The whole DAY has been like this.

 I am on hold, the second caller in the queue.

I wrote that this morning.  The problem was eventually identified and fixed by a very, very clever young man who noticed that someone had spelled our name wrong and that was the spoiler. We are an ÈourÈé, not an 'ore'.

 Oh, drat and other expletives. My keyboard has shifted to French. Again.

Back later. Or, perhaps, Encore un fois. Whatever.

Hah! "our".

I went to get my hair cut this afternoon. My wonderful stylist, who has been cutting my hair for twenty years, disappeared from the salon just as I arrived. Family problem. I have done the same thing myself and so I do not fault her. But a lovely young colleague of hers gave me quite a different cut. 

And there is no Quick Blending flour in either of the grocery stores in my shopping town.

And it is 11:05. I have just turned into a pumpkin - the kind that has just had its brains scooped out with a spoon.

Tomorrow I have to go and work at the hall in the morning, my daughter and partner are coming for lunch, so they will make it. Then I have to make the filling for three pies.

On Sunday I will put the meringue (Where is an accent when I want one?) on the pies, schlep them to the hall, perhaps clean and fill twenty odd pair of salt and pepper shakers, come home for a break and go back to work on the door for the hall dinner.

So much for posting every day with any coherence or plan.

 I rolled off to Book Club today, with my three typed pages of text about Follett’s Cathedral series. And when I handed it out, most of the other members remembered reading the The Pillars of the Earth tome. They seemed interested in reading the newest sequel, as reported. I did warn about the possibility of lack of sleep thereby. And then the rest of the group reported, historical fiction being our genre for this meeting. And each of the other choices was a book based on a real event or happening. And each of them was Meaningful; indigenous people’s suffering, Japanese-Canadian internment during WWII, the pogrom of Jewish people in Poland, ditto. And more. To be honest, I felt a bit of a fraud with my cheerful epics of what never was.

It is November 2^nd, and the calendar page has been turned. Our daughter contemplating the pond has been displaced by three candid snaps of the step-grandsons. Lovely to have this piece on the kitchen wall to admire, although we keep our data on a less exotic piece of paper on a clipboard. And in calendar booklets, pocket and purse sized. We do not use our iPhone apps; for one thing, we are not sure we know how and for another, we are used to our twentieth-century tools. JG’s brother used to be on at us about this, but we ignored him.

Tomorrow I am finally going to get the haircut I have needed for the last month. Also, while I am in town, I am going to buy the pie crusts I will need to make three pies on Saturday afternoon after I finish working at our community hall on Saturday morning to get the potatoes peeled for the dinner we are putting on on Sunday as a fundraiser. Thus, also, the pies. I think I have written about this event and the pie cooking before; the event is called the Hunters’ Dinner and we run it (Covid years excepted) on the Sunday before deer hunting season starts in this location. We have a neighbour who sights in rifles, and so the loud bangs have already started. The YD’s dog always hated these bangs and would need her paw held for some time after she heard one. Sadly, she is no longer around to hear them.

Nor is the YD around, as she is resident in Brussels for the next couple of years. Today her father wanted to show a photo of her swimming in a very cold-looking bit of water, but when I tried to find the photo on his phone, I phoned her by accident. Three times, I think. Three overseas calls. Thank goodness it was not a charged call series. I have a book on how to use an iPhone, and should perhaps be reading it in preference to Follett’s addictive fiction.

But reading is my delight, as well as my fortress. And evening is the time to indulge, yes?

Signing off. There is a novel waiting patiently beside the computer. (Note that Grammarly made me add those hyphens, but also wanted me to correct ‘sights’, not recognizing the usage. And corrected a spelling error.)

Ken Follett's Cathedral series

So, if I am going to post every day, some leeway should surely be allowed? This is what I will be presenting tomorrow at Book Club. I have just edited out about 90% of what my poor book club buds will have to look at. But, opinions are eagerly requested on this version!

"Follett surprised his readers with his first non-spy thriller, The Pillars of the Earth (1989), a novel about building a cathedral in a small English village during the Anarchy in the 12th century. The novel was highly successful, received positive reviews and was on The New York Times Best Seller list for eighteen weeks. It topped best-seller lists in Canada, Britain and Italy, and was on the German best-seller list for six years. It has sold 26 million copies so far. (written in 2017, I think.)

