Life in the Confused Lane

 

The ‘template’ I open in Word to write posts gives me the Calibri font at 11 points. I do not like it. And so I usually type two letters, wipe them and change to Times New Roman at 12 points, a look that I like, at a guess, because it is so familiar. I think of it as easier to read, but, in fact, I am not sure that is accurate. I just like it. (Having just typed and formatted this, I am now wondering how Blogger will display it.) Edited to add that Blogger did not display it at all, and I have reformatted inside the posting page as well as I can. Blogger does not offer Calibri, I find, and I defaulted to Arial to show the difference. It did not work well, sadly.

 The way this blog looks is important to me, to an extent. I will change my header away from a Christmas theme over the next few days, providing I find time to do it. I did get the laundry mostly under control today, and so there may be time. But I need to get the English tutors up and running too, and that means a lot of time on the phone. Next week is my crazy week, the first of the month, because I have a discussion group that meets on the first Monday and a Book Club that meets on the first Thursday. Add the lessons I am teaching and at least one other meeting, and I am going to be going from home to Perth and back like a yoyo next week.

Meanwhile I am plotting to force one of my students out of charming and lazy mode and into real learning, move another one up a level whether it is a priority or not (time is ticking) and catch up on the two that I am confident have good tutors and are doing okay. But I need to check. And the time thing is real. Our group is committed to supporting these families for a year and we are already a third of the way through it. I do so want, while it is available for them to learn without cost, good English fluency. It may not be entirely possible, but I want to give it my best try. They are lovely young people and deserve our help.

 Also meanwhile, the YD is back in Brussels and as of today, so is her stuff. Or, most of it at least. We have been receiving an hilarious series of Whatsapp comments as the shipment arrived at her house and was unpacked. There is one big item that did not make it, and her North American small appliances did arrive, all useless without a translator of the power supply (I can’t remember what that is called). The last post she made was from a hardware store where she described herself as trying to explain in French what gismo she needed to put her table together, without knowing the name of said gismo, and then realized she had brought one with her to show. I trust she is now asleep in her own bed and bedding, cats purring and a weekend of organizing it all in store.

 When I think that all I have to organize is the laundry, my blog header and my English tutors, I realize that I am blessed. Plus, it is above freezing here and the laneway ice is melting. Um, having said that, I realize that I have all the Christmas stuff in the house to take down, pack up and store. Never mind the Christmas header for the blog. It will have to line up behind figuring out how to make my student stop telling me that we will meet ‘on the library’, getting the tree needles out of the stairwell and deciding what of my Christmas décor to keep and what to give away. I promise myself every year that I will do this last chore, and last year I actually did reduce the storage boxes by one. Maybe this is the year I can reduce by a second one. Stay tuned for the next exiting episode of Life with Me.

The Aftermath

 After my complaining, Santa ought to have brought me coal instead of gorgeous jewellery and two books, one of which I have been wanting for a long while and the other looking really interesting. I had a serene and leisurely Christmas while the YD cooked, sliced, poked, diced and cleaned, most of the day, and the ED and family picked up, helped to clean up, stripped the turkey carcass, packed up and did all of the running around associated with Hosting the Feast. All I did was set the table, as pictured, and make the gravy (and I got help with that!). It was a real treat. 

This is, of course, pre food, when the table cloth disappears under a multiple dish layer.

Note that the counters below are not only empty but clean! The bag contains the last of the detritus, on its way to storage in the basement freezer. The refrigerator contains enough leftovers to see us through a major weather event. There is also enough chocolate, from Belgium and locally sourced, to ruin any diet. 

Thank you, wonderful daughters. 

And to all a Good Grief!

 

Tis the day before the day before the night before Christmas, and all through the house, each table and flat surface is piled with stuff. At present the master of the house and the visiting daughter are both roaming through the grocery stores of our community, garnering foodstuffs. Foodstuffs that they will bring home and add to the already bulging refrigerator and pile onto the already laden counters in the kitchen. Later they will cook, and I am expecting more cookie tins to join the four (or more, I am too lazy to go and count) tins already there. I expect new and fresher bagels. I expect fruit, vegetables and treats to appear. It has occurred to me that it is a very good thing that we do not have a chimney, down which a droll little fellow could appear with his sack. By the time I get son-in-law’s massive box wrapped and under the tree, there is not going to be room for anything more.

 It’s Christmas time in the household. The tree needs water (waiting for the agile daughter to crawl underneath and fill the reservoir), needles from the tree already decorate the stairs, I still have presents to find as well as wrap, and I have a return to make since one of the online retailers I patronised has sent me the wrong parcel. The bag for the return is presently cluttering up my office, since I have to phone and arrange a pickup and this, given where we live, is not going to be a fast job. Other jobs involve me baking pies, and the finished products will have to be kept somewhere until the Festive Meal is finished. Oh, and someone has to drive half an hour in to town and pick up the turkey on Christmas Eve. And it will not be in a sleigh with eight tiny reindeer either.

