The end of 'The West Commences'

For the past few days I've been thinking about sitting in the sunroom and writing my blog but I have not done it. Finally today I realized why. The west is no longer commencing. I have lived in Vernon for ten years, Jay, May and the girls have lived here, with me and in their own house, friends and family have visited me and I've made new friends. I'm here. 

Since the beginning of Covid, that's over a year ago now, I have been Kakaoing with Jay every evening and keeping in touch with distant family and friends in other virtual ways more than I did before this virus forced us into bubbles of various sizes, shapes and capacities to stretch. I started the blog to keep in touch and I'm doing that now more than I did when we could literally touch. I also wanted to create some kind of concrete proof that I was here. When you are alone after years of being with another it's a bit like being a helium balloon adrift with no string or anchor to keep you from blowing away, as Joni Mitchell said. There's no longer anyone there you can count on to confirm that things really happened. By writing down bits of my life I seemed to be anchoring them, making them real and maybe even meaningful. But I've lived in Vernon for over ten years now. I have real friends. I have a life. And my distant family and friends seem almost closer now that everyone is really separated by the virus and at the same time virtually united by it. 

I have not touched another person since March 14, 2020. That's hard to believe. And yet I can't say I really even mind that. I was never one to hug people in greeting. But I have wanted to put my arms around someone once in a while: if I see Jay on a Kakao video or a friend I haven't seen in a long time either virtually or in real life. The expression 'virtual reality' used to seem laughably oxymoronic to me, but in the last year it has become a fairly accurate way of describing much of my life. But as I do real things like: walk, bike, kayak, have dinner (outside except with Mo and John and MIriam and Bill) with real people almost once a day, my life goes on in a way I cannot complain about at all. And the virtual connections with Jay and distant family and friends are almost as good as the real thing. The operative word of course is almost. I'm too old for virtual reality to ever be able to create a whole world for me, but in this time of Covid it has augmented what would have otherwise been a bleak time of no touch and few contacts. 

The first rose of summer 2021

Nature carries on into the real world of 2021 in Gardom Lake

Indigenous humour lives on. This sign which I saw when biking through the First Nations Reserve near Enderby reminded me of Ron Noganosh. 

The sky is blue

The sun is dappling every surface in the sun room where I'm now relaxing. 

The washing machine toiled away at the laundry while I stretched and crunched through physiotherapy exercises and some new isometric exercises that Jay suggested I try after I told him that I had not been able to do a push up the other day. My legs are strong but my arms ain't. However, I should be able to do a few push ups, at least from the knees. 

Jay's image of me lifting weights 

I hung the laundry on the line outside for the first time in 2021.

Albert and Caroline bought and installed that line for me when they stayed here a few years ago. I have enjoyed using it ever since. Fortunately the the horse chestnut tree is almost fully in leaf so I don't think my new back neighbour, her son and male friend were able to see me. I hope not because I was wearing my pyjamas. I still jsometimes forget that I have neighbours who might see me when I'm out in the yard. I've never been a quick study. Anyway, one of the things that I like about living on this street is the contact I have with young neighbours and their children who visit me and play with some of Jay's old toys. So maybe I'm just doing my part by being the elder ( I prefer that to old lady) who entertains them in her turn by wandering around the yard in whatever she happens to be wearing. 

My laundry. It's a long way from meeting the standards that Miche told me the women of Hull were held to when she was young. 

Since I bought my inflatable kayak about six years ago, I have always launched it in May in the Gorge near Terry and Barbara's.  Sadly, Barbara is no longer with us. I miss her. Terry and I have kept in touch through email, and he invited me to visit and stay in the flat this May, which I was going to do until Bonnie Henry lowered the boom. BC residents are not allowed to leave their health district unless absolutely necessary until the end of May. The police are enforcing the mandate with stops on major routes between health regions. The one that would get me is at Boston Bar on the Coquihalla. So l will be inflating the kayak for the first time in 2021 on the shores of Swan Lake tomorrow. Since I bought it, four women I know have bought them. We plan to try different lakes in the area this summer. 

Llamas we biked by the other day

Throw open the windows!

Today was brilliantly sunny and the temperature rose to 24c. For the first time this year it was warmer outside than in, so I threw open the windows in the afternoon. But it's still dry. The established trees and shrubs are fine, but I have watered things I planted last year twice already. 

Miriam and I had a good walk along the Grey Canal above  Bellavista this morning. The hills were decorated with bouquets of bright yellow Arrowleaf Balsam Root. 

