Final destination, the lower mainland

Mount Robson, near Alberta-BC border

The trip to Vancouver took 3 days, I think I could have done it in 2 if I had pushed. There were no further tire or wheel incidents.

Once I crossed over from Alberta to BC the road traffic increased exponentially, lots of RVs and tour buses. A couple of times I happened to stop at rest areas where there was a tour bus, they were generally full of Asians who loved Hapi on sight. We would get mobbed by people with cameras who I guess thought we were part of the whole BC experience. Hapi loves attention and would rub up against all the women, to their great delight.

One woman had the dickens of a time trying to get her photo because Hapi just wanted to be petted and the woman wanted Hapi to pose for her. After much running around and calling and backing up she finally got her photo. It's kind of funny to be the subject of excited tourists' cameras when you are sort of a tourist yourself.

At another rest stop a car pulled up behind me and let their little dog out who proceeded to run in excited circles. Hapi gave chase. It turned out the grassy area was full of prairie dog holes and the little dog's owners were locals who would bring the dog there for exercise. After a few minutes of chasing pop-up prairie dogs the dog was done and they drove on to their destination. I tried to interest Hapi in the game but she didn't get why all those holes were such a big deal.

There was lots of scenery, mountains and big trees and rushing rivers, it was nice to see but I am afraid I've become a bit inured to mountain scenery in my old age. Nothing new.

My truck, parked below one of the sites of the big forest fire of 2010

I stayed at my friend's brother's place again the first night out from Hay River, only this time he wasn't there. However he had told me that the lock on the back door was broken so I could just let myself in if I wanted to stay there again while he was away. It was and I did. The next night I stayed in a rest area that was fairly nondescript but I was the only person there. It rained. I got up early and drove away without breakfast, figuring that I would stop as soon as the rain did and make coffee and breakfast then.

When I did stop for breakfast I let Hapi wander around. Another car came in, a man got out and whistled. Hapi made a bee-line to him. Boy, if that guy had wanted to steal my dog he would have had no problem at all. A few moments later another truck and camper pulled in and a guy got out and started walking towards Hapi and me. He asked if she was a malamute. When I said Yes he said he had a giant malamute in his truck. I looked and sure enough there was a giant dog face in the side window of his truck. He said that his wife spotted my dog in the rest stop and instructed him to pull over, that there was another malamute there.

He let his dog out and sure enough it was giant malamute, all 180 lbs of him. Giant malamutes can run to 250 lbs so as giants go he was actually on the small side. He was excited to see Hapi but I think Hapi found him a little intimidating. What a goof. OK to intimidate a shih-tsu but doesn't like being intimidated by giant dogs herself.

I stopped for gas in Abbotsford, from the past I knew it was the cheapest place to buy gas in the entire province. Believe it or not, gas in Hay River is cheaper than in BC, the price in Abbotsford was on a par with Hay River. In Vancouver itself the price is $0.10/litre more expensive. In BC they have a carbon tax that makes gas quite expensive, but everything in Vancouver is more expensive than anywhere else, which is why I don't live there anymore. That and the rain. Beautiful, but expensive and wet.

The long anticipated reunion of Hapi and Hiro was a little anticlimactic: Hiro was delighted, Hapi not so much.

Sam was out when we arrived there but he gave me the door code via text message so we were able to go in. Sam was away all day and left Hiro in a darkened apartment with all the curtains drawn, so when I opened the door I could not see him at first. He came to check out who was at the door, sniffing and sniffing. I watched his tail rise and wag faster and faster, until his whole rear end was wagging as he sniffed Hapi all over. Hapi looked quite alarmed.

Hiro's rear end just a blur of tail wagging,
Hapi looking a little apprehensive

Hiro made all sorts of efforts to get Hapi to play with him but she would have none of it, she was looking at me with a kind of "Get me out of here" expression. Hiro would tap her on the shoulder with his paw and bow and scrape in front of her but that didn't do any good. The only time he could get a rise out of her was when he greeted me, she was jealous and tried to push him away. When Sam finally arrived home Hapi recognized him instantly and was ecstatic to greet him. I no longer existed for her.

Here I was thinking that she would miss and be happy to reunite with Hiro, when it was really Sam her heart belonged to!

The next day we took the two dogs to an offleash dogpark and they did play with each other like old times. After that things seemed back to normal between them, I think Hapi is quite content to be with Hiro now and especially content to be with Sam again. I am leaving her with him while I go visit friends, she didn't even notice my unpacking the truck and driving off without her.

Hiro and Hapi at the dogpark

Sam lives in cohousing which is quite a tight-knit community, I got a lot of stares from people who wondered who I was when I walked around the shared areas. But several started up conversations to find out and once they knew who I was and why I was there welcomed me and were very friendly. Most of Sam's neighbours remembered Hapi from when she lived there before and were glad to see her back, as Hiro is inclined to howl when left alone and they all thought Hapi being there would put an end to that, even if only temporarily.

I do hope Hiro is not doubly disappointed when Hapi and I leave more or less permanently.

There was a community dinner while I was there which I attended with Sam. It was in honour of a renter who was leaving and there were several short speeches by residents wanting to acknowledge how much they had enjoyed this renter's presence in the community.

One resident told me there were 90 members, of which 30 were children. Sam didn't think there were that many children. It is certainly a space designed for families as well as single people. There are quite a lot of older people there who like it as an "aging in place" kind of community.

The building layout is one central hub with two wings of residences. The hallways in the wings have glass roofs so the lighting is all daylight, with a few "street lamps" at night. The hallways are called "atriums" and are quite wide, like small streets. Many people have chairs, couches and tables in the area by their front doors, so it does give the impression of a friendly neighbourhood street.

When kids are playing in the atrium the echoiness of it makes the noise quite loud but they are fairly strict about quiet in the evening. In addition the building is on 5 acres of land, half of which is left wild, mostly an unmowed grassy area with a stream running through it, and the rest is lawn and garden. There is a good sized allotment garden for residents where many people grow vegetables.

There is underground parking and workshops on the basement level. In the central hub area are a children's indoor play area, a common kitchen-dining-meeting area, several studio areas for art and dance, a guest suite, a TV room, a common laundry room and large lobby area with nice plants and comfy old furniture. and of course the requisite community notice board.

Dogs are supposed to be leashed but apparently I was the only one following the rule (and I wasn't even aware that it was the rule, I was just doing it out of caution). I gather this is a bit of a bone of contention between dog-owning and non-dog-owning residents. Like any community there are ongoing dramas and issues, but the general ambiance seems friendly and relaxed. If I could afford to buy into such a community I certainly would consider it. Sam would like that, if only to keep the two dogs together.

Today I am at a friend's place trying to work out schedules for visiting with family and old friends. It's a bit tough, I am trying to fit into my friends' schedules and just when I think I have it all worked out, someone changes their own schedule and that has ripple effects all the way down the line. So today I have fired off emails and text messages to all affected and am awaiting replies in order to rework the schedule. I have a month so hopefully it will all work out in the end. My friend is out for the day attending to family business (ailing parents, etc etc) so I am at her home with the cat.

Since the last time I was here (2010) there have been significant renovations, I am staying in the brand-spanking-new guest room cum TV room and I just had a shower in the super-dooper latest and greatest of shower stalls.I had to be shown how to work the controls. I tried it on my own first, but couldn't figure it out.

Before I leave Vancouver I also hope to try the super-dooper bathtub, its controls look a little more straight forward, although they did tell me that it uses up the entire hot water supply to fill it. So one must book its use at a time convenient for all.

And that's it for now.

Heading west and north into long days and short nights

Me and Hapi above Alexandra Falls, NWT

Since last post I have visited friends in Edmonton, spent the Victoria Day long weekend in Hay River NWT with family (Josh, Kim and Eva), and arrived in the lower mainland BC. All pretty much on schedule. Didn't visit brother in Timmins due to snow storm there that I didn't particularly want to drive through. Unfortunately I think I made the right choice, it sounded pretty bad in the news afterward. As it was I did hit snow on the alternate route I took, but not significant amounts on the road. Just kind of miserable.

