Visits

Archie and Marilyn Smith visited for two nights on their way back to Wakefield.  It was good to see them and chat over wine and dinner about life on the river and after.  We walked along BX Creek, looked at the falls and drove to Silver Star for lunch.  Archie helped me with some jobs that I’ve needed a man to do for a long time, like trying again to figure out why the toilet flushes erratically.  He had an idea, which he confirmed on Google, that it might be a blockage in the stench pipe.  The suggested solution was to go on the roof with the garden hose, shove it down the pipe and turn on the water to flush out whatever was there.  I got out my new ladder, which Arch coveted, and we climbed up on the roof.  I was excited to see what it was like.  It looks good.  The pipe had a small wasp nest in it, so I went to my bedroom to get the wasp spray Marg had told me every woman living alone should have by her bed.  I have never had occasion to use it yet and that’s just as well because Arch discovered that before you get the first 20 foot spray, you have to remove something that I would never have had time to remove if an attacker were heading for me unless he was using a walker.  After removing the nest, we turned on the water and let it run a while. The trick seemed to work while the Smiths were here, but although better it remains a reluctant flusher at times.  The other thing that was evident with 3 people living in the place was that all the doors squeaked.  The Smiths needed some stuff from Canadian Tire, so we went together, and I bought 2 other essential things for a house, WD 40 and duct tape. Now there are no more creaky hinges.  So the Smith’s visit was enjoyable and helpful.

I read the Sunday ‘Morning Star’ on Tuesday after the Smiths left and discovered that on Wed. night the touring mural celebrating the Canadians who died in Afghanistan would be at the cadet camp in Vernon.  Wed. was a busy day.  I biked with some women to Ellison Provincial Park Beach, about 40 km round trip, with a couple of hills I had to break down and walk up.  And at night I walked to the cadet camp for the 6:30 ceremony.  It was very moving, especially as there were a couple of hundred cadets there whose presence seemed to have an effect on all the speakers.  A breeze came up as the evening progressed, so the flag flew over the huge van that housed the mural.  When it was unveiled, the sight was impressive.  I had arrived early and spoken to the artist without knowing who he was.  He has rendered each face in a lifelike way and his commitment to the project is admirable.

Matti, Lindsay, Cleo and their dog Jack arrived on Friday and stayed the night.  They left about an hour ago for Kelowna where they will go to a wedding on Sunday.  It was wonderful to see them all, but especially Cleo.  She’s a beautiful, long-limbed baby with big, bright eyes and chubby cheeks.  She was very happy and loved to lie on a blanket on the floor stretching, rolling and pulling other blankets over her face.  She had a bit of a digestive problem that made her fussy at times, but that seemed to be clearing up as they left.  We went for some walks around town, enjoyed the warm breezes on the back porch and had good chats.  Having visits from friends and family is helping me to feel more at home in Vernon.  And I think the hot, dry days of summer are finally upon us.  I hope it’s not too hot tomorrow when the outdoors club goes to Kamloops to hike around Sun Peaks. 

I’m looking forward to talking with Jay on Mon. on Skype, as I always am, but this time especially because I heard on the news last week about heavy rain in Korea.  They showed pictures from Seoul and elsewhere of rushing water from what they said was the most rain in such a short time in about 100 years.  Climate change seems to be a constant.  

A few of the cadets hydrate before the show

The artist talking with the commander of the camp before the show

The mural unveiled

Cleo playing with her dad and blankets

Cleo and Matti on the floor

Lindsay, Cleo and Matti on the back porch

Filipino Fiesta 2011

Monday was like Christmas.  I Skyped with Jay at 6 in the morning and opened the big box of treats that he and May had sent me from Korea and the Philippines.  It was full of snacks and salsas, a book about the cooking and culture of the Philippines and clothes, 2 ‘ajama’ (grandma) hats to keep my face from the sun, a diaphanous white blouse and a bright shawl covered in orange and yellow suns.   I’m a lucky mom.

