Rainy Thumb Rest Day

Big Rain Day and I can hardly move out of my armchair. I called our kayaking leader last night to say I wouldn't be coming due to predicted rainy weather and she said, But you will come if it's a beautiful day, right?

Uh… sure...

I spoke with my youngest son later and he said, Why did you lie? Your hands hurt! That's a good enough reason not to go, why did you lie about it?

Uh…

My son The Ethical Philosopher.

Truth is, I don't like to admit to weakness if I can avoid it.

I love being out on the water, and it is killing my thumbs. But paddling fiercely into a strong wind is exhilerating, I don't want anyone telling me I can't do it because I am hurting myself.

Aylesford Lake Kayak Loan Program

These days, first thing in the morning I am on automatic: roll out of bed at 6.30am, coffee, toast, granola, wash dishes, brush teeth, put on bathing suit and pack waterbottle, hat and sunscreen into backpack and I'm out the door. An hour later I am at the lake, signing out a kayak and slipping on a life jacket. Then I'm out there. I am the second fastest and strongest paddler, I team up with the first fastest and we determine where we are going today and then go for it. She is ahead of me, I am putting everything I've got into keeping up with her. I don't know where the other paddlers are, they've gotten used to D and I disappearing across the lake. Yesterday D didn't come so I went alone; she said she had to go to the South Shore but I bet she was home resting her thumbs.

When I get home I usually have a list of things to get done: errands, garden chores, whatnot. But I try to spend at least an hour doing nothing to regain energy for a late afternoon swim, across the Reservoir and back. It's a 5-minute bike ride away. By evening I am so exhausted I wonder if I'll make it out to kayaking tomorrow. Lights out at 9.30pm, down for the count moments later. Repeat all over again at 6.30am the next day.

But there's only so long I can keep up that pace, four days apparently. I didn't go today but I still had a list of things to do. Didn't do any of it. Read the list and mentally ticked off each item: Not Urgent, Forget It. Too damn tired.

Eldest son is coming to visit for a week, he says he has to work online for part of that time so I will probably get out kayaking while he works. But no kayak time is scheduled until Tuesday so hopefully four days of not paddling will allow my thumbs to improve.

One of the kayakers gave me a phone number to call to work as an election poll clerk. I procrastinated because I wasn't sure I wanted to work 14-16 hours in one day. But I did call today, they don't need poll clerks now but there was an information officer position available. I took it. Pays less for same amount of time, but oh well. At least it's close by.

Here's another photo from the evening at Houston's Beach last week; that's me in the pink shirt gazing intently at the popcorn being popped over the fire.

Eaglet, moon rise and post viral

Houston's Beach, cloud with rainbow

Another more or less perfect week. I and another kayaker have been exploring the hidden coves on the other side of the lake that we kayak in. There's a young eagle living there who sits by its home nest calling all day, presumably for his parents to come feed him. He can fly—we've seen him in the air—but he prefers to sit in a tree by the nest calling plaintively. One day three of us floated in the water beneath him and he quieted and examined us from the safety of his perch.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I missed only one morning of kayaking due to weather and I am glad that I did, I think five days in a row is a bit much for me but I can handle four days broken by rain. Yesterday I kayaked in the morning, swam in the afternoon and went to a beach bonfire in the evening to watch the full moon rise. We roasted marshmallows while waiting for the moon. Our "firepit" was an ingenious little metal affair that folds away to nothing, it has a heatproof but porous bottom to allow air flow from below without setting fire to whatever is underneath, it also has an optional firescreen cover and a grill for roasting food over the fire. The owner of the portable firepit says he bought it over the internet from some company in southwestern USA.

We also had telescoping forks for roasting our marshmallows. My companions prefer their marshmallows browned but not burnt, I prefer them well burnt. I stick my marshmallow into the coals to set it afire, then raise and twirl it to make sure the entire surface is burnt. After we had our fill of marshmallows, the popping corn was popped and we filled up whatever crannies of our stomachs remained unfilled. 