 Bah, humbug. This is the (I counted) fifty-sixth Christmas that has found me in charge of the Feast, the majority of the gift buying, wrapping, tagging (just did that. I recall a sad story told by a friend of mine who, one year, wrapped the presents as she bought them but did not tag them. On Christmas Eve she had to unwrap quite a few to figure out who got what) and keeping the house somewhat clean. Another fond festal memory of mine is of my mother, one Christmas when they visited us, vacuuming madly in the living room on Christmas morning, after the Grand Unwrapping had taken place. Mostly what she was vacuuming was, in my recollection, dust and dog hair. I have a photo of this somewhere, as I was on a mission to record the festivities, and to *** with cleanliness. Mother did not agree. But she loved me anyway.

 Mostly my parents stayed home for Christmas, as did JG’s parents. Several years found us with our feet under the paternal Gilmour table, and once JG’s sister hosted us, my parents and all of her family for, I think, Christmas dinner, when our children were small. There were at least three tables set up to manage this crowd, but the amazing woman never turned a hair as I recall. This year the visiting daughter who, she says cheerfully, likes to cook, has taken over the kitchen. Cooking and clearing up. Last night we had a lasagna for dinner that she spent most of the afternoon concocting and, as her father stated (loudly and clearly) it was far, far better than the frozen ones I seem impelled to buy. I love lasagna. I love my daughter.

 Each Christmas we leave, in the mailbox and in the holder driven into the ground for the purpose, cheques for the mailman and newspaper carrier. I just got a phone call from the latter of these to let me know that I had put the mailman’s cheque into the newspaper box. And this after I had marked the envelopes before I trudged down the lane to put them out. I may be impelled, now, to check all the gift tags to make sure I have not confused more labels. Confusion, my constant companion in this my eighty-first year, is now out of hand. And God Bless Us every one, especially me, as I surely need it.

Playing

I have just spent a somewhat fraught (because I inevitably forget, from time to time, the how-tos), but enjoyable half-hour, refreshing the look and header of my blog. Not that I write in it a lot, nor have for some years. There are people (you know who you are!) who post every day in November. There are people, in fact, whom I read with enjoyment, who post almost every dern day of the year. I don’t and can’t and never have, even when there were lots of memes and games to fill in the days when the brain went dead or there was literally (hah!) nothing to say.

 I don’t have much to say today, in fact. Except that we spent a lot of money, for us, during a trip to the city and that when we got home, the credit card that we had used to pay for it all was, somehow, borqued. It took my poor suffering JG a long time on the phone to sort things out. But he did. Sort it all out. And the ‘stuff’ we paid for will stay paid for. Stuff? Tsk. But … but, but, but  - Christmas stuff. It is all, in fact, useful stuff. One purchase was of a new mattress and, oh my, do we need that. The present one has a slight resemblance to an egg poacher. The rest was Christmas gifts. Can’t help it. Santa’s most faithful elf gets the urge every December. And what we purchased was practical stuff that is wanted (we checked) and will be used.

 We also Went Out For Lunch (Okay, so I am out to lunch most days. Will you stop that!). To a restaurant with music and a menu and a very plain waitress, according to the elf, who was drinking water, honest. I know it is not post-Covid yet, and that the flu is all around us, yeah. We ate out anyway. It was really lovely to put my feet under someone else’s table and have a menu with choices. I have spent far too much time with the can opener, frying pan and oven over the last few years. Even if JG keeps restocking the kitchen with yet more complex and modern appliances.

 I get the Air Fryer. It reduces calories, reduces power usage, keeps the kitchen cooler. I get the microwave, and have had a simple one for many years, again reducing cooking time, power usage overall, and making leftovers palatable. The all-singing, all-dancing item now reclining on my kitchen counter is not simple. I have learned to live with, cook with and even appreciate the induction burners on my cookstove. JG does the cooking with the sous vide appliance, even if it was a gift he gave me, and the Instant Pressure Cooker (Instapot?) does a fine job, fast. No, I would not go back to my grandmother’s coal stove. But at some point, the learning curve is going to become so steep that I will probably backslide and go thump.

 I have been making on line purchases for Christmas as well. Practical and, um, Very Impractical. Plus, I just bought myself, untouched and untested, a bra on line. I may or may not report on that, depending. Mostly, I buy practical underthings at Marks or Giant Tiger. This purchase is a real gamble. As are many on line purchases. And if it is really true that returned items are discarded, I am glad that I do not return. Garments that I buy on line (thanks to Covid, grrr) that do not work, I either wear anyway or pass on to our local reuse centre.

