Back in Toronto

I arrived home in Toronto this past evening (it's the wee hours of the morning now), everything fine.

I goofed about what I am allowed in carry-on baggage; Peter and Pat gave me some preserves which I should have packed in the checked baggage but instead tried to carry through security. Fortunately my son Josh who had driven me to the airport was still around as he had to update some documents there, so I called his cellphone and he came by security to pick up the suspect preserves. Merry Christmas Josh!

Isaac picked me up at the Toronto airport, he had Dobby in the van who was happy to greet me in the airport parkade. Except Isaac closed the van door on his tail. Oops. Dobby howled briefly and then wagged his whole body in greeting when he saw me.

I've mostly unpacked, but I'll finish tomorrow. I'm still on Vancouver time so it doesn't feel all that late, even though everyone else in the house packed it in hours ago.

When I come home after being away for awhile, and my place has been rented out to someone else, it's a bit strange coming back to things not being quite normal. Not only do I now have to unpack my bags but also all the closets and boxes that I packed my personal belongings away in.

I never met the tenant, all I know about him is what he left behind in the kitchen. Apparently an American who likes Tennessee bourbon and organic blueberry jam.

Happy New Year

I wish you all the very best in the new year, 2010. 

I am enjoying a quiet evening with old friends in Whistler, we are all hoping we will manage to stay awake to toast the new year in with champagne (old fogeys that we are!). 

This afternoon some of us went cross-country skiing, some of us went snowshoeing. Leia the dog fell through the ice into a lake! But she valiantly pulled herself out, shook herself off, and proceeded as if nothing had happened. We however, noting the shivering of her hind legs, decided that our little expedition was over and we should hurry home. 

Hope everyone else manages to stay awake for the new year too...

Night walk

Last night I tried to take Hiro for a solo walk after dark, he just went crazy with joy to be out on the trail, running, leaping, jumping, even twirling in mid-air. It was great to see him so happy, but it did some damage to his wound so he doesn't get to go out off-leash any more. If you look closely you can just make Hiro out at the edge of the darkness. He's wearing a T-shirt to protect his wound.

While he was leaping for joy and tearing his wound apart, I was taking night photos...

The moon was only half full, but it was enough light to see quite clearly by, and there were sharp shadows on the bright snow.

Downed in D'Arcy

The Teeny Tiny computer went belly up last night. It's been just over six weeks since I bought it and it appears to be kaput.

Wow. Probably the shortest lived computer I've ever had.

I called the store where I bought it and they said bring it in to the nearest outlet and they'd see what they could do for me. Because I bought the extended warranty the fellow I talked to said they would attempt to go the extra mile for me. Technically it's still under manufacturer's warranty so I'm supposed to deal with the manufacturer.

I have not backed up this computer since I left Toronto, but I don't think I've lost a lot. All my photos are still on my camera memory card, and my email on a Yahoo server. A few small files that I have downloaded might be lost but the fellow I talked to seemed to think they could recover the data from my hard drive at a reasonable cost. In the meantime Sam is loaning me the use of his laptop while I am at his place. After I leave here I'll be netbook-less until I get back to Toronto as I really don't have time to drop in at the nearest computer store outlet to have them look at my computer. And this still being the Christmas season I imagine they are terribly busy right now anyway.

It does feel weird though, not having my little netbook. You know you're an addict when a brief period of no access sends you into a tailspin! Really should do something about that, but I am at a loss as to what.

Aside from that setback things are fine here, we're just hanging out with the dogs.

Hiro is wounded and although he is feeling fine any rambunctious behaviour stresses the stitches and the wound is not healing properly. So we are trying to keep him more or less immobilized. Might be do-able if it were just him, but Hapi really really wants to play with him, so we have two very big, very frustrated dogs here.

This afternoon Hiro got loose just when I was trying to bring Hapi in from a walk; the two dogs took off in a great play fight all over the field in front of the cabin. I spent several minutes chasing them and yelling at them to quit that, which of course they had no intention of doing. I finally managed to collar Hiro but Hapi kept trying to attack him anyway.

I think it's going to take another couple of weeks for Hiro's wound to heal enough for him to be free to play again, I am sorry I will not be able to witness that.

It's Christmas Day, so this must be D'Arcy

Merry Christmas to everybody. I am at my son Sam's place in D'Arcy for a week, enjoying a winter wonderland in the mountains.