Its much-later sequel, World Without End (2007), returns to Kingsbridge 157 years later and features the descendants of the characters in Pillars. The next novel in the series, A Column of Fire, was published in September 2017. Beginning in 1558, the story follows the romance between Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald over half a century. It commences at a time when Europe turns against Elizabethan England, and the queen finds herself beset by plots to dethrone her. A fourth novel, The Evening and the Morning (2020), is a prequel to The Pillars of the Earth. Set in the decade around 1000 AD – in the so-called Dark Ages – the story "concerns the gradual creation of the town of Kingsbridge and of the many people – priests, nobles, peasants, the enslaved – who played significant roles". 

A fifth novel, The Armour of Light, was released in September 2023".

The information above is “cut and paste” from Wikipedia. There is a very extensive biography and discussion there; worth looking through.

I read The Pillars of the Earth many years ago and enjoyed it immensely. Well written, it has a marvellous storyline and is a bit of a learning experience about cathedral construction.  When I saw that there was a series stemming from it, and a new book out, I picked it for the club. And ended up rereading Pillars and chugging through the whole series.

Follett writes, in my opinion, stories that you cannot leave, even when it is far past bedtime. His research is really very good, insofar as my knowledge goes, and he writes good, clean prose. Again, in my opinion, the books are uneven. The prequel is almost what I categorize as a potboiler. It does not have the drama of the others, possibly because the characters are mostly not as well drawn. 

The newest book has a weak ending, for me, as he manages to move through the Battle of Waterloo in a very few pages, leaving me thinking he had either quit researching or had decided the book was too long. He has the set up - his characters are gunners. But the battle on the heights is almost ignored. However, the majority of the book is a lot of fun to read and instuctive on the cusp between home spinning and weaving and industrial methods. The medieval centre book is good, but the setting is not as well done as in the first and last, and he tries, almost, to cram in too much again. The Elizabethan one is the best structured, but not as compelling a read. 

I usually read books twice, once for the plot and once for the language and nuance. I will certainly read The Armour of Light again. I got it as an ebook on my Kindle, but am thinking that it is a book I would like to have as a real book. And Christmas is coming, right, YD?

Ghosties and ghoulies, (and lizards)

 And from things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us.

I learned to sew on a machine at age eight and did hand sewing before that. Doll clothes, as I recall, and simple embroidery. My mother and grandmother both did a lot of sewing; my mother could tailor, even, and made my father’s sports jackets. I remember wearing blouses cut down from old shirts of my father’s, for one thing. Because not only did they sew, they were, politely, frugal. And I learned that too.

It is Hallowe’en, and on this day, many years ago, I had costumes for my daughters, and later for my granddaughter that I made to order. Or ordered them to wear what I made, depending. I looked up a few photographs for this post as illustrations, and am amused all over again at the first one I found. The ED (elder daughter) was a clown 

in a costume made from old curtains. There were a lot of costumes like that – I regularly rummaged the ends and scraps bins in the local fabric store and received, joyfully, donations of clothing not needed that could be adapted, either for regular wear or costumes.  

I wish this photo were colour – the dragon is a pale spring green with a red ridge. Later the granddaughter got a much more elaborate dragon costume as I was rummaging in a more high-end store – her deep green and golden scaled fabric had a shiny gold ridge. 

But the best ever costume required both father and me – first the ED and then, because she saw the photo of her mother’s wings, the granddaughter, got to be a monarch butterfly.

Father bent the wires into shape and I sewed old sheets onto the wire. I then painted the fabric, using a reference book to get the markings positioned correctly. One set of wings was donated to the school; the second was used by the ED and partner at an adult party as shown.

Sewing costumes was a lot of fun as they did not require finishing the way a proper garment did. No buttonholes, hemstitch or binding required. Measure, cut and sew. Once, when I did not measure carefully enough, the costume just barely fit. Luckily it was worn on a warm for October night. Tonight bids fare to be much colder. A prepared parent makes the costume big enough that lots of sweaters can be stuffed underneath. However, I did make ‘real’ clothes. For myself, and for the daughters until they rebelled and wanted clothes like their peer group; i.e., jeans with a label. For her last costume with me, the granddaughter sewed it herself under supervision. As shown; a long dress with a collar, puff sleeves and a yoke made from fabric she chose herself.