I found nice places to stop overnight, once on a snowy beach on Lake Superior, once on a lake near the Ontario-Manitoba border, and once in a park-like area in a valley in Saskatchewan. The first night on Lake Superior was the only really cold night, about -5C, but I had enough warm bedding to get through the night comfortably. There was a rime of frost inside and out of the whole truck in the morning. I stayed with friends in Edmonton, and they in turn gave me the address of a relative halfway to Hay River where I stayed the following night.

Saw a turkey buzzard, snow geese, three black bears, either two beavers or one beaver twice, numerous deer, some elk, caribou and mountain sheep?/goats? Hapi chased the beaver but they were close to their waterway and slipped into the water before she was anywhere close. Happened twice in on the same creek, which is why I don't know if it was the same individual or not.

On the road from Edmonton to Hay River the scenery gradually changes from large flat fields to forest to muskeg-like terrain. In the last part there was lots of waterways, and almost every body of water contained a beaver dam and/or lodge(s). I bet that entire landscape is created by the beaver. Some of the lodges were huge, at least one I saw was half the size of my own home. One place had four of them in a row, no more than 8 feet apart.

Two of the bears I saw were just sitting on the side of the road, watching the cars go by. A car in front of me stopped at the first bear, presumably to take a picture, and the car occupants and bear just looked at each other for several minutes. I debated whether to wait or pass, and then the car finally pulled forward. The bear waited. I could have stopped and exchanged stares with him too, but wasn't sure why I would want to do that. So I drove on. The second bear was not as interested in staring, it ambled off into the forest when the car ahead of me slowed down.

Hay River is not the prettiest town, definitely not a tourist destination. Most people bypass the town and keep driving to Yellowknife. Hay River is more of a frontier working town, the terminus of the railroad where supplies and equipment are off-loaded onto barges to cross Great Slave Lake and go north down the Mackenzie River. The river is open to barge traffic all summer all the way to the Arctic Ocean. The lake is not yet clear of ice so the barges are all lined up in the port waiting for that momentous occasion.

My son and his family live in the old Hay River townsite. Back in the '60s that area flooded badly and people were encourage to move to higher ground, but a few stayed and after a while others moved in as well, so it is a regular neighbourhood now, it's just that the town powers-that-be would prefer all those people to move elsewhere. As it is they are required to have their homes up off the ground a minimum distance and many houses appear to be sitting on jacks. My son's home is a trailer raised about 5 feet from the ground. His home is so well insulated that his heating bill last winter was actually lower than mine. Windows are all triple-glazed.

There are no sewer or water pipes in that neighbourhood so their water tank is filled several times a week and their sewage tank emptied once or twice a week. The water tank sits in an alcove off the hallway and is made of translucent plastic so you can tell at a glance how much water remains. One day I was there we were not running the washing machine or dishwasher, and flushing the toilet sparingly because the tank was low. Since a water delivery was scheduled for the next day they didn't want to order an extra delivery.

The first full day I was there Josh booked a Cessna (named "Snoopy") at work to take us all for a little flight. We flew over a waterfall (Alexandra Falls on the Hay River) I had seen on the trip to their place, it was fairly spectacular.

Here is that waterfall viewed up close on the ground. Lotta lotta water! We visited there the next day and the photo of me at the beginning of this post was taken then.

We flew over the new town and the old town, we saw their house from the air (recognizable by the trampoline out front).

Hay River (new town) proper. 
The airport, the railroad terminus and the old town site would all be off to the far left of this photo.

Hay River old town, can you see the trampoline? 

Hint, upper left quadrant, third lot in on first road running up/down in photo

We did a couple of shopping trips in the main town so I got "the tour" (here's where I work, there's the firehall, this is the grocery store, over there is the high school...) and once Kim and I drove through the reserve since she had never been there and of course neither had I. What can I say, it looked like a reserve.

Every evening we took the two dogs, my dog Hapi and their shih-tsu Brewster for a walk in the neighbourhood and over to a vacant field where they could be let offleash. Brewster was initially excited to have a new doggy playmate but when Hapi responded to Brewster's invitations to play he was quickly overwhelmed. Having an 80-lb malamute leaping over him and growling in his face (a play growl) was not quite his idea of play. After that they were content to share space but not attempt to play with each other.

I was in Hay River for the Victoria Day long weekend, and met Josh's boss at the airport as well as the chief pilot and his wife. We had dinner with them and in the course of various activities that weekend met several other friends and acquaintances. My overall impression of the town was that it is a pretty typical working frontier town and the community is fairly friendly. Not a beautiful place but kind of interesting. People hunt and fish and work hard. No shortage of jobs or work. The evening the other pilot and his wife came by was marked by a big homemade lasagna dinner and a few beers and the sharing of local gossip. We were going to do a fish fry, but the local fisherman had nothing on hand as they were between seasons.

I never saw darkness there. It is not quite the time of year when there is no night at all, but we never stayed up late enough to see the dark and it only would have lasted a short time before it became light again. Judging by the local hardware store, people were just gearing up for spring planting of flowers and vegetables. Lawns were still brown and there was still some snow lying about, but it was warm and spring was definitely in the air.

We went to the beach on Great Slave Lake on a lovely warm sunny day; we had to cross the snowdrifts in sandals and flipflops to get to the sand and beyond about thirty feet of open water was the ice. The lake was still frozen.  Great Slave is huge, at least as big as any of the Great Lakes in the east. Hapi waded in but the rest of us were happy to just sit on the sand and enjoy the warm sun. Brewster loves snow so while Hapi waded and we sunbathed, he ran around in the snow. To each his own.

See the ice on the lake in the background?

Hapi relaxing on the beach :)

Hapi picked up a few ticks on the trip and a lot in Hay River. Every day I was picking a half dozen or so out of her ears and around her face. Ticks there are called winter ticks and they do not carry lyme disease. Their primary host is caribou. I was still picking them off her when we got to Vancouver, by that time they had been on her several days and were gigantic, easy to see and quite gross to pick off. Lots of blood involved. I think we got them all, she now has a lot of bloody scabs where they used to be.

I had a slow leak in one tire that I first noticed near Sault Ste Marie in northern Ontario. I needed to get air in it every morning and that would last until the next morning. I just didn't want to stop long enough to get it fixed, due to my tight driving schedule. When I arrived in Hay River Josh told me there was a shortage of air in there, I would not be able to get the tire filled at any gas station, but there might be air at the airport. So I bought a cheap compressor and filled the tire with that, but after only one fill-up it conked out. You get what you pay for.

The morning I left I stopped at the local tire shop to see if they could repair the tire quickly, they could and did but in the process discovered that my tire rim was in dire shape and unsafe to drive on. So they put my spare wheel on instead and advised me to get all the rims looked at and replaced as soon as possible.

I continued on to Vancouver, getting the wheels checked at a tire shop in High Level Alberta as instructed. No problems there so I have only occasionally kicked the tires to see if they are wobbly or not. So far so good but I will definitely get the matter attended to before leaving Vancouver for home.

Changes, minor and otherwise

A few mishaps, minor and not so minor. Exhaust system needed attention in PEI, one hour and $50 which is minor, I think. Uneventful trip from PEI to Toronto and a great visit in the city. I love the old neighbourhood and it was really nice to be back. Hapi was on her best behaviour, did really well with the dogs in the dog park. She had one brief set-to with Dobby, her host, but after that they got along fine.

I visited with some old friends, did a bit of shopping, saw a movie and hung out with the kids and grandkids.

Then today I was going to leave early to drive to Timmins. Hapi had a seizure. Out of the blue, never happened before, and scared the daylights out of me. I think it scared her pretty bad too.

So I decided to stay over one more day which meant I couldn't spare the time to see my brother in Timmins. Unfortunate but I just didn't feel good leaving not knowing what Hapi's health status was. Called a vet who said there really wasn't much to do, that generally they don't treat a single seizure because it is too hard to know what caused it.

Later in the day I spoke to a dog owner of an epileptic dog and she told me there was little point taking my dog to a vet unless she seized frequently.

