Balance

Dull, dull, dull, inside and outside.  I need a tonic.  I heard on the CBC radio this morning that the amount of active vitamin D in any given tablet can vary a great deal.  Maybe I’ve been taking my daily dose from a bottle of weak pills lately.  Or maybe it’s the lingering cold I have.  At any rate, I’m going to write this out of my system, move forward, put it behind me, get on with my life and mobilize every other cliché I can think of behind an effort to pull myself up by my bootstraps.   Here’s a picture Jay sent me recently that is his and now my ‘go to’ photo for bad mornings:

And here’s one of my nephew Matti’s baby, Burke Boyce.  It will now be my shot for good mornings:

In an effort to maintain a balanced tone, I will now present a high point from the last 10 days.  On Friday evening I volunteered as an usher at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre for the ‘Travelin’ Slam Poetry’ show.  It was great.  I was so ill at ease at the beginning that if I hadn’t been an usher, I wouldn’t have stayed in the theatre.  Poets, alone on stage, baring their creations to strangers, how could they do it?  But they were poets, very good ones, and they did it.  The main one was Brendan McLeod from the Vancouver arts collective ‘The Fugitives.’  He’s 33 and quite plain looking, short brown hair, blue jeans and an untuckedin dark shirt, but a gifted MC and poet.  The other 3 were about his age or younger.  Each was unique looking and a genuine poet.  One was a very tall, thin, wired First Nations man, one a round, flouncy-skirted Bahamian-Canadian woman from Montreal and the last, perhaps the shyest of them all, seemed to have a background in heavy metal and video games.  He never took his cap off, but he really ‘gave her’ at times.  They did bare their souls, but within minutes I was completely at ease.  They were used to doing what they were doing, good at it and full of energy.  The format, with judges from the audience and lots of booing and cheering was invigorating.  Brendan led and they all participated in the final set; the audience chanted the chorus and the whole atmosphere was exhilarating.

One of the expressions that has been buzzing around the CBC radio and tv this week is, ‘the aging tsunami.’  Once that network gets its teeth into an idea, it holds on like a terrier and shakes the blood out of it.  I like the CBC, it’s the only radio station I listen to but they do go on and self promote.  At any rate, they make it seem as if our generation has had quite a ride, coming in with the ‘baby boom’ and going out on an ‘aging tsunami.’  I wonder about how much debris we’ll leave behind us to wash up on the shores of the world.

On Tuesday evening, walking home from my class at the library, I saw The Big Dipper and across from it, Orion, both brilliant in the black sky.  That was a joy.  

The old cold

 I have the cold that has been going around for so long.  I haven’t had any illness since the persistent cough that wracked me most of May in Korea.  I tried to ignore it this morning; I did 2 loads of laundry while listening to Korean cds, walked downtown to the bank, came home, ate some soup and lay down for over an hour.  Now I’m sitting in front of this laptop staring at the cursor, finally admitting defeat.

I’ve been making an effort to get back to Korean lately.  If I compare this to the building of the railway across Canada, I’m at the stage of laying down track.  Sometimes the effort of remembering such strange words makes my brain hurt almost as much as if real spikes were being driven into it, and I’m still a long way from Craigellachie, let alone from buying rolling stock.  When I’m sitting in the living room listening to my cds, I can repeat Pimsleur’s phrases as if I were a lifetime resident of Seoul, but when I try to make an appropriate comment in Korean to Lucia or one of my students, I can’t.  It really is testing my determination to learn ‘anything but bridge’ in my old age to keep my mind alive.