And I mended, our increasing affluence having allowed me to purchase a brand new sewing machine with a ‘drop arm’. This fine invention allowed me to patch a leg without unpicking the whole [censored] seam to get to the worn spot. And thereby hangs a tale. I wish my aunt, a marvellous raconteur, were here to tell it, but you will have to put up with me. This aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, lived near us and was actually closer in age to me than to my mother. Her children, two boys, were only a few years older than my girls. And my aunt and I did a good few things together. At one point, soon after I got this marvellous sewing machine, she arrived with three or four pairs of her son’s jeans, all with considerable worn patches, rips, and wear. She was, she said, tired of the boy (he was in his early teens) looking like a tramp and could I mend the jeans. I could. I sacrificed one pair to make patches and I reseamed, invisibly patched and trimmed the others into respectability. Son, receiving these garments, was devastated. The fashion in his high school was that the jeans be ripped and worn to pieces. My mends had wrecked his sartorial splendour and, in fact, he was now a laughing stock. His mother was most amused.

I am now on my third sewing machine, this one an all-singing all-dancing Scandinavian monster. On which I mend. And do not, alas, make costumes any more. However, there is a bowl of chocolate bars at the ready, should a costumed child appear out here this evening. And I hope for the full spooky moon.

October Song

Well, it's a long, long time
From May to December.
But the days grow short,
When you reach September.
And the autumn weather
Turns the leaves to gray
And I haven't got time
For the waiting game.

And the days dwindle down
To a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days
I spend with you.
These precious days
I spend with you.

 We had our first snow this morning. I woke up to a white world, a beautiful world, but since it is the second last day of October, it was rather a bit of a shocker. And I found bits of the lyrics above running through my head. “And the days dwindle down to a precious few”.

  My days, certainly, have done that. I am eighty-one (“and a half” in my granddaughter’s eight-year-old treble). Nothing I am works the way it used to – eyes, spine, digestion, fingers, skin, brain. I spent some time this morning “downsizing”, as they say. I tossed out maps and information pamphlets from trips we have taken – Virginia, Newfoundland, Utah and the rest of the southwest of the USA – and, as I tossed, knew, sadly, that I never would go to those places again; there was no use keeping the information. JG and I took a lot of long and fascinating trips in the day, but we have no ability to do that any more.

 And, I thought, I have no ability to do much of anything, really. Except, maybe, write. The fingers, lumpy as they are, do work. The brain, cranky as it is, does spin out words. And, maybe, the things that flutter around in my head will be amusing to me, at least, to write down. So, the intent is to do a diary for November. For anyone interested enough to keep reading all of this. "These precious days, I will spend with you."

If I am honest with myself, I have not done a lot with my life. Scraped through university, taught, briefly, took a variety of part-time jobs when my two daughters were very young. Took a full-time job when they were in their early teens and got fired from it. Supported my husband in the life he wanted, including a quarter century making maple syrup every spring. I also did a lot of community and committee (much the same thing) work, mainly because there seemed to be a need to get something done. I found I did that rather well. An eight-year stint as a trustee on the school board of the city where we lived is probably the high point. I got elected quite easily, probably because one of my skills is public speaking. I did and do care about how children are educated. And about what opportunities are open to them. But that is not really an outstanding resume, for eighty-plus years.

I can’t wait to see what Grammarly makes of all those sentences with no subject. Too bad, Grammarly. That is the way I write. It is a lot like the way I talk. (I set up Grammarly a few weeks ago, because I have a tough time typing on my iPad and an even tougher time typing on my phone, using one digit. (Here I am using all ten; I took typing in high school and have never lost the main part of it, although I have to look at the keyboard to put numbers in. Is it not a Fine Thing that proper writing requires writing out the numbers as words. “Here” being the computer with a full=sized keyboard.) Grammarly took my sentences with no subject. I am informed that my "clarity" is good, but that my "engagement" is "a bit bland". And, as for "correctness", I am "looking good". This analysis thing is actually fun, although "bland" is a slap in the old kisser.