On Monday and Thursday I went bike riding with the VOC in Lake Country. A woman on one of the rides told me that it's the fastest growing industrial and residential area in Canada. I can believe it. When we visited Jim's parents in Kelowna in the 80s and 90s, it was called Winfield and the only reason Jules drove the single lane highway there was to buy the cheapest gas in the Okanagan. Now there's a two and in places three lane highway between Kelowna and Vernon, and right in the middle is Lake Country with a huge industrial park, hundreds of big new homes and many thriving wineries. The industrial park is fascinating to bike through, if you like looking at construction sites, the preparation of marijuana growing and processing plants and work sites in general, which I do. All this is hardly visible from the new highway which gives spectacular views of Wood Lake, Kal Lake, vineyards, orchards, hills and the whole north end of the Okanagan Valley. 

One of the impressive works of Indigenous art that have been installed along the Rail Trail that circles Wood Lake. 

Life for me in Covid times is revolving into a predictable round of doing physiotherapy exercises, walking, biking, reading, writing, practicing a bit of Spanish and trying to perfect a recipe for real juice and gelatine gummies that my neighbors' little girls will like and that I can eat to build up my bones so that I will pass the bone density test that I hope I will be able to get soon. My chances are slim, but I am trying to avoid having to take osteoporosis medication. This pandemic limits so much (travel, social life, work, play) that life seems almost static day to day.  But there seems to be a lot happening (socially,environmentally and politically) that is going to lead to real change on this planet. I'm inclined to wonder if it will be for the better, but that's probably because I'm too old to do much about it. Youth always seems to be able to take the world it's given and to have the energy to do whatever it deems necessary to grow and develop there. That has been the challenge for youth in every age, but (again it might be just because I'm old) the unconscionable gap between rich and poor people and countries, the inescapable threat of largely man made climate change and now the pandemic mean that young people today are going to have to swim against a current that is stronger than the one I was launched into. Everything springs into action each year and generation, but as you age and become more of a spectator in the great play it's hard to imagine where the energy comes from. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that it won't be from fossil fuels in the future. 🤪

Thanks to Jay and Nahlah  Ayed

The Bluetooth speaker Jay gave me and the CBC program 'Ideas', eased my way into this Sunday morning. I took an audio voyage from approximately 600CE to the present/future. Jay gave me the speaker just before he returned to Korea, and soon after that I downloaded the CBC Listen app. Since then I have used both to provide an alternative to the repetitive soundtrack of my mind while doing necessary tasks. 

This morning I did physiotherapy exercises first thing as usual; if I don't, there is little hope I will do them later in the day. 'Ideas' transported me back to Old English poetry via a programme, 'The First Good Poem in English'. I took one course in Old English at university, so had a limited introduction to 'The Wanderer', the poem referred to in the title. I was entertained so thoroughly that I frequently lost track of the only thing I have to do, keep count of repetitions. The scholars interviewed read extracts from the poem either in Old English or contemporary English and spoke of their interpretations of it or of the beauty of its language and alliterative style. It tells of an aged warrior, an exile lamenting the loss of his lord and land and the past. Most seemed to think that a few lines suggesting a Christian tone at the beginning and end of the elegy were probably added by the presumably Christian scribe when it was first written down in the Exeter Book long after it was originally composed. It's not a long poem, so I am going to read it again. The work of an aging poet who lived perhaps over twelve hundred years ago, an exile from the time, place and friends of youth, seems timeless and especially apt at this moment. 

Then as I made and ate breakfast I listened again to 'Ideas', the first of a series of CBC Massey Lectures from 2020 entitled, 'Look at that device in your hand.'  presented by Ron Deibert of Citizen Lab. It was Miriam who mentioned this particular series to me last Friday on our walk. She was a mathematician working for Irish Rail at the time when it was beginning to move into computer systems, a bit later but like the women in the movie 'Hidden Figures' who worked for NASA in the early 1960s. She was reminded as she listened to the series of how energized she had been by the fact that she was contributing to advances in technology that would eliminate some of the most boring and time consuming aspects of the running of an efficient railway system. Now she sees so many of the unintended consequences of these same advances, such as those pointed out in the 'Ideas' series. Her youthful enthusiasm has been thrown into question lately. I tried to assure her that the positive intended consequences can not be ignored. They allow me to travel in space every evening to S. Korea without leaving the house and in time from about the seventh century CE to 2021 between getting up and eating breakfast on an ordinary Sunday morning. 

