On the Trails Again

 I got out into the bush this afternoon. JG loaded me and my portable oxygen into the Kubota (yes, I will explain that) and we growled off up to what I think of as the back hundred. Our property is sort of in the form of a fat L, with our house right at the point of it. A lot of the most interesting stuff is in the upright part of the L – the beaver ponds, the sugar bush, some of the best bush. And so we mostly go that way. The ‘back’ part has rougher trails and fewer of them. We have cut a good lot of firewood off this part and had it logged once, but we visit it less often. When we skied, we had a loop that took us down the middle of the bush, out onto the beaver pond and back through this part, but in summer unless we are cutting firewood, it gets visited less.

Anyway, that is where we went this afternoon in glorious sunshine with not a bug to be seen. It is still very early spring here but there were tiny hepatica in many places

and I spotted one or two dog-toothed yellow violets and some Dutchman’s breeches in bud. The trillium leaves are just unfolding; when the trillium flowers are fully in bloom, the black flies are also here in numbers I shudder to think of. But, today, we zoomed along unbothered by anything biting.

What is less wonderful is that these less travelled trails have a lot of brush down on them from winter breakdown and the high winds we have had lately. Our ED clears trails as she walks, and she loves her walks, but she is almost always on the upright section, so there was quite a bit of brush down. JG has a dear little battery-powered chainsaw and he got out of the Kubota from time to time and chopped branches out of our way. 

Here is a ‘before’ shot of the trail and a second photo of the man and his instrument clearing it away.

The hepatica are tiny. They hide, almost, from a casual eye. But if you look carefully, they are there in number, pale-pinkly petalled and perfect, a harbinger of glories to come. 

And there are buds on almost everything, the red maples are flowering and the birds are singing their hearts out morning and evening. I heard a really unusual song late this afternoon after we got home, and am a bit frustrated trying to locate a bird with a call that sounds that way. I suspect a northern mockingbird is trying out its repertoire, sometimes, when I hear something brand new.

As for the getting off the leash, not anytime soon, as far as I can tell. And my GP is now back to worrying away at a sleep apnea diagnosis that, if accurate, will add yet another layer of misery. It is hard, a lot of the time, to be motivated to do the work that I know is what is needed. However, once bug season is upon us, what better occupation indoors can I have than an exercise program? Um. Don’t answer that.

Here is a picture of a little Kubota utility a lot like ours.

Diesel engine, noisy, but it will go almost anywhere and not get stuck. (Much – I have stories!) And JG can store all his trail clearing tools in the back, along with my oxygen pump.

Ambulances and Libraries

 It’s been a bit of a rough go, this last few days. On Sunday we were planning to celebrate my eighty-second birthday with a family steak dinner, followed by cheesecake by special demand. On Sunday afternoon I was hit by breathlessness, nausea and sheer terror and ended up in an ambulance being transported to the emergency room. A lot of holes in my arms later it was determined that I had not had a heart attack and I could go home. The cheesecake and gifts were transferred from my daughter’s car (she had zoomed out here from Ottawa) to ours, I was wrapped in a flannel sheet and we trundled home. I watched JG have some cake.

The next couple of days were pretty strictly recovery. And cake. I recovered quite well in that respect. But it is disconcerting in truth to find out that beside what you fondly consider to be your adult self is a frightened three-year-old whose reaction to stress is to sit down on the stairs and cry her eyes out. However. I am now back to the breathing and the treadmill (advanced to a .5 slope today, whoopee) and can get around the kitchen, get a meal and even try to get  my head organized a bit. I have things to do for the hall party in June that have to be started soon, and everywhere I look I see something that needs doing. Including a large cobweb in the front hall corner above the door. It got swiped, by golly.

On June 3rd, we are opening the hall for a celebration, the main piece of which is that the Dalhousie Library books will again be visible. And visitable. It has taken the library crew months to get things cleared and cleaned and ready to go. What library?  It’s a story. Probably the simplest thing for me to do is add the rough draft of our advertising writeup to this post. And so, I shall do that. Note: rough draft. It will be better, shorter and clearer when I get the edits done.

But it would be nice to know what in [censored] caused me to get weirdly ill last Sunday. Nice, but I am pretty sure it will not be explained.

So, here is something that is its own explanation.   

History in your Backyard Draft 2

“Did you know that the oldest rural library in Ontario is only a short drive away? It’s not easy to spot but the historic Dalhousie Library is inside the Watson’s Corners Community Hall at 1132 Concession 3 Dalhousie in Lanark. If you drive on County Road Six, you drive right by it. On June 2nd, don’t drive by. Stop in and find out about the library and the history of the hall.

We plan to celebrate both the fascinating history of this old and well-loved library and of this wonderful rural gathering place.  On June 2nd, from 12:00 - 4:00 p.m., you will find the Watson’s Corners Community Hall Open House and the Grand Reopening of the Dalhousie Library. There will be music, light refreshments and tours of the historic library. The original Scottish settlers will be evoked by a piper to open the event, highland dancers, and fiddlers. When the hall addition was opened in 1947, there was piping and dancing too. Inside there will be photos and information about the many years that the hall has been in use. Come and find out what you remember and what your neighbourhood has provided.

