Planning trips

Jay and I talked more this morning about our trip to Kyoto.  I had booked a hotel for us last week because I like checking out sites on the Internet and couldn’t resist the temptation of being able to book with no down payment and then cancel within 3 days of the date of arrival.  I think I’m getting better at organizing trips.  I started on Hostel World looking for hostels because that worked well for us in Beijing, but I couldn’t find a hostel in Kyoto that had private bathrooms, which we want.  Then I started looking at ryokans, a traditional Japanese accommodation with mat floors and futons to sleep on.  Some looked fine, but there was always something wrong, usually to do with locations that were remote or facilities that seemed ‘sketchy’.  Then I started thinking that May and the girls have had the Korean experience of sleeping on mats on a heated floor many times, as has Jay, and I even tried it when we went hiking at Seoraksan National Park the first time I visited them.  So I followed the advice of a friend who has planned a lot of holidays using Booking.com.  I found a great hotel that is well located for walking to most sites.  We will have 3 days and nights to wander around Kyoto.  Jay and May are going to get the tickets on Peach Airlines to get us from Incheon to Osaka because although I found the site, it was difficult to use, especially the conversion from yen to Canadian dollars.  After Skyping with Jay, I went on Expedia.ca and booked my flights to Korea and back.  I will leave Kelowna on Friday, Sept. 19 and arrive in Incheon on Sat. Sept. 20.  Coming back, I will leave Incheon on Sat., Oct. 25 and arrive back in Kelowna before I left.  The wonders of time and space still delight and elude me.

I had my last ski of the season on Saturday.  The conditions were wonderful.  There was  nothing spring-like about the snow; although, it was quite sunny and the air seemed warm, about 0c.  I’m sad that I won’t be getting any spring skiing in the heat on corn snow, but, on the other hand, I plan to drive into real spring in Victoria on Wednesday.  Within about 5 hours I will go from white to pink.  Barbara and mom tell me that the blossoms are out and the ‘pink rain’ is beginning to fall.

 I am moving up in the world of the Vernon Outdoors Club.  On Friday, I scouted a Ramble in Kalamalka Park with a friend, Jenny.  She and I will co-lead it on Tuesday.  That is if she is feeling better.  She felt sick on the Sunday hike and had to turn back.  I talked with her this morning, and she feels better but not great, so I might be rocketed into the lead position alone.  That’s a bit daunting because even though the Rambles are much easier than the hikes, I can get lost anywhere with no effort.  If we make it out of Kal Park on Tuesday afternoon, I will leave for Victoria on Wednesday morning.  That too might be a challenge because I am thinking of going up to Kamloops and over to Hope on Highway 1, along the Thompson and Fraser Rivers.  Bill says it’s scenic, and I’ve never traveled it.  The Coquihalla has had a lot of snow this season and is still often either slushy or icy. 

A male Spruce Grouse who left his mate at the Black Prince Cabin and came to demand that we give him food if we wanted to pass

The Black Prince Cabin on my last day at Sovereign Lake Nordic Centre

A moiling mass of ants on a stump we passed on Sunday's hike

   

Seasons eventually change

I’ve never had a better season of skiing.  The last few weeks I have left the dry brown of the city almost every morning to drive up to the deep white of the hills.  Yesterday I arrived back home around 2:00pm.  Snow was falling even in town, and a flock of robins was pecking up the back yard.  The forest floor that I am trying to cultivate must shelter a feast of grubs and worms.  I hope a couple of robins stay as they did last year.  The majority of them are on their way to Prince George, if the locals are to be believed.  This morning, Vernon was sparkling white, but I didn’t go skiing.  I went with my book, Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George, to ‘The Bean Scene’ for coffee and a cinnamon bun.  My job sorting books at the fire hall is perfect for me.  Since I rarely read a book when it’s first out, I have a chance for $1.00 to pick up old ones whenever I want.  This one is very detailed and well written.  I’m getting lost in late Victorian England and two men’s lives that intersect about 2/3 of the way through the book.  Now I’m at the part where they are beginning to work together on a malicious mystery that has upset the life of one of them, George Edalji, and his family for many years.  The other character is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I can hardly put the book down because it has seemed at many points already that things should have been resolved but they haven’t.  I wonder if even Arthur will be able to penetrate the fog of ordinary maliciousness and incompetence that surrounds George.