A drawing of Jay done by one of his students last week

Aside from that, l'm reading a very good book, The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee. It's a carefully researched and well written study of the roots and continuing growth of racism at the heart of the limited democracy that continues to struggle to survive in the USA. My back continues to improve, biking has started and I can walk farther all the time. I'm also waiting for rain. The forsythia and crocuses are starting to bloom, but things would be more colorful if we had a good rainfall. 

On Monday, March 29 at 11:50 I get the Covid 19 vaccination. Yahoo! 

Tomorrow will be March 15, 2021. 

Jay will turn 40. 🎂For me, his birth is a wonderful moment to celebrate. He and I have had good thumb chats this week. They are the anchor of my every evening. 

But this past week has also been a time to remember less joyous events: 

On March 11, 2010, Jim died. "What falls away is always and is near,"

On March 11, 2011, I was on O'ahu with Caroline when the Great Sendai Earthquake rocked Japan causing a tsunami, nuclear meltdown and thousands of deaths. Fortunately, the waves that hit O'ahu were not deadly. When we drove along the shore the next day, the only evidence of them that we saw was at the mouth of a small river where ocean water was rushing in, pushing the fresh water upstream in big waves. Kids were surfing up river. 

And on March 11, 2021, Canada acknowledged those who had died this past year from Covid 19. 

I no longer even think of trying to ski or snowshoe this winter. It's spring!! We moved the clocks forward one hour last night, there's no more snow on the ground in the valley and I seem to be able to walk farther and farther without much pain. 🤞 

Miriam and I this past Friday on the first CFUW hike of the season on the Rail Trail along the shore of Kal.Lake

Last week as I walked on Kin Beach, this young woman rode by. I was impressed by the statuesque formation she and her horse presented and surprised when she told me that she had got the horse as a rescue only a year ago and trained it herself. 

Lake Okanagan is ice free. 

The geese are floating gracefully again over its surface. 

Vernon continues with its plan to spend an outrageous amount of money to kill a few of them. Although the number has been increased from 150 to 250 it still strikes me as wasteful in every respect. 

On Friday I had my third appointment with the physiotherapist since November 26. I intended to make it the last because $80.00 a visit seemed steep; I don't have any health plan beyond the provincial one. Also the pain had certainly diminished but not gone away, and I was beginning to think that after three months the same would have been the case even without physiotherapy. I entered the office for this last appointment intending to carry on doing the exercises I had been given and going on ever longer walks. But as Monty Python said, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."  And that's exactly what I got from Carey. His explanation of how bones heal laid bare my uninformed assumptions, his outline of new exercises and his unexpected use of needles in my muscles combined with the fact that this time the fee was only $75.00 crushed every aspect of my argument against continuing. I am booked for another appointment in early April. 

I don't know if it's the pandemic, ageing, living alone, recovering from injury or an ultimate submission to the unrelenting media exposure to Covid, Covid , Covid with its contemporary tendency to dwell on individual emotional and psychological reactions to this overwhelming external reality, but I have never been so conscious of and spent so much time on my own physical, mental and emotional needs, wants or whatever. It's crept up on me slowly. At first I fought it, thinking this attention to self was unnecessary and self indulgent. But as I don't have much else to occupy my time I carry on doing physio exercises with intention, walking ever longer routes, cutting my hair with unwarranted care, applying cream to face and body, making changes in my wardrobe and home decor that I would never have even deemed necessary before, hovering over house plants, writing and reading and all manner of self centred pastimes. 

My newly reorganized sun room

I'm beginning to think that the importance attached to self care these days is often warranted because the stresses placed on family and work life in this uncertain time of pandemic must sometimes feel insurmountable for younger people. I suffer little of that, but old age no matter the historical period makes its demands on the body, mind and spirit. And maybe at its best caring for the self makes a person more aware of the necessity of care itself and hence of the need to help others whose cares are much greater than our own. 