Tonight I’m going to listen to a presentation on autism with the gang from SSASS.  We’re having a potluck before.  I was too lazy to cook anything, so, I picked up a pizza at a really good Italian deli nearby as I was wandering aimlessly around town in the warm sun on my way home from the bank.  We seem to be heading into an early spring; that’s what the groundhogs predicted, isn’t it?  Most of the snow has melted in the yard, but there’s still a lot in the hills.  I was cross-country skiing on Monday and Thursday and tomorrow I will have 2 classes with SSASS.  I was talking with Jay about the fact that since I dislocated my shoulder last February, I have not really enjoyed down hill skiing.  I’m too frightened.  We agreed that I should probably quit, so I think I’ll enjoy some easy stuff this season and next year I’ll just do cross-country.  Our decision was reinforced this morning.  As I was carrying my pizza home across a parking lot, I saw and stopped to talk with a friend from the VOC.  She had just come out of the doctor’s office after seeing him about an aching knee.  She had spent 3 consecutive days downhill skiing before one of her knees became very stiff and sore; the doctor said that the scan showed it to be pretty worn-out.  At our age we have to moderate ‘use it or lose it’, and that’s not all bad, since we are our age.

Now it’s Sunday.  I didn’t work with SSASS yesterday.  I was coughing so much at the meeting Friday night that one of my colleagues moved away from me and everyone suggested that I stay home and rest on Saturday, which I did.  My head aches, my nose runs, I have a heavy cough that practically gags me at times, etc., etc.  Tomorrow is Family Day in BC, and I think I’ll spend it at home too.  By then the worst should be over.  The main thought I have is that I hope my dad doesn’t get this.  He couldn’t cough his way out of it; he’s so frail.  When I talked with mom and dad on Friday, I discovered that he had fallen earlier in the week and mom had found him bleeding from the ear.  They were unable to get him up, so she called the ambulance, for the third time in 8 months.  Luckily, they discovered at the hospital that the blood was from a deep cut by his ear and not coming from inside.  Within a few hours, they were back at home, but he sounded very weak on the phone and mom sounded weary.  They are at the limit of their abilities to keep themselves going independently. 

The 'real deal' Aussie flat white.  It was made by the only barista at Silver Star who actually worked at The Dome, a coffee shop Mo remembers from her time in Australia.  Mo took the picture.

Teaching and learning

It’s Friday, February 1^st.  The alliteration in this date reminds me of Martin, my Korean student in grade 11.  I spent a total of three hours this week trying to help him learn literary terms.  What a drag for both of us!  We made an effort to enliven the ordeal by inventing ludicrous examples for each of the terms so that they might stick in his head.  He seems to have a good memory, but it’s being taxed to the limit by four typed pages of terms he’s hardly ever used and likely rarely will.  I finally discovered that he had a list of about 20 of the terms written without definitions on a page that was stuffed into his binder among a lot of other disorganized material.  He seemed to be completely clueless about why he’d written them, but I thought his teacher must have had them make a list of the terms that were most likely to be on the test, so we concentrated on them.  He had not kept copies of any of the poems that they had worked on in class.  The study of English literature is beyond him for many reasons.  First, the language in “Macbeth” and even Lord of the Flies, let alone poetry is more than he can cope with, and second, the whole idea of going beyond memorization to application and appreciation is right out of his ken.  He will be able to write the definitions because he will memorize them.  I can only hope that some of our crazy examples will stick in his head too and help him to find similar ones in the works he is presented with on the test.  

Tutoring his sister Stella provided me with a much more positive experience this week.  She had asked me a while ago to speak to her grade 6 class about teaching.  I agreed and had a vague idea of what I would say, but as the date approached, I began to get nervous.  I wrote the ideas down on a sheet of paper, tried to order them and interject a few lively examples.  I had a big map of North America and bought another of the world to use to illustrate points.  I pulled out the old one-room schoolhouse bell I have kept since I found it in a cottage we bought on Lake Superior when I was in high school to use as a prop.  With only 2 days left, I actually got out cards and put key ideas down on them.  I knew I’d shake a bit; I didn’t do that in my own classes when I taught, but I have done when I’ve had to speak before, as president of the union at the Lycee Claudel or on a few other occasions.  Even when Jim and I got married in my own home, the dry grasses that I had gathered shook raspingly in my hands as I stood and said the few words I had to in front of family and friends.  As it turned out, I was marvelously calmed by the familiar smell and atmosphere the moment I entered the school, but my hands shook a little bit as I wrote the theme of the talk on the board: 

Students and Teachers

Are not such different creatures.

