Some things you just don't see coming

I had a very interesting experience today, one of those things that make you rethink opinions and attitudes you've held for a very long time.

This morning I took Hapi to the Reservoir as usual and for reasons I won't get into right now I decided to walk along a trail that is well out of the way. One of the mountain bike trails that is narrow and steep.

I had arranged earlier that I would talk to my eldest son on the phone, just to catch up on things since Christmas. Yes it's been that long since I last talked to him. When his dog was still alive we used to go for long dog walks and phone each other, him in Toronto and me in Nova Scotia. Since I was on a trail that I used to walk along for those talks I called him. He was having breakfast in bed and said he was about to call me. So I walked and we chatted, with Hapi following along behind.

At a certain point I noticed that Hapi had stopped quite a ways back, so I stopped too. She was looking back the way we had come and I saw a man coming along behind us. Hapi was waiting for him sociably. I was at a fairly level point in the trail so I stepped off the trail so the man could pass me but he didn't.

He said, "I know you, we met fifty years ago."

I was holding my cell phone, still in the call with my son, so he was hearing the conversation. The man started to describe the time that we met, it was the birth of my youngest son and I realized immediately that the man was the doctor on call that day. It wasn't fifty years ago, it was 42 years, that son has just celebrated his 42nd birthday.

The birth was a home birth, without benefit of a doctor or midwife, just a couple of friends. I lived in a cabin that I had built a couple of summers previous, situated almost a kilometre from the nearest road. No electricity, no running water, no phone. And a blizzard that day with a foot of snow on the ground. The birth went reasonably well but afterwards there was too much blood and one of my friends went to the neighbour's place over a kilometre away to call a doctor. This was that doctor.

Nothing bad happened, everyone survived without intervention, but I did have to go to the hospital "for observation" for a couple of days. There was more blood than there should have been but I didn't think it was life threatening. But I was young and fearless then so perhaps I underestimated.

I never liked that doctor. I thought he said and did things that were uncalled for, but being in a somewhat vulnerable position I did nothing about it other than to avoid ever having to deal with him again. Until today.

He seemed really happy to meet me today. He started recounting that long ago day as he saw it. Our memories did not match up entirely, but after all it was 42 years ago.

He said, "There was so much blood, I was really worried!"

I said, "Really? I wasn't."

He said, "Well you should have been!"

But he said it in a nice way, he wasn't criticizing. Then he told me that that had been his first year in practice and he had only just moved to the area.

"What a way to start out!" he said.

I didn't know that. It kind of put things in a different light. He was inexperienced, trying to handle a situation that he thought was beyond him, trying to appear like he knew what he was doing. And this was my third birth, I did think I knew what I was doing.

He told me that he had just retired.

I said, "Do you miss it?"

He said, "Oh yes, I miss it a lot. All those people, they were like family, they were my family. I miss them a lot."

I was a little sad for him. I didn't know that a doctor might feel like his patients were his family.

Anyway, we shook hands and he continued along the trail, I waited until he was out of earshot.

I said to my son who was still on the phone, "Did you hear that?"

"Wow," he said, "Wow!"

He was six years old at the time and present at the birth. He remembered it.

I always had a very bad opinion of this doctor because of that single encounter 42 years ago. I avoided having anything to do with him. But he turned out to be a nice man, a good person, and probably a good doctor.

Ironically I walk by his house every day on my way to the Reservoir. I didn't think he knew that, but he did.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I also went skating today. I've been trying to go almost every day because you never know when the ice will disappear under a foot of snow or a whole bunch of rain. I tried to go skiing but the snow is very icy and I am a very bad skier. I lose my balance easily and fall down, then it is really hard to get back up again. After the third fall I thought that if I fall again I won't even bother trying to get up. It feels like a lot of work for not much joy. Unlike skating.

Hapi is not keen on my skating or having to go out on the ice but she is patient about it. And today there were lots of kids skating so she got plenty of attention.

Joy, and Obligations

Okay first the Joy. I went skating this morning. The ice was amazing, like glass. And I was almost the first person on it since the last big rain and subsequent freezing. I met the guy who tries to keep it clear on my way in and he said the ice was so good that you really need sharp skates or you won't be able to skate on it. My skates are sharp.