 And, speaking of reporting. I now have the English as a Second Language classes sort of sorted, hopes of new teachers to augment the process in the new year, and am working on prepositions with my own student. He blew a simple construction in an email to me, one that I had just gone through with him, and he is in for a bit of a hard time at our next lesson. (Picture me with a gleam in my eye and a ruler poised to thump.)

 That’s next week. When I will also finish my shopping, bake, decorate the house, go Out For Lunch again, and, probably, go to sleep every time I sit down, come the actual Day. JG has ordered the turkey. The YD is in for her second lesson on how to cook it. In the conventional oven, thank you.

 Have a good weekend. If you've read this far.

Tuques and All That

 

One of my long-time and much-admired blogging friends posted a photo of frosted leaves and other detritus, a photo she ventured outside in her bare feet to get. Another described getting up in the dark and cold to go and source frost on the leaves photos. Ah, the onset of winter. As I sit here at my computer, I can glance out the window at trees and deck and ground covered with a few inches of the white stuff – at present the sun is shining on it and I should, I suppose, leap up, grab a device, and get the photo to post here.

 But. My coffee is hot and fragrant and I have lots and lots of photos of sun-on-snow. Lots. The one different shot I could go for, our small and stubborn oak still decked in all its leaves and laden with sticky white blobs, would require me to put on boots and trek outside. Did I mention the coffee? Also, it is warm and lovely here at my computer as the floor vent wafts a stream of hot air over my feet. Switching from the wood furnace (time to add a log) to propane has simplified life Chez G.

 And that is a Good Thing. (The Department of Nance has Capital Letter emphasis and I love it. Copying. Thanks, Nance.) My life is complicated enough without lugging logs. If anyone ever tempts you to run English language classes for incoming refugees, think carefully. It is a lot of work. And frustrating. Many of the complications at present are coming from my lack of skill at using Google Calendar to schedule. I found yet another double lesson this morning and sent off yet another sad email to the teachers asking for clarification. If I were having to stoke the furnace on top of this (note untrue condition), it would probably be quite cold in here.

 The sun has now vanished, and lovely fat flakes of snow are falling, dancing lightly down. I love winter, given that the roads are cleared. Although I am worrying a bit and hoping that my lessons on Canadian vocabulary (felt liners, mittens, quilting, layering) have been absorbed. Two of my students assured me that they had winter in Afghanistan, thank you, and I did not need to teach them about it. Yeah. In Canada we have, I repeated, Winter. Do you have boots yet?

 Speaking of which, I must touch bases with the YG whose boots, as far as I can tell, are in the storage closet in our basement. Since she is in Brussels, this is not optimum. However, her sister posted, yesterday, a photo of Ottawa’s first snow and the YG countered with a photo of a lawn in Brussels covered in green grass. So maybe the boot thing is not a problem. (Note to self: research what winter is like in Brussels, also in Afghanistan.) Regarding boots, one of our stores is advertising boots with a new, non-skid material in the soles. I am hopeful this will actually work and if so, I am buying some.

 It was quite cold in here for a bit. But more warm air is now flowing into my office as I have just manually adjusted the thermostat. It is sulkily mistaking night for day and offering night time temperatures in the morning. An expert is supposed to come and fix this, as we cannot. Between the thermostat computer and the Google calendar, I am longing for the 20^th century, sometimes. Although, sadly, it is probably a lack in my wetware, not the software, that is at fault.

 Quitting here. Must print picture sheets of mittens and tuques.

English as a Second Language Training - Reporting

 I said, at one point, that I would report on how things were going. And so ....

I just looked at the desktop on this computer, and I am sitting at my desk, and both are cluttered and stacked with ESL bits and pieces. The funniest of these is a drawing of underpants. The least funniest is an email from one of my coaches who has had to cancel at the last moment, too late for me to fill in.

I have seven coaches for four young people now in their homes and adjusting to Canada. I have access to the Google Calendar that is supposed to keep us all organized, ‘us’ being not only the Language group but also leaders and helpers for health, finances, housing, transportation and the children’s school entry and transition. All of these needs are going onto the calendar and it seems to me that the concentration of things to do must be daunting for them on a daily if not hourly basis. I know that English is a top priority and should be on the calendar so as to be sacrosanct. And it went on. And it is a mess.

Three of our people have enough English to understand a lot of what is going on. Two of them have an excellent accent, giving the impression that they are right with the narrative. These three are proud, intelligent young men and women who hate to admit they didn’t get it. So they don’t. Admit it. When I am coaching, I have to watch their faces and body language to pick up cues when they lose the thread of what is going on. We all need to slow down the stream of comment and information to a pace that the Afghan lot can follow. That is one problem. A second is that all of my team have not bought into the reporting method that I have asked for; that being an email account of the lesson passed on to the next coach. I have, at the moment, chaos.