The pandemic is forcing Canadians of my generation and following to question the delusion of control over our personal destinies that some of us have basked in during 75 years of peace and prosperity. We are now facing uncertainty as never before in our time. But people through the ages have had their complacency ruffled. Plague, drought, flood, famine, corrupt governments and wars have regularly forced human beings to rework their systems, to return to struggling together against the odds and even to endure mass migration. Now it's our time to be compelled to accept the tenuousness of our situation. Perhaps we will even learn to appreciate the much more dire case faced by millions of people around the world and do whatever we can to promote greater equality and more sustainable sources of energy at home and everywhere. I'm thinking again about Rutger Bregman and how influenced I was by his books, Utopia for Realistsand Humankind. I probably wouldn't have read either of them if it had not been for lockdown which has made me pay more attention to many things that I  previously would have thought I didn't have time for. What did I have time for?

There's always time fora laugh. An old poster on the wall of a coffee shop in Lake Country. We went there after a walk on the rail trail. 

Winter Carnival is over. 

It survived Covid 19, a Polar Vortex and some vandalism. Two of the ice sculptures were smashed two nights before it began, but a local who had worked with the specialists was able to partly repair one and the ice blocks of other, a cowboy on a rearing horse, were turned into a mini Boot Hill. Lynne and John Young picked me up on Wednesday evening to drive through Polson Park and look at them. It wasn't what Ed Sullivan would have called, "A Really Big Show!!!", but it was an admirable effort. The group organizing the carnival this year was an enthusiastic bunch. They deserve a lot of credit. I went for a walk in the park this Tuesday morning just in time to watch the wrecking crew level the sculptures. It would have been fun to watch them slowly melt but I guess the city was afraid of litigation if someone got crushed by a heavy block of ice.   

A night shot of one of the ice sculptures

The smashing of the train

Geese walking awkwardly on the glass flat ice of Lake Okanagan during last week's Polar Vortex freeze. The lake had been ice free until then. 

We had a bit of snow last night. When I woke this morning and looked outside it was sparkling in the sun. I couldn't resist going out to shovel for the first time this winter. Ama, a teenage neighbour has been doing it. She does a fine job, but is not given to early rising, so after I had finished, I phoned and told her mother not to rouse her early because I had done it myself this time. It was an easy shovel, but I was happy that my back didn't ache at all after. It was still sunny, so I went for another first in a long time. I walked to the Black Rock and back, still very little pain. Then at 1:00pm I went to sort books until 3:00. Wednesday's are busy days. 🤪

But I'm really encouraged because this is the most I've done in one day with the least pain since November 26. 

In keeping with the Covid forwarding of laughs, I end with one of the funniest I've received lately. 

This will be the last entry in the post Winter Solstice sunrise/sunset series. 

The inconsistencies continue between the numbers of minutes of daylight gained in the mornings and evenings, but I'm discontinuing the study. This pandemic has taught me a few things, not the least of which is that there's a reason why I'm not a research scientist. It requires far too much attention to detail. People in our instant gratification society  often criticize scientists and public health people for not being more quick and consistent in their responses to Covid 19, but I am not among them. Research takes time, patience and an ability to question what you think you know in order to discover another possible truth. That's too much like work. I'm retired now and all that concerns me is the glorious fact that since the Winter Solstice on December 21, 2020 we have gained 1 hour and 37 minutes of daylight in Vernon. 

Quite a few of the new hours were sunny this week. I intended to try skiing but didn't.  I still get sharp, hot pain in the back if I do too much, but things have improved. I thought of trying careful cross country but just couldn't get excited about gathering my ski gear together and driving up to Sovereign where it would be all white and wonderful, but colder than down in town. This has been the first winter that I've spent in the valley since I moved to Vernon. It's been an unusually mild and relatively snow free one. I've actually enjoyed it. I've gone, either alone or with friends, on walks I hadn't known about before. I've spent more time on local beaches than I ever have in the ten summers I've lived here. I don't like lying on a towel in the sand under the hot summer sun, but walking by the water in winter boots is wonderful. 

Yesterday, Bonnie Henry extended the mandate about not gathering in groups beyond your household until the end of February. The only houses I go into are Mo and John's and Miriam and Bill's. I can do this because I live alone. Our Rec. Centre is still open, so I walk there on Tuesdays to swim a bit and relax a lot in the hot tub and bubble pool. BC schools remain open, with a few changes in mask-wearing protocols this week. A few anti maskers were shuffling around carrying signs on sticks at the corner of Polson Park near Highway 97 one day last week when I was walking there, but they didn't get many honks from passing motorists. People are worried about the developing variants of the virus and confused over the delays in the delivery of the vaccines the federal government ordered and its failure to invest in Canadian vaccine-making facilities. Some are questioning the provincial government's distribution of the shots. But aside from people with legitimate doubts about the rapidly developed vaccines that are now available and rabid antivaccers, most seem content to keep their distance, wash their hands, wear masks and accept the inevitable wait for their turn to get the shot and do their part to help make the herd immune. When I reread Camus'  The Plaguea while ago I took note of some of the ideas presented through the lives of the characters. The best among them exhibited a kind of active fatalism. The plague was an unavoidable given, from which there was no island of escape. The only solution was to try to do whatever good was within their power to do. One of the lines connected with the tireless work of Rieux, the doctor, was that he endeavoured to, "...provide opportunities for the munificence of chance."  I like that idea. 