Hapi ventured out but only made it a few feet to a mound of snow that looked like a little island surrounded by a glassy sea. She stayed there the whole time I was skating, she looked like an Eskimo sled dog abandoned on an ice floe. Each time I came around her little ice floe I thought, Just one more time, one more time and then we'll go. It was so hard to stop, I was in skating heaven!

I did finally stop and after changing back into my boots and Lee Valley Icers because the trails are as icy as the ponds, we went for a hike through an apple orchard and then a woodland trail. By the time we got back to the ponds parents and little kids were arriving for skating and hockey because today is a holiday.

The photo above was taken a couple of weeks ago, today it was even better: the sun was shining and the sky a brilliant blue.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The comments on my last post were pretty unanimous, don't feel guilty and take time for yourself. How exactly one does that is of course for me to figure out. After venting about the problem, I then turned it around from what I didn't want to do to what I did want to do. I had a list of things I wanted to spend more time on. That list made me feel better, I felt justified in staking out time to tackle my list.

I called E to explain about how driving to her place at supper time was too hard, that I would drop by in the daytime if/when I was in town to shop. She seemed to accept that, but three days later there was a message on my phone (I didn't hear it ring) pleading for me to come visit. Ugh!

I called her and said I'd visit soon and she was more than welcome to come visit me whenever she wanted. Next day she got her son to drive her over. It was suppertime of course, but at least I wasn't out driving around in the dark, and her son texted me when they'd be arriving so I was prepared. But OMG, watching her struggle out of the car, up the driveway to my back stairs, then precariously manouevre herself up those three steps with her son behind her with his arms out in case she fell backwards, then across the back deck and through the kitchen to the nearest chair: that was painful!

We had a nice little visit, there was a stack of photos of children and grandchildren on the table by her chair which we went through after she fed her little bag of dog treats to Hapi, and then it was time for them to leave. The painful process of getting from the car to the chair was re-enacted in reverse and they drove away. But not before E tried to nail down the exact time of my visit to her place in the next couple of days. I just said, Soon, soon.

But I don't know which is worse, driving to and from E's place in the dark when I am tired and hungry, or watching her struggle in and out of my place. I feel doomed.

So yesterday I was talking about this situation with a dogwalking friend, F, and he described his own struggle with aging parents. First his father and now his mother. His father died in his 90s and was both blind and demented, his mother is mentally healthy but blind and physically deteriorating, also in her 90s. In comparing notes I realized that my relationship with E is rather like his with his parents, and the sense of obligation is not much different. Although E is only a few years older than me, regarding her as a debilitated and dying parent puts things in perspective. There are obligations I can shake and obligations I can't, much as I would like to.

We commiserated on feelings of obligation and what it did to the rest of our lives, also on our growing desire to withdraw from everyday socializing altogether. I think it's a bit easier for guys to retire from social obligations than for women, there is more of an expectation of women to "take care of people". I can reduce the socializing with J more easily because she is still mobile, has a car of her own, and multiple other friends. But E has none of those things. Plus, her son has been a real lifesaver for me in the past, so I can't just say, Sorry, I don't feel like it. He said to me a few years ago, You are part of our family. Unfortunately I'm afraid that is true.

I spent the last few days tidying and reorganizing my home which was immensely pleasurable. I now have bags of garbage and recycling prepared for disposal and a couple of bags of stuff for Value Village and/or the SPCA. If I take it to VV, they will give me discount coupons to shop there which I could give to E, but E commented that she hates that place and would rather shop at the SPCA. So maybe I'll take my stuff to the SPCA.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I am going off Facebook. I disabled my account yesterday, if all goes well I will delete it in a month or so. A Facebook friend posted a TEDx video by Tristan Harris on why one should quit social media and most of his reasons made sense to me. There are pros and cons to everything but right now the cons are outweighing the pros for me.