By now I feel better about it and that I can probably handle this. Worst comes to worst and we'll change our travel plans but chances are good that nothing at all will happen. So I plan to leave first thing tomorrow. Hapi seems back to normal.

We have 4 days to get to Edmonton, it will be a bit tight.

My itinerary

May 3: Fanning Brook, PE
May 6: Toronto, ON
May 11: Timmins, ON
May 15: Edmonton, AB
May 17: Hay River, NT
May 23: Langley, BC

All assuming I get out the door today.

Packing seems endless. I am sure I will forget something important.

Dog is terribly nervous. She doesn't know she is coming with.

TTFN

Well I think I need to make it official, after 2 months of no posting I think I might be done here. I am no longer even going to try. If it happens it happens, but I think it won't.

In a few days I am taking off on a 2-month road trip westward (and northward) with Hapi. We will visit friends and family, and Hapi will reunite with her brother? other half? in BC. It will have been two years since Hapi and Hiro last saw each other so I am very curious as to whether they remember each other. I hope so.

I had a dream the other night that when they met it took a minute or so of sniffing before they recognized each other, or rather Hapi recognized Hiro. Hapi went nuts, doing her excited writhing dance under Hiro's nose while he just stood there. I don't know if he was just being reserved or if he didn't recognize her. Anyway, we shall see.

The truck is almost ready for camping, a couple more things to do for the trip. I haven't packed yet. I am still trying to iron out details of when and where I will be stopping to visit, it is tricky trying to coincide with multiple schedules. The longest leg of the trip, around 4500 km, may have to be a rush job of driving non-stop for 6 days. I would have preferred something a little more leisurely. Also I am cutting it close for black fly season in Ontario and presumably northern Alberta and NWT.

I love being on the road, I wish I was already there. But too many things have to be taken care of before leaving, so the target date is May 1, the dropdead date May 3.

Some more winter

('Snow angel' on a nearby frozen pond)

Recovery from the flu has been slow for me. I still feel quite lacking in energy. Last week I started back on regular activities, exercise class and choir practice twice a week. That on top of regular dog walks was quite exhausting. The last choir practice I attended I had to stop about half way through, sometime in the middle I stopped being able to read the music (just looked like a a whole lot of polka dots and lines to my stunned brain) and my voice quickly followed. I stayed, hoping somehow what we were practicing would sink in on some level. This week is reading week at the university so that affects everything around here, both the exercise class and choir practice are on hiatus and I am relieved.

(Hapi sleeping through the blizzard)

Winter continues, another blizzard last weekend. Not a huge amount of additional snow, but lots of blowing snow and ice and power outages. I was surprised the other day to find out that most of the town lost power for 10 hours or more. My power remained! I later talked to a neighbour who used to work at the post office and he said that he thought our street was on the same grid as the university and that's why we didn't lose power. Apparently the university has better power service.

(The Gaspereau River in winter)

Today Hapi and I went up the Gaspereau River. At the head of the trail a wood stick about 4 feet long was leaning against a tree, I picked it up as I had forgotten to bring my walking stick. I am glad I did.

The regular trail very quickly petered out, there's a section near the start where you have to wade through the Gaspereau and that section was such a mess of open water, ice slabs and snow hiding the breaks between that I didn't want to risk it. Hapi had no problem with it though. I backtracked a bit and found a trail of footsteps heading up the steep bank around that section. The bank is very steep and in normal weather I would not have attempted it but the snow was crisp and icy and the footsteps provided toeholds along the slope. With the help of my wooden walking stick and the icy toeholds, I headed up the bank.

At a certain point there was a brook flowing down that I had to cross, Hapi headed straight down that brook and suddenly a large bird wing appeared in front of her. She stopped, nose to beak with a hawk sitting on the edge of the brook half way down the slope. The hawk didn't move, other than to open its wing in front of Hapi, I guess to make itself look a little larger. I thought it must be injured or sick, it did not attempt to fly or even walk away. I called Hapi away and the hawk folded its wing and watched me. The slope was too steep for me to attempt to reach it, I felt sorry for the bird.

The footsteps now headed downwards and I reached the regular trail on the other side of the impassable section. I tried to walk back to see the hawk from below, however I did break through the ice and snow in one place into the river, not far enough to cover my boot though. I could see the hawk sitting there, it did not turn to look at me or Hapi, just sat motionless by the brook facing away from us. It did not look well.

(Hapi by the river)

We continued on and it was very pretty there, the snow and ice made it look quite different and the trail was very faint, not a lot of people come there in the wintertime. After about half an hour more I turned to head back, I was quite exhausted. Hapi immediately disappeared. When I walk up the river she stays close by I think because she doesn't want to lose track of me, but when I turn around to head back she knows where I am and where I am going so she no longer feels the need to keep an eye on me. So for most of the walk back I didn't see or hear her, I didn't know if she was ahead of or behind me. Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of her through the trees out on the ice covering the river, she trots along oblivious of the danger, hunting for critters to chase or capture.

When we got back to where the hawk was, it was gone. I hope it was able to fly away.

I left the wooden stick by the tree at the trailhead for the next person, it was handy to have it, especially on the steep detour where we saw the hawk.

February

Came down with the 'flu some time last weekend. Knew I was pushing my luck, I had something going on every evening for four nights in a row and I was not sleeping all that well in between, so by Sunday evening I knew I was in for it. Managed to get out for a dog walk on Monday afternoon, but not again until Thursday. Monday and Tuesday I had a fever although all I felt was bone-snapping cold. By Wednesday morning the fever had broken and I was relieved at getting off relatively lightly, but apparently that wasn't really the case.

Getting out for a dog walk is possible, but it is pretty much the extent of my energy for the day. As long as I don't move I feel fine, but the second I try to do anything the complete lack of energy kicks in and I am done.

I have been reading a lot. And I knit a cap. Made some soup, ate some soup.

Hired the girl next door to walk Hapi. Then I called an ad in the local paper for a dogwalker and tried her out too. I think I'll stick with the girl next door. At least she has experience with a large dog that can be aggressive toward other dogs, their family dog is not unlike mine.

My book discussion group is doing February by Lisa Moore this month, I completed that book and also read The Ocean Ranger by Susan Dodd. It all brings back terrible memories. Dodd notes that it has taken 30 years for people to finally be able to write and talk about that, three books came out in fairly quick succession dealing with the subject, Moore's and Dodd's books and also Rig by Mike Heffernan.

I have been all over the map with my own emotional reaction to discussing this book. I was fully prepared to dislike Moore's take on the story, but I am softening my stance. I thought Dodd's analysis was extremely good, I liked the way she mixed the personal (her brother was on the Ranger) with the analytical. I had a hard time relating to Moore's disjointed story, it seemed pointless to me, dismoored. Although that may have been the point. But some of the widow Helen's imaginings of what happened struck home.

There were three Nova Scotians on the Ocean Ranger that night, one of them a friend of mine. I said good bye to him only a few days before, as he was leaving for his two week shift on the rig. His wife was my best friend at school, I spent all that next day sitting with her while she waited for a phone call that never came.

I remember drowning dreams for months afterward. Waking in the middle of the night holding my breath, wondering when I could breathe again. Looking up at nothing but black water.

I also remember helpless rage and horror. The character Helen feels none of that, she retreats into herself and her grief. I can understand that, but it wasn't universal.

But in the end you had no choice but to get on with life. I talked to a friend about the Moore book, she said she couldn't read it. Not that one not any book. Too soon, too hurtful. I can relate to that too.

The other thing I have been reading is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time fantasy cycle. There are 14 books in the cycle and I have just completed the first.

I had been reading The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R R Martin ("Game of Thrones") and finished reading book 5 quite a while ago. Apparently there will be seven books in the series and book 6 has yet to come out. I had been quite into it but by book 5 I was having a hard time keeping track of all the characters and complications, and frankly almost relieved that book 6 was a ways off.

Some reviewers like to refer to Martin as the American Tolkien, however a short while ago I read somewhere that really Robert Jordan had prior claim to that epithet. Never having heard of him I looked him up and found out about the Wheel of Time series which was already completed. I thought it would be interesting to compare and also nice to know that the entire series was already in place. Unfortunately Mr. Jordan died before he could complete it but he left sufficient notes and outlines for his widow to select a suitable author to complete the series.