The theme of the winter carnival this year is the Wild West roots of the city. They are doing admirably well to keep it lively in this time of Covid. They are going to have car tours of Polson Park where there will be an ice sculpture and light show. This sculpture represents the arrival of the train in town. I saw it being finished when I was on one of my walks this week. 

Today the sun sets at 4:32pm. It will rise at 7:36am tomorrow. 

I haven't contacted Bob MacDonald yet, so I'm continuing my scrupulous research on my iPhone. We have gained 5min. on the set side and a whopping 11min on the rise since the last blog. One of my questions for Bob is thus nearing an answer. There's no consistency in the amount of change between morning and evening. This study of mine is idle, of course, but it is helping me appreciate the plight of all scientists. Science requires strict attention to minutiae, patience and an ability to drop what you thought and turn the ship around to take advantage of new evidence. Maybe I should volunteer to work with Bonnie Henry's Covid team. 

But then maybe not. My training period has been just over a month and my only equipment is an iPhone which indicates that it is snowing now in Vernon while a quick look out the window reveals that it is not. 

To the extent that my calculations are accurate; however, there is some good news. Since Winter Solstice, we have gained 55 minutes of sunlight per day. Much of it has been behind cloud, but not all. I have widened the range of my walks from the Black Rock and Polson Park to include two beaches and Kal Park. We have so little snow that you can walk on frozen sand along both Kin Beach and Kal Beach and even dip your boots in the water. 

Biden is busy signing executive orders to overturn the executive orders of the former president who shall go nameless here. It's such a joy not to hear from him that I will follow the lead of Putin who refuses even to name his rival Alexis Navalny.  Covid and its variants continue to trouble the world and the slowing down of shipments of vaccines is making news in Canada. 

As I have lots of time these days I'm indulging my idle interest in how the age we live in fits into the pattern of human life through time on this planet. I remember how, when Jim and I watched the HBO series 'Deadwood', I was levelled by the last show in which the loves, struggles and mendacity in the small western town which had entertained us for hours were trampled to insignificance in an instant by the arrival of the train and the grander schemes from the east. At this and at many other moments in my life I've been fascinated by the simultaneous importance and insignificance of our actions in daily life. I love Stephen Leacock's stories for this reason. They are humane and funny and I see myself and our world in them. So a few weeks ago, when I came upon the book, Why The West Rules -For Now by Ian Morris while sorting books as a volunteer with Vernon Friends of the Library, I paid my $2.00 and took it home. I've been reading it slowly since. Much of it I forget soon after reading, but he writes well. I am enjoying the book and managing to appreciate some of the recurring trends in human history that his years of study enable him to present. Human history is moved by  big wheels and little cogs, but both are ultimately subject to much larger natural forces. Morris believes that individuals are each unique but that in groups they act in very similar ways no matter where in the world or when in history they live. 

Today the sun sets at 4.27pm.  It rises tomorrow at 7:47am

That means that it sets 19 min. later today than it did the last time I wrote this blog but rises only 8min. earlier. Have the days always lengthened more through the evenings than the mornings? Will this pattern continue until we reach the longest day?  These are observations I would never have made and questions I would not have posed were it not for the imposed idleness of age, back pain and a pandemic. For the answers, I will have to either continue my meticulous observations 🤪or send an email to 'Quirks and Quarks' for Bob McDonald to answer. 😂

And so it goes. We have had two days of glorious sunshine. I really enjoy walking in Polson Park, but my back still aches after about 4km. Priscilla, Lynne and I met for lunch in our cars at Kin Beach on Wednesday. I sat in the back of Lynne's car and Priscilla backed in beside us, properly distanced, of course.🤪With our windows open and wine in our glasses, we ate, drank and were merry. We are going to have more such Covid lunches. 

