As I type this, Jay, May and the girls are probably waking on the morning of their move.  Jay and May’s brother will be doing the heavy lifting, May will be running around finishing up the paper work and the girls will go home from school to a new apartment.  I hope it’s not as hot in Incheon as it is here today.  I enjoyed a slow morning finishing the Saturday ‘Globe and Mail’ over coffee.  I get it from Mo and John most Sunday nights when I’m there for dinner.  I was at the library when it opened at 10 to have the first of two classes there with Lucia’s kids.  I walked around downtown doing some shopping from noon until about 1:30 and came directly back to the cool dark house to spend the rest of the afternoon.  I’ve been hiking and biking with Mo and John lately; we meet at 8 and are home by noon.  It’s best to be either in doors or in the water between 12 and 6.  I water the cedars every other evening, open the windows when the sun goes down and turn on my new fan in whichever room I am.  I usually keep it running all night and turn it off in the morning, shut the windows when I get up and the blinds as the sun moves into the west.  It cools down to about 15c at night, so with this routine, the house stays comfortable. 

Last night the Vernon Film Club showed, ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist.’  I liked it.  The sets and sound track shifted back and forth from the glass offices and cool deals of Wall Street to the chaos and color of the streets and tea shops of Lahore.  The characters were also torn between these extremes.  The main character, Changez, was played very well by a British actor and rap singer whom I had never seen before, Riz Ahmed.  All the acting was good; the story was gripping and not without nuance.  I’d give it two thumbs up.  Hell, now that I can do it again, I’d give it two arms up. The preview was for a movie with Forest Whittaker called ‘The Butler’, which I will definitely go to.

Moving from movies to the more mundane, tomorrow I get a new toilet.  I’ve put up with my reluctant flusher for as long as I can.  Kristin, the woman who did most of the renovating of this house before Jim and I bought it has helped me with a few things lately, and tomorrow she will replace the toilet that hasn’t flushed properly since I moved in.  I can’t wait.  Even a retired person has enough to do without having to wait after flushing to make sure she doesn’t have to flush again.

Yesterday when I arrived home from biking and going to the market, there was a message from RBC saying that the $500.00 Can. in Korean won and $1,000.00 Can. in Chinese renminbi that I had ordered last week had arrived, so I walked downtown to pick them up.  They are now stashed in my secret hiding place awaiting the end of August, as am I.

Me standing in front of a corn field in the hat and dress I bought last year in Korea.  Jay thought the dress was corny, a house dress.  Perhaps it is.  I hadn't realized how bow legged it makes me look.

One of the mountain bikers in the competition that was going on at Silver Star when we hiked there last Sunday.

Burke Boyce and his bear.

Visit to Victoria

It’s Sunday, July 21, and I’m sitting on a bench in the shade of a tamarisk tree looking out to sea from the tip of the Turkey Head Walkway in Oak Bay.  A crow nearby is cawing and pulling apart something he’s found in the garbage can.  I don’t have my glasses on because I want to see what I’m typing, but it appears to be a whole plastic bag full of stuff.  He’s tearing at it with his beak and flinging white bits around in all directions.  In the distance is a rocky point and beyond that a few white sails dot the dark blue, rippled water.  The horizon is mist.  It’s the first day since I arrived in Victoria a week ago that the snow- topped Olympic Mountains have not been visible from here.  The weather has been wonderful.  I’ve had coffee every morning with Barbara and Terry, twice outside, once at the table and chairs in the garden off the basement suite where I stay and once on the deck above.  Coffee and a chat with them eases me into a day with the aged Ps, who are putting up a good fight, but it is a struggle.  Mom is the same as Jupiter was when he got old, full of youthful enthusiasm for short periods each day, usually before and during meals.  Dad is much more grim.  He’s happy to see me and always wants mom to have a good time but every move is difficult for him to make and he pushes his walker into his room to lie down many times a day.  He’s so thin that his bum hurts if he sits too long, so he’s happiest flat out on the bed, eyes shut, mouth open and breathing heavily.  His mind is inclined to wander, but mom won’t let it stray far; she calls him back to the concerns of the moment and because she’s genuinely helpless in many circumstances, requires him to do or say things. 