So far so good. I have the Wheel of Time on my Kindle and it promises to provide many hours of good fantasy reading. Good stuff when you are sick.

While home sick there was a great storm with raging winds and high temperatures that melted all the snow. Now we are back to freezing again, but this time with no snow cover. Although the weatherman says that will all change tomorrow.

Now I'm off to eat more soup.

Lang may yer lum reek

(frozen lake that Hapi and I visit occasionally)

I am using the Mac that I bought in December to send this post to my blog, I have not figured it all out by any means. I had been postponing writing until I figured out how to do this but the best way to figure it out is to just do it I guess.

This is not shaping up to be a mild winter like last year, so far we have lots of snow and cold and wind. The wind makes it quite bitter out there. Hapi awaits her walk and I am sitting inside where it is nice and warm thinking up new ways to postpone it. Must blog. Must make chicken soup. Must read…

On New Year's Eve I went to see The Hobbit with a couple of friends, after a lovely fish chowder made with coconut milk. In her household two people cannot drink cow milk, one substitutes goat milk and the other almond milk. The third person in the household is a cow milk drinker who cannot abide substitutes. The coconut milk in the chowder was the compromise that all could accept and I was impressed with how good it was as well. No more cow milk in the chowder!

The Hobbit was a bit of a disappointment, even in 3D. I have to say I don't find the 3D feature particularly worth the extra dollars one pays for it. After three Lords of the Rings, The Hobbit was a bit of same old same old, with the added irritation of being a To-be-continued. Oh rats! On the one hand it I feel obliged to see how the story ends in movie form, on the other I am not sure it was spectacular enough to warrant sitting through again.

Midnight came only minutes after the movie ended, people milled in the lobby half-heartedly wishing each other a Happy New Year. We three hurried out to the car and headed over to Shannex, the seniors residence nearby, to visit my friend's father. We had told him we would drop by after the movie to toast in the New Year.

When we got there the residence was completely dark. We went to the front door and hesitated to ring the bell, they were probably closed and locked up for the night. So we went back to the car. I suggested we drive by Neil's window and see if there was any sign he might be still up, and sure enough through a crack in the curtains we saw him in his brightly lit room, clearly not asleep. My friend phoned him. He answered and told us to go back to the front door, he had left a message at the front desk that we were coming so they were expecting us. That we did.

The residence is quite new, with wide corridors, several common rooms including the dining area, TV area and large lobby. In the hallways there are little glass cupboards by each door, residents display small items and pictures that convey a little of who they are in these little glass cupboards. Neil's room is small and simple, he recently moved in and has setup his computer and is awaiting his internet connection. He has a private bathroom, a wardrobe, a desk, a couple of chairs and his bed. It is remarkably similar to his old bedroom in his daughter's house, even down to the wall colour. Much of Neil's life is on his computer, so I doubt he has experienced any diminishment with this move into the senior's residence, other than the temporary loss of internet access. He now dines in a dining room at a small table he shares with another gentleman, he can "stroll" the hallways and outdoor grounds in his electric wheelchair. He used to ride his chair all the way into downtown for the occasional coffee, but it is too far to go now. Instead he can go to the much closer dining room for a coffee with whoever is around.

Frankly, I think I could do a lot worse than to end up here. It was a pleasant surprise to see how nice it was.

We smuggled in a half bottle of wine and some plastic cups and poured a glass for each of us. Neil proposed a toast that he learned during WWII posted in Scotland: Lang may yer lum reek! Which translates to, Long may your chimney smoke!

After that we went home and finished off the bottle of wine, I got back to my own home somewhere around 1.30am. I saw I had an email from a friend out west, who said she was spending New Year's at mutual friends in Whistler, so I phoned them. They are a small group who spend every New Year's together, and when I lived there I did a couple of times too. When they answered the phone they told me that they had just been talking about me and they put the call on speaker phone. It was nice to get together with old friends thousands of kilometres away like that! We chatted for a half hour and then bid each other a Happy New Year and I finally retired to bed around 2.30am.

Not being very good at sleeping in it meant that I spent the first day of the New Year in a bit of a daze, and managed to lose Hapi out on the dykes. I met an older gentleman out walking who assured me he had not seen her and that there were a lot of pheasants in the bushes there so she was probably out hunting and I shouldn't worry, she'd come home when she was done. He said he started walking 3 miles a day when he was 52 and has been doing it ever since, and did I want to guess how old he was. By the look of him I was thinking he was at least 70 if not considerably older, but he was clearly proud of what good shape he was in so I guessed, 60? He thanked me for the compliment and said he would never see 75 again. He also said he wished someone had told him how hard it was to grow old, he did not find life easy. He was out shovelling snow a few days ago and came in so exhausted he had to take a nap. But he was fine again when he woke up.

I went home and Hapi wasn't there, probably still out chasing pheasants. But then I heard a voice calling, Hapi! Hapi!

Who would be calling my dog other than me?

I looked around and finally spotted my neighbour in her driveway. I looked at her and she pointed across the street, Hapi had just disappeared into someone's backyard. She had spotted Hapi in the street and thought Hapi had escaped my yard and she had come out to try to round her up again. But Hapi ignored her. However when I called she immediately came out from behind the house across the street to see who was calling her, and came running when she saw it was me.

You miserable dog! I greeted her. I spent almost an hour out on the cold windy dykes trying to find her when she was already well on her way home.

Well I think I've made her wait long enough, I better take her for a walk. On the leash.

Lang may yer lum reek!

The gap

(from a previous dog walk, a channel to a power dam near town)

I read something on the internet yesterday to the effect that at this time of year the gap between what we want and what we have seems the greatest. I thought that was pretty spot on. The rest of the year we take that gap for granted but now, it just seems hard. We want the picture-perfect Christmas and we get reality.

Not that I am complaining, I just thought it was a good observation.

Today was a do-nothing day after a series of hectic days. I got sidetracked cleaning up some computer files, in no time at all it was 2pm and I still had not taken the dog for a walk. So we walked downtown and stood in line at the post office, myself for a package and Hapi for a dogtreat. We went home and I made tea and read a bit of my new book from the post office. I brought in some firewood from the shed and made supper.

Yesterday I had a whole bunch of things lined up to do, I was kind of dreading it all week. Knew I would have to leap out of bed and hit the ground running if I was to get it all done. I had church, walk the dog and three overlapping entertainment-slash-social occasions in the afternoon and evening. Also some prep work to do for two of those occasions.

At choir practice one of the choir members invited me to the lighting of the last Hanukah candle that evening.

I said, You celebrate Hanukah?
He said, Yes, I'm Jewish.
I said, I didn't know you were Jewish!
He grins and says, Yes, will wonders never cease!

Anyway, it was smack dab in the middle of my overlapping entertainment-slash-social occasion run for it so most reluctantly I had to turn it down. Damn. That would have been a good thing.

Then I go home and start getting ready for the quick dog walk in between and my neighbour comes out to invite me for supper and an inspection of their newly renovated kitchen and bathroom, an invite I have been secretly hoping and waiting for these last couple of months. Again, damn, can't do it, and her Christmas social calendar is so socked in that the next available opportunity won't be until sometime in 2013.

Unfortunately the three overlapping entertainment-slash-social occasions require missing supper, I thought I could manage it but turned out I couldn't. I grabbed a couple of leftover Hallowe'en candies to tide me over but they didn't. So I ended up missing the middle occasion and going home to eat instead. To the dog's great delight. However she was quite dismayed when I took off again less than an hour later.

The final social occasion was one I was actually kind of dreading, would have dropped it I could have, but it turned out not to be nearly as bad as I thought it might be. And I got to eat some very good food. I was greeted at the door with hot-from-the-oven lobster cakes and it got better after that. And I met a couple of bakers who I have admired from a distance, they sell their wares at the Farmers' Market and they are really good. Turns out one of them stood behind me in the Christmas Cantata last week and is a former opera singer! I did not recognize her until she told me. And, we have the same first and second names, but she uses her first name and I my second.