What I find is my main source of pride is that my daughters have done extremely well; they both have Very Important Work. My avatars, out doing good for the world.

And now I have to go and make supper. The meat is in the oven, but the rest of it is awaiting my paring knife and organization. This may be Day One, or I may come back to reread and edit. Depends. The days grow short, after all.

My Corner

 I don’t know if this holds true for other people, but for me there is a childhood time and a place that I can look back to when I was perfectly happy. My parents’ kitchen had a ‘banquette’, as they were called. A corner with padded benches on two sides of a table and a chair on the third side. My mother’s younger sister, who taught ‘Enrichment’ (Music, Art, etc.) at several schools, would drop in frequently after classes were over to have a coffee and chat with my mother. They were close and had similar amazing, blazing intelligence and similar whacky senses of humour. Listening to them was fascinating as they dissected people and things.

I sat on the banquette seat between them – I was probably eleven or twelve – reading, and listening to them. And I knew that I was perfectly loved and perfectly approved and perfectly safe. Even now, seventy years along, I can see that table, hear them talking and laughing, feel the warmth of the seat, smell the coffee percolating. The thing is, though, that they were both constant smokers, and so the corner of the kitchen would also be wreathed in tobacco smoke. So, there is my perfect place. Loved, approved and smoked, with a coffee flavour.

About the smoking. Our house smelled of tobacco smoking, in truth, as my father also smoked as did most of our relatives and visitors. When I was taken to meet my future husband’s family, the parents and daughter all smoked and so the odour was the same. Mostly, in the fifties, there was cigarette smoking everywhere.

As time and years went by and the attitudes and habits changed, my nose still told me that tobacco smoke meant home. Unfortunately, both for me and for them, my family finds the odour to mean just the opposite. They hate the smell and can detect it in very small quantities. And I have tried to accommodate. From smoking in the house, I have moved to smoking outside on a screened porch off the living room. This is a poor compromise for me in windy winter weather, and a poor compromise for them as I bring residual fumes inside on my clothing and in my lungs.

I am writing this because I had a very emotional discussion with my YD this week about my smoking. Among other things, I tried to explain to her why I do not find the smell offensive. Without, I feel, much success. So, here is another try. And, looking at what I have written, I think I should add that I adored both my mother and my aunt. My mother had Standards, and I had to meet them, but when I did, and as long as I did, she showed both love and pride in me. And my aunt simply loved me, took me on fascinating expeditions to museums and theatre, thought everything I did was perfectly wonderful and not only loved me but laughed with me. They were, for me, the two best people in the world.

My life has given me a lot. I have been married for over sixty years to a man whom I implicitly trust. I have two successful children who seem to love us and visit and help out. I have no monetary problems, my country is at peace and my neighbourhood is safe. I have good medical care available, good friends, a fine place to live. But there are always a few flies in the ointment, eh? And when there are, what I want above anything, is my corner of the banquette, my coffee, my book and my cigarette.

Roads

 Warning: long, discursive and a bit weird.

synonyms for housewife: homemaker, family manager, home economist, home engineer, lady of the house, mistress of the house, wife and mother.

You know, the world would probably not run without housewives. (And the occasional house husband, of course.) A woman with top intelligence and drive can manage a fulfilling and successful career and wife/motherhood. But most women do not have the opportunities, the work ethic or a very helpful spouse, all of which are what makes the career path possible. Yes, I hear you muttering, there are a lot of single women out there managing work and children. Yes. There are. The point is, though, that it can be very, very hard. Ask a childless, unmarried career woman how easy it is to have a dinner party solo, just in passing. She could certainly use a helper, a gofer, someone to shop, clean, manage the laundry, run errands, garden, all that. A helpmeet. Synonym for wife. To have the time and resources necessary to climb most work ladders, a person needs that support. That wife. Politicians almost have to have one – preferably blonde, sweet, the mother of two and a half adorable children, and ready at any time to pose with said children and the photogenic dog.  Most successful people have one. Having the support leads to success.