For the first time there's talk of Covid in Vernon, in three seniors' homes. There are cases among both staff and residents but not many so far. There are a few other cases, but the largest spread in the Okanagan is in Big White, the ski area outside of Kelowna. People I know who ski say that there are plenty of cars with Alberta and Quebec plates at Silver Star, and residents of Fernie are worried about the number of people from out of province in their area. John Horgan has approached the Federal Government to see if there's any way BC can shut its borders to people from other provinces that have many more cases of Covid than BC does. That would be difficult to enforce. 

Talking about closing borders, Jay said the other night that that's one of the ways that S. Korea has kept its numbers down. It's a peninsula with its northern border with N. Korea so heavily guarded only a handful of people have made it across alive in decades. S. Korea can isolate itself the way Newfoundland and some island countries can. It's not so easy to control traffic between provinces in Canada. 

Jay has been Zoom teaching long enough to actually like it a bit now. But he says they will go back to "mask to mask" classroom teaching this week. 

By the next time I write this blog the USA will have a new president, Joe Biden, in spite of Trump's Troopers' storming of the United States Capitol on Jan. 06. It and the state capitols  are being very heavily barricaded and patrolled now. It's unlikely the insurrectionists will do much damage on Inauguration Day. 

Again I'm reminded of Leonard Cohen's:

"Democracy is coming -- to the USA."

Today the sun sets at 4:08pm

That's 12 min. later than it did on December 22, the day of the winter solstice. But it rises tomorrow at the same time, 7:55am, as it did then. I haven't taken note of these subtle changes before. Of course the source of this information is the weather app on my iPhone, so you should check more reliable sources before spreading it. 

I will never be the recorder of my times that Samuel Pepys was of his in the diaries he kept during the 1660s in England. I'm not meticulous by nature. However, in the slow pace of my present life I am more aware of some details and that is what made me think of Pepys recently. When I read an edited version of his diaries in university, I was awed by the minutiae of his observations of the 1666 fire of London, his honest account of his own life and his comments on the Great Plague of 1665, but I hadn't thought much about it again until recently. Just as the knowledge that plagues in London had interrupted Shakespeare’s career a few times had added little more than local colour to my first readings of his plays.  I had imagined what it would be like to stand on a street and watch a play that rolled by on wagons, each presenting different  scene or act. The fact that this was happening because the actors couldn't perform in big theatres in London because of plague meant relatively little to me. What a failure of imagination on my part. I'm thinking and reading more now about those and other times of plague. Heaven knows I have time, and maybe the fact that I'm no longer young and healthy makes me more sensitive to the horrors of disease. Also, one can tire of looking out the window at the falling snow, beautiful as it is. 

We hear so much these days about how we are living in unprecedented times: Covid 19; the inglorious end of the Trump fiasco; the increasing awareness of the threat we humans are to the world's environment; mass human migrations caused by war, climate change and unscrupulous governments; the Black Lives Matter movement coupled with the rising recognition of Indigenous values and rights. These are turbulent times, but not unprecedented. In the long history of human life on earth, even just in the last 500 years there have been precedents. In Pepys time, 1660s England was returning to monarchy and at war with the Dutch while London suffered from the Great Plague and the Great Fire. Many periods in human history have experienced catastrophe, and it's always the poor and disadvantaged who suffer most. 

Now that's PPE! 

I'm not suffering. My back and knees are making me realize my age. At 74, it's about time. Staying alone at home much of the time is a physical necessity as much as it is a government mandate in this time of Covid 19. I see three of my friends quite regularly, FaceTime, email, message and phone others and Kakaotalk with Jay every evening. I finally saw the physio on December 30. He gave me gentle exercises to do twice a day for my knees. I go for two short walks a day and am trying to fight off the need to take osteoporosis medication by altering my diet a bit, cutting out caffeine and uping my intake of greens and veg. in general. As long as I don't have to give up butter and cheese, I can do it. In fact I am invigorated by making the changes necessary for this new regime. I like having routines. I can go for ages without much change, but sometimes a change is not only as good as a rest it's as good as the addition of rosemary to roast potatoes. I learned that trick a few years ago. It's one thing I'm not going to change. 

My Christmas treats from Jay, May and the girls. May says the jacket is popular in Korea this year. She says the English translation of the Korean name is something like double sheep because it's as furry inside as out. 

Me wearing my double sheep on a walk in Polson Park

I hope that in 2021 we will be able to gather like these ducks in Polson Park.