The Dalhousie Library has been in existence since 1828 when it was established by the early Scottish settlers, who arrived from Scotland starting in 1821 and settled this area. Books and learning were valued commodities, so valued that, along with surviving in their new rugged home, building a library/ meeting place was a priority for these determined people.  Members of the local St. Andrew’s Philanthropic Society petitioned The Earl of Dalhousie, Governor-in-Chief of Canada, for help to start a library. Dalhousie sent 100 pounds sterling and 120 volumes stamped with his coat of arms. Along with the books from some of the settlers’ private collections, by 1843 there were 800 books housed in the log meeting place called St. Andrew’s Hall. 

The pioneers made long journeys through the woods to attend “Issue Day”, held six times a year. Library Issue Day was a social occasion as well, when friends and neighbours caught up on one another’s news. And they looked after their books. Amazingly, the current historical library collection contains a number of the original books that are stored on the shelves of the original 1827 pine cupboards in their section of the Watson’s Corners Hall. 

Although the original hall housing the books did not survive, in the early 1940’s there was community interest in having a new St. Andrew’s Hall built for community gatherings and to preserve the library books. In 1947, after years of community donations of cash, material and labour, the new St. Andrew’s Hall was built and became the Watson’s Corners Community Hall. 

Since that time there has been a very useful addition built to add kitchen facilities and indoor plumbing, also involving fundraising and volunteer labour. During the 1990 ice storm, the hall was a hub and a refuge. There may even have been a kangaroo at one time; certainly it has been fun for the hall to celebrate its possible existence. We want to talk about this history and hear your stories. Seventy-seven years later the hall continues to be a community hub, providing space,  variously, for exercising, dances, card games, birthday and baby showers, formal meetings and celebrations of life. The Dalhousie Library also lives on in the hall 196 years later!  

Come see the history and share some memories. See you there on June 2nd.”

Watch It

 Small things amuse small minds. I was reviewing the post that I wrote about the Drivers’ Test for eighty-year-olds, plus, and thinking that anyone who was wearing an analog watch would have no difficulty with the clock face that we were asked to draw. Although a great many people these days use digital timepieces. And teaching the little ones about clock faces is a harder task for that reason. As I was ruminating about this, I looked at my watch face. And laughed. A lot. 

Below is a drawing of what my watch face looks like. 

And, just for further amusement, I drew it again with all of the numbers that SHOULD be shown, where there are silver dots on my watch*. Grade ten Latin, anyone my age?

*The silver dots on my watch, and the silver outside round, are shown in light grey in the drawing.

And here it is.

Wheels and things

  

I am sure that you will all be pleased to know that according to the MOT, I am sane and certifiable as a driver. I went to their renewal meeting, drew the clock, read the letters on the screen and got my licence renewed. The only thing different from JG’s description of his renewal (those of you who are 80+ will not need an explanation) was that we were told to put the clock hands at 11:10, not 10:10. There was one guy there who could not figure it out. The person running the exam very gently told him that further paperwork would be required and that he would be contacted. I do not know if this gentleman drove himself to and from the meeting location or was picked up, as I was last in line to be tested.

When I arrived, lugging my ‘portable’ oxygen generator, the room had about twenty people sitting in it. “You must be Mary Gilmour,” said the examiner. Last in. Last out. After the close, those of us waiting for a pickup compared knee surgery outside, sitting in a row on a concrete wall.  I have now finished the online renewal and paid my fee. All I need is to get off the oxygen.

Or get smarter with the tubing. I just ran over it twice with my desk chair while trying to plug my phone into the charger. However, the people who supply the oxygen are very accommodating. I just got by mail a supply of clean canula rolls and a tubing length that JG had asked for. I also got a call from the respirologist to explain about recharging the portable machine, a call that ended with her decision to send us a recharge cord for the car and to visit us as soon as her schedule permits to help me with things. Her schedule puts this meeting into May, but that is a lot better than July.

JG is out picking up debris off the lawn in preparation for his summer occupation of mowing a great deal of grass in the area around the house.

As of today, a day later than the meeting described above, my General Practitioner phoned me with the news that I can drive while using the portable oxygen generator, as long as the oxygen level in my blood is 90% or close.  I have my wheels back. Unfortunately, my GP had no better advice about getting my blood level up to 90%+ without the boost than had the doctor at the General Hospital. Nor did she seem to know about the Lung Health program purportedly run out of our CHC. I guess I will follow that up myself once I get calmed down. This whole thing is Getting To Me, frankly.

And. I addition.  As I was doing some typing following writing this draft, I had, as I too often do, a series of sneezes triggered by nothing identifiable. And the last sneeze sort of hung there and would not happen. I only know of one thing more immediately and overwhelmingly frustrating than that. 

Yes. Of course.

