Summer 2013

 The transition from spring to summer was a wet one, but on Friday, June 21 the clouds broke in the late afternoon, the sun set brightly and the full moon shone for a while.  We've had more rain since, but the sun is coming out now.   I’m back to biking, with a smaller group doing less strenuous rides.  It’s fun, and I’m going to celebrate by biking over to the store where I bought my bike and getting a pack that sits on a rack above the back tire.  I want to use my bike more for shopping and riding around town.  Vernon, like a lot of places, I imagine, is in a prolonged period of tension between those who want to encourage the development of bikeways and the real use of bikes in town for riding to school and work and those who don’t want the width of roads altered in any way that might either make it more difficult for them to manoeuvre their big trucks and SUVs or raise their municipal taxes.  Almost every edition of the local newspaper, ‘The Morning Star’, has a letter to the editor on this topic, some of them quite heated.  It reminds me of the Great Giant Tiger Debate in Wakefield.  Like Joni, I’ve looked from both sides now and really don’t know at all but feel drawn to the pro bike argument here because it seems that at least inside a small town you don’t need big vehicles, even if you do need them in this vast country sometimes.  Vernon could have thought ahead a bit and left more of its waterfront and hills as public property.  It’s time to make its downtown more pedestrian and bike friendly.

We’ve had a lot of rain in the last 2 weeks.  I went to a small but great concert on Mon. night. Because of the rain, it was held in a 2 car garage instead of outside in the yard.  If you ever get a chance to listen to ‘dave lang & the twin otters’, take it.  I even bought their hand made cd entitled ‘champagne breakfast’.  We also had rain on yesterday’s hike, but it didn’t dampen our spirits much.  We haven’t had flooding like Alberta, but the Okanagan hills are green instead of their usual camel hair color.  My cedar hedge likes it.

I went to Dr. Inkpen, the neurologist this morning.  He stuck a needle attached to a monitor into my deltoid muscle, and we actually heard it working.  At least that’s what he said we were hearing.  It just sounded like static to me, but I was eager to believe him and will now always associate the sound of static with muscles working.  I’m a long way from being a body builder but very happy that at least the nerve has repaired itself.  Now all I have to do is exercise: muscles, to get them back into whatever shape they can attain and caution, so as not to dislocate any more joints and stretch any more nerves.

Russel Earnshaw, one of the funniest women in  the VOC, using the radio.  It was a rainy day, but it's never dull when she's around.  I took the picture because she and Jane and their gear were such bright colours on an otherwise dull day.

    

June 17, 2013

I turned 67 today.  Fortunately turning doesn’t demand too much energy because when I got out of bed this morning, I was in no mood to leap.  However, my right arm was able to reach up and pull on the cord to raise the blind and that’s more than it’s done in 3 months.  On Wed., June 12, three months and one day after I dislocated the shoulder, I was surprised to find my hand above my head.  Eunjung and I were preparing dinner, and she said or did something funny, which is not unusual for her.  I threw my hands in the air, and they both actually went.  We looked at each other in surprise, and she raised her arms to give me a high five, MILAGRO!  Well, maybe not.  I thought so for about a day, but then realized that what had probably happened was that my bicep which is getting quite developed thanks to the physiotherapy I’m doing had probably done the heavy lifting, not the atrophied deltoid.  There are still a lot of moves I can’t make, and I don’t have a deltoid that can be seen, just a skinny arm with a bump of a bicep that’s about the size of a dinner roll, but quite hard.  Thanks to Jay, I now know where the ‘lats’ are and that I don’t have any of those either.  The triceps are the other muscles I’ve been working.  But, I might have 2 working arms again soon.  I exercised some uncharacteristic common sense on the hike on Sunday and decided not to go down into the area of broken volcanic rock and columnar basalt.  I had done it last year and remembered as I approached that it was difficult to get solid footing there.  I’m going to exercise (that seems to be the word of the day) that kind of restraint more often because I want to continue being able to do what needs to be done when living alone. 

I certainly don’t feel alone on this day.  I have very thoughtful friends and family.  Mo and John had a surprise birthday dinner for me on Friday evening and Mo gave me a picture of the Wakefield Covered Bridge that she painted from a photo she had taken when she and her mom visited Wakefield last fall.  I went to Bert and Peg’s last night for a birthday/Fathers’ Day dinner with them, Jules and Carol and Jean.  Today, Barbara Chase and Cathy Van de Vyvere phoned to wish me Happy Birthday, I received some birthday e-mails, mom and dad just called and sang the song, alternating lines as neither had the breath to do two consecutively and at 5:30 I will Skype with Jay.

Thinking about Wakefield reminds me that I heard on the CBC news the other night that Senator Lavigne has finally been sentenced to 6 months in jail for fraud and breach of trust.  It’s taken a long time, but the Faulkners must be happy that they pursued their case.

The recent interviews with Joni Mitchell have been another reminder of the past. I was interested to read in an article about her by Brad Wheeler in the ‘Globe and Mail’ on Saturday that it was while reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King on an airplane, that she was ‘moved’ to look at the clouds below her and immediately started writing ‘Both Sides, Now.’  I’ve always loved that song and I must have read that book just a while after she did.  I’ve thought of it often since, especially the refrain that frequently runs through Henderson’s mind, “I want, I want, I want.”  This has prompted me to get that book from the library and refresh my memory of it.  Maybe the recurring thoughts I’ve had about it have been wrong, maybe not.  Anyway, it gave me a kick to discover that a novel that I’ve thought about more than a lot of books I’ve read was the inspiration for one of my favorite songs.

