New Tricks

It’s 1:00pm Monday, November 19, 2012, and it’s been raining steadily since early last night.  It’s warm, about 9c., but dreary.  I hope the cedars are happy.  When I talked with Jay last night it was raining there too.  The weather in Incheon isn’t too much different from that in Vernon at the moment, but we have snow in the hills. 

Yesterday I had a great cross-country ski with Mo.  We had talked about it on Saturday night but neither one of us was really keen on going by Sunday morning.  We didn’t even phone each other until after 9, and if it hadn’t been for the other, neither would have gone, but together we did go.  When I saw the snow getting thicker on the spruce trees as we approached Silver Star, I felt mildly excited, but as soon as I got out of the warm car in the parking lot, I wanted to get back in.  It felt cold, it was grey, I’d never cross-countried here before, and we had no idea where the trails were.  Why were we here?  But neither of us said a word.  We shouldered our skis and started to walk to the centre of the village.  There, we encountered about 5 of the people who form the heart of the Vernon Outdoors Club, just as I did last year when I went up alone for the first day of skiing.  I pushed myself harder last year; I had to if I wanted to make a life in Vernon.  Now that I have established myself a bit, I am tempted to settle into my default position, which can be pretty sedentary.  The encounter with these VOC keeners did what it always does, gave us a needed boost.  We saddled up and had a wonderful ski.  The snow was perfect.  It never got really sunny, but the clouds cleared a bit, the air was bracing and within 2 minutes I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.  We went to Paradise Cabin and back, only about 10k, but it felt great.  I had put on the right wax.  We had something to eat in the village and even did a bit of shopping up there.  As usual when I shop with a friend, I got more excited than I do alone and bought a pretty splashy top for the Christmas season and winter in general, not a bad day considering the little hope I had for it when I got up.

Today it was the necessity of domestic chores that got me up.  I stripped the bed and started a white wash.  Then I approached the espresso machine that I had finally bought on Saturday, after having wanted one since I moved to Vernon over 2 years ago.  I’ve always been short tempered with appliances and all purchases that require the reading of manuals to operate.  I usually run my eyes over the instructions, picking up the essentials, rush to get the thing operational and hope I haven’t done something irredeemably wrong.  If it doesn’t work right away, I feel like throwing it out and going back to whatever relic from the Ark I was using before I bought it.  Now that I’m old and retired, I am trying to take advantage of the fact that although I don’t have a lot of time left on the planet, I do daily have more of it in which to fiddle with things calmly.  It’s not easy to jettison the conditioned reflexes of a lifetime, but if Jim’s example of slowly learning to let go of the petty stresses of life and gracefully accept the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’ didn’t teach me a lesson in patience, I really am incorrigible.  The mere unpacking of the Breville box taxed my new resolve.  Each of the many individual bits was bubble wrapped, taped and fitted into a specially molded space in a thick piece of white Styrofoam.  It was a masterpiece of waste, the non-recyclable foam, the packers’ time and mine.  But it was admirable how each piece fit so perfectly.  The designing and making of these packaging systems for shipping goods from China to the rest of the world must require entire departments and employ thousands.  I now had all the parts in front of me, the manual open and was ready to begin.  I read carefully for once.  I ground the newly purchased espresso beans as directed and tamped them into the filter using the cunningly sculpted end of the measuring spoon, heated the unit, filled the water reservoir,   plugged the machine in, waited for the orange light to go out to indicate that all was ready, turned the dial to the little cup that indicates the espresso position and waited.  There was a grumbling noise but no water flowed out.  None ever did and after many patient minutes and reworkings I gave up.  Still calm and this after no coffee and noting that it was almost 10:00am., I repacked everything.  I had a whole plastic bag full of molded pieces of Styrofoam that I couldn’t begin to put around the right parts.  After a bowl of cereal and a press-café made with my trusty old Canadian Tire Bodum knock off, I gathered everything up and went to London Drugs to return it.  The woman at the customer service desk was even calmer than I was.  She asked only a few questions about my efforts to make it work, but even these tested my resolve to remain in control of my temper.  However, I passed, and she told me to go get another.  My patience was rewarded because she didn’t write a note on my bill to the effect that I had returned the first, so I can, if necessary, return this one too.  What she doesn’t know is that last year I returned 2 push lawnmowers to Canadian Tire before I finally got one that I could use.  The new box is sitting on the kitchen counter.  I’m not going to tackle it until tomorrow.