Aside: I have always gone by my second name, I don't really know why. My parents' decision.

Her husband bakes bread and we had a lively, if a little esoteric, discussion of locally available flours.

The event was a Greed and Avarice party, in which we all pick gifts from a pile and take coveted gifts from each other. This year the coveted gifts included a lard bucket full of high quality home baked cookies, a couple of bottles of wine, a large box of truffles, and tickets to the local cinema. Last year I ended up with a gift I quite disliked and went home and stowed it in a trunk in the basement. This year I rewrapped it and stuck it in the pile as my contribution. Turns out the person who pulled it from the pile made a huge joke of it, everyone rolling on the floor laughing, and then reluctantly gave it up to someone who actually wanted it. Wow.

My new opera singer friend ended up with a gift that she didn't like at all, and quietly said to me that she had contributed one of the much coveted gifts and felt a little cheated ending up with this terrible thing that she quite disliked. I told her what I had done with my gift from last year and she brightened up.

That's exactly what I am going to do! she said.

I did not end up with any of the sweets, wine or tickets, but did briefly get my hands on a couple of those items. My gift consists of two items, one of which I may keep and the other I may regift at an upcoming opportunity involving a completely different group of people. Or they may get both, I haven't decided.

Standing ovation

Last Sunday my church choir performed its annual Christmas Cantata. I joined the choir this fall and for the previous week we were intense practice for this upcoming performance. We have several "Music Scholars", university music students, in addition to some very talented singers. I don't count myself as any of the above, and there were moments when I only mouthed the words for fear of getting the tune wrong.

Nevertheless.

It was a full church and at the end of our half hour performance we got a standing ovation.

I think it might be unusual for a congregation to give their choir a standing ovation, but they did.

I have never in my life received a standing ovation, and I have to say it was absolutely thrilling. I now understand what talented performers, whether musical or theatrical, must feel and why they find their work fulfilling. I still can't get over it. A standing ovation. All those people standing and clapping for us, for our performance.

One of our musical scholars, a tenor, sang a solo (after the standing ovation) of "O Holy Night" and I can't imagine there was a dry eye or a throat without a lump in it for that. The acoustics of that church are quite amazing and his performance was right up there with any famous tenor you want to name. Powerful. Moving.

I know he hopes to pursue further studies at a top school in the USA and his ultimate life goal is opera. If anyone deserves it he does. And I will be able to say, "I knew him when..."

Oh yes, and today is 12-12-12. As Rain over at Rainy Day Thoughts points out, this is the last time such a dateline will appear in this century.

Too much to do at this time of year

(This faded drawing under a bridge shows the artist's face and what she is looking at. If you stand in front of it and face in the same direction as the artist's face, you can see the view that she painted. But it is faded now and hard to make out in this photo)

At this time of year I try to send out a few Christmas cards in hopes of receiving some back, but so far I can't say with much luck. I went to a friend's place yesterday for dinner and a board game and she had a bunch of cards on display that she had already received (I have none). She showed me an example of a Christmas card she makes herself and sends out. It is gorgeous, she has great talent. I oohed and aahed over it but I doubt that will have any effect. And this is a woman who is a devout atheist, who was hesitant to go to see the movie Life of Pi because she had heard there was too much talk of G** in it. She did go, her review was too much g**--talk but great cinematography, however not worth the extra bucks to see in 3D.

Nevertheless she has totally decorated her small apartment in handmade Christmas ornaments, some she made herself, some made by her daughters. She has a crappy low-paid call centre job that entails shiftwork and no holiday time, so she pretty much assumes no time off at Christmas. she was hoping to save some sick time to take off this year, but she got pneumonia and that was that. Instead one of her daughters celebrated Christmas early with her while she was still sick, and our dinner consisted of leftover turkey soup. It was good and it made her apartment smell very Christmas-y. She showed me the lovely ring her daughters got her for Christmas. She picked it out at a craft fair and told them that was what she wanted, they put together the money and bought it for her. What a clever lady, what nice daughters.

The board game we play I always win and I did again yesterday afternoon. I don't know why. Sometimes I wonder if she lets me win because she says I am a poor loser. Hmph. I thought she was going to win yesterday, but she didn't. It was close though.

After dinner she went to the movie and I went to choir practice.

Choir practice was long and I was tired. I am a second soprano but I sit in front of some very good first sopranos and at times I cannot hear the other second sopranos so I sing along with the first sopranos in my not very good second soprano voice. I try to be quiet so as not to be noticed at those times. We have some extra singers joining us for the Cantata and of course they are all very good. They will sing some solo and duet parts while the rest of us rest. This Cantata was written for a Celtic band including a penny whistle. Our choirmaster was shaking her head over that because the score requires several key changes for the penny whistle and she says what composer in his right mind requires a penny whistle to make key changes?

After practice one of the tenors told me about his heart surgery earlier in the week. He had to go into the city for it and his wife didn't come with him because she was sick. He said it was very painful and despite complaints they gave him no pain relief. Until a male nurse took pity on him in the middle of the night. He said, Don't go to the city for surgery without an advocate, it is terrible! He seems OK now, he came to practice at any rate, but holy cow what a thing. 

I got home very tired and had to make a few phone calls before it got late, the last one to my son in Toronto. About half an hour into that call I had to beg off because I couldn't stay focused any more. I had made my dog come indoors for a bit but allowed her to go out to sleep. She doesn't like coming indoors but I make her just to have her company for an hour or two. When the temperature dips below zero at night she far prefers to be sleeping out, she loves the cold. I prefer sleeping indoors.

December 6...

Today is the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre in 1989. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you need the details. A horrible event. I lived in Ottawa at the time, a two hour drive from Montreal and it was as if everything came to a grinding halt, the enormity of the evil and the fact that it was aimed specifically at women, all women. Well, he said only the feminists but apparently his definition of feminist pretty much covered all women. So I mark this day every year.

OK, moving on.

A friend of mine is going through some marital difficulty which is leaving her pretty devastated. She and her partner are in counselling, but as far as I can make out the only thing they've accomplished so far is to delineate the full extent of the disaster. It kind of came out of the blue for my friend, she had thought that they were fine. I try to be supportive but there is really not much I can do other than listen when she calls me, which is not all that frequent really. I am busy these days but try to remember to call her too, not all that frequently either.

Sometimes being single is lonely, but not very often at all. I like being alone and right now my need for affection is quite well filled by my big fluffy and affectionate dog. I like spending time with friends, I like spending time alone, I am grateful for my turmoil-free life. Especially when I watch friends going through it. There are a few things that would be easier or more enjoyable with a partner, but you could say that about anything one lacks in life, and I think that most of us lack something or other and one way or another we live with it. There are plenty of things I would like to change in my life, but then I'd need a whole other lifetime to accomplish it all and sadly, that is just not an option. If only I was immortal...

My friend commented recently that her current situation is good for her weight, her appetite has disappeared and she has to force herself to eat. I remember going through a period like that, I remember that feeling of a permanently clenched stomach and I don't miss it at all. But I did lose a significant amount of weight that I was happy to lose. Hopefully my friend will too, as a small compensation for the rest of the unpleasantness. Not a weight loss plan that I recommend, but it does work for some of us.

I went to the physiotherapist yesterday. I have pain in both arms which I attributed to either tendinitis or tendinosis (look it up) in or around my elbows. The physiotherapist had me run through a bunch of exercises and poses and extensive questioning to figure out exactly what was going on. She found it confusing as apparently what I am experiencing does not fit the definition for either condition. She found that the pulse in my wrist changes when she puts my arm in different positions, indicating that the blood flow may be blocked somewhere along the line when I am in certain positions. And there's a vertebra in my neck that does not move along with the vertebrae on either side of it. So her theory is that that vertebra is somehow pinching both the blood vessels and the nerves to my arms in certain positions and that may be what is causing the pain. But she's not absolutely sure of that, it is just the only explanation she can come up with right now. Sounds good to me though. She asked me to perform certain exercises over the next few days and we'd see how it goes next week. The idea is to get that vertebra moving properly by stimulating weak muscles on either side of it. I believe there is arthritis involved, so I don't know how much improvement is reasonable to expect.