Meanwhile, back in Vernon in 2014, it’s sunny and getting warm.  Much of yesterday’s snow has melted.  The birds are in the back yard, chirping.  There’s hope that at last spring is here even if the Malaysian plane has still not been found, the war in Syria rages on, Afghanistan is reverting to Taliban violence, Pauline Marois dreams on of founding a new country and a chill breeze of the Cold War seems to be blowing.  

Jay with the new baby, Kang Woo Jin.  

The rain tree, Albizia saman, in front of the house covered in snow.

Spring Fever

On Saturday I saw Jules Massenet’s ‘Werther’ live from the Met at the Vernon cinema.  I think there might have been a time when I would have scorned the emoting and the extreme romanticism of the story, but not last Saturday.  I don’t know what to blame: the approach of spring; the absence of romance in my life; the fact that the tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, who played Werther was gorgeous; but I willingly suspended all disbelief and left the theatre an emotional wreck.  This in spite of the fact that the last scene as Werther dies in the arms of Charlotte exceeds in length any of Shakespeare’s tragic death scenes. And their parting words are not merely uttered, they’re sung in full voice. 

I have recovered with only a mild spring fever that lingers in the form of a restlessness to organize my future holidays.  Jay and I talked this morning about a change in plans for my visit to Korea.  I’m still going to go from about the middle of September until mid October, but for our family trip we might go to Osaka, Japan for a few days, instead of to Jeju Island.  That will be something new for all of us.  I’m almost ready to book the tickets for my summer holiday ‘back east’.  It will be mid July to early August.  And very soon, probably April 2^nd to 16^th, I hope to drive to Victoria to visit mom and dad and Barbara and Terry.  The mountain passes and highways in BC have been and continue to be dangerous avalanche areas this late winter and spring, but I’m counting on their clearing up soon.  All that planning and traveling should settle my restless soul.  

Today I walked a bit around Vernon, a tourist in my own town, and looked closely at an old log house by a stream that I pass often but had never looked closely at.  The pictures are from the walls of the house and the bench and ducks were beside it.

If you click on the picture it will enlarge and you can read about this eccentric first settler in Vernon.

Vernon by many other names.

Two of the ubiquitous local mallards

A memorial bench to a local doctor who fed them.

Vernon Spring

We sprang forward on Saturday night, and today I got to sleep until 7 before Skyping with Jay.  Korea, like Saskatchewan and some parts of Alberta does not go on daylight saving time.  The sun rose in a clear sky as we talked, and I was energized as I always am after seeing Jay.  This morning, I was also motivated by the warm spring air to hang the laundry out on the line Caroline and Albert set up for me.  That’s all done now; my smalls and other things are swaying in the backyard breeze.  Micheline once entertained me with a tale about the rules the housewives of Hull when she was a girl had to follow when hanging out their laundry or risk being condemned by their neighbors as sluts.  It involved rigid prescripts concerning the separation of articles by sex and size.  I have no worries about the former, but as I look out the window now at the disorderly lengths of my laundry, long johns beside serviettes, I know I would not meet the standards of the good women of Hull in the 50s and 60s.  Whatever!  I still feel righteous looking at it.  At least I’m out there.

I haven’t brought in the shovel yet, but signs of spring are everywhere.  Skiing was wonderful on the weekend.  I went by myself for the first time on Saturday because I was going to help with food preparation for the SSASS end-of-season lunch, but that wasn’t until 10:45 and I drove to the Star with Mo and John.  She had a lesson at 8:30 and he didn’t want to ski.  All went well; I didn’t get lost.  Emboldened by this, I asked Jane to join me on Sunday.  We didn’t get lost then either, although I almost repeated my fall and shoulder dislocation of last March 11.  To get to the trails I wanted to take, we had to cross 2 downhill runs.  Just before doing that, I heard my name called and turned to see my physiotherapist.  He’s a great guy.  He introduced me to his wife and 2 kids.  Standing in the sun, we were all keen to get skiing.  As we were talking, I put the sunshades on my glasses, and when we finished, Jane and I pushed off one way and they went the other.  Conditions were fast, and I pulled ahead, flying across the bright downhill path into the shady patch just before the turn to the cross-country run.  Blinded by the transition from light to dark, I flailed around and just managed to maintain my balance.  Sobered by the near repetition of last spring’s excessive enthusiasm, I removed my sunshades and we carried on.  The conditions were very good, and I look forward to more of the same this week. 

