the job when the ridge shingles are available again. I warned them about my crow family, but there was no conflict, the men and the crows did not bother each other.

I called the solar panel installer after the roof was done to get an estimate of when he planned to start. Turns out some document or other got lost so there is a delay. Surprise surprise. He thinks he will start in 3 weeks, and it will take about 6 weeks. I am not holding my breath.

Then I put my car up for sale, it sold within a couple of days. I priced it at an amount that I wanted, then after it sold I looked on the internet to see what it should be priced at. I was about $500 under what they said it was worth. Even so, the guy who bought it tried to talk me down in price. I am pretty sure he knew it was already underpriced, he just wanted to see if he could get an even better deal. Nope.

My next big job is to get the house painted. I had already lined up a friend to help me do that, and she wanted another person to do the ladder work. A friend of hers has a son with a mental illness that pretty much prevents him from getting a steady job, she arranged for him to help, after running it past me of course. But she can't start until June and I had the idea that the young man could start this month doing cleaning and scraping. So he's been here for the past few days. He's a good worker, he just has difficulty relating to people. That's fine with me. He has some experience with this kind of work so I don't really have to supervise him. I know his mother from the dog park, she used to have a border collie that Hapi liked, which says a lot because Hapi didn't much care for border collies.

New garden frames and transplants-in-waiting

Since coming back from kayaking we've had beautiful sunny weather and I've been working in my garden. It is slow going because it's heavy work and I am tired and dizzy. I'm not making progress as fast as I would like. My transplants are huge and desperately need to be planted, but strictly speaking it is too early yet and I haven't got the beds ready for them. I did manage to get peas, spinach and some potatoes planted.

I love seeing the goldfinches and cardinals flitting about, and the male cardinals are quite noisy now, declaring their territories. Pinky and Big Red are still fighting, I saw them in a showdown in my neighbour's driveway. But they saw me watching and flew away before they really got into it.Traffic at the bird feeder is dropping off, but I keep it up because the cardinals always come in the evening and I like seeing them.

I am being referred to an internal medicine guy and I am supposed to go to the Chronic Conditions centre for a NASA Lean Test. That's to see if I have Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). If I have POTS then I guess it means my heart has been affected, but not sure how much. Not even sure I have it, but it would explain the two years of dizziness and fatigue. It's also a known complication of Long Covid.

I am reading an interesting book, A Primate's Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky. It's about his years in Kenya studying a troop of baboons. He obviously has a deep fondness for his study subjects and a wicked sense of humour. At the start of the book he says that the tragic last chapter is completely true, but he did change a few names. My curiousity caused me to read the last chapter first, and it was so tragic I almost couldn't go back and read the first chapters. Who knew you could be so fond of baboons? Stuff I've read about baboons suggests that the males run the show and females are completely under their control, but it turns out that is wishful thinking on the part of (male) animal behaviourists. As usual, things are a lot more complicated. However, because Sapolsky's research involved taking blood samples, and the females were mostly pregnant, lactating or generally taking care of children, he couldn't take samples from them. Taking a sample involved darting a baboon, waiting for it to fall unconscious, carrying it back to his vehicle where he took the sample and then returning the baboon to where it was when it fell unconscious. Since he couldn't really do that to a female who couldn't afford to spend time away and unconscious, most of the baboons that he knew up close and personal were male. 

All the lovely sunny weather we are having does not bode well for summer crops. The land is unusually dry. It is supposed to be a La Nina summer which is unusual too, and that means more hurricane activity. The large number of snow storms we had this winter were due to a La Nina winter. Not sure what unusually dry ground and unusual hurricane activity will add up to, not much good I guess.

No marbles or spoons in the bowl

You have to be honest, so that people believe you. You don’t need to try. You need to be yourself. And maybe, after you show who you are, maybe people will love you more than before, because they see that you are not so strong or are lazy at times. No, each time don’t lie and show people who you are exactly. And it’s important not to show that you are better than who you are. 

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, March 2022.