That being said, I do have teaching in place for all four of them, all with competent people whom, mostly, I have worked with before. And the families have been here long enough that the initial spate of appointments and arrangements ought to taper off and/or become predictable. Aids like computer access are going into place. I think we will get there, maybe with one more week of semi-chaos to come. But I feel overwhelmed, frankly, and as if I have not done my job as leader well enough. They are such fine and deserving young men and women, and I want to do my best.

 I sent the report above to my bosses, and received words of encouragement and cheer in return. And that is good. But I still wish I had a better handle on things.

And two more coaches.

Happy to report that the kids knew exactly what to do with the Playdoh.

Hey, local friends and readers ... want to have a rewarding and sort-of-fun experience?  One of my needs is for people to talk with and make friends with these four newcomers. Not hard. No irregular verbs included. No need to translate underpants. Drop me an email.

That Book Meme

 

Author You’ve Read the Most Books From: C.J. Cherryh. She keeps writing them. I keep reading them.

Best Sequel: L. M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside. Yeah, I know. But it is a cut above a lot of the potboilers.

Currently Rereading: Ann McCaffrey Dragon Riders of Pern

Drink Choice While Reading: coffee

E reader or physical book: both. I love physical books and have shelves full of them, but when I want a book right away, I get on the internet and download it to my Kindle

Fictional character you probably would have dated in high school: Not much choice here – I am trying to think of a character who would have been interested in a tall, not very pretty girl with Really Good Marks. A fatal combo, eh?

Hidden Gem: Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population

Important Moment in Your Reading Life: When I persuaded our school’s librarian to let me take out books above my grade level.

Just Finished: Kushner’s book about his White House years. It was interesting and did not deserve, in my opinion, the panning it got in the reviews.

Kind of Books I Won’t Read: Languishing Love Stories

Longest Book You’ve Read: Good Question. I have no idea.

Major Book Hangover Because Of: The Steerswoman series. The [censored] author will not finish the series. She’s four books in and talking about another two.

Number of Cases You Own: nine

One Book You’ve Read Multiple Times: Jane Austen’s Persuasion. But I reread a lot of my books.

Preferred Place to Read: On my screened porch.

Quote That Inspires You, or Gives You All the Feels, From a Book You’ve Read: “He [Bilbo] used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.”

Reading Regret: So many books, so little time.

Series You Started and Need to Finish: The Steerswoman, as above.

Three of Your All Time Favorite Books: The Lord of the Rings, J, R. Tolkien, A Civil Contract, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings. (and sequels)

Unapologetic Fanperson For: Jane Austen, in spite of my book club.

Worst Bookish Habit: Breaking the spines

X Marks the Spot—start at the top left of your shelf and pick the 27th book: Left case is non-fiction, The Dance of Anger, Harriet Goldhor Lerner, Ph.D.

Your Latest Book Purchase: A Dangerous Inheritance: A Novel of Tudor Rivals and the Secret of the Tower Weir, Alison

Zzz-Snatcher Book (the last book that kept you up late): I go to sleep and the book falls out of my hand. That is what happens when you are my age (old!). Happens at all times of the day. The only thing that keeps me up late is the computer. If I go to sleep, my face hits the keyboard.

Peace, Order and Usually Okay Government

 

The Canadian Encyclopedia defines constitutional monarchy as follows:

Constitutional monarchy is Canada’s system of government. An absolute monarchy is one where the monarch has unchecked power. A constitutional monarch, in contrast, is limited by the laws of the Constitution. Constitutional monarchs do not directly rule. Instead, they carry out constitutional, ceremonial and representational duties. Canada’s monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, is the head of state. The prime minister is the head of government. The monarch is represented by the governor general at the federal level and by lieutenant-governors in the provinces.

I have done a lot of cut and paste from various authoritative sources including Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica and others. And I have moved stuff around so much that I am not sure which quote comes from which source. And so, I have put the quoted material in italics to separate it from my personal opinions and comments. If anyone wants a specific source, let me know and I will try to recreate it.

We in Canada have this system because we inherited it from Great Britain, inherited it in its present and useful form, a form developed over many centuries. A little history here. You may have run into a fun history book entitled ‘1066 and All That’. It runs you through the throes of England turning from an absolute monarchy under the early kings into what it is today. The process was not without its drama – from the insistence of the nobility on imposing on him the Magna Carta after a battle in which King Henry was defeated to the final erosion of the last Kingly interference under George V in the nineteenth century. During this process various kings were run out of the country, had their head chopped off and were starved of money by the House of Commons until they gave in. For one period in the 17^th century Parliament tried to rule under Cromwell, but the British people did not like that either and they brought back a king, Charles II, who had been a boy smuggled out of England when his father got the chop and who ruled very, very cautiously. His brother inherited the kingdom and was not cautious enough. He got chased out and a biddable and protestant queen installed in his stead. This king and his successors more or less did what Parliament told them or they did not get enough money from the Commons to manage. You note, it comes down to money and who has the power to determine taxes and collect them. Even Elizabeth I could not work around that.