Lichen on the cliffs at Shorts Creek Canyon Ridge and lake Okanagan in the distance

Penstamin on the same hike

A mini variety of plants on the volcanic basalt

Mom's 92nd birthday

This week I did all the planting I’m going to do for the season, and again I’m resting after a day’s work.  It’s too early for a drink, so I will write this and enjoy a glass of wine later while I listen to Korean cds.  I bought an Italian plum tree and some herbs early in the week and put them on the south side of the house near the tiny hazelnut tree I had purchased at the Tai Chi Club’s plant sale.  Today I went to a wonderful garden store in Coldstream and found out that contrary to what I had been told at the Swan Lake Garden Centre, a plum should have another plum near by.  Also, as mine is a European plum, it should be another European plum, not an Asian one, which was what I originally wanted.  So I now have a Green Gage Plum on the north side of the house to mate with the Italian one on the south.  I also bought two more tall grasses to fill in the spaces left after I removed the dead cedars.  My hedge is no longer gap toothed, but it certainly isn’t a perfect set of dentures.  If it were teeth, its picture would qualify for a place in ‘The Big Book of British Smiles’ that frightened Lisa Simpson into going to the orthodontist.  Of the original 24 six foot cedars that I bought in May 2011, 10 are now glorious seven foot statuesque trees, 9 are about six foot and stunted or bent in one way or another and 2 have been replaced by grasses that should grow to about eight feet high and three wide.  The Green Gage Plum will eventually take up the place where 3 cedars died, side by side.

It’s been quiet in the hood this week, so I’ve spent a few evenings in the back yard watching a couple of robins teach their little ones how to listen for worms, or whatever they do.  There are only 2 little fluffy grey students.  It’s fun to sit quietly listening to the rustle of their tiny feet in the dry leaves and the evening song of one of the adults perched on a fence post overseeing the lesson.

Mom turned 92 on June 7.  She’s 2 days older than Prince Philip and about 2 years younger than Nelson Mandela.  She seems to be doing marginally better than either of them is at the moment, but she’s frail and still suffering from the pain of post herpetic neuralgia almost every day.   She and dad continue to do their best, but they ‘don’t get around much anymore’.  They have managed to go for two drives, one to their favorite breakfast place, Tim Horton’s and one to Willows Beach, but dad can’t go far.  In spite of the fact that they live on the first floor, there are 4 steps between him and the front door, so he has to go down the elevator to the underground parking and then walk from there to the street.  They were hoping to go across to the Oak Bay Beach Hotel for lunch one day, but he was too tired by the time he got up from the garage to carry on.  He had to sit on his walker and rest before returning to the apartment.  Their main source of entertainment this week has been the French Open tennis.

Hard labor

Saturday, April 1, 5:10pm.  I’m sitting at the laptop peacefully listening to my audio fountain and sipping a tequila drink that I’ve just invented.  I thought of the fountain and bought and found most of the components, a small cheap cd player, 2 cds of water sounds and drift logs from the beaches I walked along in Victoria, last fall, but I’m enjoying it for the first time this evening.  I was inspired to put all this together by the noise that often emanates from the outdoor smoking, drinking and talking area built last summer by people who live nearby.  By the time I got it all together, the weather had turned cold and they had moved indoors.  Last night they were enjoying the fresh air again, and as I also wanted to do that, I thought of putting the fountain together.  But I didn’t have an extension cord, so I moved inside and shut the window.  Today I bought the cord and arranged the driftwood.  I now have 2 locations where I can place the fountain, one indoors and one outdoors.  The revelers are not around at the moment, but I’m surrounded by the sound of flowing water and the odd Buddhist bell, not that Buddhists are odd, but the bells’ chiming is erratic.  I also have the sound of rain and the sea.  When I take my glasses off, as I do when I’m at the laptop, I’m so blind I think there must be water around me but just beyond my vision.

Another reason why I’m so happily enjoying the drink and soothing sounds is that I have been doing extreme landscaping the last 2 days.  Ever since the spring of 1979 when Jim and I started preparing the land for our first house I have enjoyed yearly periods of hard labor.  I certainly don’t want to imply that I wish I had been born in the mid nineteenth century so that I could have worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week bent double in a coal mine in Wales, but I do enjoy exertion in moderation. By now these times have dwindled down from the whole summer holidays to one day in May and one in June, but the exhilaration of it is the same.  That’s one of the mixed blessings of old age; it requires much less work to be exhausted, liquor and food to be satisfied, sleep to be rested, play to be pooped, etc.  I still imagine more drinking, eating and staying up late, but I only get partway there and I’ve had enough.  At the rate I’m injuring myself, that’s probably a good thing.  I’ve spent the last 2 days working in the yard until I’m covered in dirt and dripping in sweat from making a walkway on the north side of the house.  That’s enough for this year.  Fortunately my hanging right arm was no problem because it lifts well up to the waist, and then I could rest the 14” squares of cement on my wheat belly and carry them to the channel I had dug along the side of the house.  The new path is not perfect; I think I made the trench for the cement squares too deep, but I adjusted it until it satisfied me.  I was easily satisfied at that point because by the end of the second day, I was getting tired.  It looks good enough to celebrate with a wee tequila.

It’s getting dark early tonight, so I think we’ll get more rain.  Fortunately it’s rained mostly at night lately, and Barb and I had some fine days for walking, hiking and visiting wineries.  Of course chatting for hours with a good friend was wonderful.   The smokers are silent, so I think I’ll turn off the fountain and make dinner.  The cd is at the sound of rain now.

Barbara at Rattle Snake Point ( now called Turtle Point so as not to scare tourists away from Kal. Park) on Kalamalka Lake

Barb at the BX Falls which were going full tilt with the run off and the recent rains

Some of the hundreds of iris that have come out in the garden this year.  It has taken me 2 summers to remove all the weeds, etc. from their corms, but this year they are splendid.