We celebrated Christmas a little early, a couple of days ago at Josh and Kim's place in New Westminster. It was a bit of a comedy of errors, Josh planned to have the turkey in the oven by 2pm, but with traffic delays and whatnot, we did not manage the trick until 4pm. However all turned out well, it was a great turkey and a great dinner. We took a break between the turkey and the apple pie to walk Brewster (the resident shih tzu) around the neighbourhood and look at Christmas lights.
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I'll be in Whistler for New Year's, and if my stamina holds out, I'll be visiting Seattle briefly before heading home to Toronto. Am thoroughly missing my little truck for getting around!

This 'n' that

I'm not finding a lot of time to keep up the blog right now, so I'm afraid you're just going to have to be patient with me. However a few quickies today:

1) Yesterday the coldest place in the world was Edmonton Alberta, at -49C. Yikes!

2) A link on Rebecca's Pocket to The Seven Foods Experts Won't Eat. Yikes again, I'd say at least half of them are regulars in my diet...

3) I'm in Victoria BC now; we decorated a Christmas tree last night with eggnogs and rum in hand, Carolling, Carolling on the CD player, and a gentle snowfall outdoors. How seasonable! However the forecast is for warm temperatures and rain for the rest of the week so the snow will be short-lived.

D'Arcy expedition

Josh and I drove up to Sam's place in D'Arcy last week, and I have only just now had a chance to write about it. Josh beat me to the punch, you can read his version of the trip at his blog. We photographed some of the same stuff, although I didn't photograph the Noxious Weed. Or the CC-177.




It was just an overnight trip, a three hour drive and arriving early afternoon, then leaving early afternoon the following day. We drove into town to see Sam's house and the D'Arcy waterfront (Sam lives in a rental cabin, and rents out his house), then walked back in the bush to see the now abandoned runway.


I had to laugh, Sam invited us to make sandwiches when we arrived, and Josh had to clean Sam's kitchen before attempting to prepare food in it. Usually that's what I do, clean up the kitchen as soon as I arrive there, but this time Josh did it. Since the last time I was there Sam has acquired a dishwasher, so at least the sink wasn't piled high with dirty dishes.


Then there's the dogs, Hapi and Hiro. Very sweet dogs. Huge, but sweet. Their fur is thoroughly matted with burrs from their daily walks in the bush, and it must be over four inches thick. It will have to be cut off before it can be brushed or combed, it is quite badly matted. They are used to sleeping outdoors, Sam has a very good kennel setup for them.



We went for quite a long walk the next morning up a logging road to a viewpoint and then back again in a large loop. It was cold and frosty with snow on the mountains but not in the valley.



The pine beetle is a huge problem in BC, I don't know how much pine forest has been lost to it, but it's a lot. The land where Sam lives has a lot of beautiful old ponderosa pine on it, the owner is trying to save it. This involves cutting down and destroying infected trees, and using pheromones to keep beetles away from healthy trees. They look like little white paper packets stapled to the tree trunks; they are supposed to convince the beetles that these trees are already occupied and they should look elsewhere for a pine tree to infest.

Trees that have to be cut down are debarked so that the cold winter will kill any beetles remaining in the tree.


Beetle traps are also attached to downed trees.


The beetles don't actually kill the tree themselves, but they carry a fungus that clogs the tree phloem and chokes the tree. All the needles turn red and fall off. An infested forest turns red, then grey.

When an infested tree is cut down, you can see the fungus stained wood just under the bark. It turns the wood blue.


They are attempting to market this blue-stained wood as interesting building material; it is still perfectly good pine wood but with a mix of the normal and blue colours.

The drive to and from D'Arcy is magnificent. We had lovely clear sunny weather for it, and Josh was driving so I got to enjoy the scenery. Many mountain vistas, views across Howe Sound to the mountains beyond, the ski hills of Whistler (mountains, not hills), the tall trees, and more.



There was snow on the ground in Whistler and the snow-making machines were very busy there preparing for the Winter Olympics. Josh tells me they imported hundreds of snow making machines for the occasion. Usually Whistler gets more than enough snow, but there has been the occasional winter when nature just didn't come through with the white stuff, so they're not taking any chances.

Security has flipped into high gear here, all the stories I heard about how China allowed no nonsense to occur there during the Olympics is no different from what is happening here. The place is turning into a police state for the occasion.

But I love the time I get to spend in D'Arcy, it is a wonderful place.