So, what is this system and why is a ‘constitution’ so important? Under Canada’s system of responsible government, the Crown is a vital part of the legislative, executive and judicial powers that govern the country. The Crown is the source of these powers, but they are exercised by the federal and provincial governments. In general, the Crown is bound by constitutional law to follow the government’s advice, which in turn represents the will of the people. For example, Parliament and provincial assemblies vote on and pass bills. Before they become law, they must be approved by the Crown. In theory, the Crown could withhold its assent, but this has not happened since 1945.

Constitutionalism is a doctrine that specifies a government’s authority to be determined by a body of laws or constitution. Constitutionalism attempts to avoid arbitrary decisions by designing mechanisms that determine who can rule, how, and for what purposes. However, constitutional traditions differ as to what precisely counts as an arbitrary act and which mechanisms offer the best defense against arbitrary acts occurring. The classical republican tradition, identifies arbitrariness with domination of the ruled by their rulers and seeks to avoid it by establishing a condition of political equality characterized by a balance of power between all the relevant groups and parties within a polity, so that no one can rule without consulting the interests of the ruled. This tradition is what created and has informed the American system with its balance (they hoped) between Congress, the President and the Judiciary.

The more liberal tradition identifies arbitrariness with interference with individual rights and seeks to establish protections for them via the separation of powers and a judicially protected constitution. Thus, the repatriation of our constitution from its birthplace in England. There were quite funny jokes circulating in 1982 about the British being unable to find our constitution, filed somewhere in its basement in a shoebox. But yes, there was one, from 1867, and yes, the Queen signed it over to us in its entirety on a rainy day in Ottawa, sitting at an outside table with an umbrella held over her head. Looking on was Prime Minister Trudeau (senior) with a huge grin on his face. It was his government’s initiative that made possible that final step.

What does the ‘constitution’ do? Three elements underlie this classic theory of mixed government. First, arbitrary power was defined as the capacity of one individual or group to dominate another—that is, to possess the ability to rule them without consulting their interests. Overcoming arbitrariness so conceived required that a condition of political equality exist among all free citizens. Second, the means to minimize such domination was to ensure that no one could rule without the support of at least one other individual or body. Third, the balance to be achieved was one that aspired to harmonize different social interests and maintain the stability of the polity, preventing so far as was possible the inevitable degeneration into one of the corrupt forms of government. As the English system developed, a dynamic notion of balance based on mechanics and physical forces was worked out. In this conception, balance could involve a harnessing of opposed forces, holding them in a dynamic equilibrium that combined and increased their joint power. Thus, the concept of ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ was refined into the party system we have today. This was the idea that political balance now consisted of the competition between government and a “loyal” opposition. As parties evolved from simple factions and patronage networks among rivals for office to electoral machines defined as much by ideology and social composition as by the personal ambitions and interests of the political class, they became the organs of this new type of balance

This modern form of political constitutionalism has proven constitutional in both form and substance. Equal votes, majority rule, and competitive party elections offer a mechanism for impartially and equitably weighing and combining the views of millions of citizens about the nature of the public good. And in making politicians popularly accountable, it gives them an incentive to rule in nonarbitrary ways that respond to the concerns of the different minorities that form any working majority, thereby upholding both rights and the public interest rather than their own interests.

While nobody would deny that the parliamentary system is far from perfect, it works. Legal constitutionalism, the separation of powers, developed out of the theory of mixed government during the English Civil Wars of the mid-17th century. The functional division remained far from clear-cut until this century and has only been partially clarified by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It works, in great part, because of the system of law, unwritten and based on precedent, that accompanies our parliamentary system. The two together are cumbersome and testing the validity of a new ruling can take years, but … it works.

I think it works better than, say, Israel’s system or that of the Netherlands because of our tradition of having a government and an opposition that requires the government to withstand votes of no confidence whenever the opposition thinks it can bring the government down. This vote triggers an election, and the polity then has a chance to change from the view of the previous majority to a different one. Obviously this works best if there are only two parties. But it does work cleanly if the parties are few enough that the classic liberal versus conservative values are clearly represented. (Please note small ‘l’ and ‘c’ here.) At present we have two liberal groups propping each other up enough to stay in power. Contrast this to the USA at present where the two views are almost equally represented and nothing much is being decided. The American system was designed to allow for a number of parties’ views, but the polity has not generated them and the result is almost a stalemate. This could not happen easily in a constitutional monarchy where a one person majority can be made to work. The system came into being using two parties, but it was decided to fund more if the group met a certain level, giving us the four party groupings we have today.