Credit, Deviant Art

Books and Stuff

 

Photo Credit - KBIA | By Naomi M. Klein, Hana Yun

Still on my leash, but I am learning to work with it, as least a bit. I can make a meal and clean up after it, do laundry and have enough energy to get a bit of the work for the Hall done. But yesterday was, to say the least, annoying. Jim and I had dark glasses out and Jim cleaned up both of his welding helmets and we were all set to admire about 98% of the eclipse. We had a forecast of light cloud, and that is what was up there. So we could see the crescents and check on the progress. But just as we got as close to totality as we would get, one thick strand of cloud blocked off the view entirely. By the time the cloud had moved on, so had the moon. Well, at least it did not rain. We were a bit surprised that we did not lose the light. The almost total eclipse that we recall from 1967 lives in our memory as producing quite a dark period; we did not see that yesterday.

This afternoon the couple that is in charge of the hall at present came by and I gave them a lot of photos of past events and people that worked regularly in the kitchen. Some of them still do; they were younger then. And so, indeed, was I. We are gearing up to do an open house, in conjunction with the reopening of the Dalhousie Library, featuring some of the hall's history. The library is fascinating. Here is a link if it interests you,but the gist is that the first settlers here wanted books and a group of them set up a library, hitting people like Lord Dalhousie, a ‘landlord’ of sorts, to provide books. Some of those books are still there, almost two hundred years later. Since the paperbacks that I love and have read over and over are falling apart and yellowing as well, the sturdy nature of these old books is amazing to me.

I should, I suppose, get organized (We Must Get Organized is a mantra of sorts among some of my friends and me) and find out if some of the most fragile of my loved tomes are still in print. And if I can afford to buy them if they are. I have some newer paperbacks that I would like to replace in hardcover, but the thought of shelling out three figures plus change to get them is not a good one. Well, some morning when I am feeling strong, I will look.

Tomorrow I go and do my update to keep my driver’s licence current. When I get off here, I am going to clean my glasses. I also have to renew the licence, and since my birthday is a week away, I guess I had better get onto that as well. I am not driving until I get rid of the oxy – that agreement with my surgeon has left me with the licence. I guess he could have pulled it. I guess I am lucky, things taken overall. But I am tired of stepping on my oxygen tube, unwinding it, stretching it out and stepping on it again.

I just found and corrected a major grammar break. Before the bot did. Hah. 

Hooked, line and sinker.

 

We got in to the city, had my follow-up with the surgeon, and got home late Wednesday just as the rain turned to sleet. As those of you who live anywhere in my area know, we got a snow dump that lasted all of Thursday. As I write this, it is Friday afternoon, the power has just been restored and I am trying to catch up on the laundry and the blogs I follow all at once. My comments are, in great part, very short as the list of things I just had to read was very long. And, cheerfully, I report that the wretched snow is melting. The trees are out from under and we have not only got power, we have also been plowed.  A Good Thing, as JG had to go and get more fuel for the generator.

Normally we are pretty calm about snow dumps. We have a really good generator and we generate just enough to get meals and get through the evening. We normally shut down overnight. At present, however, I require supplemental oxygen and so we have an oxygen pump that needs to be kept running. There is a small battery operated auxiliary pump that I have to use in the car, etc., but it makes a ‘thump, swish, thump, swish’ sound that I was sure would keep JG from sleeping. So, I took myself to bed with it in the living room on a reclining chair. In the very early hours JG could not hear me and so he got up and restarted the generator and main pump, hooking me to a canister in the interim, and I crawled into my nice warm bed for a few hours. We are both exhausted today; this is not a snow dump that I was primed to admire in any case as the heavy wet spring snow falls often bring trees down onto the power lines and cut off our electricity, but no power to run the oxy system was not something that was easy to work through.

As to the medical follow-up. I was prepared for several results but not, unfortunately, for being sent home on oxygen. I asked during the interview to be referred to someone who could teach me how to wean myself off it quickly. And so, I have been referred to respirology and have had an appointment to see them … on July 3^rd. When I called the surgeon’s office to see if this could be moved closer, at a bit after 3:00 pm today, the office was closed. I did find, however, that my local Community Health Centre can refer me to a local program for COPD, emphysema etc. I see my GP next week and can only hope that this program will be available for me. In the meantime, I have agreed not to drive and so my licence, I guess, has not been formally lifted. There is more than one form of leash that this puppy is tangled in.

I am trailing yards and yards of tubing everywhere. I did manage to cook dinner last night, kicking the [censored] line ahead of and behind me as I went. I can just reach the treadmill at the end of my line if I hold onto it in one hand as I tread. The stairs are a menace, as the tubing manages to hook itself around the railing, do what I will, on every passage. This aspect of post-surgery recovery that I did not expect really has me on the ropes.

In summary I can only comment that if you are faced with a major medical event, think all of the possible outcomes as much as you can ahead of time. 

Ears at the Ready

I haven’t reported in for a while; I haven’t, in truth, had much of anything positive to report. I staggered into the hospital last Tuesday, coffeeless. Although my anesthetist had allowed that I could have a black coffee, none was available since my check-in time was six in the morning. Nothing in the hospital was open and we were in a motel next to the hospital with no coffee-making apparatus in the room. If I ever have to do something similar again, I am going to remember my thermos. The operation was, as they say, a success. I came out with four small holes and a drain, in good time. And minus the tumour and some lymph nodes. Then the fun started.