Yesterday, Barbara and Terry took us out for lunch at Swan’s in downtown Victoria.  They had asked us to their place at Christmas and then not been able to have us there because Barbara had a horrible flu, so they made up for it with Christmas in July.  Barbara brought a china Santa to decorate the table and Christmas crackers to pull.  The whole affair was festive and mom and dad loved it.  Swan’s is on a busy street corner near the harbor, so they were able to see for themselves what they had watched on t.v. the night before, the hoards of tourists, tour buses and cars that fill downtown Victoria on this its busiest summer in quite a few years.  They don’t get out of Oak Bay much now and miss the action.  Dad also enjoys a good beer and he had quite a few during my stay, at restaurants and at home drinking the beer Terry had made and given to us.  After the lunch we drove home along the water and saw many of the old cars that are here for a show this weekend.   For dinner, dad and I had eggs in the nest and mom enjoyed the last half of the Reuban sandwich she had ordered for lunch.  For dessert we finished the fat, juicy cherries that I had brought from Vernon.  The whole day was perfect; today wasn’t.  They wanted to have their usual Tim  Horton’s Sunday breakfast, not in Tim’s, which is dark and deserted on Sunday mornings, but on a bench at Willows Beach.  Mom and I went into a nearby Tim’s and brought the breakfast back to dad who waited in the car.  Then we drove to Willows.  When we got there, I had to drive and stop and slow down and stop and move on again as they debated/argued about which bench we should choose.  I made the mistake of entering in at one point and got snapped at.  Finally, we settled on a bench that was wood, not concrete, and facing out to sea but away from the sun.  The day was cool and cloudy and dad hadn’t worn a sweater, so after all the time taken choosing the perfect perch, we ate and left quite quickly.  Mom, not wanting to let any chance for fun escape her, suggested that we drive downtown again and then home along Dallas Road, as we had so successfully done yesterday.  We did that, but only to discover that not only can you not step into the same river twice, you can’t even take the same drive on two consecutive days.  This time many of the downtown streets were blocked off for special summer busker shows, art walks and antique car rallies, so the traffic was horrendous.  We were stuck in it and couldn’t get out for half an hour.  When we finally got home, dad pushed his walker into the bedroom and was flat out on the bed before I could turn on the oven and put the stew in.

This break by the ocean has been refreshing.  I’ll drive back to mom and dad’s to find them refreshed too, I hope, and eager to Skype with Jay at 5:30.  Seeing him and talking with him all the way from Korea always fills them with childlike wonder, me too.

I’m now on the ferry to Vancouver.  The Skype with Jay was all that mom and dad had hoped it would be.  I was surprised at how calm mom was.  She listened to Jay and added her comments as if he were in the room with us.  Dad was very happy to talk with Jay for a while, but he can’t sit for long so left us to continue while he wheeled his way back to his room for a lie down.  It was sad to leave them on Sunday night.  The last couple of partings have felt as if they might be the last for at least one of them, but so far they have carried on.

Barbara and Terry having coffee with me in their back yard, just outside the/my suite.

The gang celebrating Christmas in July at Swan's, near the water in Victoria

A new sculpture that caught my eye as I walked around downtown Victoria one morning

The Oak Bay Marina, near mom and dad's place

Heat

Again it’s a hot Tuesday in the Okanagan, but not hot enough to keep us inside this week.  One of the women I bike with lives in Armstrong, a small town north east of Vernon.  We met at her place about 8:45am this morning because her car has broken down so she couldn’t join us anywhere else.  We biked from there.  As usual we did about 35 km on rolling back roads.  My arm has improved so much that I’m sure I could handle more difficult rides now, but I really enjoy the company of this group of women and I don’t have to get myself strong for the fall bike trip this year because it’s in Sept., when I will be in Korea.  Armstrong is in a beautiful wide valley.  The roads are paved and roll through fields of corn, hay, grains I don’t know the names of, market gardens and even huge herb gardens.  At one point, the smell of oregano combined with that of the clover on the side of the road to create a perfume that made me want to breath deeply and never stop.  Of course we passed through other less pleasant country smells too, especially at the point where a farmer was spraying liquid manure on his fields using an irrigation sprinkler that shot the putrid yellowish stuff in a vast circle.