The system of constitutional monarchy, with its roots in tradition and example, is, I believe, responsible for the mostly smooth transitions in government that you see here, in Australia and New Zealand, and, of course, in Great Britain. It survives photo op Prime Ministers, the Boris Johnson Trump lite Prime Ministers, the power-hungry Governor Generals of Australia and, most importantly for me, a lot of voter apathy in quiet times. We have a lot of quiet times in Canada. If we end up with a political head of state, I project that there would be a lot less peace, order and good government.

Please, Please, Don't Eat the Playdoh!

I spent part of the day not long ago digging madly through my backups and folders, looking for the English as a Second Language worksheets that I used with one of my students who, when I started with him, had only oral English that he had taught himself by watching American movies. He did know the alphabet, but his preferred method of learning was oral. And he was amazing. His ability to retain and memorize was absolutely incredible to someone like me who had always dealt with book people. This lad had not had books – other than a copy of the Koran placed in front of him at his madrasa, maybe. But he knew how to learn.

I have done a lot of ESL teaching over the years but my students have always been people who had at least some schooling of the kind with which we, in North America, are familiar. You start the kidlets with the alphabet, you read to them starting from age zero, practically, and you and they rely on the printed page to tell them things. Or, um, they used to. Now we rely on the computer screen. Where I snarled at my offspring to ‘look it up’ and I meant them to get the dictionary (or whatever), now the word is ‘google’ and a world of information pops onto the screen at the touch of a finger. And so, most of us are visual learners. We see the word; we learn the word.  This young Syrian lad heard.

Earlier I had received a call from a fellow ESL teacher who has been asked to take on another of these young men. She wanted to see some of the materials I used and talk to me about how to go about working with this kind of student. She is not sure, she says, if he is literate. Of course, when I finished with my last Syrian student, I tossed most of my aids, material which was all on my computer. I have a nasty tendency to make my own -- worksheets, reference materials, teaching aids. I had a fine set of photographs of the Canadian seasons, with the months of the year and words for snow and ice and biting bugs. It seems to have disappeared. I have hauled out a few examples, but the bulk of what I prepared for two Syrian young men is gone. This is not entirely bad, as I do believe that the material, especially when you are, in effect, tutoring, ought to be tailored specifically to your victim. Oops. Student.

I still hug myself with great enjoyment when I think of one young man who arrived here in eastern Ontario in July. I used the month photographs with him and came to realize, as we worked through the fall season, that he was dreading the onset of Canadian winter. In fact, he was really worried about how he would cope. And so, we had a lesson in Marks Work Wear and he acquired a toque, a storm coat with lining and hood, boots, mittens, several scarfs and, here is the fun part, long underwear. When I tried to interest him in waffle weave long johns, I was given to understand that only Old Men wore those and he would rather freeze. We found a more acceptable substitute. He also chose a very stylish red storm coat, and was a lot happier, although his growing command of the language was employed, through January and February, in a lot of complaints about how difficult it was to walk anywhere.

What I started to post about is that we have two young Afghani families coming in and they are going to be located, for the nonce, quite close to me. I have undertaken to start their ESL for them. I am told that the ability level varies from good to none among the four adults. And so today I launched off to pick up some starter materials and some distracting toys for the young children to receive while I assess the parents. I was able to find a lovely little game of Playdoh where you press alphabet cutters into small pots of the dough and form the Roman alphabet.  If I can get across that the dough is not for eating, that may be a useful toy for mother as well as child. There was a numeric Lego too, that I picked up, suitable for the youngest of the crew. And parents. These purchases fill me with glee as I cannot think of a better method of teaching the mother who needs it the alphabet. Without being rigid about it.

The saga of ESL in the bush will be ongoing – I am going to keep a bit of a narrative diary here for my own amusement and, I hope, as part of the group dynamic.

So, stay tuned.

Cripes, I hope I can convey that the Playdoh is for playing.

More about Books - and Other Stuff

 

I have been overdosing on books, lately. Rereading old favourites that I have picked up on my Kindle. Paging through others that I read quickly for the plot. I do that – read at my full speed, which is fast, scanning for the action, running my eye past description and detail. Then, when I reread, it is almost as if I have a new book, but one I can put down, if I must, since I know what is going to happen. If there is anything worse, for a reader, than to have to put down a book right at the suspense point, or the denouement, it is hard to imagine. And, if you are a wife and mother and there are meals to get, children to move around and manage, a husband ditto, interruptions at the best part of the book happen all too often Rereading in tranquility, with time to savour the book as a whole, is precious.

 I am about to start a re-read for yet another reason. The ED tells me that there is a book we have not read available in a series by an author that we both love, Guy Gavriel Kay. She HAS the book, in fact, and was planning on finishing it while here so that she could pass it to me. But she went off for a hike instead and did not get it finished. A Good Thing. I now have time to fish up the first two volumes and re-read so that I am current to start hers when she passes it on the next time we are together. Not that she would have had much reading time this weekend, as she and partner moved the daughter into her apartment ready to start her second year at university. Move around and manage time does not stop just because they are grown up. In fact, the YD is about to land home and have a scant few weeks to reorganize her life and get off to a new job in a new city in a new country. I think I get the cats to manage. Luckily, cats mostly let you read, although they do not encourage knitting.