Dinner

I had dinner with a friend last night. Mona (not her real name) used to be president of the strata council of the condo complex where I lived in New Westminster. In BC a condo complex is known as a strata. She sold and moved out about a year before I did, and when I sold my condo she offered me a house-sit while she went off to Arizona to visit family. It was timely for me, my condo was sold but I was not yet ready to move eastward.

Mona's parents lived in Burnaby, they were working class folks who raised a family and lived in the same house for over forty years. Mona is the youngest of three sibs, she has a sister in North Van and a brother in Arizona. As these things go, her parents began to show signs of dementia in their 80s. Mona, as the never-married daughter, became more and more involved in their lives, until last year she was spending all her weekends and after-work time at their home. She did get home-care help but it was tricky, her mother resented strangers in the house.

Then last August on a fine summer evening her parents went walk-about. For six hours. Mona was frantic, called the police, helicopters were called in, the whole nine yards. Eventually she got a phone call from someone who lived many miles away who had noticed an older couple sitting on the kerb in front of their home and had managed to coax a phone number out of them. It was time for a nursing home.

In BC you can get into a nursing home situation on subsidy fairly quickly, but there are strings attached. Major strings. You can for example look around your region and pick three nursing homes you like, but you won't get into any of them. You get slotted into one you don't particularly like and wait for a "lateral transfer" to one of your top three picks.

If you are a dementia patient, that first move into a crappy nursing home far from friends and family will probably kill you, so the lateral transfer will in all likelihood be unnecessary. In addition, if you are a married couple, you will be separated. The province will guarantee that you will be placed in the same complex, but the chances of being in the same room together are pretty slim if not non-existent. If you are a married couple with dementia, then for sure that move will kill you.

Mona's parents were hardworking frugal folks, it turned out when the kids went through all their papers, they realized that their parents were well off enough to afford private care. There would be no estate but their parents now had options. With private care they could be placed in a nursing home nearby in the same room.

"Private care" sounds superior, but in fact it is exactly the same as "public care". Mona and her sibs placed their parents in a nursing home that also has public care residents, and there is the slim possibility that her parents can shift to public care in the future and stay in the same accommodation. So the family home was sold, the family finances arranged to pay for the nursing home, at a whopping $9,000 a month. For a tiny room and less-than-perfect care.

Mona says that her parents got better care when they were still at home. At the nursing home she has found her Dad in dirty diapers, apparently unchanged for many hours. Their room reeks of urine, she has taken their laundry to her own home to wash. On $9,000 a month.

Mona is no wimp, she has reamed the nursing staff out on more that one occasion, made threats of dire consequences if they don't smarten up and treat her parents with dignity and respect. Her sister on the other hand is afraid of retaliation from the nursing home and tries to get Mona to shut up about the abuse, the sister is afraid that the parents will never get on the public care option if they rock the boat too much. Mona angers both the nursing home and her sister by continuing to advocate for her parents. I'm a bitch, she says.

Mona has no social life, she has lost a significant amount of weight in the past year. Her doctor applauds the weight loss but not the method of achieving it. She feels a tremendous amount of guilt because her mother is rather upset about losing her home and being forced by her own family to live in this godforsaken place. They are somewhat safer there, but have on occasion gone walk-about from the nursing home.

Once Mona was in Arizona visiting her brother when she was called that her parents had gone missing. Her response was, "And you are calling me because?" Did they expect her to rush back from Arizona to help in the search? Mona's mother can present as sufficiently normal to exit the nursing home as if she were a visitor there. But there is nowhere for them to go, their home has been sold to pay for the nursing home care.

Mona's sister says she will kill herself before she will let this happen to her. Mona says, How will you know when it is time? Do you know that dementia runs in families? Will you follow through on that plan when your mind is gone?

If we treated children like this, there would be public outrage about child abuse. It is OK to treat elders this way. Sooner or later, we are all elders.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Rain rain rain

This has been an historically wet month in Vancouver, so I've seen plenty of rain so far! I can probably count on one finger how many hours of unfiltered sunlight I've seen. OK, maybe two fingers.

Gretel drove me to the Toronto airport for 5.30am, kind of a hurry-up-and-wait deal, where you scramble to be at the airport in time and then sit around for two hours waiting for your flight to take off. But at that hour the airplane was not crowded, I had a row to myself. I had made lunch for myself but left it at home, Gretel made me a bagel for breakfast and that had to do for lunch as well.

