Vancouver airport

I'm waiting for the flight to Mexico City in the beautiful part of the airport. 

To Mexico????

This is the last time I’ll be writing with a full keyboard.  It will be words with one thumb from now on, at least I hope that will be the case.  I’ve been walking down two trails lately, one in the direction of Guanajuato and the other Victoria, but mom seems to be determined to do her best on her own for the next little while, so the former might be the final one.  Every time I come back to the house after being out, I look at the phone to see if the message indicator is blinking red; my heart soars it it’s not and sinks if it is.  Actually mom has only called twice, both times about small matters.  She wore a heart monitor yesterday to test her blood pressure.  She will talk to the accountant tomorrow about taxes and annuities and she has finally broken down and made an appointment with the audiologist to get something slightly more up to date than the ridiculous ‘pocket talker’ that she got in a rush so that she could hear what was happening when we went to Matti’s wedding.  He now has two children and is working at his second job since he got married, so nobody could accuse her of rushing into new technology.  But I’d best stop there; I also am slow to let go of old possessions and old anything for that matter.  I’m continuing to read Graham Greene, another book of his that I hadn’t read, The Heart of the Matter.  There’s a density to it that I can’t understand, except to say that the way he writes and what he writes about seem perfectly suited.  I get completely lost in the atmosphere he creates.  His perceptions are clear and his expressions of them are perfect, without sentimentality or any form of embellishment.  The very cold eye that he turned on Mexico in The Lawless Roads, and that I hated because I love Mexico, is what made The Power and the Glory such a good book once it was expressed in his terse style.  The same must be the case here, although I know nothing of the post war West Africa that he is describing in The Heart of the Matter.

This brings me to my heart, which has been the only matter that has slowed down my preparations for Mexico.  I bought travel insurance on Friday.  On Monday after an appointment with the doctor where we discussed what tests I have had or been scheduled to have lately and what the state of my angina is, if that is what I have, I went back to BCAA and changed some of the answers I had given to questions about my health.  The result is that I paid another one hundred and some dollars more for travel insurance that covers everything, except anything that might happen to my heart while I’m in Mexico.  I’m satisfied with this because I’ve managed whatever I have to this point and think I can do so in the future.  My grandmother and uncle had angina for years and neither died of it or of anything to do with the heart.

I certainly am not leaving Vernon to get away from the weather.  It’s been warm and often sunny since I returned.  The skiing has been good, if not great.  This morning, the sun was brilliant and although the base was hard, the groomers had worked up a bit of a surface on the snow.  Where the sun had been shining through the tall spruce, the snow was quite soft by noon.  I almost fell on a downhill bit when I streaked out of the shade into the sun and slowed down instantly.  I almost fell, but not quite.  Any stupid thing like that that happens to me in Mexico will be fully covered by my travel insurance.  So as all the Ausies at Silver Star would say, “No worries”.

My Friday snow shoe gang.  I'll miss the last run on Friday, March 13 because that's the day I fly to Guanajuato.

A new app

A young man who works at Staples helped me download an app so that I can write my blog and add pictures to it on my iPhone because I hope to travel light to Mexico, just a carry-on suitcase and pack. I'll see now if it works. 

It seems to have. 

This is a picture Jay sent me on Kakao when I was at mom's. He wanted to show her how to be tough. It's the picture that inspired her fist pump pose in the last blog. 

This is May in a tea cup in Seoul 

Now let's see if this works. 

Back to Vernon

After waking at 6:50am and arriving at the dock at 8:20, I caught the nine o’ clock ferry to Vancouver.  Now, I’m lined up with fellow passengers like a bird on a wire at one of the many workstations.  I had plenty of time before the 9:00am ferry to get a cup of coffee to drink in the car as I ate my breakfast, a fig bar that I had bought yesterday at Ottavio’s in Oak Bay.  I had thought it would be like a granola bar, although it did look a bit dark.  It turned out to be just a densely packed mass of figs.  Fortunately, Barbara and Terry had given me a snack bag for the road as I bid them adieu before leaving this morning.  In it was a HUGE hermetically sealed and very typical bag of Korean crunchy snacks, which went well with the figs and made a hearty breakfast.  Also in the bag was a chocolate/hazelnut bar, to remind me of our wonderful morning chats and cups of hazelnut coffee, which I will miss.