  My shins are still marred with dark scabs from biking, but this has been one of my most sedentary weeks.  I think the body needed a break.  It’s Sunday and I didn’t even go on the hike today.  It was supposed to be in the mountains near Revelstoke, but again was cancelled because of deep snow on the trails.  The email from the man who was going to lead the thing informing us that it was called off and that we were invited to join him on what he described as an unappealing alternative, was so convincing that I opted not to go for the first time since I joined the club.  My new physiotherapist would approve.  He’s a funny man with a New Zealand accent, I think, who seems to be a good physio.  He told me in the course of my initial treatment that in his 5 years in Vernon he’s come to the opinion that it has a very militant population of would be athletes between the ages of 55 and 75.  We had a laugh sharing stories about our encounters with such people.  He told me that a patient he’d had this week, a man of about 58, was so desperate to have his back problems cured and over with quickly so that he could return to mountain biking that he screamed and accused him of being a quack with no capacity to independently diagnose a problem just because he had said essentially the same thing the man’s doctor had, that this was a serious back problem that would not be resolved in a week.  I told him of the tartars I’d met in the Vernon outdoors club, some of whom are at least 75.  I was glad I was wearing long pants and that he was only looking at my shoulder so that he didn’t see my barked shins that reveal my efforts to join the group of aged jocks.  I’m now following a regimen of easy exercises for the rotator cuff, which I hope will work because Dr. Jones says that unless the patient is really in pain and inconvenience because of rotator cuff injury, they don’t operate after age 65.  I already don’t have much pain, and I have good movement but very little strength.  I went on two moderate bike rides this week.  One around the area of Coldstream, beautiful country that once was a huge ranch, and one to a beach on Lake Okanagan where I sat on the shore and read. 

I still read the local paper, ‘The Morning Star’ which is delivered free 3 times a week and is wastefully full of fliers.  But I’ve found some deals on things I need to get settled and also learned of local events by doing so.  This time it was the Philosophers’ Café on Thursday night that caught my eye.  It was held in a woman’s home, but she told me that it had originally been started in a local café that went under.  There were about 30 people there, and I enjoyed it.  Two men spoke about their pilgrimages, one walked for 2 months around the small island of Shikoku off Japan on a circular, Buddhist pilgrimage with his son, and the two of them went together on the Camino de Santiago.  Both spoke insightfully and presented slide shows that had very apt sound tracks. 

On Saturday, I worked with Vernon’s version of David Glover, a gregarious Yorkshire man a friend told me about who is a jack- of- all- trades.  It was great.  We hung all the pictures I’ve been moving from one spot on the floor to another for a couple of months. Then at 5 I dressed up and went to the Filipino Fiesta 2011 at the Vernon Rec. Centre.  It was fun.  I met a woman who’s a volunteer clown.  She also was there alone, so we ate and watched the show together.  The food was spectacular, full of what the book I got from Jay and May would describe as ‘umami’, which I think means bring- your- mouth-to life flavor.  Everyone was dressed up, and the entertainment was just that, whether very good or merely a valiant effort, it was entertaining.

Cougar Canyon without a single cougar.

Filipino women, brightly dressed and hard working.  Mercy, in pink, is the woman I met at the Immigrant Services Office.  She sold me the ticket.

Women of a certain age doing the Itik-Itik dance which has something to do with ducks, I think.  The fiesta queen and princesses are in the background.

Young men doing the dance of heroes which commemorates the killing of Ferdinand Magellan

Women doing the Philippine National Dance, the Tinikling.  It's like a cross between skipping Double Dutch and the sword dance of the Scots.  They hop and skip delicately over and between sticks that are being rhythmically banged together.  It looks exhausting and dangerous enough to appeal to the Vernon Outdoors Club.  But their costumes are much more beautiful than my hiking gear.