Then I remembered that nothing works like asking for help, so I asked if 4 kids could help me put up the maps.  Hands flew up and I had nothing but cooperation and interest from then on.  I went from a lesson I learned in kindergarten, to how I became a teacher, to what it was like teaching in a French school full of kids from all over the world, to the fact that my son is teaching in Korea and finally that Stella’s mom is trying to teach me Korean.  This was punctuated by students teaching each other about themselves by coming to the board to point out on the maps where they had been born, lived and gone to school.  Forty-five minutes went by quickly.  I had to drop some of what I had planned to say in an effort to complete the circle and end the presentation by reiterating that throughout our lives we are all both students and teachers.  I was exhilarated by the end of it all.  Then I drove to Stella’s house where her mom thanked me by teaching me how to make kimbap.  We had a wonderful lunch of miso soup with tofu and green onion, kimbap with kimchee and bolgugi.   It was all good.

Inversions

It’s Sunday, January 20, 2013, the second consecutive day of this weather inversion.  We’ve had a few lately, and as with many other things, it’s best to be on top of them.  I was yesterday because I drove up through the blanket of grey over Vernon to Silver Star at 8:30am in order to be ready for Shea, the 8-year-old autistic girl I help with skiing.  The sun was shining there; the shroud of mist below formed an opaque lake through which the distant Monashee Range and all other high points of land rose like islands of dark rock and bright white snow.  It was magnificent and warm.  The class with Shea started out well, but she tired and refused to continue after just over an hour.  My friend and usual partner, Marie, was enjoying a visit from her son, so I worked with an older man who was convinced he could get Shea skiing right away, until she disabused him of the idea.  I made her hot chocolate, we wrote up our report and I was happy to join Marilyn, another instructor, for a few runs before lunch.  I descended through the mist and hoar frost of the inversion around 2:00pm and spent the rest of the day grocery shopping and doing house stuff in the grey.  Today I have stayed below, studying Korean, cooking, filling the bird feeder and shoveling what snow I could from the roof of the back porch.  Yes, FedEx finally delivered the tapes and now I’m cursing them for that because it means I have to stop thinking about and start actually studying Korean.  Actually, I’m enjoying it.  But it’s hard.  My brain hasn’t hurt like this in a long time, and the worst part is that whenever I feel I’ve cleared a path and placed some new words and phrases down, it seems as if the fog rushes back in like an inversion and obscures about 60% of it.  It’s worse than shoveling, but then I like shoveling too. 

This Friday night I volunteered at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre for the Montreal Guitar Trio (MG3) concert.  It was spectacular.  The audience went wild many times.  The men were not only talented, creative musicians but also very funny.  I’ve seen two  shows by Quebec artists in the past few months.  The Ballet Jazz de Montreal was also very good.  I have a friend from Montreal and work with a woman at Silver Star who is from Quebec, so I don’t feel so far from the Gatineau.

This week was a great leap forward for our trip to China.  Jay and I talked about it last week.  He told me that he has a friend who went to Beijing last year and gave him the card of a man who is a good guide there.   That inspired me to push on with the reservations of the flights and hotel.  For the latter, I did quite a bit of research on line.  I  narrowed it down to about 5 places and finally chose The Peking Yard Hostel.  I found it through Hostelworld.  It looks and sounds delightful.  We’ll see.  I decided when I was about 20 and heading to Europe that I was on a trip and wouldn’t sweat the small stuff.  It mostly worked then.  I’ll try to open up those same channels in my brain for this trip.  Last year in Korea was ‘all good’, so the Ross family motto, ‘Success breeds Hope’, encourages me.  

