Dabbling in My Stream of Consciousness

 Tuesday

We had a light rain earlier this morning – something that the crops needed. It has been interesting to drive by the planted fields for the last several weeks, watching the seeded fields sprout and start to grow. There are several large corn and sorghum fields that were seeded at just the right time to catch the last rain, and the plants are up in those fields over a foot for the corn, and a good spread for the soya. The fields that were done a little later have been hanging back, but this rain should, in my family’s expression, ‘bring them along’.

The rain pattern has been just perfect for the strawberries. The baskets I have bought from the stands of two different berry farms are just excellent. Hardly a spoiled or too green berry in the bunch and they have lasted (in spite of my depredations) very well. I hope to get a third batch before they are gone. And I am hoping for local raspberries. That is a really short crop, and sometimes I miss it.

Speaking of stands, This is 

the one where my granddaughter worked two years ago This year's is up and stocked in my shopping town. I am watching the display like a hawk every time I pass it in the hopes of raspberries. And the first green produce should be out soon. The asparagus has been splendid, but that is pretty well it so far. Miss G, when she was working there, took a short video of her stand with the berries - from her phone, I guess - and it is quite instructive. For those of you too urban to know about produce stands, most of them have a canopy, with tables that are set up each morning, and are supplied from a truck that is backed under the back of the canopy. Miss G had never driven a pickup when she applied for her job doing this and had to come out here and get a lesson from grandfather in his pickup. She described the ones she used as old and beat-up, not a small one like Grandpa’s.

It is pretty gruelling work to run one of those stands. Miss G had to rise early, drive to the farm, get her truck, drive to her stand, set up, serve customers until after supper time, pack up, drive to the farm and drop the truck, and get to her home. Say 7:00 am to 8:00 pm. It was good pay though. This summer she has an indoor job, with bilingual bonus – she is working in a federal museum. We are told that Canada Day was insanely busy there. But on the upside, she is inside and fairly close to home.

Thursday

My poor ED has Covid. She picked it up at a conference in France, the first in-person event she has been able to attend for about two years. She is not very sick, she assures us, but she is quarantining in their spare bedroom to shield her partner and daughter, and is trying to work in there. It is a small room. Basically, there is a single bed, a bedside table, a very small desk and some shelves. And a closet full of storage, well-organized because that is what my daughter does, but jammed. She is trekking to the basement bathroom from this second- floor room so as not to share the second-floor bathroom with her daughter. All being well, she should get out of there on Saturday. But she may be a bit stir-crazy.

She also is amused that a lot of the people at the conference are reporting in with Covid. The participants were mostly unmasked and the venues were not spaced out, so I guess this is not too surprising. My guess is that the same thing will hit our schools and universities when they try to resume in September. Only special populations under 69 have been eligible for a fourth vaccine in Ontario, and I think I read that Canada is having to toss away a huge number of expired vaccines. Our governments are not, alas, efficient. At any level.

Friday

I just watched a news clip of Boris Johnson’s resignation speech. He was not resigned to resigning, it appeared. ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it’, hmm? I have had to really ration my news consumption – there is nothing it is possible for an ordinary person to do about the Ukraine, except hope, against hope really, that it will not escalate. Covid variants keep on and on and on. Rather like Boris, really. The weather is wonderful right at the moment, but locally we are still seeing the aftermath of the windstorm that, in my mind, was a harbinger of extreme weather to come as the world heats up and no one is doing anything useful to stop it. Banning one use plastic is not going to do much except annoy shoppers.

I grew up in the pre-plastic-wrap era. Hardware stores were full of bins and a clerk, a real person, counted out your screws or nails or whatever into a paper bag. Groceries were packed in paper bags that my mother saved for multiple uses, among them covers for my school books. The text books were loaned from the school board at the beginning of the year and we had to keep them as pristine as possible to hand back at the end of the year or face paying for a new one. Hence paper bag covers. We could write on those. And did. Meat was wrapped in ‘butcher’s paper’ a heavy paper with one side waxed. And yes, the packages leaked. 