At one point we were all so engrossed in the popping of the corn that we missed the actual rising of the moon. It was halfway up before we noticed. Watching the progress of the moonrise was the highlight of the evening, a few clouds at the horizon allowed you to actually see it rising upwards. It gradually turned from dull red to bright white as it gained height. The reflection of the moonlight on the water of the Minas Basin gave the moon a kind of long bright trail.

The tide was very low so the beach was extensive when we arrived, but it was coming in so that by the time we left the beach was half its width (length? distance to the water's edge?). Some fishers were out fishing for striped bass and flounder; they only come into the Basin when the tide is rising so serious fishers are prepared for nighttime fishing when the low tide is late at night. The beach is also the only place in the county where you can camp for free so there were several tents and one RV set up for the night, with a couple of fires in the parking area. In June recent school grads use the beach to celebrate so it can be quite noisy, but in late July it is quiet.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I am quite exhausted by a busy week so I try to rest on the weekend, nevertheless I plan to go out tonight to a music event with a couple of friends. I was going to mow the lawn today but couldn't muster the energy so hopefully I can do that tomorrow. My friend J is going to paint my truck cap tomorrow and then sometime this coming week I will get a roofrack installed on it. In the course of prepping the cap for clearcoating last week, J managed to sand off too much of the existing paint, so now he has to paint before he can finish the clearcoat. I didn't think I would find a roof rack before autumn but I found a shop that said they could have it for me next week. A little pricey but worth it.

A birthday and an adventure

On Thursday it rained in the morning with thunder and lightning, so we did not go paddling. Instead I got myself caught up on various chores and in the afternoon went to a birthday party at a local restaurant.

The birthday girl was celebrating her 80th and she invited a couple of other women who also were celebrating birthdays in July. 

Altogether we were six. Since the weather was a bit iffy, we chose a restaurant that had a fully covered patio so we could be outdoors without getting soaked (or baked, if the sun came out). It's a marvelous restaurant specializing in Turkish food. The owner lives around the corner from me and is a single father, I often see him in his apron walking down my street to his restaurant, with two young boys in tow.

We had a lovely meal and greatly enjoyed this being our first restaurant meal since the pandemic started, we showed off our funniest fanciest facemasks. You have to wear a mask when you are moving about but can take it off when seated at your table, and all of us were double vaccinated. Near the end of the meal the owner came to our table bearing a plate of baklava made in-house, with lit sparklers in honour of our birthday party and the fact that several of us had birthdays in July.

"Here in our restaurant, we all have birthdays in July!" he said.

Afterward we retired to the birthday girl's home for more wine and celebration.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

One day this past week the kayakers booked in the afternoon instead of the morning because one person had a dental appointment in the morning. I decided not to go. But as luck would have it I did end up kayaking with someone else I had met at the Reservoir while swimming there. She had bought an inflatable kayak and wanted to learn to use it but was reluctant to go out on her own. I said I would accompany her in my own inflatable. We chose a lake close to town, Lumsden's Pond. There's a provincial picnic park and tiny beach there. 

After unloading all our gear and lugging it down to the beach, I realized that I had locked my keys inside the truck. J, my companion, thought we could go back to my house to get the spare key and then return to Lumsden's in her car which she had left at my house. Then she remembered that she left her car key in my truck. She had her phone and thought she could call CAA (my phone was inside the truck), but it turns out there is no cell coverage at the park. J said never mind, we will cross that bridge later.

I've used my kayak a couple of times already this summer so the process of getting it ready for the water is properly memorized; time-consuming but not confusing. J had no experience at all and her kayak was brand new. Also very cheap. It really took a while to figure it out, even with both of us reading the instructions a couple of times. But eventually we got it water-ready.

J couldn't figure out which end of her kayak was the bow, we had to guess and my guess was opposite to hers. She went with her guess. As it turned out, she was wrong and the kayak was very unmanouverable. She couldn't paddle in a straight line if her life depended on it! So after all that frustration we went back to shore after a very short paddle. Once onshore we turned her kayak upside down to see which way the keel was pointing, and then turned it right side up again to see if there was anything on the bow end that was different from the stern end so she would know the next time. We packed up the kayaks and then tried to figure out how we were going to get my truck unlocked.