I recently saw some good movies at the 20^th Vernon International Film Festival.  Two of them were nominated for best foreign film at the Oscars and one of them, ‘The Great Beauty,’ won.  It reminded me a bit of a Fellini film, the extremes and excesses of life in Rome and the circus-like extravaganza of characters.  It was good, but I liked the other better.  It was a Flemish production called, ‘The Broken Circle Breakdown.’  It was originally a play, and the playwright played the main role in the movie, a gorgeous banjo man in a country music band.  His girlfriend was a tattoo artist.  It was about a group of musicians and back-to-the-landers who lived just outside of Ghent in the 60s.  The story was moving and the music was too.   I also read a good book last week, Tiger, a True Story of Vengeance and Survival,  by John Vaillant.  I’m probably the last person on the planet to read it.  I unpacked it at the fire hall on Wednesday.  We just pay a dollar if we take a book, aside from the valuable ones, that we want as we’re separating the books into categories.

The parking lot where we left the cars before snowshoeing up the trail to the left of the outhouse last Friday morning

The front of my house, bathed in sun at around four last Friday afternoon

Mountain Ash berries capped in snow last Monday morning

Laundry on the line this Monday morning

Marching on

There’s snow on the cedars again.  After talking with Jay until about 7, I went out to shovel the sidewalks.  It was a beautiful morning.  I was tempted to go skiing, but the pull of routine kept me at home.  Mondays have become my time for housework and rearranging the clutter on my desk.  Also, I meet my iPhone teacher in the library this afternoon, and after a full week, I hadn’t done my homework.  Now I have, but it wasn’t easy.  I had to get a new email address through Shaw so that I will be able to use ‘Shaw Open’ in the local coffee shops.  Then I had to download the TD bank app in order to access my Easy Web account on the iPhone when I travel.  That was easier said than done because Jim had opened the original account, so, when it came to answering the question: “What’s your favorite charity?”, in order to enter the system, I couldn’t.  I’m not sure how Jim would have answered that question, but I am pretty convinced that by the time I had run through a few guesses, I would have been banned from TD Easy Web as a hacker.  Or at least I hope I would have been.  I’m leery enough about on line banking as it is.  Finally, I had to resort to my default solution for all such hitches.  I phoned TD bank’s 1-800 number and was guided through the maze by a patient young man.  My last task was to send my teacher an email with some crazy ‘emoticons’ in it.  I did that, and she replied by giving me an A+.  Now I’m done.  I’m tempted to agree with Thoreau’s comment on technology, that it’s, “improved means to an unimproved end,” but I can’t let myself because that way lies isolation.  The more I message and work with one thumb on my iPhone, I still haven’t mastered the 2 thumb technique, the more I accept the cryptic forms of communicating that I used to scorn.  At least they keep you in touch with those you like or love.  I am ‘Jan the thumb’ using ‘Jay the thumb’s’ iPhone, and I can save my wordiness for this blog and the few friends I have left who still email in complete sentences and paragraphs.

On Tuesday last week I was called by the Vernon Hospital to say that a date in March had been set for my operation.  I was pretty sure she meant the shoulder surgery, but as she didn’t specify, and as I have been waiting since May, 2011 for that and was also waiting to find out the results of my recent heart tests, some imp inside me made me say,

“Are you talking about my shoulder or heart?”  She hesitated a second and replied that it was for the shoulder.  For some twisted reason I told her that I was awaiting word about my heart and would like to postpone accepting the date until I knew about that.  She was very accommodating and agreed.  On Thursday, I heard that the test results showed that  my heart is fine (YAHOO).  I have slight blockage of the arteries apparently.  The internist called it a mild case of angina.  He knew that I would prefer to try handling it with exercise and diet if possible, so that’s what I’ll do for a few months to see what happens.  I’m also having some lung tests now since my main problem is shortness of breath.  I phoned the hospital to decline the shoulder surgery since I have complete movement of the arm and no pain and was told by a doctor whose advice I accepted that nothing would be gained by an operation. I already know how long it takes to recover from rotator cuff surgery; it’s not worth it if you know in advance there will be little or no improvement.  Now someone whose need is greater than mine will be taking my place.

The last ski of February.  It looks today as if there will be quite a bit of skiing in March too.