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It's been awhile, not a great time. I completed the CBT-I course. On paper, according to my sleep diary, my sleep "efficiency" improved a lot and the amount of time I spent sleeping improved marginally. In reality all my illness symptoms got worse and I continue to wake up exhausted, "unrefreshed" as it were. I guess the facilitator gets bragging rights about my improvement but from my perspective it was a complete disaster that I am trying to recover from. Good luck with that.

A week after the CBT-I course ended I started an Energy Management (Pacing) program and so far, it feels like yet more disaster in the works. The facilitator, an occupational therapist, said that it would be "hard work", and that some of us will only see survival as the outcome. I question whether survival as an outcome is worth yet more hard work. I drafted an email to that effect and sent it to the OT, but got back an immediate response that she was out of office and would not be back until the next Pacing session happens. So do I show up for it or not?

If I am going to work hard, I'd rather do it in my garden, there at least there will be a positive outcome to hard work. My Wednesday coffee buddy's husband has a business doing cabinetry and finished carpentry, he is going to make garden frames for his wife and he said he'd make some for me too. Mine are disintegrating and it sounds like the ones he will make will be way better. He has started attending our coffee dates but he only stays for a short while, just to take a break from his work.

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I have started some seeds but so far only a few have sprouted. I am trying to start onions from seed as I have had poor luck with onion sets. Unfortunately I think I added way to much water to the tray of seeds so I may have drowned them. Hope not but we shall see. 

On Tuesday I drove a friend half way down the Valley to her new home. She wanted to take a load of stuff and I wanted to see her new place. Her place is marvelous, a small one bedroom apartment on the ground level in a kind of motel-like building. She has a front door, a back door, a private patio (with a view of a small forest) out back and two parking spaces in front. I met her new landlady who is very nice. In these days of rising housing costs she is actually going to reduce her rent by almost half, thanks to a seniors' subsidy. 

The only down side is that she doesn't know anyone in her new town, all her friends are here. But she is a very sociable cheerful kind of person, I am sure she will do well. She made me leave my deck chair at her new place so that I would be obliged to come visit. The problem is, that after I got home I collapsed; an hour and a half of driving, lunch out, and a tour of the local shopping mall utterly did me in. My chest hurt and I was winded, dizzy and spaced out all the next day. There is a bus, but it takes almost two hours one way.

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Today I did a bit of yard work. I had to cart in some firewood and while doing that observed all the things that need to be done this month. It was very hard to resist tackling it right away even though according to the Pacing program I should not. They use a lot of metaphors in this program that sound descriptive but when you break them down they're not so helpful. 

We were supposed to imagine that we had a bowl of marbles when we woke up and each time we engaged in an activity we spent a marble or two. Some people know it as Spoon Theory. The OT asked us to describe how we spent our marbles. I drew a complete blank on that and then asked, "What if there are no marbles in the bowl when you wake up?" I just couldn't picture it, the metaphor made no sense to me. 

Another one was about activities that "recharge our batteries". What activities this week have recharged my battery? Again, not able to picture it. The reality for me is that I am not a very meditative person, I like to be active, gardening, paddling, swimming, etc. These activities are what give me pleasure but now they are draining. So do they "recharge my battery"? Or do they run it down to the nub? 

I don't think I'm going to be a very good program participant. After the CBT-I experience I am hypercritical of programs that supposedly are going to improve my health. I am in a space now where I feel that since I am no better now than I was two years ago when I first got sick, it is highly unlikely that I will ever improve. My age and the lack of decent medical care are working against me. I see that they are working on changes to MAID, one of them is Advanced Directive. That's where you can be approved for MAID even though your illness is not fatal, just no hope of recovery. At this point that is hopeful news to me.

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But to end on a positive note, I am extremely grateful that the CBT-I program is over. I was happy to see that a few of my seeds have sprouted. I'm thinking about getting a puppy.

Ice-mageddon

The last ice storm did me in I think. I spent a few hours on Saturday digging out (inches and inches of solid ice). Snow plough guy could only do a partial job, even the snow plough was not up to dealing with the ice. However I used a garden spade to break through the ice around my car tires and later a couple of people helped me push the car loose from the ice. Since then I've been in bed, getting up only to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. Partially fatigue partially dizziness, even sitting up with my head unsupported is difficult. Between the icy roads and the Omicron restrictions, there's nowhere to go.