Some of the tests she performed involved me lying on my back while she manipulated the back of my neck. If she had just stopped talking I would have been out like a light, it felt so good. I hope there is more of that prescribed for my recalcitrant vertebra.

On the sidebar of my blog there are some links that I check fairly frequently. One of them a couple of days ago was to an article about bubble wrap as window insulation. That sounded really interesting to me. So today I am off to the store to buy some bubble wrap to try it out. Also I need tape for wrapping packages for mailing, my old roll of tape has become permanently glued to itself and I cannot extract any more from the roll. And conveniently, I have a dinner date with a friend who happens to live near the stationery store. We are going to play a board game and eat dinner together, then I will be off to choir practice. Hapi will be all alone for the afternoon and evening so I must try to take her for a good long walk this morning. Which means I should get a move on now.

The approach of winter

This picture of Hapi was drawn on a smartphone by a young woman standing behind me in line for the local ATM. I can't believe she did this so quickly and on a cell phone! She texted me the picture. Amazing, eh?

Coming 'round to Christmas and it has been a while since I last posted.

Pottering around doing this 'n' that, nothing so time-consuming as to justify leaving off the blog, on the other hand nothing so exciting as to inspire a new post.

I've been going to an exercise class, Triple-A (Acadia Active Aging), which is OK but I can't say that I notice any kind of physical improvement. I had a student trainer who was supposed to be training me on the various machines and tracking my "improvement". Mostly we chatted about dogs and her life in northern Ontario, where she is from. And I got tendinitis in my arms. Not sure what caused that, could be coincidental or it could be the Triple-A stuff. In any case I am back on the waitlist for physiotherapy and after a month and a half I have my first appointment coming up. In the meantime the tendinitis is subsiding.

I also started skating with a friend in Triple-A. We try to go once a week but it is kind of boring as it is just a windowless indoor rink with no music and hardly any people. At times we have the entire rink of clean ice to ourselves. If I was a great skater I would be tickled pink at the opportunity to have all that ice to practice my skills on, but I am not. I am one step removed from hugging the boards for balance. I can sort of skate backwards and in circles but that is the limit of my amazing skills on ice.

I joined the Baptist Church choir. Mostly because a friend of mine is the choirmaster and every time she sees me she mentions that I can join any time and the last time she did that she caught me at a weak moment and I agreed. Her enticement was that the annual Christmas Cantata was going to be a medley of Celtic carols, complete with Celtic band. My choirmaster friend has her doctorate in music and teaches music therapy at the university, as well as numerous students in her home. So working with her is a bit of a privilege, but seeing as how organized church religion is never going to be my thing and this is the Baptist church no less, it does feel a bit strange to be hying myself off to church every Sunday. However to my surprise the singing part is actually sufficiently pleasurable that it makes up for the churchy part. There are some Acadia music students in the choir with amazing voices and it is good to be singing along with them. I can sing in tune if I am singing along with someone else who manages to be in tune, otherwise I am quite hopeless.

To round out my musical career and as somewhat of an antidote to the churchy Sundays, I also joined a ukulele group that meets on Sunday evenings in each other's homes. We bring along snacks and "something to drink", sit in a circle and strum our ukes and sing silly songs. The "something to drink" is usually a mason jar of some anonymous alcoholic beverage, so the songs get sillier as the evening progresses. There is some talk of going out carolling, with our ukuleles, in a couple of weeks. We are torn between announcing our plans in advance and not. On the one hand neighbours are likely to turn out their lights and lock their doors when they hear our ukes coming, on the other hand there might be "something to drink" on offer.

Last week I went to PEI. The grandboys were spending a couple of weeks there as their parents were overwhelmingly busy with work. I took a couple of early Christmas presents and the dog. The resident dog Fiona was not thrilled with Hapi's arrival so there was a bit of tension in the house over that. The climax was a grand dog fight over food that sent dogfood and water bowls flying all over the living room. The fight was over in a matter of seconds but the cleanup took a little longer. The dogs were sent outdoors to have it out, and they did. After that no more fighting. the occasional warning growl, but they appeared to have settled the main issues.

We have had our first snows here. Locally they forecasted snow flurries and we got a blizzard instead. Kerthump and there was a blanket of snow everywhere. While I was in PEI another snowfall to the delight of the boys. In addition there were a couple Canada World Youth fellows in the house, one of whom hailed from Indonesia. It was his first snow ever. He said that in his home town, they considered +20C (68F) cold, +40C was normal. His counterpart was from Calgary so he was pleased to see the snow and insisted on dragging the Indonesian youth outdoors for a snowball fight. The grandboys started to build a snowman but got distracted by the snow-covered trampoline.

I took the boys and the dogs to the beach where we found a patch of thin ice on the sand with no water underneath. They had great fun sliding on it and throwing sticks for the dogs. The dogs skittered and slid over the ice after the sticks. Only feet away great white-capped waves crashed on the shore.

My truck is now ready for winter. It has been painted and waterproofed and snowtires put on. My neighbour found two rims for the snowtires, he says he will keep an eye out for two more. That way I don't have to keep having the tires removed from the rims and replaced with whatever tire is suitable for the season. The waterproofing was largely successful but one leak remains that we don't know the exact location of. Nothing a small towel can't catch though.

I still have carrots, kale and mustard greens in the garden. I worried about the carrots the entire time I was in PEI because the temperature dropped below -10C at night. But I had left them covered in snow and plastic and apparently snow is almost as good an insulator as the pink fibreglass stuff. In any case even the mustard greens held up under the snow and plastic. I also have some green onions that are going on two years old and are huge. I had left them out because I didn't know what to do with them, the green parts are way too tough to use in salad. But it turns out the that the white part is very usable and since that part is now as big as leeks, I have a tonne of "green onions". And since they grew through last winter I hardly worry about them this winter. A fellow "Newcomer" gave me a recipe for kale mashed potatoes that calls for a large quantity of onion, so I have a good use for all the kale and onion still in the garden and the potatoes now stored in the basement.

Speaking of potatoes. I read a while ago about the nutritious value of potatoes. When potatoes were first brought into Europe, the Irish went for them in a big way. In fact they became the diet staple which ultimately led to the infamous Potato Famine. But before the famine, poor Irish peasants subsisted on a diet largely consisting of potatoes and a bit of milk, while poor peasants elsewhere in Europe had diets based on grains. And apparently the Irish peasants were far healthier than their counterparts anywhere else, because the potato is almost a complete food. In combination with milk it covers all the nutritional bases.

In my hippy days we eschewed anything white as being bad for you: white flour, white rice, homogenized milk, potatoes and such. To this day I associate the colour white with poor nutrition, and I even have trouble with cauliflour. But this is just wrong. White doesn't mean anything. And potatoes are actually a very healthy food. Which is good because I have always loved potatoes and felt terribly guilty eating them. No more.

Another thing about the Irish, this is about Irish Soda Bread. Back in the day firewood was at a premium in most of Europe because the nobility controlled all the forests and common people couldn't access them for fuel. Except in Ireland where the laws were different and everyone could go into the forest to gather firewood. As a result, most European villages had community bake ovens to conserve fuel and most people ate yeast-leavened bread because that was most suitable for a community bake oven. But in Ireland, common people could bake at home, they had the fuel for it, so community bake ovens were not so common. And soda bread is a quick bread that wouldn't do so well if you had to wait your turn at the community oven but is just fine if you have your very own oven for baking on your own schedule. So the Irish made soda bread while the rest of Europe made yeast or sourdough bread.

Reading. Well I just read another really great book, Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Very long book, over 600 pages. I found it a bit overwhelming at first, the pace was, to my way of thinking, extremely slow. I'd say the first 150 pages are about the birth of the story's narrator. But once I settled into the pace I found the book extremely interesting and thoughtful. And along the way learned a bit of Ethiopian history.

Ethiopia is the one African country that did not succumb to European imperialism until the 1930s when Mussolini came along. But for the centuries and millenia before that it was an independent land never warped by colonialism. It also is home to some of the oldest Jewish and Christian communities. The Queen of Sheba was thought to have come from there, although that is disputed now.