Women having a good time dancing to pop tunes from the 60s and 70s

The weather

The unusual weather of this la nina year continues.  Again because of the slow melt in the mountains, the hike tomorrow has been changed from Twin Lakes in the Monashees to a place lower down and closer to Vernon, Cougar Canyon.  The name sounds intimidating, but locals say that although there can be cougars in the area you rarely see them.  From the top, you look out over what used to be called Rattlesnake Point because there are rattlesnakes there, but it has recently been renamed Turtle’s Head Point, probably by the tourist bureau.  What’s in a name?  I had some of my best walks in Ottawa around Mud Lake.  However, you can’t fight the weather.  It’s about 4:15pm now and dark.  I’ve turned the lights on, the wind is up, thunder is booming and large drops of rain are tapping on the sidewalks.  I just checked the weather report, and it looks as if tomorrow should be fine but next week we’ll have more rain.  The sunny Okanagan it’s not.  And Ottawa and Winnipeg are melting in the thirties with nothing but sun in the forecast.  I was afraid Vernon would be too hot, and I still go biking in the morning to escape the heat, as I did today, but instead I’m beating the rain.  It was the same on Wednesday morning when I biked around Vernon with a few other women and returned home to rain in the afternoon.  I learned a lot about how to get around on a bike on that ride.  As I said last week, the bike paths are erratic here, but these women know how to link them up.  As a result, I decided to commit myself to biking for groceries, etc. and bought ‘panniers’ and a rear view mirror.  I’m getting geared up.  Speaking of which, and before I leave this quintessentially Canadian topic, I have to say that Blake and Tracy’s motorcycle honeymoon sounds like a hot one.  They rode right into the oven as they headed for Texas.  I’ve enjoyed tracing their route, but not envied them the extreme heat.

Living alone and having to do things I’ve never done before continues to be a learning experience.  My favorite picture of Jim is one in which he’s wearing a cap, like the one he was wearing when I first saw him, and his eyes are sparkling.  I recently remembered that the reason they were is that he was delighting in my ineptitude as I tried to get everything set to take the picture.  I used to get angry when he did that, but increasingly I’m learning to admit that I’m often distracted and clumsy and the only way to face it is to laugh.  My shins are covered with scabs from practically falling off the bike, and putting the panniers and mirror on was quite entertaining/frustrating.  I’m a hard worker and quite capable, but if there’s a wrong way to do something or a wrong direction to take, I’ll do it and/or take it. 

Vernon and Swan Lake as seen from Ravine Edge, last Sunday's hike

Two members of the club enjoying lunch

Shooting stars on the path

Violets on the path

   

July nine

I have just finished reading a book Linda sent to me, The Songlines by Bruce Chapman.  I had not heard of him, but I think I will look for more of his work.  He’s a ‘storny great’ traveler, observer and thinker, and much of what he wrote escaped me.  But a lot of it interested me very much.  The songlines are one way of referring to the paths that cover the surface of Australia.  Unseen by all but the aboriginals, and even by them more sensed than seen, they mark the journeys of the ancestors in the ‘Dreamtime’.  Each individual is connected to one of the many ancestors and thus to one of the long trails that weave back and forth and cross the whole continent, hence the nomadic nature of Australian aboriginals.  They don’t seek home and possessions; they follow a path.   Although the story is set in Australia, Chapman refers throughout to notes he has taken from his readings, other travels and discussions he’s had with people.  At one point he quotes Soren Kierkegaard who wrote in a letter in 1847, “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being, …; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it…”  The thoughts of Chapman and Kierkegaard are more profound than mine, but my grief makes me try to approach an understanding of them, and my experience lately helps me appreciate the sense of liberation that follows a walk.   It moves you out of yourself and away from the material worries that wrap up daily life.  I’m no Australian aboriginal; my walks are short, I enjoy and am burdened by possessions that they eschew and even if Vernon gets as hot as it’s supposed to in summer, it will never approach the heat and searing sun of the Australian outback.  I’m a daughter of Cain visiting her uncle Abel. 

