I missed the Sunday blog for the first time in ages.  It was the third item for the day, and I couldn’t exceed the two-task limit.  The club hiked Cougar Canyon.  I volunteered to be the sweep again.  As we began, I wondered about the wisdom of it.  Snaking along the valley I had mental images of a huge cat following our progress and picking me as the last and weakest morsel in the line.  When you’re sweep you have more time to think than if you’re without responsibilities and can move up and down the line to talk to different people.  When someone did hang back and chat with me, I mentioned how I was giving myself a puny thrill by imagining a big cat eying me as a meal.  She pointed out the fact that the line of us was more like a telephone wire than anything else and that no cougar would salivate at the prospect of biting into such a buzzing prey.  It was true.  There were 39 hikers ahead of me.  We were more numerous and as talkative as the W.W.W.  As we began to climb, I no longer needed to entertain myself with conjured up threats.  I began to enjoy the exertion and was happy to quietly look up the sheer rock faces, down the steep canyon walls, across at other cliffs and along the canyon floor.  When I got home at 4:00pm, there was a message from Terry saying that his family theatre adventure was a success and he was back in Vernon.  I phoned him, he came over and we had beer and pickled eggs on the back deck.  It was my first outside drink of the summer season.  Then he took me to the local Chinese Buffet for dinner.  He came back for coffee, which we drank while sitting on my new futon in the sunroom, another first.  It was a good visit.  By then I was too tired to blog.m

Now I’m into the final stages of packing for Korea and looking forward to Mela’s visit.  I Skyped with Jay on Monday, as usual, and discovered more about some of the very real issues he is dealing with.  He and May seem to be working through them admirably, though, and I am eager to join them and have a whole month to live with them and the girls.  It sounds as if Jay has 2 excursions in the works, one for the first and one for the last weeks that I am there.  The rest will unfold as it will.  I just have to make it to Korea.  You know how after a plane crash there’s often a person interviewed on the television who tells a story of a lucky loved one who, for some reason or other, was supposed to be on that flight but missed it. Well, when Korean Air flight #72 out of Vancouver had a bomb scare and was guided back to Comox by two U.S. fighter jets the week before last, I thought my trip was jinxed.  That’s my flight.  I had already bought a second, West Jet, ticket from Kelowna to Vancouver to avoid an Air Canada strike and ensure that I would make it to the Korean Air flight on time.  Now that was under threat.  I told a friend the other day that if I go down on Korean Air flight 72, she can tell the reporters that I did my level best to be on that doomed plane. 

Me chatting with friends on a hike when I was not the sweep

The bridge from Kelowna to West Kelowna as seen from high point of the Rose Valley Reservoir hike

Mountain sheep on the side of the road on the drive home from the Rose Valley Reservoir

Blossoms on my Nanking Cherry

16 sleeps before Korea

I know I have adjusted to retirement because I’m not bothered by the fact that a couple of tasks I would have done in a period off between classes now constitute a days’ work.  Plus living alone has limited the number of things I actually have to do, so that I sometimes spread those two tasks over two days, lest I have nothing at all to do on some days.  Of course an aging body requires much more maintenance than a young one, so certain activities like walks, exercises, long baths, etc. now can be counted as tasks that justify getting up in the morning.  As my father used to say, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” 

But this week I weakened.  It was Tuesday, and I was slowly drinking my morning coffee and preparing for the Ramble, when Randy from Swan Lake Nursery phoned to say he had finally found a kid to plant the cedar that would replace the one that had died.  He’d be here just after 8.  I was overjoyed because the alternative was taking out the dead one and planting the new one myself, but the hike was off.  All went well.  Then the phone rang.  Goret, the insurance broker we first contacted when we bought the house, was finally back at work after a bout with a bad back and could see me at 10.  Perfect!  After two hours with her I had renewed car insurance, car license and house insurance as well as bought travel insurance for Korea.  I had accomplished a weeks’ work in a morning and rewarded myself with a good walk.  I returned to find a note on the door informing me that Fed Ex had tried to leave a package.  I had been expecting one, but not quite so soon.  It was from Jay and contained my assignment to help him renew all his papers in order to stay teaching in Korea.  I was devastated. It was only 2 o’clock.  I could have gone immediately to FAX the requests for sealed transcripts to Lakehead U. and Concordia.  I snapped and foolishly tried to phone Fed Ex to see if I could intercept their delivery truck.  What a mistake.  I’ve never been good with automated telephone systems, and either I’m getting worse or this one is the one that’s been waiting for years to break me.  There was no possibility of just hitting 0 and talking to a real person.  I had to enter the 14 number delivery code and on and on.  I was trying for the third time to enter the code when, miraculously, I was connected to a real human being.  At first I was so shocked my voice came out in the same strident tone I’d been using to curse the machine, but I calmed down before the person hung up and slowly managed to convey my message.  The woman said she would try to contact the driver.  I had to postpone the tutoring session I was supposed to have so that I could await her call.  When she got back to me after about twenty minutes, it was to say that she hadn’t succeeded but that I could get the package at the main office on Airport Road near Kelowna at 8 the following morning.  All was fine.  I had my class late and picked up the package the following morning with no problems.  The FAXes were on their way by 9a.m. Thursday.  The week continued at this frenzied pace.  I’ve had my hair cut, seen the physiotherapist, bought all the pharmaceutical supplies I need for the trip on the seniors’ discount day at Shoppers’ Drug Mart, taken a tour of most of the many murals in Vernon and gone on the Sunday hike.  Now I’m going to kick back and enjoy a meal that I have about once a week, roasted pieces of chicken, yams and sweet potato, all done on one pan in a toaster oven.  