Johanna picked me up at the airport in Vancouver, we drove downtown for breakfast (it was just past 10 in the morning by the time we left the airport) at a little place on the harbourfront. It rained solidly all day, we didn't go outdoors all day except to get into the car. Just as well, I was thoroughly jetlagged anyway.

Last year I stayed with my friends Dave and Johanna in New Westminster, but they moved to North Vancouver just over a month ago so now I am staying with them in North Van. Since they only just moved, and they both work full-time, they are not fully unpacked, but it looks pretty good. On my first full day here I went out to buy a few groceries, including english muffins for breakfast, only to discover that they have no toaster or toaster oven. They probably do have one, they certainly used to, but it is probably buried in the as-yet unopened boxes in the basement.

They have lots of trails for walking the dog, the sense of living in a rainforest is pretty unavoidable here. Lots of very big trees dripping wet most of the time.


I connected with number 2 son Josh for dinner and a walk on the harbour seawall, last time I was here parts of it were blocked off due to construction but it is all open now. Walking the seawall after dark was quite lovely with all the lights and seaplanes. Out in the harbour there's a float with gigantic Olympic rings displayed, they light up after dark but the middle ring is for some reason not lit. The 2010 winter games will be here in February so they are still working on getting the city ready for that. I'm kind of glad to be missing that, it'll be a madhouse.


We are going to drive up to D'Arcy to see Sam on Wednesday, Josh has never been there. Sam plans to take some time off work to show us a good time in the boonies. He said to be sure to check weather and road conditions before setting out, most of mainland BC is under snow already and some roads in his area are already a bit tricky. After that I have a busy schedule of trips to the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island, back to D'Arcy for Christmas and Whistler for New Year's, then down to Seattle for a quick visit there before flying back to Toronto in the new year.

I got out to a movie at Tinseltown with an old friend, we saw Pirate Radio. Quite funny with a lot of good '60s rock and roll. Last time I was at Tinseltown it was like a ghost town. Huge downtown shopping centre with no shops except the movie theatre. They built it just in time for the housing and dot com crash in Vancouver around 2000, it sat empty for years. The cinema is on the top floor, you had to pass through several levels of deserted shops to get to it, very bizarre. But Tinseltown survived the lean years and now it's full of open shops.

Afterward we went for dinner at a favourite Indian restaurant down on 4th. It's a family business, usually empty, not sure how they survive, but they've been there a long time and we usually end up chatting with the owners in the course of the evening. They make the best chai ever.

It's a bit strange not to have my truck handy, I have to take buses everywhere. But so far it's working OK. I rode on the new skytrain for a couple of stops, the train cars are slightly bigger than the regular skytrain cars. Actually, the new line is not called the skytrain, because much of it is underground so it doesn't make sense to call it a skytrain. So what I rode on was really the Canada Line. It goes through a part of Vancouver that in my opinion badly needed a skytrain line, but there was a lot of opposition to putting it in. However the coming Olympics caused the government to ram it through in spite of public opposition. Quite frankly I am glad they did that. This new 'skytrain' goes through the relatively wealthy part of Vancouver, the opposition was largely from folks who didn't want mass transit in their nice neighbourhoods. In my not-so-humble opinion. It used to bug me that I could not skytrain to that part of the city, I pretty much had to drive because the bus system was so inadequate.

So that's my trip so far, I really should get outdoors for the surprise appearance of the sun this afternoon. And this blog post is coming to you from the keyboard of Dora! So far, so good!

Leaving again

I'm off on a jet plane to the west coast, to spend all of December and Christmas with family and friends there. Dora's coming along for the ride, this will be its first trip and hopefully not its last!

The waiting room blues

It's getting colder all the time now, Sheila says the long range forecast is for snow flurries next Friday. I'd pack up and leave now, but...

It seems like every time I plan to leave, whether from Toronto to Nova Scotia, vice versa or anywhere else for that matter, all hell breaks loose. All of a sudden I have emergencies that must be taken care of right now and even involve postponing departure dates. Right now I have both medical and vehicular urgent matters---or so it seems---to take care of and I can't leave until I do.