It's Monday now.  I woke up at 7:30 to the forecast of cloud in the Okanagan Valley.   Could it perhaps be an inversion?  I went to the Silver Star web cam page and saw pictures of the sun just rising behind the hills.  My pre coffee fog was instantly dispelled.  I would go skiing.  I didn't rush up because the temperature was about -6c, and as we haven't had fresh snow in about a week I knew the surface would be hard until the sun warmed it.  But I was eager enough to make it to the top for my first run before ten.   The drive through the mist and frost was beautiful, and bursting into the bright blue was--- A visiting Scot described the morning best when he said, "It's brilliant." .  I had lots of runs, took pictures and talked with people on the tow.

Three photos from the top of Silver Star showing the Monashee Mountains rising above the mist of the
inversion.

2013 limps into action

It’s Friday morning and I’m finally getting back to the blog, partly because I’m waiting for FedEx.  It’s my present pet peeve, although I’m trying to remember one of my many resolutions of this year, not to be an angry old woman who’s incapable of handling the slings and arrows of this outrageous communication age, a time in which it seems to be increasingly difficult to actually talk to a real person and get something really done in real time.  Now I have vented here, but unfortunately I have to admit that I got pretty testy with the unfortunate real woman I finally talked to at the FedEx. office in Kelowna.  I won’t do that again, I hope.  Why is it so difficult to resist shooting the messenger?

This whole FedEx ‘issue’ started at noon on Wednesday, a day that was full of other small frustrations. I arrived home after meeting my Korean friend for our shared class.  I was happy that I had been able to help her with English but still irritated with myself for having forgotten my Korean notes so that I hadn’t been able to ask her about the questions I had.  The FedEx card was hanging on the doorknob.  They had come and gone without leaving the Korean language program that I had ordered on line and been eagerly awaiting.  I am hoping that it will help me to realize my main new year’s resolution, get back to seriously trying to learn Korean.  Thus started the series of small frustrations: call FedEx. to see what’s up; find out that I have to pay import duties; I can pay them directly, but they can’t make my Master Card work; call Master Card; they don’t know why F is having the problem unless it’s because Bert’s address as well as mine are on file; have Bert’s removed; call F back; they finally make the card work but still can’t just leave the package at the door because it costs over $100.00 dollars; I will have to wait at home one day for it or else drive to Kelowna airport, the only F outlet in the north Okanagan, to pick it up.  That’s why I’m waiting at home today.  I won’t bore you with the other hitches of the day.  Suffice it to say that I was again reminded of the fact that a person can drown in teacups, if there are enough of them.  At least in the ocean you can try to keep swimming.  It’s 10:37a.m., and F still isn’t here.

Now for some good news, the birds have come back to the feeder, at least a few brave redpolls have been there at breakfast and lunch for the last few days.  Not a flock, but neither have I bought the suet yet.  I’m going to do it today if F ever gets here. 

The times of my sessions with the Korean students continue to be in flux, but I hope that by next week all will be settled.  The adaptive ski classes start this Saturday morning; I have the same little autistic girl I had last year.  It’ll be a challenge because when she’s not ‘on’, she’s as limp as a length of over-boiled spaghetti, but she’s funny when she’s not furious.  I’ve been downhill skiing once, but cross country much more.  Mo has introduced me to a Silver Star special, the ‘flat white’.  It’s an Aussie specialty coffee.  As Silver Star is owned by an Aussie, they make it at the main restaurant on the hill.  Her husband John and I have a crazy system going.  John and I are very practical, one might say tight, so he buys me a flat white, I pick up my free seniors coffee, he’s not a senior yet, and we exchange.  I give him my freebie plus $1.00, and he gives me the $2.95 flat white because otherwise he would have to pay $1.95 for and ordinary coffee, which he prefers.  Life laughs on, except for FedEx, except for FedEx, except for FedEx.

Mo's picture of David's blue tree taken when she visited Wakefield in the fall

My copy cat red tree waiting in the new snow for the birds to recover from post traumatic stress syndrome.