Mr Harris noted that he thought the first couple of weeks after quitting would be the hardest but then one would adjust. We will see. Last night I went through my Facebook friends list and noted three people for whom I have no other contact info. It may be that I will lose those friends, I don't know. Two of them might be able to contact me if they remember the email address I had before Facebook and the third, well, I think I could probably track her down through mutual friends if I had to. All of them currently reside in other countries.

Big Raven

Hapi and I have been sick the past week, I am recovered but I don't know if Hapi is. She looks un-Hapi and she hasn't eaten her dinner in a couple of days. She does eat any treats offered though and still likes her morning walk. No one else can see any sign of her not being her usual self. I'm thinking it is temporary, she's done this before.

As a result of not feeling well I have had no motivation to go outside for anything other than Hapi's walk and I have to say I am enjoying that. I did get out skating once and skiing once at the Reservoir. The skiing was interesting, I got a lot of advice on how to ski as I made my way around the ponds. The advice was coming from older dogwalkers who used to ski back in the day. I think they were envious, they wanted to ski too. Two mentioned that they still had their skis in storage somewhere, maybe they'd dig them out. I'm not a good skier so I don't mind advice. Who knows, maybe I'll have company for another ski.

Meanwhile back at the ranch I've been puttering around. I got it into my head to finish the woodcarving that I started in Toronto years ago, it has been sitting on a high shelf in a closet since I moved to Nova Scotia (in 2010). I got it down and looked at it.

Where are my carving tools? I spent a day ransacking the house looking for them. In the process, found all sorts of other interesting things and decided to throw away half of them. Interesting garbage, not much more than that. Found the tools.

Then I thought I'd rearrange the furniture in the living room so that Hapi's bed is closer to the armchair I usually sit it, I thought she might spend more time indoors if she could be closer to me. Did that. Didn't make a difference, she seemed to think the new location was a bit odd but she could live with it.

Where are the notes I took in the woodcarving class? Another day ransacking, but still haven't found them. I suspect I may have tossed the notebook they were in. After looking at the set of tools I realized that I have forgotten what many of them are for. I may have to find a book on it.

The instructor in the woodcarving class was a woman whose name I forget. Most of the students were older than me and had been in that class for years, they had a nice thing going. It was a 4-hour class, but halfway through they took a leisurely coffee break and sat at a round table together just chewing the fat. We each had our own project that we worked on independently and the instructor was available for advice. When I joined the class (I was only there for two years), she took several half-sessions to get me up and running, and she did that with every new student. We shared the tools, which were high quality carving tools that she provided. She was a professional carver, actually made a living doing it. It was a very relaxed fun time and I very much enjoyed listening to their stories. One carver was the same age as my Dad would have been and he had the same name! Both given and surnames! They were both in World War II, what an amazing coincidence.

My project is a bas relief (that is what she started everyone on, once you completed that you could do anything you wanted) based on an Emily Carr painting called Big Raven. I love almost everything Carr has done, but Big Raven is my favourite. The instructor approved of my choice, she said it was not too detailed and would transfer nicely to a bas relief.

The first step was to photocopy an illustration of that painting from a book and blow it up to the size of the bas relief, about 12"x16".

Then I laid out a slab of plasticine on a piece of masonite and transfered an outline of the photocopy to the plasticine by poking a needle through the photocopy along all the lines. I also traced the same lines onto a transparent film of mylar with a magic marker. I used the mylar outline to draw the picture onto a 2" thick slab of balsa wood.

The plasticine was for a mockup of the final bas relief, I started by carving the plasticine using the same tools I would use on the wood. Plasticine is a little more forgiving than wood if you make a mistake.

I started carving the wood before I completed the plasticine mockup, the idea was to always be a little further ahead on the plasticine than on the wood. Actually there are parts of the final bas relief that are started (some background details and a tree) that don't appear on the mockup. I don't remember why that is the case.

While I was writing this my neighbour phoned and we had a long conversation about this and that. By the time we were finished I had been given three assignments—call my son about his daughter, call another neighbour about a concert ticket, and call a mutual friend to arrange to go out for lunch this week—which I had to complete before getting back to this blog post. All done now. Texted my son, left a message about lunch, and reserved a ticket for Friday.