What really blows my mind (yeah, dated slang), is that it took so little time for plastic to gum up the ocean, the soil and, probably, our lungs.

My mother took a string bag or two to buy vegetables. Fruit came in wooden boxes or baskets. Again, we reused those. My school lunch was packed in a paper bag and the sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, secured with an elastic band. I folded up the bag and paper and took it all home for reuse. Milk and pop were sold in glass bottles. My grandmother bought in quantity and things like rolled oats came in burlap bags.

This sort of packaging made more work than the plastics and so when they became available, we all started using them, gleefully and without much thought as to disposal. The availability was just starting when I started keeping house, summer of 1963. I used a lot of tinfoil and waxed paper then, as I recall, and kept - as I still do - vegetables in bins. The bins were the result of a terribly stupid accident when I forgot a bag of root vegetables in a bottom cupboard and they rotted.  

We all loved the ‘ziplock’ bags, although I can’t really remember when they became available. The first I recall were about when my daughters’ contemporaries started having babies. There was also, at that time, a lovely contraption that had a single-use plastic bag for the baby’s milk instead of a glass bottle.  Sterilizing glass bottles was no fun at all and I was really impressed with this labour-saving gizmo. But I honestly can’t remember what we used to carry breastmil for my grandkid except that a container leaked into my purse on one unfortunate occasion. Happily for both generations, mostly both my daughter and I breastfed, reducing the need for bottles to a minimum, often for the use of a grandparent minding the child. Once, indeed, for a great-grandmother.

Monday, 11 July 2022

It is my YD's birthday today. And she is far away. 

My house is being cleaned by my wonderful neighbour/cleaner and I am working away on the bits and pieces of my brother-in-law’s estate. Or, I will be if I ever finish this and get it posted. I talk too much, even on paper. If anyone asks you to be an executor of their estate, make sure that there is also a law firm involved or the trivia will smother you. Not that it is ‘executor’ any more. I am an ‘estate trustee’. Sigh. That, I guess, is what happens when Latin is no longer taught.

Speaking of teaching. My high school organized and held an 100^th anniversary party. After the fact, an attendee was posting photos and spelled the name of the teams ‘Sparten’ instead of ‘Spartan’. I corrected it and, underneath my correction in the comments, someone politely pointed out to me that the word was used to name the school teams. My English teacher would have made mincemeat of the whole exchange.

Not that Spellcheck and I are really in tune. I am struggling, I really am, to accept the use of a plural pronoun or possessive with a singular noun. e.g. - ‘Their name is Judy and they are two years old.’ I have to make myself do it. And have a coffee and a good cry afterward. Spellcheck does not like ‘eg’ or ‘ie’. What did I say about Latin? Coffee, a doughnut and a good cry. But while you are wiping your tears, here is what they stand for.

Well, we will see if the formatting worked this time. I am going to shut up, shut down and post this before worse occurs. And, when I typed it, I used a sans serif font and no double strikes at the start of paragraphs. Sigh. (It seems that 'sigh' is becoming my signature.)

Life after Eighty, in part.

 I think I wrote the first part of this in the middle of last week. Maybe. Things are not much better today.

My laundry room is a mess. The screened porch needs vacuuming and its floor needs scrubbing in the worst way – not to mention the dirt on the walls. My sweater and tee shirt drawers are a disaster. My desk is beyond disaster and my filing system has had a nervous breakdown. The storage room has no room to store anything more until I sort it and get the donation stuff out, working around a pile of my younger daughter’s Stuff as I do so. (Yes, you, YD.) Also, Something was sleeping in the daffodil bed and it is thoroughly squashed, as well as weed-filled and in need of thinning. And that is only a partial list.