As luck would have it a young woman and her child were just heading home, they stopped to greet us and we asked the big question: would you drive one of us to town? And also back to the beach again? At first she said she was happy to take one of us to town but not back again, and we hesitated as we tried to figure out how we would get back, then she said never mind she would drive us back too. She didn't mind the driving, she was just concerned about how her young daughter was going to take it.

I went back with the young woman and her daughter who was fine with it all, she sat in her little car seat smiling until she fell asleep. We had a nice chat, it turns out I knew the woman's parents and we talked about a variety of things, from travel out west to Toronto weather to whether or not to invest in solar panels. She turned down the offer of a bottle of wine for her trouble saying it was her pleasure to help out. Of course my house key was also locked in the truck, but I keep a spare outside so I used that. Note to self: spare truck key somewhere outside the truck cab!

First thing I did was unlock the truck and get J's bottle of water out as I was pretty sure she was quite parched by now. Then we went for a swim. We swam across the lake and back, a much longer swim than I am used to but we were chatting so much that we didn't think to turn around until we reached the other side. I didn't sleep so well that night due to neck pain because of the long swim, but it was otherwise a very interesting day that ended well.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

J mentioned a book she was reading, Why We Swim. I looked it up on our local library website and the e-book version was available so I borrowed it. Looks interesting. In the first chapter the author writes about the earliest known record of human swimming, dating to over 10,000 years ago. There are cave paintings of swimmers in the Sahara Desert! In those days there was a whole chain of lakes full of fish, and in addition to the cave paintings there are old harpoons buried in what was once a lake bottom. I can't get those ancient swimmers out of my mind, the idea that where they once swam is now a complete desert.

Kayaks and rodents, and trucks

My truck and J's

It looks like I won't be posting much this summer, too busy. It seems I had more time on my hands last summer to keep posting here, but this summer not so much.

My main activities are kayaking and swimming, with a little gardening on the side. July is my low gardening month, I fertilize and plant in May, weed a lot in June, and then in July I figure my plants are established enough to let the weeding slide. Whatever is not doing so well I shrug my shoulders and think, "I guess it's a bad year for <whatever is not doing well>". And I start picking and eating whatever is doing well. So far it is peas and green peppers and a single cucumber. Green peppers! I have never successfully grown green peppers! Makes up for all the lettuce, kale, chard and squash that failed to sprout or grow.

The garden is overrun by volunteer potatoes, apparently my potato harvest last year was not so efficient. Even so I got a lot of potatoes and had enough left over in the spring to replant this year. The potatoes may be why the squash failed to grow, their alloted space was taken over by the volunteer potatoes.

A friend and neighbour has been organizing daily kayak trips. The county bought a bunch of little plastic kayaks and set them up at a public beach on a local lake for county residents to use for free. All you have to do is book a one-hour time slot and then show up for it. My friend is a great organizer (if she was a dog she'd be a border collie!) so she books the kayaks a week in advance and then herds a bunch of us to the lake to paddle. We carpool because it is a 45-minute one-way trip. My friend does not have a car but she also gets a ride out of it to her favourite golf course on the way home from kayaking (busy girl!).

All told we are in the car for an hour and a half every morning for one hour of paddling. You may think that much driving is not worth it, but it is. It is glorious to be out on the water in a tiny little kayak! On really hot days we go for a swim afterward. At that hour of the day the beach is not crowded, and it is nicely set up with change rooms, port-a-potties, a little kiddie playground, and lots of grass and picnic tables, some of them under cover for shade or shelter from the rain. The beach is more pebbly than sandy so most people sit on the grass when not in the water.

In the junkyard

Lately my afternoons are taken up with my truck project. J found a cap for my truck at a local junk yard, so we went there to buy it and the junk yard guys helped transfer my tonneau cover to J's truck and install the cap on mine (photo at top: my truck and J's with the tonneau cover transferred to J's truck). J has no money but wants to pay for the cover which he says is worth $100 or more, so he's going to pay it off with work on my truck. 