Anyway, the book is set in modern times and the story is set against the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie but it is not about that. The story's narrator is a conjoined twin separated shortly after birth and raised by adoptive Indian parents. He becomes a surgeon and ultimately practices in New York. That is the bare bones of the story, there is of course much more to it which you will discover if you decide to take on this giant of a book. Along the way you will learn a bit of history of a very interesting country. And since the author is a surgeon himself, you will learn a bit about surgery as well. But Mr Verghese is a very thoughtful surgeon with a lot to say about life in general and the practice of medicine in particular. Very satisfying read.

OK, sorry about the long wait, if in fact you have been waiting for my next post. And I imagine some people who might have waited have given it up so my audience is no doubt considerably smaller. Although I have always assumed that it was small to begin with, now it is probably just that much smaller. Eventually it will dwindle to nothing, I will stop writing altogether and nobody will notice.

...And then she said:

Yes it's been forever. Well a couple of months at least. I have probably lost any audience I ever had---I think there were maybe four of you---and am writing to myself. I have not set fingers to pen or keyboard keys (except to navigate through what other people write) in a very long time.

My last post was from PEI; since then I went kayaking once on Gaspereau Lake in a friend's kayak because my own was in drydock. It got badly scratched in the spring and needed a fresh coat of urethane which is now done.I also visited a friend's cottage on the South Shore, and went camping at Blomidon Park.

The friend I went camping with has set a goal of camping at least once in every provincial campground in Nova Scotia, I will try to accompany her. Blomidon was nice: well-maintained and quiet even though it was full, great views of the Minas Basin, several hiking trails in the woods and on the beach at the base of the cape. Hapi was on her best behaviour, she knew not to go off our tent site even when parades of other dogs strolled past, never even so much as woofed under her breath at the malamute in the adjoining campsite. She wouldn't sleep in the tent though, I had to tie her to the picnic table.

We hiked out Cape Split on the Labour Day weekend which was like hiking in rush hour (Blomidon and Cape Split form a hook-shaped peninsula separating the Minas Basin and the Bay of Fundy, Blomidon overlooks the Basin and Cape Split faces into the Bay). I didn't bring water for Hapi and there was none on the trail so at the tip of the Cape I went around begging water for my dog from all the people sitting in the grass enjoying the view. Got way more than enough thanks to people's generosity and Hapi's cuteness. Curiously, some people said No when they thought it was for me but changed their minds when I said it was for my dog. What, I am not cute enough?

The cabin on the South Shore was great, right on the shore overlooking a small beach on a large ocean bay. The cabin was built by my friend's father, she remembers when all there was was a platform to pitch their family tent on.

Speaking of whom, her 96-year old father was also there. He is busy working on his second book, a kind of summation of his religious and spiritual knowledge and beliefs. He is a retired Baptist minister and unretired Free Thinker. I imagine he had to keep a lot of what he really believed to himself when he was active as a pastor, now he is putting it out there for all to hear and read. He made up a little jingle to sum it all up: "God is Love, Salvation is Free, Why Worry About Eternit-ee?" 

When I wasn't listening to him expound on the nature of the universe and the history of mankind, we were hiking the shore with our dogs to a cafe for lunch, setting on the deck with wine under a canopy of stars, and watching the ongoing drama of the dogs, their respective food bowls and local marauding squirrels.

I made a hash of my garden but it turned out OK, I got 5 6 quarts of tomato sauce, 5 quarts of salsa verde (probably a lifetime's worth even after giving half of it away), a pint of pesto with more to come, a whole bunch of kale, beans and peas in the freezer, piles of potatoes, onions and carrots, and many meals of fresh peas, beans, broccoli, lettuce and cherry tomatoes. I had to finally compost the cherry tomato plants because I could not face eating another single one. Would you believe I planted 15 cherry tomato plants and every single one survived to produce gi-normous quantities of purple, yellow and red cherry tomatoes? I expect next year's garden will be full of cherry tomato upstarts.

I still have not harvested the squash (all 2 of them), the garlic was pathetic (planted 20 cloves got 8 tiny bulbs), and the green onions have become monsters I do not know what to do with. The tomatoes and cherry tomatoes were a near disaster because I did not stake or cage them and they sprawled everywhere. After the PEI trip I waded in and chopped off all the lower branches of every plant and attempted to prop some of them up against the garden fence. Amazingly, this did seem to help, but my garden pathways were quite obliterated so walking through the garden was very tricky.

But I have already planted a bed of next year's garlic, which hopefully will do much better for being planted in the fall instead of the spring. There is still more kale in the garden that I would like to turn part of into kale chips which I am told are quite good. I plan to make quince marmalade from the few quinces that grew on the bush in the front yard. And I am still getting regular meals of green beans from the pole beans.

Got all my firewood stacked away, the garden taken care of, the lawn mowed on a more or less regular basis. Killed my sourdough but fortunately had a little stashed away in the freezer so I was able to resurrect it. We had near-perfect summer weather, warm and sunny. There were a couple of weeks in early August that were unbearably hot and humid, I got very grumpy then. I don't do well in that kind of weather.

I decided to clean up my loom room which of late has turned into my junk room---anything I didn't know what to do with got tossed in there and the door closed. Eventually it got impossible. I did a pretty good job of cleaning it up if I do say so myself and then thought I should tackle the living room and bedroom. Last night in a frenzy of activity when I should have been hieing off to bed I put together a couple of shelving units and rearranged some of the living room furniture. The jury is out on whether that was a good idea.

Speaking of the loom I have revived the project started last fall and then abandoned through the winter. In the spring I dreamed about removing that warp and putting something else on the loom, I decided to follow through on that dream but at the last minute thought that if I removed the warp I would never in a million years put it back on and it might be easier, quicker and more economical just to finish the damn project. Then a friend said, instead of doing the project as is, why don't you modify it to turn it into Christmas presents for family members? Hot damn, two birds with one shuttle! That apparently was all the inspiration I needed, the project is now three quarters done and being worked on regularly. It is the kind of thing that I can sit down and work a few minutes on while I wait for tea to steep or sauce to simmer. And while it doesn't look like much to me, visitors have commented on how beautiful it is. Funny how when you have your nose buried in something for months on end that it ceases to have any finer qualities, all you can see is its faults and mundanity. And how much there is left still to do.

I moved into my basement guest room. Am quite surprised by how comfy it is and am thinking of making the move semi-permanent. Probably it will get too cold in the winter and I would rather not turn on the baseboard heater, but am enjoying it for the present. If I am not careful my old bedroom will turn into my junk room.

My neighbour up the street is helping me do some work on my truck. He painted the whole thing and undercoated it too. He put rock guard on the lower panels. He told me to buy some chrome tape to trim the wheel wells with and put it on for me. He tore out the headliner in the cab (it was sagging and disintegrating). Our next project is to remove the cap on the box (if anyone on the west coast is reading this, cap=canopy), replace the truck cap tape, add a bead of silicone and put the cap back on again. To keep the water out. My Blomidon camping friend wants to camp at Keji in October and I would like the truck box to be rainproof by then.

I joined the Newcomers Club. I don't feel like a newcomer but of course in many ways I am. And it turns out there is no time limit on being a newcomer, there are newcomers that have been members for years. Once you join you can participate in any or all of the interest groups, I signed up for three but there are many more. On Wednesday I went biking with the biking group; we did a leisurely ride to a bakery for coffee and muffins and then back again. We laughed ourselves silly over the coffee. The night before I went to the book discussion group; I read Wreckage by Michael Crummey for that group and the discussion was quite interesting.

Several of us mentioned the literary device of jumping around in time in the course of the novel, how it bothered us because it seemed kind of choppy and disorienting. But one woman said, Isn't this how we think of our lives? I mean, we don't remember things linearly, we remember bits and pieces all over time, whatever seems relevant at the time of remembering, or next in line in our own peculiar streams of consciousness.