The view of Vernon, Kalamalka Lake and Terrace Mountain from the top of today's hike up East Hill. 

Spring Beauties are among the early wild flowers that are out now.

    

April 8 and Easter Sunday

Today’s hike was to Adventure Bay.  It’s the first one this year that has made me recall the sensations I had last spring on the first hikes with the club, when I thought they were a friendly but excessively fit group.  Now I feel at home with them.  My friends are there, and I can keep up with them.  My head was wet with sweat from the first ascent, but it’s always that way whenever I exert myself.  I don’t get nearly as winded as I did last year.  It was a jewel of a day, 15c with a sapphire sky above emerald pines, the ones that hadn’t succumbed to the pine beetle.  Either side of the path was strewn with trunks that had been cut to clear it.  The young deer were out near us and undeterred even by our babbling.  I’m home now at the computer with warm red cheeks and the calm I always feel after a walk.  I’m sure that the runner’s high must be wonderful, but as I could never push my body enough to attain it, I am satisfied with this feeling of peace. 

I discovered this week that when you buy cheap winter rims for your tires, they’re heavy.  I was able to carry the summer tires and their light aluminum rims up from the basement where I had put them last fall and lift them into the trunk.  But when I got home from Canadian Tire and tried to haul out one of the winter set I got a surprise.  I could just lift it to the edge of the trunk, dump it to the ground and then roll it into the garage/storage area by the parking spot.  Doing this four times constituted a real test of strength.  Talking of this garage/storage area makes me remember that another thing I did this week was screw the ‘Jim’s Eccentricity’ sign that Gene Marquis made for Jim when he finished the sauna on the Gatineau River to the door of said space.  I had brought the sign with me but couldn’t think of where to hang it until this idea struck me.  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it earlier because I can’t imagine a more eccentric piece of property than this one, and Jim was absolutely undeterred by its weirdness.  That garage/storage area is the middle third of one long building, either side is owned by the adjacent back neighbors.  Only our third has drive-through doors.  I use the whole space for storage and gardening tools, but if I wanted to I could use it as a garage and exit on to 25^th Street because we have an easement in perpetuity between the two back neighbors’ lots.  We also have an easement in perpetuity through the parking lot of the house next door and on to 32^nd Ave.  This is the route I use because I don’t need a garage in this climate and the parking area we have is big enough for about four cars.  That and driving to Kelowna to get the spring check up at the Mazda dealership and have lunch with Bert and Peg were the highlights of this week.   

A male quail.  They're so common that the locals pay no attention to them, but I laugh every time I see them darting around.  

View of Lake Okanagan from above Adventure Bay.  In the distance is Terrace Mountain.  Nobody here plants their garden until the snow is off that mountain.

There was just a bit of snow left on the trail today

   

Local news and colour

You can’t call Vernon a cultural backwater.  This week has been book-ended by Hollywood and Bollywood.  The film society showed ‘A Most Dangerous Method’ on Monday.  Admittedly, it’s after the Oscars, but at least it’s within the year.  I wasn’t wild about it, but as with all David Cronenberg movies, there were moments when it made my skin crawl, and I like that sensation.  I sometimes find Keira Knightly a bit tick-ridden, but for this role, as Sabina Spielrein, she was perfect.  She went well beyond ticks to violent, chin-thrusting contortions.  I was relieved when Jung finally gave her the beatings she needed.  I left the theatre relieved that my psyche is relatively untroubled.  As for the Bollywood, that was in Polson Park today as part of a celebration welcoming Rick Henson to Vernon.  As is usual at these city events, much of the entertainment was provided by the local ‘ethnic’ communities.  This time the most colorful were the dancers from the Punjab, at least as far as I saw.  Mo and I stopped by after the hike because some of the people in our adaptive skiing group were putting on a display.  But we were cold and hungry, so we went to my place for a bowl of soup and then to hers for a hot tub.  The hike was good but it was raining a bit as we gathered, and although the sun came out later, it never got hot and I never got dry.

As for local news, a teacher who was accused of sexual impropriety involving one of her 12 year-old students was found not guilty at the end of her second trial this week.  This time she went before a judge because in the first trial the jury could not reach a verdict.  As a result of all this, I had a lively discussion with one of the women I sort library books with.  As a retired social worker who worked with abused kids, she was on the side of the boy, and I as a retired teacher was giving the benefit of the doubt to the teacher.  The other women stood around and let us go at it.  Eventually we withdrew to our corners and threw in our towels with no clear winner.  Not, as in Ottawa this week, where Justin Trudeau T,K.O,ed his opponent in their farcical fisticuffs.   And Stephen Harper appears to be as eager to get to Korea as I am.  He seems to be pretty single mindedly pushing some of our natural resources at the Orient while leaving the rest of the environment to the bleeding hearts who are funded by Americans whose secret agenda is to undermine our economy.  I’m not sure that I even get the connection, but something about this makes me think of the joke about the patient who goes to the doctor to see if he can cure his cold.  The doctor says, no, but that he should come back if it develops into pneumonia because that he can cure.  

A dead pine with moss covered stumps of branches that looked like young antlers, but green.

A huge ant hill at the base of the dead pine

Bollywood comes to Vernon.  I especially loved the little girl in yellow on the far left who was very focused on doing it right but whose face broke into the most wonderful smile when she caught one of the other girl's attention.

The boys were less numerous, but most were equally enthusiastic.