Isn't she handsome?

I now need a slider window at the front of the cap and a roof rack. I won't find those at a junk yard so I will have to pay a bunch for them new and wait a while for them to come available. In the meantime J is going to clear coat the cap and do a couple of small repairs on it, it is otherwise in very good condition. It was pretty filthy when we retrieved it from the junk yard, but a couple of good rain downpours and a bit of scrubbing has done wonders for that. It had been sitting on the ground for at least a year so stuff was starting to grow on it and at least one critter had made a home for itself inside.

Speaking of critters making homes for themselves, I've been finding holes in my potato patches. It looks as if something was trying to dig up my potatoes, but no potatoes showed any damage. Also tunneling into the compost bin. Then one day last week J and I were in my driveway discussing next steps on my truck project when J spotted a critter diving into the window well of one of my basement windows. I looked into the well and saw that there was another tunnel dug in there. A few moments later a head popped up at the edge of the window well. It was a chipmunk! It spotted us a few feet away and immediately dove back down. Since then I have seen it running between my garden and the window well a couple of times.

I am not going to chase out a chipmunk. If it was a grey squirrel or a rat I'd take steps immediately, but a chipmunk? Can't do it. I will put up with its ravages in my garden.

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...

Solar eclipse and window blinds

There was a solar eclipse early this morning, I made a pinhole camera to view it but it didn't work. However I photographed some shadows on nearby houses that sort of display the eclipse: the sunlight filtering through leafy trees that serve as excellent natural pinhole cameras.

I've spent the last week on a rampage of cleaning, painting and installing window blinds, and am now in the midst of moving furniture. The energy ran out yesterday, so I may not accomplish anything today. By late afternoon I just could not get enough air, I felt quite oxygen-deprived. But I got a lot done.

I used to have a lovely maple tree in front of my house that cast excellent shade on the large west-facing windows of my living room, but the tree had to be cut down and the last couple of summers have been murderously hot in that room. So I determined to try to fix that artificially with new windows that blocked some of the heat and new cellular blinds that cut some more of the heat without blocking the light. Otherwise I would have to use the thermal curtains which leave the room in darkness all afternoon and early evening. 

As I described in a previous post the windows got replaced a few weeks ago. Then I went to Home Depot and picked out the cellular blinds I wanted. I decided to get new regular blinds for the rest of the windows at the same time. Money is cascading through my fingers and down the road like a waterfall! But before I could install the blinds I needed to paint the new window frames and touch up the old ones: two coats of primer and another two of the semi-gloss finish paint. Oh my!

Installing window blinds involves screwing a lot of hardware to the upper surfaces of the window frames, that means a lot of standing on various stools and step ladders holding a screwdriver over my head. The wood of the new windows is relatively soft but the old window frame wood is not, so pressure needs to be applied. I have an electric drill but I thought that holding it steady overhead was going to be more than I could manage so I screwed all the hardware in manually. I was in a race against time, a heatwave was coming and I wanted at the very least to get the west-facing cellular blinds up before it started. I did that, but only just barely. I spent the two-day heatwave (30C+) installing the rest of the blinds, moving around the house just ahead of or behind the sun. 

The new paint on the window frames made the baseboards of my house look terrible; they have not been painted let alone washed since I moved in over ten years ago, and they look it. So I determined that they needed cleaning at the very least and maybe if I had the energy I would paint them too. And then I had the brilliant (not) idea of moving my bedroom from the west to the east side of the house. Fortunately, I am now sleeping in the basement bedroom (cool and dark for the summer) so the chaos of moving furniture is confined to rooms I am not currently using on a regular basis. So I can take my time about it. But once I get started it's hard to stop, I keep thinking, just one more thing. Hence the utter exhaustion yesterday afternoon.

My winter firewood arrived and is blocking my driveway; I have a young friend who has offered to help stack it and I need to contact her about dates and times. My garden is all planted and mulched, but the straw mulch is full of seeds (oat or wheat, not sure which) that are now sprouting and all of the promised rain has never materialized, so weeding and watering are now required. Not to mention weekly lawn-mowing.

