Not on the road but in recovery

The pictures today are completely unrelated to the text, they're from a recent shopping trip on Roncie (Roncesvalles).

Best laid plans, etc

All the test results are in and the coast is clear. With a couple of minor exceptions, nothing there to impede the way. The twinge of pain down there is most likely arthritis, so I'm going to ignore it.

Doc asked if I wanted an X-ray, I said No, his diagnosis made sense to me. He said take a couple of Tylenol every day for a few days and if the pain goes away then that pretty much confirms that it's arthritis.

Of course in the meantime I came down with a sore throat and fever, so leaving today---which had been the plan if all went well at the doc's office yesterday---is now out of the question.

I'm over the worst of whatever this is, fever is gone, throat is better, but I'm sufficiently lethargic to not want to be driving all day. With the long Victoria Day weekend coming up, I don't want to be on the road with all the other holiday travellers, so that means my departure date is now postponed until sometime next week.

I have mixed feelings about it all. Toronto is leafed out and green now, the weather is neither hot nor cold, so it really is a nice time of year to be here. But I had set my heart on being in the Harbour by mid-May and that is now not going to happen.

So, my plans are now to:

(a) get better,
(b) try to get my kayak into Lake Ontario this weekend,
(c) see the latest Star Trek movie,
(d) see the last Lost episode for the season, and
(e) try to get together with The Dog Ladies one last time.

Dog days

While I was going through my week of medical tests, we very nearly lost our dogpark. Apparently a complaint was lodged (this now turns out not to be true) and one of the Catholic School Board maintenance folks told us that we would have to get a permit to take our dogs onto school property, and the permit was going to cost BIG BUCKS. It was a rather stunning turn of events. With all the stress of the medical tests I was in no mood for it and it instantly depressed me.

I thought:

(a) there's no way we can fight this, or at least not in the near term, and
(b) this dogpark has meant more than simply a place to walk the dog, it was the basis for my flimsy but growing social life in Toronto and now it's gone.

Without it I just felt like, what's the point, well, of anything, really.

However, with the Clean Train Coalition thing going on, this neighbourhood is very politicized right now, it was just a hop skip and a jump to take on the School Board over this issue. The Brockton Dogs Yahoo group had already been formed so it was kicked into high gear to take on the issue. Within a day alliances were formed with other dog owners' groups, several people were calling the Board over the issue, and news was being debated and discussed online as to what our best strategy was. The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, within a couple of days the issue got resolved and the dogpark remains, it turns out that the "complaint" was actually a somewhat misrepresented report from a Board employee.

So kind of not surprising that I fell victim to a sore throat, as this past week has been an emotional roller coaster.

Preparations continue in spite of setbacks...

Seeing as how I have no energy for packing or cleaning or whatever, I instead mapped my truck. Crawled around inside the cab and the truckbed with a measuring tape and wrote down all the packing space measurements. Then I measured all the things I wanted to pack and tried to map them to the truck space measurements. I think I'm going to squeak by. And there's still the kayak hatches as a last resort.

Come fly with him

On another note, I recommend Black Flies and Bush Planes to you (see the blog list on the right). This is the new blog of my son Josh, who is spending this summer in northern Ontario becoming a bush pilot. He's an excellent writer (comes by it honestly I think ;-) and it's an interesting topic.

Something I've found fascinating about blog-reading over the past year or so is all the sub-communities of bloggers. There are elders, birdwatchers, taxi drivers, political commentators, mommies, knitters, quilters, you name it, they have a blogging community. When you chance upon one blog you get to sample a bunch of the same ilk by following bloglist links. So Josh is the tip of the airpilot iceberg, check out his bloglist for an international sampling of airpilots who blog.