However, I have a clear view of the bird feeder and that is my principal entertainment (I periodically go out to refill the feeder, but since it is so icy I have to use my ice grippers). There are a few new birds, a couple of pairs of purple finches. The males don't take no guff off other bird species but they don't mind each other. I've been enjoying watching them, but today a female finch crashed into my window hard. I looked out and there she was belly up on the snow with her legs sticking up like a dead bird. Her head twitched a bit so I got a small box and a little rag and went out to get her. She struggled a bit but not enough to get away. I left her in my foyer, a tiny unheated room. Then I went back to bed and read for awhile. After an hour or so she had lifted her head. Another hour later she was looking around. I went in to check on her and she panicked and flew around the tiny room. So I opened the outside door to let her out and she did indeed fly out, but only to my shoulder. I put my finger in front of her and she didn't move except to peck it a bit. More exploratory than defensive or aggressive. After a few more moments she flew away.

Since then I've seen two female finches at the feeder, but am not sure that one of them is her, they look alike. I guess I could have kept her indoors a bit longer but I don't know what their water and food needs are or how badly she was injured, so I left it up to her. I hope she's okay.

The four mourning doves survived the storm, I see them occasionally. One of them perches near the feeder and looks at me through the window. And now that the snow is so solid the pheasants who live in the bushes behind my place can walk on top of it and I have spotted a colourful male poking around my back fence.

Today it is raining. It will probably freeze overnight, yet more ice. So far this winter is rapidly approaching the snowmageddon we had in 2015. Icemageddon? The one good thing about the ice storm was there was no snow shovelling necessary and you could walk on top of the snow because it was frozen solid. All 50 cm of it. No power outage here but tens of thousands of them in a swath that marks the worst wind and freezing rain. My town is located on the edge of that swath, so we were very lucky. I think they have not finished getting power back to folks 4 days later, and more power outages are happening due to this storm today. Hope we continue to be lucky. 

Our power company wants to not only raise the rates for residential customers but also penalize anyone with solar panels. Amazing. There was such an uproar about it that the premier of the province said he would make sure they legally could not do that. I am getting solar panels in the spring so my installer called me to make sure all the contractual documents were signed so I would be grandfathered in under the old rates. The proposed penalty is so hefty that it would discourage most people from attempting to install solar panels, thereby putting the nascent solar industry out of business. In Nova Scotia our principal sources of electricity are coal and oil fired generators, and supposedly the Maritime Loop from Muskrat Falls. A financial disaster in and of itself. Years ago our power company was owned by the government, but they sold it off to an American company and nobody is pleased with that either.

There's a joke circulating that after the latest ice storm the power company was checking on how many customers used generators during the power outage, with the intent of slapping on additional penalties for generator use.

Sorry, no photos, just no energy. It's either way too cold or way too slippery to risk freezing my fingers or unbalancing myself. Not in a happy picture taking mood anyway.

Complexity

It's a good rainy windy day to stay indoors and recuperate.

I went to the clinic yesterday, about an hour's drive away on the highway. The highway goes through the interior forest of the province, rocks, lakes and trees. The reds and golds of the maples and birches were nicely setoff by the dark green of pines and spruces. A very nice drive.

The visit itself was long and tiring, I was there for 3 hours seeing a nurse practitioner and a care coordinator. They deal with longterm complex chronic conditions and I fit right in. I actually felt validated, this is not all in my head, it's not psychological, it's a real physical illness that is not well understood by doctors and medical researchers. The diagnosis I got is a kind of either/or thing; it's either Long Covid or it's ME/CFS or it's ME/CFS triggered by Covid.

They have two streams of treatment, one for Long Covid and one for everything else which they refer to as Central Sensitization (Fibro, ME/CFS, PTSD, and a bunch of others). They will let me know which stream they are assigning me to but they are not hugely different. The main thing is that they recently got funding for Long Covid and have to keep it separate, but seem a little vague as to whether a positive Covid test is a requirement. A lot of people had Covid in the early days but couldn't get tested because of the restrictive testing criteria at the time. So they believe I had it, they just don't know whether the lack of a positive test disqualifies me under the funding terms.