My son's father-in-law died suddenly last week, I wanted to send condolences to my daughter-in-law and her stepmother, now a widow. He died as he had lived, helping out a neighbour. It was one of those freak accidents that probably could have been prevented but when you've been doing this stuff for years sooner or later it catches up with you. Hopefully his death was quick and painless, but it was surely devastating for all of his family. 

These things were weighing on my mind, I really must stop moving furniture and attend to them! And the Reservoir ponds have warmed up enormously and everyone is swimming, I badly want to go swimming too. I have no doubt that all of this contributed to the exhaustion, the frustration of putting off stuff I either needed or wanted to do was mounting.

Finally, I have been invited on an afternoon kayak trip on Friday (tomorrow) and I think I have to rest up a bit before I can go, so today no work is scheduled. Last night I dreamed that I smashed up the bow of my kayak and it sank, I was tremendously relieved to wake up to the realization that it was only a dream, the kayak is safe and sound.

Genocide

I listened to discussion of the mass burial of children at a Kamloops residential school on CBC Radio's The Current yesterday and it really hit home. The pivotal moment for me was when one speaker said that they weren't really schools they were detention centres; children were held there until they were broken in or had died in the process. The schooling they received did not do them any favours or prepare them for the world they were to be released into. They lost their parents, they lost their communities, their language, their native skills, their culture. And it goes without saying that their parents lost their kids and their own futures. I can't imagine the pain they felt.

The residential school system was started by our dear founding father, Sir John A, to "assimilate" the native peoples of our new country into colonial culture. It destroyed them. The Americans had the Indian Wars, we had the residential schools. It was a kind of genocide that we politely refer to as cultural genocide. The word "cultural" makes it seem less violent, less murderous than the real thing, but it's not. Nowadays we decry the separation of children from their parents at the southern American border, this was far more horrific in that it went on for generations. It started soon after Confederation (1867) and the last school was closed in 1996. Those children were really never released, the ones that made it back to their home communities were forever cut off from them by virtue of their lost abilities to communicate with their families or even support themselves. Not to mention the emotional trauma they survived but never resolved.

Until relatively recently we all approved of violence toward children in the name of education, I was lucky enough to go to an elementary school where the principal at the time was the first in Toronto to ban corporal punishment of pupils, just the year before I started there. So it would not have been unusual to use violence to "educate" the children of residential schools. But those kids did not get to go home at the end of the day, they lived day in and day out in the school with the perpetrators of the violence. When those children died, they simply disappeared from their family's lives, very few were even informed of the death of their child. CBC has published the names of all the children known to have died at those schools, but those names are many fewer than the number who actually died and were buried there.

The schools were run mostly by religious groups, predominantly Roman Catholic monks, priests and nuns, but some Protestant religious groups were involved also. The Roman Catholic Church has consistently refused to release the written records of those schools to anyone, not the families of the children, not the First Nations communities, not even the Canadian government. No one knows the true extent of the horror. First Nations are determined to use ground-penetrating radar at all residential school sites, whether publicly or privately owned, to find the bodies of their lost children.

My mind just boggles at the damage done in the name of Canadian civilization. This is a horror that First Nations have known all along but the rest of us have not taken seriously. The result of the residential school system decimation of First Nation culture is right up there with the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, in  my opinion. Maybe worse. I remember that when I was a teenager a representative of the South African government told a group of us that we were in no position to criticize his government's treatment of the Black peoples of his country, after all apartheid was based on the Indian reservation system of Canada. And China has admonished our government for criticizing the Chinese government treatment of the Uighurs, after all we did the same to our First Nations.

Presently over a hundred First Nations are suing the Canadian government for reparations. This is an action that has been in the works for awhile, but in light of what was discovered in Kamloops has suddenly gained some traction. My grandson goes to a university named for the man who essentially designed the residential school system, my grandson and many of his peers now refer to that school as X University. Commemoration of the founders of our great nation and the enablers of "cultural" genocide is hard to stomach.