The West Commences

I missed the Sunday blog for the first time in ages. It was the third item for the day, and I couldn’t exceed the two-task limit. The club hiked Cougar Canyon. I volunteered to be the sweep again. As we began, I wondered about the wisdom of it. Snaking along the valley I had mental images of a huge cat following our progress and picking me as the last and weakest morsel in the line. When you’re sweep you have more time to think than if you’re without responsibilities and can move up and down the line to talk to different people. When someone did hang back and chat with me, I mentioned how I was giving myself a puny thrill by imagining a big cat eying me as a meal. She pointed out the fact that the line of us was more like a telephone wire than anything else and that no cougar would salivate at the prospect of biting into such a buzzing prey. It was true. There were 39 hikers ahead of me. We were more numerous and as talkative as the W.W.W. As we began to climb, I no longer needed to entertain myself with conjured up threats. I began to enjoy the exertion and was happy to quietly look up the sheer rock faces, down the steep canyon walls, across at other cliffs and along the canyon floor. When I got home at 4:00pm, there was a message from Terry saying that his family theatre adventure was a success and he was back in Vernon. I phoned him, he came over and we had beer and pickled eggs on the back deck. It was my first outside drink of the summer season. Then he took me to the local Chinese Buffet for dinner. He came back for coffee, which we drank while sitting on my new futon in the sunroom, another first. It was a good visit. By then I was too tired to blog.m

Now I’m into the final stages of packing for Korea and looking forward to Mela’s visit. I Skyped with Jay on Monday, as usual, and discovered more about some of the very real issues he is dealing with. He and May seem to be working through them admirably, though, and I am eager to join them and have a whole month to live with them and the girls. It sounds as if Jay has 2 excursions in the works, one for the first and one for the last weeks that I am there. The rest will unfold as it will. I just have to make it to Korea. You know how after a plane crash there’s often a person interviewed on the television who tells a story of a lucky loved one who, for some reason or other, was supposed to be on that flight but missed it. Well, when Korean Air flight #72 out of Vancouver had a bomb scare and was guided back to Comox by two U.S. fighter jets the week before last, I thought my trip was jinxed. That’s my flight. I had already bought a second, West Jet, ticket from Kelowna to Vancouver to avoid an Air Canada strike and ensure that I would make it to the Korean Air flight on time. Now that was under threat. I told a friend the other day that if I go down on Korean Air flight 72, she can tell the reporters that I did my level best to be on that doomed plane.