Past and Present

My high school friend Maggie Barr, who keeps me in touch with some of our friends from FWCI, emailed me today as she was catching up on my blog. She hadn't looked at it in a while. I'm always surprised to hear that anyone other than Jay reads it at all. It's a bit of a coincidence because earlier today as we were driving down after skiing, Lynne, Priscilla and I were talking about, among other things, how Saudi Prince MbS supposedly hacked Jeff Bezos' private messages after they had shared phone numbers at a dinner party. I appeared to be the most exposed of the three of us to such activity because of my blog. We laughed a lot about the prospect of anyone even reading it let alone revealing the secrets therein. Bezos is a billionaire who has affairs; I'm not. 

Maggie interrupted her reading to send me a correction. l had misnamed the mountain in the picture I took from the dome car on the VIA train as we headed east out of Jasper. She knew the name because she had stayed in Jasper at her aunt and uncle's bungalow camp, Roche Bonhomme. From the window of her bedroom there she could see the mountain Roche Bonhomme after which the camp was named. I had called it The Sleeping Giant because that's what everyone in the dome car said it was called. As they were mostly tourists from Britain and the USA, I should have verified the name before I put it in my widely read and influential blog. 

As I read about this mountain I discovered who had named it. 

Grant Hall is one of the most prominent buildings at Queen's. It's named after this man who was Principal of Queen's College at Kingston from1877 to 1902.  When I was there, I had no idea he had named a mountain in Jasper.  

Fresh snow and sun for last Friday's snowshoe. 

Cold 🥶 

It's minus 21 in Vernon for the second day in a row. As I am still trying to allow for a bit of space between stimulus and response, I will not rush to declare that for someone who lived most of her life in Thunder Bay and Wakefield that's nothing to write home about. And resolution aside, I'm old now and have been living in the Okanagan long enough to have changed in more ways than just trying to think before I declare; -21 to be cold 🥶. 

It was about zero on Sunday when I parked the car after skiing, snow was melting on all the windows. By about 10pm the temperature had dropped to -10 and by morning it was -22. After doing physiotherapy exercises and enjoying a slow breakfast, I bundled up and went out to shovel. There hadn't been much snow overnight, but the plough guy for the clinic next door had hemmed my car in with relatively big, hard lumps, so I had to get my special shovel out of the trunk. It was then that I discovered that 3 of the 5 car doors were frozen shut. Fortunately, the trunk, where that shovel was, was not one of them. I didn't need to use the car on Monday, so after clearing around it I left it and returned to the house to hibernate. 

I didn't return to the car until about 11:00 this morning. The temperature was still around -21, but by then I was able to open the driver's door. I started the car and left it running as I scraped the thick blobs of ice from the windows. As I did so, I thought about sublimation, a word I learned in high school science. That subject taught me some of the best words: nictitating membranes in fish, etc. and exophthalmic goitre; the picture of a sufferer was frightening though. At any rate, I think that sublimation might explain why the driver's side door finally opened after a few more hours of freezing cold had transformed the solid ice around it to gas with no intervening liquid liquid state. 🥶😂. So allowing a bit of space between stimulus and response might work for opening my car doors as well as my big mouth. Now that's growth and freedom. 😹

On a much more serious note, the following cartoon by Bruce MacKinnon in 'The Chronicle Herald' of Jan. 11, 2020 is the best statement I've seen so far of the self interest and mendacity that is behind the tragedy of the downing of the Ukrainian Airlines plane that killed so many Canadians and others. 

 Victor E. Frankl

Between stimulus and response 

there is a space. 

In that space is our power to choose our response. 

In our response lies our

growth and our freedom. 

This is the verse I will try to keep in my mind in 2020. If by doing so I improve my use of the space after the stimulus, I hope to limit the number of knee jerk verbal responses that I make. As I write this I'm laughing because my knees are  the source of some physical pain at the moment, so this resolution might help them too. Also the silence that will inevitably fill the void might give me a certain gravitas that I have never had. This makes me think of Don MacMillan's expression, which I never gave him the space to direct at me,

"Ya look sa grave,

  Na doot yer wise."

So far this has been a weird winter in Vernon. I spent Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 shovelling slush, doing physio and reading Joan Didion's, The Last Thing He Wanted and MIRIAM Toews', All My Puny Sorrows. I did go to Jane's New Year's Eve party and dinner on New Year's Day with Miriam and Bill, so l'm not complaining. But I was getting discouraged about the weather. Today, however, I went up to Sovereign with Jane and had a wonderful ski. Jane takes lessons and skis with the Masters, so I went by myself for a good run and then had the fun of seeing many people from the VOC who are also in the Masters programme and wishing each other a Happy New Year. As always, it was worth while going up for a ski. Last night I was wakened by wind blowing icy rain against my window and this morning I walked gingerly on ice to the car, but at Sovereign the snow was puffy and perfect. 

Jay's version of, ' Out with the old.'

Jay and his crew at their New Year's dinner

Snow at Sovereign