I am defining ‘success’ in saying all this. A successful career, as opposed to a ‘job’, or a succession of jobs, is specific, in this context. It is the path of choice for the woman in it, and a path that leads upward to recognition and reward, to responsibility and promotion. A successful career satisfies the person in it and the person gives satisfaction. Sure, a lot of men do not have successful careers, for various reasons.  But my point is that many more women than men end up dead-ended, struggling, underpaid and unappreciated. If, instead of a struggling worker, the woman is a housewife, all of these things are also very likely to be true. Yes, there are housewives by choice. If they have not been persuaded by custom or family pressure, good for them.  Those few, those happy few. As they say. The rest of womankind is, um, held cheap.

Is it fixable, do you think?  There is one road, a path that runs through education combined with both the ability to profit by the education and the opportunity to use it. For this to work, the education has to be relevant and suited to the individual. The things taught have to be related enough to the work world, to confer value and impart both knowledge and desire to know and do. I have worked in the peripheries of the education industry all my life and I do not have a high opinion of a lot of the curriculum, which tends to lag reality, or some of the teachers, who tend to live in yesterday instead of tomorrow. Somewhere in there it would also be really good if the student learns to think, just a little; but I have digressed. 

One thing that cannot be changed is that it is the women who gestates and produces the children. And, after the pregnancy, a lot of the caring for the newborn falls to the mother, especially if the child is nursed rather than bottle fed. Although it is tiring for both parents, raising the children falls mostly to the mother, in our society. The same thing is true of housework and, just generally, gatekeeping. In a two-person household, these tasks tend to fall on the wife of the house. She may hear ‘How can I help?’, but lifting the burden requires looking at its shape and weight and figuring out how to share, truly share it, without being told to do each individual task. The gatekeeper, the scheduler, has the responsibility and must make the time to do the planning, telling, reminding, list making, locating and researching. True even if there is an empty nest – guess who ends up disposing of the egg shells. 

Ah, I now hear you saying. You just need to simplify. Then the burden is less. I hear that in a lot of ways from a lot of sources and I think it is just plain wrong. Simple solutions to complex problems do not exist. Sorry. Whether you are the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition or married to a worrier, you are, please believe me, wrong. “You don’t need to iron my handkerchiefs” says the helpful spouse. Well, no. But rough-folded handkerchiefs do not fit into the drawer properly; they take up twice the space of ironed ones. To simplify, one could use paper tissues. At, sadly, a cost both to the weekly grocery bill and the environment, not to mention the task of making sure that a tissue does not go into the wash in a pocket. Paper tissues are make using bleach, oh dear, but the cloth handkerchiefs require bleach, or at least saline solution, if the user has a cold or a nosebleed. And around we go. Simple? Nah. 

Disclosure time: I am a housewife. I have been a housewife, more often than not, for sixty years and counting. Yes, I have studied, worked, volunteered, all things I did in addition to my day job. Um, perhaps I should describe it as my day-and-night job, because housewifing is not something that you
can quit at 5:00 PM, hang up your tools and go out for a drink. Especially not if you are a mother; disclosure requires me to add here that my househusband was a willing and creative babysitter in the evenings and certainly made being a mother an easier job because of that. I do not, am not, able to judge if I have been a successful housewife, though, because what is the standard for success? Sixty years of marriage to the same man? Two successful children raised, launched and applauded? A grandchild well on the way to at least a chance at a satisfying life?  Am I, then, a success judged by my past ability to do my job? I repeat, I have no idea. Am I satisfied with myself? Well, no. 

It was the road I chose, but the road not taken haunts me.

Long Light

We are almost to the equinox, and that means that the sun is higher and sets later.  At this time of year, if we have the right snow conditions, there is what I call ‘long light’; long clear shadows are cast across the snow by the setting sun. We had those conditions today and I grabbed my big Nikon and tried to record them. It has not worked well – the photos are dull compared to the visuals in my memory. I am going to post them anyway – a pale ghost of what I wanted. The turkeys in shot 3 did not intend to photobomb – they come by every afternoon as JG puts out a snack for them and the deer.