As far as the vehicle goes, apparently I have a gas leak, but it is most likely not the gas tank but the hose from the gas lid to the tank. However they no longer make that hose, but the local gas tank repair guy has obtained one from the "after-market" (now, would that be the junk yard?) and can install it Wednesday. I also am taking the truck in to another garage on Tuesday to get the front end and brakes inspected. I think they're fine but don't want surprises on the road. Both garages are in small towns so there's not a lot to do while waiting, and usually they want a few hours at least, so it's a bit of a pain but what can you do.

The medical matter is more of a mystery, I suspect it is nothing but the doctor---a young guy---has taken the ball and run off with it, ordering up all kinds of tests and X-rays and CT scans and whatnot. He's at a walk-in clinic so I can't make an appointment, I have to show up and wait for at least an hour before I get to see him. I'm getting the immersion course in waiting room life (that would be a whole other blog posting!).

So far he has proposed several theories, each one necessitating yet another test, and I am on my second course of antibiotics even though there is very little evidence of any kind of infection. A kind of ruling-things-out-by-treatment: if the antibiotic doesn't fix it then it must not be an infection. And apparently each antibiotic is only good for certain things, so if the first one doesn't work then maybe it's another kind of infection.

I just looked up from my laptop to see a blue jay sitting on my windowsill, a few feet away. Cool!

The X-ray was supposed to be definitive, but it only raised yet more questions and more theories, so now he wants a CT scan. That is sure to be definitive! I went home Friday night quite discouraged, I am "sick and tired" of all this fuss over a relatively minor complaint that as near as I can tell does not indicate anything serious. So I went on the internet yesterday to look up CT scans, and while there are lots of benefits there are also some risks, it involves considerably more radiation than just an X-ray. The descriptions all say that the benefits far outweigh the risks, because the CT scan allows early diagnosis and prompt treatment.

My problem with that is that we're not talking cancer or any other life-threatening issues here, and the doctor's current theories either have no treatment or a "wait and see" treatment. So why run the risk for such little benefit? He says it could take as long as 3 weeks to get the CT scan, or I could get in as early as one week from making the appointment. And since I only saw him on Friday night after the clinic staff had left for the long weekend, that appointment won't get made until Tuesday, so we are talking at least a week and a half. Hence the discouragement.

So, I am thinking that I will get the truck taken care of and then see how I feel about taking a miss on the CT scan. I am pretty sure it will be even harder to get the CT scan in Toronto, and my current plan does not involve staying in Toronto for very long. I just bought myself a round-trip Westjet ticket to Vancouver for Christmas, leaving Toronto the end of November and returning early January. December has got to be one of the worst months weather-wise to be in Vancouver, and of course the same can be said for January to March in Toronto. I'm just a glutton for punishment!

I dislike flying in big airplanes to and from big airports, but Westjet is one of the better ones so I am kind of looking forward to that. Haven't flown with them in a while so they may not be as good as they used to be---we shall see---but I have good memories of them. If ever an airline believed in customer service, it would be Westjet.

One of my favourite memories is of an ill-fated flight during the winter from Toronto to Vancouver, with a stopover in Calgary. Departures were delayed by several hours, in both Toronto and Calgary, due to weather. Connections were missed. When we finally boarded the plane in Calgary it was clear that we would be arriving in Vancouver after closing time and we would be damn lucky to find taxis or buses there. But, when we were all seated and belted in, the pilot came on the intercom singing, "Six days on the road and we're gonna get you home tonight!" They've got the nicest people working on their airplanes!

They have no first class seating, it's all one class. They didn't used to serve meals so there were no food carts in the aisles and as soon as the seatbelt sign went off they encouraged you to get up and wander around. The flight attendants told jokes and played games. One game they used to play involved throwing rolls of toilet paper down the aisles! People brought their own food and shared with their neighbours, I had some really great meals on some of those flights. We used to compare flight jokes, to see who had the funniest flight. Unfortunately the airline now serves food so they do have the food carts in the aisles, and they have TV screens in the seatbacks so the flight attendants don't tell jokes or play games anymore. Too bad, it used to be a lot of fun.

One thing I discovered with Westjet though is that flights with stopovers are actually better than non-stop flights, they give you a chance to get out and stretch your legs and breathe real air. Westjet used to stop at some out-of-the-way places, so you ended up in tiny airports in parts of the country you never expected to see. Small airports are way better than the big ones.

Oh, one more thing. I got email from Lisa, the Festival Committee Chair of Deep Roots Music. She found my blog post on this year's festival and liked it, she was writing to ask permission to link to it from the Deep Roots website. I feel honoured!

And that's my rant for the day.