To recover from surgery that removes part of a lung, the patient is required to cough up the residue of the surgery remaining in the lung. This is, I am sure, more than you want to know. It is certainly more than I wanted to know, as I have a poor cough reflex. Accordingly, a large and muscular respiratory therapist pummelled, jerked and exhorted. It was a grim couple of days, especially since the hospital food service supplies tea and coffee on alternate days. Luckily for me, my ward mate hates coffee as much as I hate tea and so we were able to exchange cups, quietly.

I recovered quickly, as I do, and have been home for a week or so. What is a bummer is that I have been adjudged to be getting insufficient oxygen into my system and so I was sent home ‘on oxygen’. This means that there is a pump in the basement thumping away condensing the air that is supplied to me via a plastic hose and a nose-piece. You know how we tether dogs to a running leash so they can get around the yard? Well, Mary is on a leash. If I walk around the house, I trail tubing behind me for the family to trip on. If I leave home, I do so accompanied by a small pump that I can carry that hisses and thumps extra oxy into me. Next week we go back for the post-op assessment, and I am really, really hoping to be unleashed.

The tough bit is no cigarettes. I hope that no one reading this has an addiction and will therefore not understand that statement, will shake their head and think that no cigarettes is A Good Thing. Maybe. But it, like the coughing, is not fun. And unlike the coughing, it does not improve.

However, the snow has disappeared, all but a few lumps where the plow left it. And my YD is home for two whole weeks, has been here looking after her decrepit mom and cooking, laundering and amusing her parents. She is taking this opportunity to plan some renovations to her house before resuming living there; a new kitchen and a bathroom re-do, in fact. The choice of countertop materials is, as far as I can tell, endless. As I recall, when choosing finishes for our kitchen, I went to one location and held down the budget. The YD has a large budget and a lot of places to go and graphite to see. As well as graphing out where she wants the cupboards. All this has been most interesting, as those of you who have done renos will know.

The ED is also in renovation mode. In fact, their home is undergoing upgrades to all three of the bathrooms. In series, I am assured, so that there is one working shower and toilet somewhere in the house. All is not going smoothly, however. The construction crew has a truck with a trailer. Yesterday the ED and partner were informed that a film crew is in the neighbourhood and all on-street parking is banned for the next, I think, three weeks. This means that the ED will probably have to take their car to work and park, expensively. How partner will be able to get around I did not enquire.

I did get the chocolate bunnies purchased at Village Treats before I got tethered, so Easter is allowed to arrive. There is something about biting the ears off a chocolate bunny that is like no other treat.

Wind from the West

The weather changed a few days ago, on the last, leap day of February in fact. We had been having unseasonably warm temperatures for days and the clouds, as I watched them, were streaming from southeast to northwest. Then the wind, and with it the weather, changed overnight and on that Thursday was howling a bitter, vicious blow. The temperature dropped like a stone into the minus numbers. The sky cleared to a bright, pale blue. And walking into that wind brought tears to the eyes. “Blowing in the Wind,” said my weirdly echoing brain.

Bob Dylan’s lyrics are very apt today. “Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?”  I have heard those questions most of my adult life and I cannot answer any of them.

Our generation has not done well by future generations. I have been reading a book about the influence of the very aptly named Quiet Generation on culture, behaviour and beliefs. The thesis is that a small number of influencers led the way into the rebellious days of the Baby Boomers, the Vietnam War protesters, the so-called ‘Beat Generation’. Personally, I was not part of that. I was at home working part time and raising two children to school age. I paid little attention to what seemed to me an American problem, not ours. And I happily adopted any and all of the petroleum-based solutions to housekeeping chores that were then available. Plastic pants over the cloth diapers – excellent. Plastic sippy cups, Melamine plates, nylon snowsuits – all very useful.  Plastic wrap – a fine replacement for waxed paper and elastic bands. Smog was something that happened in London, England. Climate just was. It varied, but so what.

“Westron wynde when wyll thow blow. The smalle rayne downe can Rayne” is the medieval original of another popular song of the sixties. “Oh western wind …” It is the sad cry of someone far from family and familiarity, from safety.  Cryst yf my love were in my Armys And I yn my bed Agayne.  The words tie in my mind to a Mansfield poem that I think most of us learned in school.

“It’s a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries. …” the verses start and go on to describe the spring as 'merry'.  “The young corn is green, brother, where the rabbits run. It's blue sky, and white clouds, and warm rain and sun.”

 This year there may not be a merry spring. There may never be a merry spring again.

The warm and loving western wind may never blow again and a small rain hearten the crops. Instead we have unseasonable warmth, weather ‘events’, fire and flood.  The birds are not coming to our feeders as they used to do. Our native trees are not thriving. We are not thriving. In the words of the old Anglican prayer, ‘there is no health in us’.

 Perhaps if, instead of ‘flower power’ and all of that, we had put our minds to preserving our world, we might have avoided the worst that now will come. And to say, now, that I am sorry or that I was unaware is completely useless.  I am afraid that there are no answers, that too many people will die. When I look up, I see no blue in the sky.