 

Well, most cats let you hold a book. Whether you can use your computer without serious bribery is another kettle of, as they say, catfish. I have a blogging friend whose cat, immortalized in Caturday posts once a week or so, demands things like hand feeding. The YD’s cat resents my iPad. I suspect she thinks my fingers would be far better employed in ear scratches and turning the key on the can opener. However, if you want a cat with personality, Miss G’s elderly sort-of-Siamese is a study. She loves her arthritis medication and slurps it off the eyedropper. Amazing.

 Arthritis medication. Ah yes. I spent a strange half hour on Tuesday having painkillers injected into my neck, shoulders, upper back and left leg. This, I am urged to believe, is a mitigation for my lower back pain. Pain is referred, you see. Numbing the neck will help the back. We shall see. The shots are taking place at a ‘pain clinic’ to which I was referred by a sports medicine doctor to whom I had been referred by a surgeon that my family doctor booked me to see and who (the second one) pronounced my back problem inoperable. So, referrals got me there and we will see if the referred pain locations chosen by the Expert (who is, in fact, an MD) actually work. I was urged to try acupuncture in my ear lobes, also as pain relief. After the puncture, a seed is pasted to the hole left by the needle and the patient then presses the seed into the hole at intervals. Are you still with me?

 That was Tuesday. Today is Wednesday and I have to say that the walking today was easier and I was in less pain overall. Not NO pain. But better. I may have to apologise, if only in my mind, to the doctor who chose the spots to inject. I will have to see how long this effect lasts and if I can get some muscle tone back while exercising and walking are a little more possible. Well, no one promised me that old age was fun.

 And speaking of fun. The shameful, hide from your friends and family kind. I have downloaded a modern version of Lemmings onto my iPad and am playing with it a bit. Well, if honesty serves, I have gone up seven levels and won two eggs. Lemmings is a game in which a line of small idiotic figures

is launched into a maze with traps and it is the player’s job to get them through the traps to a glowing door into which they vanish, crowing with triumph. Or they all go ‘bang’ and die, wailing. I found this game way back when – mid 1990’s I think – and I loved it. It is the only ‘game’ game I have ever played although I play chess and cards with the computer from time to time. I played it obsessively and got all the way to the end of the very top level. Total win. It disappeared, and I sort of forgot about it, and although I did troll through cyberspace from time to time looking for it, I never found a newer version that would load and play the way I remembered. Until last week. It is beautifully crafted. It is also full of updates that you can buy. Of course. And cheapie me will probably resist. But it is as much fun as the old one. And famous. I had no idea. (The link is to a really comprehensive Wikipedia article.)

 The really funny thing is that I played the old one a lot when I was really hampered by a pinched sciatic nerve that prevented me doing much walking. Luckily enough, nothing so far prevents me from reading, thank you, modern medicine’s cataract replacement miracle.

 

On a rainy August Thursday

 

JG’s phone cheeped, and although he missed the call, the alert proved to be a Facetime from the YD, presently on a hiatus from her clamber among the mountains of northern Pakistan, a hiatus that provided her with internet. We caught up and I got a look at the view out of her hotel window. Absolutely amazing, and if I can, I am going to steal it and post it here. Added - nope. The photo I want is on JG's phone. So I will add my favourite - a typical trek shot. 

I chatted, and JG was off to town to have coffee with his Thursday morning group and do the grocery shopping. And somehow, between the call and an interview I found on Facebook, the morning is just about shot. Eight minutes to Thursday afternoon and the laundry is still where I left it yesterday. For all of me, it can stay there. Much more important is my need to report on the the interview, which was with Wendy Quarry of the Merrickville Bridges group and Khatera Saeedi, a daughter and sister of the Afghani families sponsored by Bridges and CARR2 to come here.

 Here is the link to the radio interview, as it tells the start of this saga in detail. But, in summary, a group in Merrickville has managed to support the arrival of part of a family that had to get out of Afghanistan when the Taliban swept in. The matriarch of this family was a judge, and the grown sons and daughters were variously involved in human rights and women’s empowerment, through a radio station and, I believe, legal issues. This made them a prime target of Taliban reprisal. She, a daughter and the daughter’s two children, made it out of the country, sat in limbo while immigration was worked through, and have just arrived here. They had to leave the rest of the extended family behind.