Ironically, when I was sick I was offered a test but I declined it because if it came back positive I would have to be quarantined and then I could not take Hapi off the property for a walk. She would have driven me crazy. At least without the test I wasn't quarantined. I did stay away from people and wore a mask when outside my house and got all my shopping done by neighbours, so I don't think I put anyone at risk.

It's going to be another few months before treatment actually starts, sometime in 2022. Not that there is a cure (there's not) or even an agreed upon treatment protocol, but simply guidance, support, various therapies for symptom management and referrals for testing as needed. So it doesn't really matter which stream I end up in, the only significant difference is that the Long Covid stream has a physiotherapist and the Central Sensitization stream does not. We have free physio at our local health clinic in town so if I needed that I could probably just get them to refer me there. Although I wouldn't even need a referral, I could just put myself on the waitlist. I don't feel like I would benefit from physio, but who knows.

I came away feeling quite positive about the whole experience, but exhausted by the time I got home. An interesting thing I learned is that many people in my condition often have good summers and then crash in the late summer/early fall. That has certainly been my experience. I was told that the crash could last till next summer. Or, I might improve a little over the winter and then crash again in the spring. That's more or less what happened this past year, so I guess I can expect more of it. I am glad I got a good summer. I also learned that I am very unsteady on my feet. I kind of knew that but the tests made it very clear.

The NP said, "I won't make you try to walk a straight line heel to toe because I can see that you would just fall over."

A couple of weeks ago I went for coffee with a friend who has been otherwise supportive, and she strongly urged me to not go to the clinic. That really I was just anxious about the pandemic. That kind of ticked me off, it's what I don't like about an invisible illness: people feel free to tell you it is not real. So it was nice to be somewhere that I was taken seriously and know that they deal routinely with a lot of people like me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I spoke to a neighbour the other day on the street, she's a lot more politically active than I am. At any rate she has recently written a lengthy letter to the town council about the student situation in our neighbourhood. She forwarded the letter to me and later in the day I read it; it was quite an eye opener. I tend to keep my head down about local issues because when I get involved I don't like what I see and it is a little upsetting. But she's younger and new in town and very gung ho about getting actively involved. We know each other because she has two big dogs who didn't like Hapi, we had to keep them all apart because Hapi would have been more than happy to set them straight about who was the boss dog around here.

So, our part of town has been zoned "R3", which is much denser than "R1". R3 is where all the poor people and all the students live, plus people like me who are not exactly poor but by no means rich. R3 is all I can afford here. R1 is where professors and doctors and town councillors and such live, nice quiet neighbourhoods with wide empty streets.

There's good money to be made by developers who have bought up all the big old houses in our neighbourhood and converted them to crowded student housing. They are still working on buying up whatever they can get their hands on that can be turned into the very profitable student housing. Bylaws state that they can't create apartments with more than 3 bedrooms, but they do. So a former single family home can now house 5, 10, or more students, each one with their own car. On the face of it, you see these big old houses in this neghbourhood and it looks not much different from R1, but the streets are packed with cars, there's garbage strewn around and properties are barely maintained. The town does not enforce the bylaws. The developers all live in R1 neighbourhoods, and so, for that matter, do all the town councillors. Out of sight out of mind.

When I lived here before, back in the '80s, it wasn't like that. There were students but the majority of houses were occupied by families. As kids grew up and moved away, parents either chose to stay or moved away too. The more houses that were bought by developers and converted to student housing, the more older residents moved away because of the declining neighbourhood quality. Now there are hardly any young families, just old people who either couldn't afford to move away, or stubbornly insisted on aging in place, or both. One older person in her 80s was told that if she didn't like how students behaved, why did she move into this neighbourhood? She's been here for over 60 years!