 I have been writing and editing this post for almost a week now. It is one of the group I write with my granddaughter in mind as an audience. I started doing this when she was a baby blowing purple bubbles and now she is almost twenty-one, the age of majority everywhere. I am sorry for and unhappy about the world she will inherit and how she will find her way in it. But if I don’t post this now, I will lose the courage to do so.

 It is what it is. Sad.

Seeing Red.

 There are a lot of colours that are described as “red”. Many of them have a descriptor in front, such as “fire engine red” or “blood red”. Others are descriptors of a different sort such as “burgundy” or “cherry”. “Scarlet” is red, as is “crimson”. As to what it is by definition, an on-line dictionary says it is “of a color at the end of the spectrum next to orange and opposite violet”.

I love red. Bright red. I love to wear it, to use it and admire it in sunsets and roses. I have two red jackets and a red sweater and I used to have, until I got too fat to wear it, a red down-filled winter coat. I have two red hanging lights in my kitchen. If I could grow anything that flowers, I would try for red, red roses.

So, all the colours of red.

Wickipedia says that “Varieties of the color red may differ in hue, chroma (also called saturation, intensity, or colorfulness) or lightness (or value, tone, or brightness), or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint being a red or other hue mixed with white, a shade being mixed with black. A large selection of these various colors are [sic] shown below.”

Another source tells us that there are 99 varieties of red. I am not about to get into technicalities here. You can, if you have that kind of interest, find lots of information and colour charts and names of varieties here.  or here.

I have a post about ‘red’ that I wrote back when. It can be found here.  The little velvet wonder in the last photo (my grandkid posing for a Christmas card photo) in this post will be hitting her maturity birthday in a few months. She is a student at McGill and, amusingly enough, a Martlet. She is on a university sports team and the McGill identifier is a red bird, a martlet. I have a photo of this. Somewhere. Sigh.

My English as a Second Language students suffered when faced with homonyms. Red, the colour, and the past tense of the verb “to read”, are both pronounced ‘red’ although spelled ‘read’, the same as the present tense. Faces suffused with misery as I explained this, slowly, several times. The definition in my Oxford Reference Dictionary covers four inches of dense type, at eight point type or less. I have not had the courage to look in the big Webster, which has migrated downstairs, at any rate.

If you have read this far, I note that this is another rag bag, but this one filled with red rags. And, just to sweeten the mix, I will end here with a shot of my red-haired daughter in a red Stewart kilt.

Ragbag

 Like other and more organized bloggers, I occasionally want a rag bag of a post. This one will be quite raggish indeed.

First, an update on my medical fun and games. I have been measured in practically every way known to medical science and am now waiting for the verdict as to whether I can have minimally invasive surgery. This verdict will be delivered next Wednesday via a Zoom meeting with my doctor. Thankfully, some things can be done this way and the hospital people are very accommodating about it. Unfortunately, some things cannot and require me to abstain from coffee, chocolate and all other things caffeine for up to two days before trekking into the city hospital. My suffering cannot be adequately described.

Second, the mess on the desk. Still there. Between the medical stuff and the secretary for our local hall stuff, I am not in paperless mode. I actually dug out a bunch of outdated types of paper for the Annual General Meeting handouts and colour-coded them. Not that most people noticed, alas. I now have to get an updated minute book to a wonderful person who is going to back me up as secretary while I get on with the medical stuff. And I am willing to bet I can do that without printing another copy of anything, provided I can sort the piles I have. Yeah. And, as I rolled merrily along, I formatted the ad for our next event the wrong size. A plaintive email from the local paper alerted me to this. Talk about typing errors. 

More Organized Blogger just put up a post about typing errors and got a lot of comments to agree that it is a very easy thing to do. I hang on to what is described as a ‘gaming’ keyboard because it has raised pads and is the same large format as the standard machine on which I learned. It also clicks and I love that. If I try to type on a small, smooth keyboard, I make a huge number of errors. I use, as I have described in other posts, a correction app called ‘Grammarly’ to find the errors. So far, all the underlining in this post is highlighting usage. Well, except that they want me to hyphenate “colour coded”.  And so I just did.

Earlier this morning I read a lovely and lovingly written post by a former teacher about a student of hers who went in very wrong directions and has died very young. It made me think of some of my former students, long ago and fairly recently taught, who struggled. And whom I am very much afraid I could not help enough. I ended up wondering why it is the failures I remember vividly, rather than the things that worked, the successes. One does not lie awake at 3:00 am brooding about a girl who went on to a Master’s degree in your subject, for instance. Or I don’t. What keeps you awake in the small hours? Other than the aches and pains of old age, that is. 

Okay. Time to quit this and hit ‘print’. Note single quote mark. Easier than using the shift key to get the proper one. Not lying awake about that.

Junkets

 I should be cleaning the flat surfaces in my office here. It is a disaster, especially as I decided to clear some of the drawers of an accumulation of, frankly, useless junk. I was looking for a card the surgeon issued when I had my knee done. I am supposed to take an antibiotic before dental work and I could not remember the name of the [@##$$%%^&&] drug. After a long and fruitless search, during which I found a credit card that I thought was lost forever, I found it sandwiched into a card holder, one of three I was sure were empty. I must, repeat MUST, file it somewhere that I can find it again without this kind of disaster.

