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.