So, when the students rioted during Homecoming Week, I now blame the town council as much as anyone else. They let the developers create a ghetto, they even officially blessed it by calling it zone R3. What did they think was going to happen? Students are transient, they have no particular attachment to this town beyond the 3-4 years it takes to get a degree, they live in squalid conditions, why would they care?

What bothers me now is, should I go ahead and get solar panels? If this neighbourhood is going to the dogs and the town doesn't care, why should I take the risk of investing in my property only to have it torn down by some developer who wants to cram in yet more student housing? And how much of this noise and congestion and irresponsible behaviour can I take before I too want to pack up and leave? I am wondering now whether to sign the contract or not. They called me last week to say that funding for this year has been used up but there will be more next year so I should postpone signing the contract until December.

Yup. If at all…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The birds aren't stupid, they've figured out the squirrel-proof feeder. I put the old feeder on my back deck so they now come to both feeders. The jays dominate the back feeder and the doves hang out on the deck floor below them because the jays are messy eaters: lots of leftovers for them. The chickadees, cardinals and nuthatches come to the squirrel-proof feeder in the front where they don't have to compete with the jays. So I can watch birds now from either my livingroom or kitchen windows.

Fall catch-up

I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner this afternoon but had to bow out. Had a bad night's sleep and woke up this morning feeling like I was coming down with something or other. I feel a little better now, but better to be cautious these days. A couple of years ago I would have taken the chance of giving a cold to other people—maybe—but now it just seems terribly irresponsible. I am very disappointed though.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I put my birdfeeder up this week and after a day or so the blue jays discovered it and now there is constant activity just outside my living room window. So far I have also seen a couple of chickadees, a pair of cardinals, a nuthatch, and a song sparrow. The goldfinches are so far missing in action, I hope they are just slow to get the memo.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I have an appointment later this month at a clinic over an hour's drive away that may be able to give me a formal diagnosis, and yes I'm still sick. Both summers, 2020 and 2021, were moderately healthy but by fall it was all back in full blast. Something about the fall I guess. The house badly needs a paint job and I thought when the cooler fall weather arrived I could tackle it, but now I don't have the energy for it. The yard work has pretty much come to a halt now but there is still a lot left to do. I did manage to get the garlic planted but I don't know how much more I am going to be able to do.

I have a stack of library books that I can't read and am wondering why on earth I ordered them. Even the titles are daunting. I harvested a whole bunch of cabbage which I am wondering why I planted because I don't like cabbage. Now I have a bumper crop and no idea what to do with it. I managed to trade the two biggest heads for a couple of hubbard squashes, so that's something, and the person I traded with gave me a recipe for pickled red cabbage which she said was really good on tacos, so that's something too. If I ever get up the energy to pickle.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In spite of feeling crappy this is one of my favourite seasons in this province. Especially October. It's still warm but not hot, lots of sun and because the sun is so low in the sky a beautiful yellow tinge to the light. And of course the fall colours, which are really only just beginning. They usually peak around Thanksgiving but this year peak colour seems to be delayed. We get "Frost Advisories" regularly now but until this morning I have not seen any sign of frost. And it's what they call "patchy", I saw frost on the back lawn of a house across the street but none anywhere else. My neighbours got frost but I did not.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing I've settled on a contractor to install a solar panel system and the municipal financing program has sent me a contract to sign. Ten pages of fine print. Most of it was pretty much what I expected but one paragraph in particular seemed a little too vague for my liking so I have requested clarification before I sign.

I contacted a couple of roofers to see if I need to do anything about my roof before I cover it up with solar panels and one of them followed through with a site visit. Running his name by friends later it turns out he comes highly recommended. Anyway, he's going to send me an detailed estimate but gave me a ballpark figure which is a bit daunting. He had a nice dog which he says he takes everywhere with him, a point in his favour. I may be eligible for a housing authority grant to help seniors stay in their own homes, but I don't know if I'll qualify, mainly because I think they prefer that your roof be leaking or otherwise in very bad shape, which mine is not.