In fact, disasters abound, chez me. Another is a closet overfull of clothing in a lot of different sizes, some of which I am sure I will never wear again. The reason for this is that I dropped three or four clothing sizes in a hurry when I had the heart surgery. Although I quickly gained one back, I was quite happy with myself (although my GP told me to lose ten pounds) until the Covid shutdown. Between that, mobility loss from the back problems and a lot of chocolate brownies, I am now back up to my biggest clothing size. The closet badly needs emptying. I think about this, and then think about the fact that I have another surgery scheduled, and am very undecided about which clothes to pack up and give away. The smallest ones are the least used, of course. 

Another surgery. An anomaly in my lung that has been followed since 2019, or thereabouts, has finally been identified as a small, discrete cancer. Supposedly the tumour can be removed by laparoscopic surgery, with only an overnight stay in hospital. However, pretesting for this surgery is ongoing and that is why there has not been much written in here lately as the testing is at the city hospital over an hour’s drive away. We have been doing a lot of driving. The problem is that if they cannot do the surgery, or if they do and things go pear-shaped, I may be in for another long siege on the hospital food that slimmed me down last time. So, what do I keep, just in case? 

Meanwhile, the desktop is layered with Stuff. And I am accumulating a big pile of paper to be recycled as I go. I keep things. And forget what I have kept or where I put it. I just found all the back paperwork from the medical claim in our Income Tax return from 2018.  And I know there are a lot of financial records jammed in there. I print off a bank statement sheet once a month and write in any information I might need for some future query.  Who received a cheque? Who was the recipient of an E-transfer? That kind of thing escapes my memory with the velocity of light. As do numbers. I can remember what my parents’ phone number was in 1958. I cannot remember what my daughters’ numbers are now and am hard-pressed to come up with my own cell number. Why is there all this stuff in my desk when there is nothing but space in my brain?

That last description of my brain? Am I a certified airhead? Yes. Because in that space there is an earworm playing. Scarlet Ribbons for Her Hair, by Belafonte, is echoing in there, over and over. It was on the playlist in the car on our next-to-last drive to the city and it will not go away. I had hoped that there would be something on yesterday’s playlist that would overwrite it, but no. Not even the Phantom of the Opera drowned it out. (And if I infected you, please accept an abject apology). Not only on my desk does disaster lurk. The head is also overfull of mostly useless junk.

About Snow

My daughters with their grandfather on the canal, circa early 1070's

 Winter is with us, full steam. We have just had a power flicker and the internet has been knocked out, we have no idea for how long, and we could lose the power entirely. Wind and blowing snow out there; the ED says it is worse in Ottawa. And they just got the canal opened for skating, in part, yesterday, courtesy of a week of deep cold. Now we are back to the just below to just above freezing temps and I hope they can keep flooding with some success. ED loves to skate and can access one end of the skateway from her office quite easily.

The grandkid on the canal

For those of you who are not local, I guess an explanation of the skateway might be in order. Our city has a canal that was dug through the small town of Ottawa over one hundred years ago. The canal was meant to be a link from the Great Lakes system via the Ottawa River to the St Lawrence system just this side of Montreal and thus create a passage into Canada that did not run directly beside the United States. Great Britain funded it. It was and is a marvel of engineering and, as it runs right through the middle of Ottawa, when it was drained for the winter, people skated on the ice formed on the remaining shallow water. Around about the 1970s somewhere, the City of Ottawa or the National Capital Commission (NCC) made bits of it smoother, this being done by men with shovels and hoses. It was wildly popular and the length of it grew until, now, it is billed as the longest man-made skateway in the world and stretches over, I think, nine kilometres from Carleton University at one end to the junction with the Ottawa River at the other.

I took our girls skating on it when they were in grade school, and Jim’s parents came up one winter to enjoy it as they were good skaters. The last year I was there myself was 2004. I know this because I was pushing baby Audrey in a stroller kind of thing. I had to hang onto the stroller as my balance was gone, so that was my last attempt. But both daughters and the grandkid have been on it many times. 

Putting the ice into condition for skating is now much more mechanized. The city uses trucks with ploughs on them to clear the snow and so the depth of ice has to be very good to be strong enough. Global Warming is getting to it; last year was warm enough that they never did get the thickness of ice they wanted and the skateway never opened. Sad. IMHO they should go back to the strong backs with shovels and worry less about depth of ice. The Canal ‘rink’ is a marvel when it is in use. At one point, when she was working next to the canal, the YD used to skate to work. You have to love that.

In fact, it is winter sport and recreation that make our climate possible to endure from November to April. Getting out into the bush, going to areas which, in summer, you could never reach, is satisfying in a way that nothing else I have ever done can match. A small cloud of chattering chickadees blows by you. There are tracks you recognise in the snow and others that are a complete mystery. The sun shadows make marvellous lattices on the snow, blue and grey blue where the snow in the sun is sparkling white. A trickle of open water remains in the stream bed, exposing moss so green it is almost black. You can trek into marshy land – I once found a cutting wedge sitting on a stump in the middle of nowhere. If the beaver ponds freeze without heavy snow, skating is wonderful. You can, with effort, climb in your snowshoes but walking on the level, where, in summer there is water, is almost without work. On skis, you fly.