PS, I looked through old blog posts about my time in the woodcarving class, the instructor's name was Ruth.

Full on winter

The long pond before the snow

According to the internet most of Canada is experiencing record cold weather, with the exception of Atlantic Canada which is experiencing only "seasonably" cold weather. Well I am here to tell you that is simply not true, this is definitely not "seasonable". Maybe warmer than central Canada, but still not seasonable. If it were just the thermometer temperature it would be very cold (for here), but the constant wind just makes it that much colder. We had one day last week when it was not windy and a degree or two warmer than usual, making it positively balmy in comparison to the days before and since. Taking Hapi for her morning walk is a flirt with frostbite. I thought I had enough firewood for two winters (I try to keep a year ahead), but I've been burning through it at a wicked pace and we're only at the beginning of the winter heating season.

Ice, ice everywhere! A couple of people who walk their dogs regularly at the Reservoir have really nifty ice grippers, I see their distinctive footprints on all the trails. I managed to collar one of them and ask where they got their footwear, but by the time I got to the website where they could be ordered, they were sold out. My inferior ice grippers will have to do for now.

The long pond is frozen sufficiently for skating (15 cm/6 inches) and some brave souls have cleared the skim of snow from part of the pond and already been out on their blades. I don't know how they stand the cold wind! But they are mostly kids and we all know how fearless kids can be about cold (Where are your mittens? Why on earth did you take them off?!?). The uncleared snow on most of the pond is meagre enough for the kids to skate right over it.

This past year has been my year of water issues (I have a bit of a history in that regard). First there was the sewage backup. Then I had a basement flood in part of the basement that I'd never seen water leakage before. Sewer pipe replaced, drainage tile installed and a finally a sump pump installed. Then a few days ago I discovered that water pipes behind a finished wall in the basement had frozen. I got them thawed out but I don't know if they burst or not so I turned off the water to those pipes to postpone having to deal with it until the spring. I suspect that the hot water pipes are fine but one of the (three) cold water pipes is not. A problem for another day.

Hapi usually sleeps in the basement but lately has moved upstairs. I am not sure why. It could be she is lonely because I have stopped sleeping in the basement, but that never stopped her before. Although she is noticeably more "clingy" (affectionate) as she ages. It also could be that she is finding the basement stairs more difficult, but she still goes down to the basement, she just doesn't stay there. It is definitely not the cold, she still likes to spend the coldest part of the day--the hours around sunrise--outside sleeping in her doghouse. And she occasionally still spends an entire night out there. Her doghouse is not insulated but it is positioned out of the wind. If she lived forever I still would not figure her out, her doggy brain is unfathomable.

Is it safe?

Winter sports I have survived

One of my sons gave me a year's subscription to the New Yorker for Christmas, the first issue arrived this week. I'm not sure I want to be reading about what is happening south of the border this coming year but hopefully there will be lots of other stuff to read in the magazine.

Came in from X-country skiing quite exhausted. I'm a terrible skier with unsuitable skis (too fast), but stupidly determined to master them. Sorry, no photos. Too busy trying not to fall (fell three times) and then struggling to get back up again. And of course I was out with a very good skier who had to keep doubling back to see what had happened to me. It was definitely a workout for me but not so much for her.

On the other hand I went skating on a pond yesterday, that was great. Haven't skated in a few years and I'm only marginally better at it than I am at skiing, but it was good. Hapi went with me, she kept pace with me trotting along in the snow beside the ice until it got boring and she went off into the woods to look for more interesting things.

Somebody cleared an oval skating path and a hockey rink inside the oval. I think this must be the first time anyone has done that, I've never seen anyone skating on this pond, although people tell me it has been done before.

Parts of the ice were very smooth, others a little bumpy. The hockey rink was freshly cleared and I tried skating on it, but the ice made these horrible noises like it was about to break up and I did not feel safe in the middle of the pond. I was told that it was perfectly safe, the noise was just the ice freezing after being exposed to the cold air after the insulating snow was removed.