I had to laugh though, I had had some work done on my roof a half dozen years ago and I thought I'd give that roofer a call. I couldn't find his contact info so I googled his name and it turns out he's now in jail for murder. Oops.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I now have three bikes in my shed and that's probably two too many. So I put one of them up for sale on Facebook Marketplace, only minutes before Facebook crashed. My bike crashed the system. However the next day I got a response from a woman who said she's been looking for that exact type of bike for years, but she lives in the city and wondered if I could put it on hold for her till the weekend. I was a bit hesitant but she offered to pay for it right away, I agreed, and she sent me an etransfer immediately for the full price. 

It all happened so fast that I was kind of shocked; I then wondered what else I could put up for sale since this seemed so ridiculously easy. She has not yet picked up the bike, she was going to come yesterday but messaged me that her daughter was sick so could she postpone a couple of days. Sure, no problem, I've already been paid and can afford to wait a few more days to get rid of the bike.

Well, must go now, the blue jays have emptied the feeder so I'm being called to replenish.

Don't complain camp in the rain...

Long time, no write!

Been busy though…

I did go on the kayak-camping trip last week, Monday through Friday. The first day was solid rain and then we had three days of sun and cloud, with rain on the final day of packing up and leaving. I have to say the rain made things quite difficult. 

Shelter from the rain

We were extremely grateful that our first campsite included a shelter, so we decided not to pitch tents but sleep in the shelter. That was okay although I didn't sleep very well. The next two days we had to move to two more campsites, which involved a lot of packing up, unpacking, setting up tents and taking them down again. That part of the whole trip was utterly exhausting, at least for me. I think the other two fared better: they shared a tent and were probably in better shape than I was for that sort of thing.

On our last day, one person was packed up and ready to leave before the other two, I was ready but stayed behind to help the third person into her sprayskirt. They get caught on the life jacket behind you and it often takes a helping hand to get it unstuck. She left and I tried to leave but got stuck between a rock and the shore. Rocking the kayak did not free it but did end up letting water into the cockpit. Then I got out to guide the kayak away from the rock, only to get two boots full of water. So by the time I left the shore I was soaked and sitting in a puddle of water inside the kayak.

The other two were waiting for me offshore but they had their backs to me and did not see my futile efforts to get launched. One of them asked me what I was doing and I told her. She was sympathetic, but the other woman laughed.

I guess I don't like being laughed at when I am in difficulty. I said, "I know it sounds funny, but it doesn't feel funny."

We paddled back to our starting point and I kept my distance from the others because I was seething. 

There were incredible moments of joy and beauty during the trip. One of our campsites was up a river and the trip there and back was absolutely magical. At that campsite, every time I looked at the river I was completely in awe of it, completely entranced.

But overall it was utterly exhausting, not from the kayaking but from the camping. A friend said she would have an awful time sleeping on the ground but for me that wasn't it. It was the packing, unpacking, packing again and erecting and dismantling of the tent and tarps over and over again. It absolutely killed my back. Also the fact that the other two women helped each other but I was largely left to fend for myself. I guess three is an awkward number, unless you have a spacious three-person tent.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My town has recently embarked on an ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions by assisting homeowners to get climate-friendly upgrades. I contacted the plan organizers and they got me started on a project to install solar panels on my house. In the past I have resisted this because it is costly and the breakeven point on upfront costs is about 15 years from now, when I may very likely be dead. However, the town's plan involves offsetting the costs through home equity. In theory I can install enough solar panels to cover all my electrical needs without spending a dime of personal money.

Of course, like all such programs, it involves a lot of paperwork, talking to contractors, getting quotes, and who knows what else. The upside is meeting and talking to interesting people who tell you interesting things, the dowside is consuming a heck of a lot of time and mental energy. The plan spokesperson thinks I can be all done by Christmas, but at least one of the contractors I spoke to is saying probably next summer for completion. That sounds more realistic. There are a lot of unresolved issues and questions, but I guess it's kind of exciting.

Yesterday and today I am digging up potatoes, so something complicated but somewhat exciting to think about is welcome. As I told one friend, digging potatoes is as backbreaking as my previous week of camping, and given how cheap potatoes are to purchase, I wonder why I bother to grow them.

Lots to think about…