 Miriam and I are going to go for a swim at Jane’s again later today.  The water in Lake Okanagan is really warm; Jane didn’t think so last week, but Miriam and I swam for quite a long time.  The only time you felt cold water was if you dove deep. 

I walked down to the Town Theatre last evening to watch ‘Love is all you need’ with Pierce Brosnan.  He was certainly better in it than he was in ‘Mama Mia’.  I looked up the movie when I got home and discovered that the title in Danish is ‘The Bald Hairdresser’.   The actress, Trine Dyrholm who played the hairdresser was excellent, and the two titles together give an idea of the jumble of romantic jocoseriousness to expect.

The lazy, hazy, not much of the crazy left, days of summer are here.  I look forward to visiting mom, dad, Barbara and Terry next week in Victoria.

Otter Lake near Armstrong

Otter Lake

Resting under a willow on the shore of Otter Lake

Summer

Now it’s hot in the Okanagan.  But as with the rain, not as catastrophic as in southern Alberta, so with the heat, not as fierce as in California.  However, the humidity here on Canada Day was unusually high and made the 35 degrees feel drippingly hot.  Around 10:30am, I walked over to Polson Park to listen to the music and wander among the food and entertainment stands.  Fortunately, I ran into my friend Noreen who was there with her son and his family, sitting under a tree on a big blanket.  I joined them and at least escaped the sun.  There were lots of people there, almost all dressed in red and white.  Even the mayor, a rather sober seeming man was wearing a floppy red and white Cat in the Hat thing on his head.  As always, the ladies from the Philippines were, serving small spring rolls redolent of garlic and tender pork skewers, so lunch was no problem.  Noreen came back to my place later in the afternoon, and then I drove her to her son’s.  By the time I had dug a trench to keep the water around the cedars, watered them and had dinner, I didn’t have the energy to walk to the fireworks at the military camp, so I watched tennis at Wimbledon on tv and stood on the front porch talking with my neighbor Donna as the firecrackers boomed.  We could see all the high ones very well.

This morning on the radio I heard one of the announcers admitting that she felt guilty about the fact that she and her husband didn’t like to turn on the air conditioning.  She said that they used fans for as long as they could.  The other announcer ridiculed her.  I wanted to call her up and tell her that she should stop feeling guilty.  I’m so brazen about it that I’ve elevated the not using of air conditioning to a virtue.  However, when I tried this argument out in Korea last May, in a futile effort to convince Jay’s girls not to use the air in the place we stayed at near Seoraksan Nationl Park, Jay pulled me aside to reason with me.  His argument was that the girls come from a blisteringly hot place where those who can use air conditioning do use it and would be institutionalized as mentally deficient if they didn’t.  I had to accept this and shut up.  Today I encountered a similar argument from my friend Miriam who comes from Ireland where they didn’t even have central heating in her youth.  She firmly believes that if you can turn a switch and be comfortable, you should.  I had the windows open all night last night and am carrying on without air.  It’s still comfortably cool in the house, but if I can’t sleep tonight, maybe I will flip the switch.  We cancelled our Tuesday morning hike today because of the heat. Miriam and I are going to go swimming at Jane’s on Lake Okanagan this afternoon.  Jane says that most adults don’t seem to be going in beyond their knees, but I think I’ll be able to take it because the Gatineau River was considered too cold for swimming in by a lot of people and I liked it.  It’s summer and the hills will soon be dry and camel colored again.

Kids going wild to the music of 'Cod Gone Wild'

'Cod Gone Wild' plays lively Irish music.  None of them is Irish, although they introduced the only obviously Oriental one as Irish.

The much more sober Scots contribution to the music of Canada Day.