Happy New Year 2013

Happy New Year!

I’m back in my wee house between the Anglican Church and the sit-outside-to-smoke and-drink centre for East Hill.  It’s Wednesday, January 2, and all’s quiet on the western front: no funerals, weddings or Christmas festivities at the former and at the latter, the party lights are lit at night but the voices are very muted.  Reading the local paper today, I think I may have discovered why.  The firemen were called there 3 nights ago because the owner’s 2002 Honda was blazing.  They extinguished it before the heat did anything more than break a couple of windows in the house, but the car is a totalled.  As I write this, I have one eye out the window so that I can see when my neighbor, Donna, gets back from work, partly because I want to give her a thank you gift for watching the house and collecting the mail while I was in Victoria but also because I want to ask if she saw or heard anything on the fateful night; her house is immediately behind party central so she sees and hears what I only hear.  More anon, if it’s juicy.

I drove to and from Vancouver Island with only one slight incident.  As I approached the dreaded Highway 10 that leads to Tsawassen on the way to Victoria, the car bounced, knocking the GPS, which I count on at this point in the trip, onto the floor.  I was stunned, looked in the rear view mirror, saw a tire on its rim rolling away behind me, assumed it was mine but was mildly surprised that as I pulled to the side of the road I was rolling smoothly.  I got out of the car to see what had happened.  Just as I had established that all 4 tires were accounted for and that the car appeared fine, I saw a young man with a blue tooth device in one ear, that’s all I remember about his appearance, approaching.  He was very concerned, as well he might have been since the tire I had bounced over was his; it had fallen off his truck somehow.  He wanted to make sure I was fine.  As soon as this was established, he went for his tire.  I got back in the car and drove off.  Only later did I think that I should have taken his name and license or something in case anything went wrong later.  It reminded me of Jay’s reaction after being hit by the Harley.  Of course I had not been bashed and thrown around as he was, but I think I was shocked by the whole thing and not thinking about anything beyond the fact that the car and I seemed fine.  And we were.  I was lucky. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, one of the birds that eats at my feeder was not so lucky.  The drive home was on clear pavement all the way from Victoria, except for a whiteout on the last 20 km of the Connector that leads down into the Okanagan Valley.  A van going the other way had flipped and 2 ambulances approached it as we drove slowly down in almost zero visibility.  There was very little snow in Kelowna when I arrived, but I was so tired that I pulled over for a sleep. I hadn’t slept before that because I had wanted to get over the Connector and into the valley before dark.  I fell off for 20 minutes and awoke feeling much better.  Bert and Peggy had asked me to stop at their place for dinner, so I did.  They gave me a refreshing glass of wine and a dinner of barbecued salmon.  After eating and chatting with them, I felt much better when I got back into the car.  I arrived home around 8:30pm.  It was too dark to unpack.  It snowed that night, so I awoke to the first real snow of the season in Vernon, just about 2 inches but beautiful and white everywhere, except under my bird feeder.

 I didn’t eat breakfast until about 9 that morning.   When I did, I noticed through the window that under the bird feeder the snow was disturbed, reddish in parts and had what appeared to be feathers scattered over it.  Later, when I went outside to shovel, I discovered that there had been a mysterious killing.  It remains a mystery.  There were no tracks of either feet or wings in the area, all around was pristine white, but clearly some creature had lost a fair amount of blood, numerous feathers and in all probability, its life.  Nothing else was to be seen. I cleaned up the area with my shovel and have not seen a bird at the feeder since.  I think I’ll go to Canadian Tire to buy a suet ball to hang from my bright red tree in the hope of attracting some woodpeckers or other larger birds that might dare return to the scene of the crime and slowly bringing life back to my feeder.