I will mention three books I've read this summer that were really good: Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill (memoir), Wreckage (novel,) and This is How by Augusten Burroughs (self-help non-fiction?). They have that quality of taking my breath away at how well written they are. Phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs jump off the page and demand to be memorized.

I am ploughing through everything Roger Zelazny ever wrote but I am thinking of giving that up pretty soon. Some of what he wrote I really really liked (Lord of Light is on my short list of all-time favourites) and the rest is anywhere from OK to boring.

Yesterday, in the course of thinking about rearranging furniture I was looking at my bookshelves. Many of my books are decades old and have only been read once, if ever ( I confess to buying books I should read and then never do). I picked up one at random, The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas, and realized that while I have a general idea of what Thomas wrote about I had no memory of the specifics except for one excerpt involving his thoughts after an accident lying on the pavement watching his blood flow out of a wound. Perhaps I should reread the book. Then looked at the books surrounding it and thought, perhaps I should reread them all. When?!? And if I am not going to reread them why am I keeping them?

I picked up a Fench language novel that once had been a favourite of mine (l'Ecume du jour, by Boris Vian), when I could read French reasonably well. Now, it is almost gibberish to me. I have no memory of what that book is about, and I would have to improve my understanding of written French substantially if I ever hope to find out. That book is over 40 years old, a musty old paperback. I remember a couple of other books that I bought around the same time and later culled; I wish I had hung onto them instead of this one, at least they had pictures.

The other day a friend of a friend dropped by to pick up something. As she was leaving she commented on the tree in front of my house, saying that I really should remove it. After having spent hundreds of dollars to remove the trees at the back and missing them afterward, the suggestion that I remove yet another tree was not really welcome. I pointed out the benefits of that tree, how it provided much needed shade in the summer and a degree of privacy as well. She continued to insist that it should go and my argument that it provided privacy spurred her to say that without that tree my house would be much more welcoming, and that I was just an old spinster hiding in my house behind that tree.

Well shut my mouth and call me speechless, as a childhood friend used to say. Who even uses that word anymore? I could only come up with Thank you for sharing as a response. Later I recounted this conversation to my neighbour and she laughingly suggested that I should have told her the tree was for hiding my constant stream of male visitors from prying eyes.

Other than the couple of short trips mentioned above I have been close to home and feeling a bit antsy about that. I feel like I should be somewhere else doing something else, but no ideas (or maybe too many ideas) about what. Tied to my garden as it were. Read a lot. Dream a lot. Wish I was there.

Last winter I kind of made a sort of new year's resolution, to give myself a year to figure out what I was up to next. Now that year is coming to a close and I have done very little to figure that out other than turn down or otherwise pass up opportunities to go somewhere. At one point it occurred to me that I was waiting for something to happen, something to change that would make it all clear to me and that really, if I wanted to change I had to change, not wait for change. From there I went to what would I change and quickly picked on several habits of laziness that I have fallen into that might be counterproductive time wasters. Things I do for the sake of comfort that are kind of addictions (TV, eating chocolate, web-surfing for hours on end). A little bit of TV or chocolate is nice but filling one's life up with it is not.

When my TV time rolls around each day, the pull of the TV is quite overwhelming, I make up reasons not to do anything else. And then I haul out the chocolate and there goes the evening. I figure between all of my addictions I am looking at half the day just gone. So now I am looking at how to deal with that. Quit cold turkey or pick at the edges? Figure out alternative activities to gradually replace the worst of my addictions? There is such a pull toward sloth, I can easily see myself sinking into some kind of oblivion of terminal laziness.

OK, a bit of a ramble, but that's all. Don't know when I'll be back...

Sunday morning at the cottage

(Roddy at the beach)*

I am on holiday in Prince Edward Island, staying at a large cottage near an ocean beach. I have the cottage to myself and although I cannot see the ocean I can hear it. The cottage is in the woods facing a potato field, robins chirping nearby. The resident rabbits are getting their exercise evading my dog.

The purpose of this holiday is to visit with my grandsons who are staying at the nearby farm of their PEI grandparents. At this moment I am sitting on the screened-in deck (lots of mosquitoes and other biting insects here!) with my morning coffee, taking advantage of the cottage wifi. Shortly Hapi and I will take a stroll on the beach to see if there are any other dogs about to play with. Hapi had quite a vigourous workout last evening with two dogs she met there.

I arrived here on Friday afternoon after a near-6-hour drive. Google Maps told me it would be a 5-hour drive, but I am not a fast driver and we did stop at a nice picnic park half way for lunch and a romp in the brook (for Hapi).

Friday evening we (Grammy Cindy, Tristan, Phelan and I) went to the nearby town of Morell for the Morell River Festival Parade, a 15-minute affair involving decorated cars and a couple of firetrucks.

Yesterday we went to the Wood Islands Seaglass Festival---in Wood Islands of course---and the boys collected lots of shards of sea glass on the beach there.

They had a fellow who would toss a bucket full of sea glass shards onto the beach, then they'd set loose the kids who collected the glass and turned it in for prizes, the fellow collected back all the glass in his bucket and returned it to the beach when no one was looking, and there'd be another round of kids sent out to hunt for glass for prizes...

Grammy Cindy makes goat milk soap which she sells at local markets, fairs and festivals, she had a booth at the Seaglass Festival. Tristan is old enough to be a help at her booth, he went early to help her set up and minded the soaps while Grammy took bathroom breaks.

Phelan and a neighbour boy Roddy came to the festival later with me, we took some back roads to get there which was kind of fun. Back roads on the island are narrow red clay affairs through the woods, when another car came in the other direction we pulled way over to the side and drove through the overhanging branches of the trees. Roddy and Phelan loved the slapping tree branches on the windshield, they thought I should drive faster to see if we could break the branches. I declined, I thought it was a toss-up which would break faster, the branches or the truck.

My truck is turning the colour of PEI, a kind of ochre-red.

Last night on the beach I met a Russian couple from Connecticut with a little dog that played chase with Hapi. I told the couple that I inherited Hapi from my son, they pointed to their dog and said, We too! Tristan was collecting driftwood that he hoped to take back to Toronto to sell to a local pet store that uses it in their reptile terrariums, and Cindy collected Irish Moss that she uses in her soaps. I collected dog poops.

Later, back at the cottage, Grampa Karl sawed some logs while Grammy Cindy, Tristan and I played Blurt. Several times there were "showdowns" between Cindy and I, Tristan called it Granny Wars.

Later today we will go paddling on the Morell River and on Monday we hope to go cycling on the Confederation Trail for lunch in St Peters. I will head back to the mainland on Tuesday.

Can't tell you how idyllic it is here, a wonderful vacation spot. The couple from Connecticut said they came here at a friend's insistence, that normally they never would have considered going north for a vacation. Now they go nowhere else, they love it here. The ocean is warm here because it is a relatively shallow protected area in the Gulf of St Lawrence. Historically it has always been a kind of vacation spot, even the Miqm'ah used to come here from the mainland for summers of fishing, berrying and the odd bit of hunting.

On another note, my brother is still in hospital being treated for a serious infection. They will set him loose in just over a week, but he had intended to be spending this time on his own island vacation spot on the west coast. He is weak, bored and frustrated but getting better, we hope. Such are the vicissitudes of one's 60s.

* The photo is young Roddy getting ready to throw a rock into the sea.

Followup post

Anne commented on my previous post that a followup post would be nice so here it is.

I am much improved. I had two rounds of IV antibiotics and after the second round the doctor sent me home with a prescription for oral antibiotics, which I will probably finish this weekend. My second visit to Emergency was almost the exact opposite to the first: very quiet, hardly anyone there, everyone getting treated promptly. My neighbour drove me to and from the hospital.

I saw my regular doctor today and she could not see any sign of the infection. Since the hospital had not sent her a report she had to take my word for it that there ever had been one. Of course that doesn't let me off finishing the pills.

Meantime I have bigger things to worry about, a family member in another province is quite ill, and their prognosis is not nearly as positive as mine. Kind of puts things in perspective. If Anne had not commented when she did I might have forgotten about my last post altogether and left well wishers hanging. Sorry about that, and thanks Anne.