Snow Shadows

The Beaver Pond, Clearing the Snow

More Shadows

The Stream

If there is one thing that sucks about old age, it is that it robs you of the abilities that enrich living. I can only go there in photos, now.

Leave nothing but footprints ...

This is going to be a plaintive post; I have a new version of Word that has more bells and whistles than even my last one. As I try to navigate through it, I am also on call to go and help JG with HIS new Word app. He has not used Word much ever, having preferred another word processing program when he worked, maybe something called WordPerfect, and having done very little word processing in the last two and a half decades. Since I am not at all sure what I am doing myself, this is not even a story about how, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In fact, I appear to be typing this in something called Aptos (Body) and I did not decide to do so. It’s not bad. I am interested to see how it will come up when transferred to Blogger. (In serif typeface in the draft, a sans serif when published. Wha...?)

I am more than annoyed with Blogger today. It ate two sets of well thought out and nicely worded comments that I wrote on posts I enjoyed. The comments were not nearly as thorough or as well written on the third attempt. But if, when I hit SAVE it actually does save, I guess third time pays all. Or something like that.

The ED was out on the weekend and went for a snowshoe in about a foot of new, untrodden and crusted heavy snow. She did most of her usual circuit through both the home hundred acres and the back hundred, in a little more time than usual and remarked that she was labouring coming up the last hill. Yeah. She did, a bit wistfully I thought, wish for her sister and her dog to, as she put it, break trail for her.

Aforesaid sister has resigned her prestigious position and handsome remuneration and is now on leave, using up her vacation and then her terminal leave before she will make the final decision about retirement. This is Freedom 55 Plus, and she is off to do a bike trip in the Far East and then a hike in Europe and then may pack up her home in Brussels prior to getting her house in the city back from the renters. She has home renovations in mind but so far that is all that she is discussing of any planning. I am surprised and yet not surprised at this decision. I knew she was not happy in many of the requirements of the position, but was not aware of the extent of her frustration. I suspect she was making the best of it when talking to us, to spare us worry. At any rate, she may be available as a trail stomper by next winter’s need.

As a personal report, I think I have found at least some of the surfaces of my desk and table here in my office. Between the hall material, the paperwork needed for my various medical appointments and the stack of usual filing, there was a fine mess. Then I was hit by a request from JG to find a particular document from his brother’s estate papers that I had handled. We got a portentous government document saying said government owed deceased brother money still and JG needed the reference. I dug, piled up files, muttered and after three tries I found the dratted thing. The money owed turns out to be about three dollars. Or about the cost of sending the cheque? And I am now refiling and Putting Things Back. When the ED was here, she put the Christmas boxes all away under the stairs, and so that is that for another year. It may, sometime, become tidy. There is a tidy in the affairs of woman…

I am stopping now before this leads on to anything. Up top you will have seen a fine photo that the ED took of the back beaver pond. You can contemplate that; nature is neat in more than one aspect. 

Winter is Here

 Last night we had our first big snowstorm of the winter blow in, and I do mean ‘blow’. There was snow pasted to all of the screens on both sides of the open porch, and the whole porch floor was covered, except for about three square feet right at the door. I did a lot of brushing and sweeping, but meanwhile JG actually got to play with his new toy. This toy is a dedicated four wheeler with a heated cab (Note: heated) and the cab has windscreen wipers front and back. This allows JG to blow the snow away while driving forward, instead of backing up as was required by the big tractor rear-mounted auger, and he can let it rip without getting his face full of snow. This is very good, for obvious reasons.

And here he comes!

When he went out to start clearing, the snow turned out to be wet and pretty heavy, and the temperature actually went above freezing for a bit in the afternoon. Then, in late afternoon, the sky cleared almost at once, the temperature dropped and we ended up with stiff snow. This, of course, is when the Township plough decided to finally come and do our road. We are the last house on a dead-end branch of a very rural part of the Ottawa Valley. I guess we should count ourselves lucky to be plowed out at all. If it were not for the school bus needing to run up part way on this road, we might be an even later afterthought. But, hey, we now are reconnected to the world.

 It took most of the day for JG to get us tidied up. Meanwhile I was ducking out in my slippers and trying to get some photos with my new and superior Christmas iPad. With very mixed results. I need to figure out how not to take 'Live' shots, for one thing. And look where I am aiming. I took a photo of the cleared porch and area, with a shovel (see above right) sitting in the middle of the shot. Annoying. And so I edited it out, sort of. A sloppy job, but, hey, it improved the photo. I think. Sigh. Must read the book. Must think before shooting. And, also very important, must put on boots and coat before venturing out into snow world.

Less Waiting.

It was Wednesday morning (when I started this but it is now Thursday evening), the morning chores are done and I have just been phoning to try to figure out what happened to my credit card. Amazing to me, I was not put on hold. Two rings and straight through to a real person – well, two rings and typing in my credit card number twice. I have an older landline phone with no speaker facility. It has a club speaker/receiver that I tuck close to one ear and hold with my chin; I started doing this in the 1980’s while working at a job that required lots of telephone calls and the habit has stuck in spite of my stiff neck and a perfectly working iPhone with a speaker. “Turn on the speaker,” says my YD, more or less patiently, when she calls me on this marvellous device.