The hike tomorrow was supposed to be along Vidler Ridge, in the high country, but I received an email this morning saying that because there is so much snow up there, we will be going to Ravine Edge which is lower down.  We will meet at 7:30am to get an early start because it’s supposed to be hot tomorrow, and we won’t be up high where it’s cooler.  It will be a shorter and easier walk than the one last week on Estekwalon Mountain, but safer.  Because the snow this year is staying in the high country, the bears are wandering down in search of food.  There have been sightings in the area we were supposed to go to and people have been mauled in some higher remote areas; one woman was even killed.  I missed both bike rides this week, the first because of my misunderstanding of where we were to meet and the second because I had an appointment to get my hair cut.  I now look like a ‘peeled eel’, as my mother would say.  I always expect a hairdresser to make me look beautiful, and all they ever do is cut my hair, usually shorter than I want it to be.  I went biking on my own one morning and discovered that if you want to bike in Vernon, you have to be prepared for hills and for bike paths to end and leave you pedaling on a sidewalk or the side of a road or highway.  I did get to a good lookout over Kalamalka Lake and then down to the beach, but I missed the wonderful Ottawa bike paths and the quiet back roads of West  Quebec.  And the beer at Molo’s.

I am now putting it in writing, “ I’m finished gardening until fall.”  I bought and planted a  beautiful Northern Gold Forsythia this week.  And I broadened the beds, put compost on the plants and spread a bark mulch between them.  That’s it. 

The view from the top of Vidler Ridge last Sunday

A beach on Lake Kalamalka

Hitting the wall

This week I hit the wall.  Buoyed by my success on last week’s bike ride, I joined the main group on Thursday.  We drove to Summerland and biked part of the dirt track that used to be the Kettle Valley Railway from there to about 10 km. south of Penticton, some 55km. return.  Not a long distance, but as I enjoyed the view and the easy pedaling out, I remembered the expression that I had learned biking last year, ‘ faux plat’.  This was that, which reminds me, ‘This is That’ is my favorite CBC radio program at the moment.  Anyway, I knew the return ride would not be so much fun.  We stopped for lunch at a beach on Skaha Lake, wonderful, and then rode back, not so great.  I immediately noted that the wind had increased and was not at our backs.  All went well, however, until the last 10 km.  The ‘faux plat’ was now not in our favor.  Because it was a railway bed, I know the grade was probably no more than 3 degrees, but that’s all it took to almost break me.  The bed was loose gravel and sand, and my thigh muscles felt as if they were crystallizing.  Half my water had spilled at the lunch spot and my mouth was dry.  Fortunately, Colette, the sweep, who could have gone faster and Peggy who was happy to go at my speed stayed with me and I made it to the end.  As the others ate ice cream cones, I gulped down a Gatorade and rested my legs, which felt fine after about five minutes.  I’ve fallen in with a tough group.  The hike last Sunday to the top of Enderby Cliffs was quite long and uphill, but the views were worth it and the temperature was not too hot, especially at the top where a cool draft blew up the cliffs from the valley. 

Terry Keough was in Vernon this week for a family birthday gathering.  He and his niece came for tea and strawberry short biscuits and thus became my first visitors of the summer season.  Unfortunately, Kate and William will not be able to stop by this visit.  More important, Jay and May won’t be coming in July.  Although I’m sorry, I think their decision is for the best and look forward to seeing them in Korea this fall or more likely next spring.  Terry took me, his sister Mary and another niece to lunch at White Spot, so I finally made it to the restaurant where Jo said the hamburgers are the best, but I didn’t have a hamburger.  The roasted vegetable flatbread was too tempting.  Now I look forward to seeing the Smiths in early August.

I spent the rest of the week watching Wimbledon, finishing up tax and health card ‘issues’, I hope, seeing what Vernon does on Canada Day and walking around my neighbourhood. 

More of the roses in the garden.  They are getting close to the end of their first blooming.  I'm dead heading them in hopes of a second one.

If you click on this picture, you'll get a better view of the artistic pattern made by the farmer as he mowed the hay.  There were a few such fields in the valley, but my camera has limited zoom capacity.

The view from the top of Enderby Cliffs with a wild flower called penstamin, I think, in the foreground.

Collette took this picture of me on her cell phone as we reached the end of the ride.  It's not a clear photo, but I wasn't feeling too clear at the time either. 

One of the most popular parts of the Vernon Canada Day festivities at Polson Park was this stand in the Mediaeval Village where kids could take 3 shots at 3 knights for 1 dollar.

The heart of the Mediaeval Village

A gallery near my house.  It was not open when I walked by, but I took a picture of the sign because it reminded me of our www sculpture.