Falling on ice is harder than falling on snow, but somehow more manageable (I didn't fall). At least I don't have to deal with big sticks attached to my feet. We were only out on the ice for less than an hour, when I got home and was taking off the clothes and emptying the pockets I realized I had lost my driver's licence. It was in the same pocket as my cell phone, and I took the cell out several times to take photos. One of those times the licence must have fallen out. So I had to go back to the pond and look for the licence. A little white card somewhere in the snow. Amazingly I did find it without too much effort! I backtracked to the places I had stopped to take photos and it was at the second spot I checked, just sitting there on top of the snow.

Got the warp on the loom and started weaving. I don't know if you can see the pattern in this picture, but it is called Goose Eyes. I also cut up the previous warp (see this post for a photo) into three pieces (three tea towels), and pinned the hems ready for sewing. Any day now I'll finish them...

More skating

On Saturday I went skating at Dufferin Grove with Isaac, Tristan and Phelan. Actually only Tristan and I were skating, Phelan is too little and Isaac opted to stay off the ice with him. So Tristan and I skated together, first just skating round and round and then later playing ice tag.

That's me in the beret, Tristan in a helmet.

Here I'm trying to avoid being tagged by Tristan.

After that we went into the change room and bought hot chili to eat. The change room is not just an ordinary change room, it also has a wood stove and tables and lots of children's books and a little cafe that sells good food cheap. A big bowl of vegan chili and two tortillas cost $2.00. There was a game of chess going on in one corner. On one wall is a painted map of the area, we challenged Tristan to find our street on the map. He's in grade one and just learning to read so it was definitely a challenge for him. But he knows our street name starts with "W" so he pointed out just about every street that started with "W", eventually getting the right one.

I was watching a lady doing some very pretty knitting on wooden needles, and noticed she was knitting continental style. Something I wish I could do but have great difficulty with. So I was watching her quite intently, trying to figure out if she had some trick to doing it. I moved over on the bench next to her and enquired about her knitting. Turns out she was visiting from Ottawa, but is originally form Germany or Austria so she has always knitted continental style. She was making a hat to match a sweater for her grandson in a lovely blue colour. The pattern was of her own design, definitely an expert knitter!


I bet she knit the red sweater too.

I didn't take this photo, obviously, or I would have made sure her lovely blue knitting was more visible.

This is my weblog

I am starting this blog with the intention of posting stories and events that I would otherwise be sending off to friends. Half the reason I send these stories to friends is just to keep a kind of record, the other half of course is to keep in touch and let people know what I am up to now. Now with this blog I can just let friends know the URL and they can check in whenever they want, and I get to keep a record without wondering if I'm boring folks with my long-winded stories. Hopefully I'll be posting pictures too, though I am rather bad at actually taking pictures.

Today for instance I went skating at Toronto City Hall and it was an absolutely gorgeous day. Blue sky and sun, crispy cold but not so cold that one didn't want to be outdoors in it. I had my camera with me but did not take any pictures, was just enjoying the skating too much to stop and take photos.

I took this photo a few years ago. That's the "new" City Hall in the background, and the moose on the diving board isn't there anymore. Old City Hall would be on the right side of this photo. When I was there today the whole rink was in full sun, so I think it must have been later in the day when I took this photo.

It's a neat place, the old City Hall on one side the "new" City Hall on another, the arches over the ice rink, and the surrounding downtown Toronto office towers. I went with Helen, a woman I met at the library knitting group last fall. We've been trying to go skating together for a couple of months I think!

Tonight I'm going to the library knitting group, going to be working on my hand warmers. I'm making them in a brown cotton-polyester blend, they are like fingerless mittens but thin for wearing indoors. In the winter my apartment is cold and I can wear sweaters and long underwear to keep warm but my hands get cold. So these will cover my wrists and hands up to about the first knuckle on my fingers and thumb. I don't really like fingerless gloves because they separate the fingers and make them harder to keep warm that way. And fingerless mittens are quicker to make. Or would be, if I didn't keep redesigning them! I'll show a picture of them when they're done, or when at least one of them is done, right now it doesn't look like anything at all.