The lavender Barbara and Terry gave me for Christmas in the living room beside the copper cactus we bought in Mexico years ago

The trail we were cross country skiing on yesterday.  I forgot my camera but ran into a friend who had hers and sent me a couple of the photos she took.  It's still amazing to me that Vernon has hardly any snow now while about 20 minutes up into the hills there's all of this.

Christmas 2012

‘Tis the night before Christmas and mom’s in the shower, dad’s taking the recycle down to the basement with his walker and I’m sitting in the diminishing light of what was a beautiful cool day in Victoria.  Life always falls into a pleasant pattern when I’m here:  a slow morning; coffee and a chat with Barbara and Terry around 9; arrive at mom and dad’s around 10; do something and have lunch out; home for a rest for them and a walk somewhere along the ocean for me between about 2 and 4:30; a drink and snack with the news from 5 to 6; dinner, usually including a long discussion of matters we have talked of many times before and will never resolve; a look at one of my slide shows and then the drive back to Barbara and Terry’s in Vic. West for the night.  Today we are deviating a bit.  We stayed home this morning and did some preparations for tomorrow’s dinner.  We were going to go to B and T’s but B got a bad cold which she doesn’t want to share with the aged Ps, generous though she usually is, so we will have muted celebrations separately.  I went for a walk today and discovered what everyone knows; once you decide to collect something, you can’t stop.  Yesterday I had started a drift wood collection and today I couldn’t leave the beach without more wood.  I staggered back to the apartment, dripping in sweat and weighed down with unique bits of twisted flotsam.   It was almost 3:00.  I was supposed to Skype with the Pollocks and all the gang at their Christmas Eve dinner at 3:00pm my time, 6:00 theirs.  As mom and dad were still resting, I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and went out on the balcony.  The celebrations were hectic in Ottawa, so we just had a quick peek at each other and conveyed a few garbled wishes.   Mom woke up in time to see everyone on Skype and was amazed again.  Caroline’s hair looked really good, but she was wearing an apron.  Ella was wearing a dress her mother had bought her that I thought looked beautiful but she didn’t.  Next year she’ll choose her own dress.  I only saw part of Sadie.  Don looked great in his ‘iconic’ joker’s hat. Thomas was handsome beside him.  Mela looked festive and beautiful, as did Mara.  Albert as always kept the show on the road setting up the Skype.  I missed Gabe, but was happy to see the rest.

Now it’s 8:30 on Christmas night.  I slept last night on mom and dad’s couch.  Our day started at 8:00am with oranges and the opening of some gifts; then baked eggs and mini cinnamon buns and the opening of the big box from Jay.  That took ages as I read words out loud in Korean, much to mom and dad’s delight, but I didn’t understand any of them, so we had to open things and taste them to find out what they were.  There were some surprises, for mom and me.  Dad wouldn’t try those things on a bet.  Then we had small glasses of Korean/French instant, sweet and creamy coffee and talked about our gifts.  This was followed by a long phone call with Bill, Patrick and Marley.  Then we went for a drive by the water.  It was a warm but wild and windy day in Victoria.  I went out again for a walk while mom and dad had a rest.  It was invigorating walking along the beach in the blow.  I returned around 4 with another treasure of driftwood under my arm, my glasses so clouded with dried sea spray I could hardly see and my hair blown around in outrageous angles.  We were all starving, having eaten nothing since breakfast, so mom made a snack, for the second day in a row, of our favorite smoked oysters on soda crackers.  Dad and I opened a cold bottle of Okanagan white wine and mom had a Presbyterian beer.  This was followed by a left over Christmas dinner, Christmas cake and Stilton cheese and the usual chatter.  I am back in Vic. West where I am looking forward to having a read and an early night.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Ducks on the pond at Polson Park in Vernon, the day before I left for Vernon

Mom, Barbara, Terry, Dad and me after lunch at Kate's Place in the Oak Bay Beach Hotel 

Dad preparing to cut the Christmas beast.

Mom and dad behind a bewildering array of treats from Korea on Christmas morning

Matti and his son Burke, born Dec. 13, 2012