As for the ‘long light’, the quote is from a poem by Tennyson. It is a fine and opulent stanza, typical of him. Rather like getting a bouquet of flowers with roses and chrysanthemums and carnations all bunched together. Beautiful in its own way.

A mixed bag from the Old Bag

I actually wrote a letter several weeks ago. The kind you put in an envelope with a stamp on it. I thought that the YD might enjoy getting such a thing as a change from emails and WhatsApp and Facetime, much as I appreciate these things and much as she employs them with great éclat. (Spellcheck just refused to give me that last word. It is, oh horror, French! And I am too lazy to go looking for the accent aigue. Hah! Got it.) I mailed it shortly after it was written, February 6th as I recall, and she acknowledged receipt yesterday, February 26th. Not a good venue for urgent communication. The term ‘snail mail’ comes to mind. 

 I first started using email when the ED (E is for Elder, sorry) was in Great Britain, either as a grad student or newly married. She and her spouse set it up for me, I think as a birthday gift. Later, when her marriage broke down, the email was a lifeline between us, for me anyway, as I heard from her pretty well every day and knew that she was surviving and managing and at least a bit okay. This drama took place before the cell phone era arrived out here. I had a ‘bag’ phone in the car to use in mobile emergencies, but it only was viable in Canada. When we had the big ice storm in ’98, the landlines went down for lack of power. No internet either, of course. I was frantically worried about the daughter and tried to phone from the car phone. Bell Canada held me up for most of a day and I had to prepay a preposterous sum to get overseas coverage, but I did manage it and we got through to the ED, who had flown back to the UK during a lull in the ice storm, and she was okay. After eleven (as I recall) days, we got the power back and email back and I got back in touch with my world.

 

I was thinking about that phone when I wrote the quick post about the car phone conversation that is the one below this one. ‘Plus ca change’, and all that. Spellcheck blue lines again. Hah! I got ‘ca’ but without the cedilla, but am called out for the placement of ‘plus’ which Spellcheck thinks is English. I am now going to go back and put that in single quotation marks and see if the blue underline disappears. Nope. Still there. Spellcheck, or whatever the correction program in Word is now called, is anally retentive sometimes. “After an introductory word or phrase, a comma is best”, it pontificates. Now that the computer geeks are bringing AI along, I look forward to having an AI doing the spelling and grammar review. That should be instructive. 

And here is a just-for-fun instructive aside. French has much nicer words for the various kinds of quotation marks than we do in English. I love ‘accolades’, and ‘crotchets’, both of which are also words in English. Here are the terms for your reading pleasure.

 « » guillemets (m)         quotation marks, inverted commas

 ( ) parenthèses (f)           parentheses

 [ ] crochets (droits) (m) (square) brackets 

{ } accolades (f)             curly brackets, braces 

For my pleasure, I have just read a post in a blog I follow that has a couple of paragraphs of pure gold – an analysis of some of the author’s writing skills. In another blog I read regularly, the writer is a really skilled photographer and frequently posts about how he sets up and why and how he edits. I learn something almost every time. There is also a blogger in PEI whose posts are full of information about the coast, the birds and the laneways of that lovely island. And then there is me. I try all of these themes from time to time but …. JOATS do most things, but none of them all that well. 

There is very little in here that is even brass, let alone gold. But sometimes, just sometimes, the words flow, pour off the ends of my tapping fingers and arrange themselves gloriously on the page. Sometimes. (I just substituted a word in that penultimate sentence and will probably reread it a multitude of times before I finally post it. I did much the same process with the letter to the YD.) And, my goodness!, how I do love my parentheses. Yeah, okay, brackets. 

There are a lot of functions up there in the drop-down menus. One of which is, it appears, translation. The sentence below is provided by Microsoft Translator and says, essentially, that I could translate if I knew how.

 اگر میں چاہوں تو اس کا عربی سے اردو میں سینتیس زبانوں میں سے کسی ایک میں ترجمہ کر سکتا تھا۔ یا مجھے لگتا ہے کہ یہ دستیاب ہے. کاش میں جانتا تھا کہ یہ کیسے کرنا ہے. And now I do. There are approximately three dozen language options, from Arabic to Urdu, the last of which is the one I chose. The things we can do! 