You know, back in the day, I used to sort of look forward to old age as I time when I might be able to sit in my rocker and enjoy life. Yeah. Here I am in my rocker, mainly because I am hurting too much to do more than sit and rock and fume, because there is so much that needs doing and I am not doing it.  Not enjoying not doing it either, as that means it does not get done. You know, I did not think of that as I raced through my days. My mental picture was of a sunny day on a nicely swept porch with my coffee and my knitting and the birds singing. The birds do play along and, if I have my hearing aids in, I can enjoy them singing. The knitting is really slow as the arthritic fingers are not very adept. I think I have been picking away at the same mitt for several years. There is a layer of pollen on everything on the porch. The coffee, however, is just fine.

Except when I forget to retrieve it from the coffeemaker and it gets cold. It reheats in the microwave, but somehow it is not quite the same. Forgetting is my middle name just now. This afternoon I drove happily off to have blood work done and left the requisition sitting on my desk prominently where I had placed it so I would be sure to take it. When I realized this, I was about half way through the half hour drive to town. Yeah. I reversed direction at the first turn I could make, frantically dialled my poor husband as I drove far faster than the speed limit back toward home, told him where to find the thing and asked him to get in his truck and drive to meet me to give me the document. This all worked.  I was only ten minutes late for my appointment and no one at the lab said a word. But it is a good thing there were no speed traps this afternoon.

That was yesterday. Today I am sitting at the computer with one earring in and the other on the counter in front of me, waiting for a person to call back with a scheduling change for a repair visit. ‘This could take some time,’ said the person. ‘Please stay on the line.’ Okay. I do have the basic housework done today. Sort of. I have a medical appointment this afternoon in town, so I hope the wait is not too extended. I spent an hour waiting for a bank to answer yesterday. All of which is not, I should add, being done from my rocker but JG reheated and returned my coffee while I listened to the bank music yesterday. This wait music is a bit better, but not up to the Rose-breasted Grosbeak’s song.

Hmpf. Word does not approve of Rosebreasted. Nor of Hmpf, come to mention. Tough.

Representative just came back on the line to apologise for the long wait. He is on hold also to the repair guys. I wonder if he plays Scrabble. I should go and look for some illustrations for the bird. And, if possible, find a link to the song. 

Ah, appointment change confirmed after a wait of fifteen minutes or so. Not bad. And a real person, not a mechanical voice offering options. Does it seem to you that there are no real people answering phones these days? Or issuing appointment reminders? Our local health centre has a lugubrious male voice that seems to prefer supper time to come on and repeat things three times as I fume.

Writing today, and I am going to post this damn thing, regardless.

The good news this Monday is that the ankle pain and swelling is resolved. The bad news is that I have not got an appointment for the x-ray yet. Our hospital is in disarray. I would like to know that I do not have a bone chip in the ankle, but that may not happen. At least I am walking, not hopping. And hoping, but not too much. The poor hospital has had to close the emergency room because of both an ER and general staffing shortage and a Covid outbreak. I expect this has impacted the whole building and explains why I have no call for the x-ray.

And my ED has Covid. Picked up at a conference in Europe she attended last week. The first time she has been able to get out and about for, I think, two years. Everything she has had to do and attend has been on Zoom or equivalent. Long, long hours staring at a computer screen. Not fun. She is not quite the people person that the YD is (and has to be), but she has told me how she misses the in-person contact. She got it last week. A bit too much right at the end there though. At least she got her flights home, in spite of the airport disarray, both here and in France. And she has a partner and daughter who cook and clean and do laundry – at least the husband does laundry that I have seen him toting. I do not recall ever seeing Miss G doing this chore. Hmm.

Talk about a fragmented post.  It reads like the written equivalent of an ancient tomb dig puzzle where all the fragments of the cranium are laid out and someone has a try at piecing together a skull shape. Yes, I just finished reading a book about archaeology. Buried: An alternative history of the first millennium in Britain. By Alice Roberts. Recommended, unless you want to cling on to Le Morte d’Artur.