What is the most marvellous, really, is that I am chatting with her as she drives home from work or back from an assignment. In Brussels, or on the Autobahn in Germany, or ... wherever. We can also chat with her via video from her home, also in Brussels. The phone calls are crystal clear. The video is excellent. It is not the same as having her here and getting hugs and finding strange wrapped bags of things in the refrigerator. But it is a miracle of modern technology. Mind you, I thought that email was a marvel when I first acquired it. The ED was living in Scotland, and to be able to reach her on a daily basis and to know that she had managed that day -in a difficult period in her life – was priceless.

Earlier communication methods were not priceless – sending bulky letters across the Atlantic, trying (and failing) to keep phone calls from Africa economically short, paying for international cell phone coverage in an emergency – all came at a price and a high one by times. Worth it, though. It is an interesting, for me, comment on how life is that something you want starts out looking expensive but becomes routine. The switch from black and white film to colour film is a case in point. We had a good camera that took a roll of twenty-four shots but that made a film expensive to have printed. (I had a developer of my own for black and white for a while, also expensive to do but very interesting.) I started by being very careful when I had colour film, but ended up doing candid shots and paying for the rather mixed results. Lines of relatives, posed and resentful, are not good photography. I went looking for such a photo and found this. Terrible photograph, but it is funny, especially when you know the kidlets.

My Facebook friend, AC, just did a retrospective of his year in photographs, and it is worth a look. His comments are gold mines of teaching about good photography. He has a post here. It made me think about photos I have taken that I liked well enough that I remember something about them. I may just go and look for a few, although remembering about them and remembering where I put them are two very different things.

Report on the report: I had to trek into our medical facility and ask for a copy of the report to be found and printed from my master file. It was frustrating, but at least I now have that information. It has generated more tests, so I will probably be muttering about more reports here before too long. Both JG and I have reached the plateau of old/old and that seems to cause our doctors to want to know all about our insides. Me, I read the report, do a LOT of looking up of very big words and sort of shrug. Yeah, this, that and the other thing are Not Quite Right. Or, even, labelled with Latinate tags. I expect I shall be like the ‘wonderful one-hoss-shay. 

The Waiting Game

 I wait. A lot. I wait for letters, emails and other communications. I wait for the mail and the paper (well, not so much for the last of these as our guy delivers in the small hours). But at present I am waiting for a report about an x-ray that was taken early this month and was supposed to be read on the 27^th. It is now January 3rd, the bottom corner of my computer tells me, and no report has been filed. It's discouraging, as I would much rather know something than not. Ignorance is not bliss.

The laundry is whirling around in its machine and some of the Christmas loot has been put away although there is still a pile of themed napkins in the dining room and a small stash of stuff to be recycled sitting on the living room floor. It was a very electronic Christmas. I think everyone but the ED's man  got a computer or computerized gadget. Ours is a bird feeder with a camera that will take photos of birds that come to the feeder. I am not sure yet how it works although I have figured out, with help from the YD, how to set it up. The YD got a laptop that cost her a whole evening of listening to a technician as she tried to set it up and found, I think, a flaw in the software. The download speed on the repair was abysmal; someone must have been streaming a movie on our shared node. Someones, perhaps, as it was abysmally slow. ( Drat you, Grammarly; that is a perfectly legal past perfect verb form. {I am getting the ‘have’ questioned. Ah, it was a spelling mistake, not the form.} I used to type quite well, but my dexterity has decreased a lot in the last few years. And why I use ‘dexterity’ when I am left-handed says something about our society, doesn’t it.)

Anyway, the tree is down and out, most of the boxes have made their annual migration to the basement, and there is the small pile of things to go to the recycle. It looks as if it may be a bigger pile next year. The YD, who likes Colour on her tree, encouraged me to get rid of the white lights that have adorned my silver and gold tree for many years and to put up coloured ones. I purchased a large number of red lights from our local CT (on sale, did I mention?) and we had a red tree with red glass balls. (Only one ball was smashed in the takedown.) And so I mentioned to the YD that the white lights could be recycled. No, she said. She wants them for next year. When, she also stated, she will help me sort out and downsize my boxes and boxes of Christmas Stuff. I await the event.

There is more on my calendar than usual, actually. The first week of the month brings a book club meeting and, usually, footcare. There is a hall committee meeting. In the following days there are more medical things, another group event and, probably, the hall AGM. Not exciting, exactly, but pleasant to await, in most cases. But things feel tentative; I do not know why. Perhaps it is the result of knowing that aging in place only lasts until managing is not safe. And that time is coming. It is around the bend of the road but it is there. Waiting. And I am afraid of what it may demand of me and mine.

That thought is there because this is a diary, mostly, and I needed to write down what feels like a cloud hanging over me so that I could pin it down a bit. It is not a thought that demands an answer here, where pleasant photos and reports on activities are the norm. With any luck, I will be posting about Christmas lights once more when the time arrives.