 Anything, it appears, except stop the carnage around the world that is taking innocent lives daily, in various horrible wars and accidents. I had to stop there and go out and watch the snow fall and calm down. When I think about what is happening in so many places in the world today, my reaction is rage. Pure, unadulterated rage. It should be stopped, it must be stopped. Why cannot it be, simply, stopped. I will stop here. More snow fall needed.

Car Phones

This is just a quickie post to share one of the funnier moments that modern technology allows. 

 JG came home from shopping in our local town yesterday quite bemused as well as amused. I appears that he was chatting with his daughter on his (hands free) mobile as he drove along the highway coming home. The daughter was also on her mobile in her car and, get this, driving the Autobahn in Germany. JG said that the connection was crystal clear (we are only a little over 100 years from ‘crystal’ wireless sets). 

Every time I think about this, I giggle a bit. How technology changes and changes us. My grandmother saw the change from horse and buggy to automobile. She lived in one of, I think, nine households on a party telephone line that crackled and hissed. She did not drive a car nor expect to do so. In my residence at university there was one telephone in a common room on each floor. I thought it the height of decadence that my daughters had their own phones in their residence rooms. Not so, and the height of decadence has become my grandkid chatting with her parents on her mobile as she walks the streets around her university. And now this. 

 The daughter in question just got her new car, and says it talks to her. It wants her to have two hands on the wheel and stay in the centre of her lane. And tells her so, or at least will do so until she figures out how to turn this fine feature off. She says it sounds like her father. I wish I had my grandmother here to tell about this. Can’t you just picture her incredulous face?

Anyone for a Mackinaw?

 

A loading of icy rain.

It is cold out there. When I was out on our porch for my post-prandial cigarette (Yeah, I know) it was -26°C, translating to -11°F and it is supposed to get even colder later on. I zipped up the coat I wear out there and covered my head. I was, however, still in my Birkenstock sandals and I may have to change them for fuzzy slippers at bedtime, the next scheduled trip into the Vortex. (Or whatever) I was, as I zipped, reminded of a silly song I learned around a campfire in my misspent youth, about a logger. One verse goes, as I recall, ‘At forty degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest.’ It does not say which zero in the song, but when I was that young it was Fahrenheit. Okay, can’t spell that. And since I have to go and find the spelling, (I forgot the first ‘h’) I will find a link to the logger song, just for your enjoyment.

Here is the reference for the Frozen Logger. I had no idea so many people have ‘covered’ it. Here below are the frankly idiotic but fun lyrics in entirety and, of course, I did not remember the line I wanted correctly. Only the AC can do that, with hymns anyway, eh? And why, just in passing, can I not reduce the line values here to save space? Argh. I have edited punctuation and changed a few words for rhythm in this version. There are many.

As I stepped out one morning into a small cafe

A 40 year old waitress to me these words did say...

 "I see, sir, you’re a logger, and not just a common bum

'Cause nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb.

My lover was a logger, there's none like him today.

If you'd pour whiskey on it, he'd eat a bale of hay.

My lover came to see me, ’twas on one freezing day.

He threw his arms around me and broke three vertebrae.

I saw my lover leaving, trudging through the snow

Up going gaily homeward at 48 below.

                                      I learned this one differently, as:

'My lover he did kiss me, so hard he broke my jaw.

I could not speak to tell him he forgot his Mackinaw. '

The weather tried to freeze him, it tried its level best;

At a thousand degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest’

It froze clear through to China, it froze to the stars above

At a million degrees below zero, it froze my logger love.

And so I lost my lover, and to this cafe I come

And here I wait 'til someone stirs his coffee with his thumb."

 This is a fine cartoon rendering. 

  It has been a warm if snowy January. We had a thaw that was well above freezing and the rain fell, mostly, as rain. No ice storm, although we are celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of our big one, about which you can read (if you must) here. Look at it, I should correct myself. The above is a video. This one should be print.

There were lots of photos, but I can’t resist adding at least one of my own, heading off this less than coherent offering of a post. I will not add a shot of the thermometer. Lots of us are doing that.

The aftermath of the 1998 ice storm.