 In the interview I heard, Khatera spoke, beautifully and at length, about the terror her family felt when the Taliban swept into their province. The family members at risk ran for Kabul, hid out there, the matriarch and one daughter with her children managed to get a plane out and ended up, weirdly enough, in Greece. It has taken this long to get them here. She is, she says, amazed at the generosity and friendly gestures of the Bridge group. She repeated the words ‘safe’ and ‘peace’ many times.

 The group, CARR, with which I previously volunteered, put a subgroup (CARR2) back together a few months ago and we are bringing in two more couples, with small children, from this family. From Kabul, they managed the nightmare trek to Pakistan and were admitted there short term. At present, I believe their paperwork is in order and we are waiting for the travel arrangements, which could be provided soon. I seem to have put myself into the mix as an English coach and have volunteered as a driver, because the housing that can be supplied to them is close to where I live. I am also involved, as we all always have to be, in fundraising to support these people until they can find their feet here.

 It is impossible for us, in our gentle life here, our safe and peaceful life, to really feel what these people have had to endure. How can we even imagine being holed up in a stuffy apartment in 40+ degree Celsius heat, in a fairly hostile country, waiting on word from strangers, doing paperwork in a barely understood language, hoping without real understanding of the process, in limbo, totally. No home, no livelihood. I think that the phone is the lifeline, the window on the future, and the suspense must be hellish.

 I worked with several of the Syrian refugees that the first incarnation of CARR brought to Perth. And I learned a lot from those contacts. The acquisition of enough English so that they can manage is so desperately important to them. The stress of trying to learn a new country, work in a strange language, find their feet, is huge. The work ethic of the young men I coached was incredible. Their courage under those stresses was amazing and humbling to see.

 I spent a happy half hour on the Amazon website last evening ordering some beginning materials to take to my fist meeting with this new group. One of the things I learned from the last round is not to waste time.

 And, speaking of time wasting, the laundry is still there.

 

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.

The Cliffs of Fail

 I am waiting for a delivery by FedEx this morning, having received a good half dozen emails earlier revising the delivery date. I got up worried about this delivery today, as I have a card from the dentist’s office with an appointment for June 7^th. Somehow this did not seem right, as I have just had a scheduled cleaning and have a repair booked for later this month. And when I called the office, I was correct in doubting it. So why do I have this card? If it is from last year, why does it say Tuesday? Sigh. The whole dentist scheduling thing has been weird this month. I arrived in the office last week to get the repair done, only to find the appointment booking was not long enough. So, I got a cancellation rescheduling for the next day.

On that day, JG was scheduled for a minor event at the hospital in the morning, and when I thought about it, the timing looked tight, and so I called and cancelled the dentist. Good thing I did, as I waited for JG in the parking lot of the hospital for six hours, and I would not have made the dentist. It turns out that the doctor who was seeing JG does not schedule. He brings his minor procedures in in the morning and does them as time permits between longer procedures. So JG lay on a hard mattress on a gurney all day without any food or drink and I hung out in the parking lot. Luckily I had water, a book and cigarettes enough to sustain me. (Yeah, don’t start, eh.)

We were both tired out for the next few days.

And tired about covers it for most days, lately. JG is not sleeping well (AC would sympathise) and is, consequently, not functioning at top form. I do not have that excuse, but am also more than a bit upset at how my head is behaving. I have had proper name aphasia for a long time, but it is getting worse. This morning I could not come up with ‘account’ as in an account number for billing. And that is some scary. Not only are there holes in the vocab, but the tricks I have always used to bridge the gaps are not working as well as they used to. Leaving me teetering on the edge, to continue the metaphor.

Being ‘old old’ is not a lot of fun. I recall my mother quoting, she said, her uncle as saying that he was as good a man as he ever was, but not for as long at a time. I can’t even say that, these days. The latest insult is that the fine woman who deals with my 80-year-old toenails glared at me at my last appointment and told me I had foot fungus. I am, she instructs, to soak my feet in vinegar and water. According to the aggravating guy to whom I am married, apple cider vinegar is the best kind. He googled it. And, yeah, it is certainly funny that I am now going to be walking around puffing apple cider vinegar scent. But if you were within reach, I would swat you anyway for laughing like a loon.

I just did a grammar and spelling check on this essay, as I figured I could not spell gurney correctly, for one thing. And the stupid, opinionated program told me to put a comma before several of my leading adverbs. Since I would not put a pause in if I were speaking, I do not think I need to put a comma into the written text. Apposition requires the comma, but not a simple leader in colloquial terms. Says I. And I am going to stick to it. We will not get started on the Oxford comma today. I will note, however, that I am not, repeat NOT, indenting my paragraphs. If Blogger does it for me, I am not responsible for its quirks.

I am about to go and look for a graphic to illustrate my stuttering brain. A fun job, in my opinion. And an hour or so later, after a fine playtime, the result heads off this post.

There still has not been a delivery.

As of mid afternoon, the van arrived with my parcel. Cheering.