I will miss mom too.  In spite of the fact that we have epic arguments and different priorities in life, we did have some good times these past weeks and came to appreciate each other a bit more, I think.  She’s still feeling very sad and often depressed.  Her most frequent refrain is, “What’s it all about?”  She’s tired and her PHN is not giving her any breaks.  I can’t get a handle on the kind of pain she’s enduring and sometimes lose my temper when I see how cavalier her attitude to drugs is, but that’s all part of her nature.  She’s either way up or deep down.  Like the Grand Old Duke of York’s men, when she is up, she is up.  She wants to do everything and have all the fun there is to have.  When she is down, she is down.  I’ve never known anyone with a bleaker outlook than hers in those times.  And when she is only half way up, she is at her best.  I, of course, am either perfect or perfectly ignorant of my own faults.  Bill and I have worked well together to try to help her, so we’ll see what happens.

I still hope to see my friends in Vernon and do a little skiing and snowshoeing before going to Mexico.  It’s going to be a busy two weeks in March because if all goes well, I fly to Leon on the fourteenth.

My last walk along Willow's Beach for this visit

Mom, inspired by a picture of Jay after his morning workout, assumes a 'fighting trim' pose.

A grey day on the Coastal Renaissance, but I did feel reborn as I breathed in the sea air on my short walk around the 'sun deck'.

Life's neither a bed of roses nor a bowl of cherries, but at least there are clusters of crocuses to look at in February in Victoria

Experiment

This is an experiment in writing my blog on an iPhone using only one thumb. I'm using the phone Jay gave me last Christmas. It had the name 'Jay the Thumb' written on the back, and I continue to use the same technique.
The weather has been glorious in Victoria, but mom's progress is slow. When I arrive at her place in the morning and see her sitting up, well dressed and ready to do whatever we have planned, I think she is such a bright little fighter, but after her noon nap and my walk along the ocean, I approach Shannon Oaks with trepidation, the dark side lurks. On Monday I found her wearing her heavy coat,slumped, shivering by the phone, having called the doctor. Fortunately he hadn't been able to see her until Friday because she was suffering from neuralgia and wanted help to die. He wouldn't have been able to do that, nor will he be able to do anything about her nerve pain when she does see him Friday, but by then she may be more prepared to carry on with it as she has done for the past 11 years. I add my voice to the campaign in favor of immunization, " GET THE SHINGLES SHOT!"

I have lots of down time in a day which I either spend walking and reading or waste drinking coffee. I did get some Spanish stuff from the Oak Bay library on Sunday, which I'm casting an idle eye over. I still hold out hope that I will make it to Mexico. I'm going to have to get tough myself and just leave next week. Mom will do her best when she has to, or is that self-justification?

Mom gets out

Tomorrow mom will get out of the hospital.  It will be Friday, February 13, 2015.  I’ve never worried much about that day and date combination, black cats crossing my path and mirrors breaking, but I’m a bit dubious at the moment.  She’s certainly cured of all infection and too agile to spend time in the physiotherapy ward, but she’s still tired, breathless at times, suffering from the pain of PHN and subject to her usual mood swings, amplified by grieving.  All of this bodes ill for a successful launch back into life at Shannon Oaks.  Oh well, it’s going to happen.  I prepared her clothes tonight, and Bill went to visit her.  Tomorrow we will pick her up around 10:00am.  The plan is to have dinner together in her place tomorrow.  Bill will spend the night with her there and then leave Saturday morning.  I will carry on here, probably until the end of the month.  I hope to leave then to return to Vernon and prepare to go to Mexico.  Bill will answer the call, if there is one, while I’m away and then we’ll see what happens next.

Bill and I have worked well together, trying to settle all the business matters for mom.  She will find something to worry about no matter what we do, but at least we will be able to tell her to be calm, confident in the knowledge that we may not have everything in final shape but we are well on the way and have done what can be done for the moment.  In this connection, Barbara made a big contribution.  We were about to drive to Duncan because we had been told that there was no Service BC office in Victoria, and there isn’t. But we were too wound up to question the idiocy of every Victoria resident with such business to conduct driving all the way to Duncan, she wasn’t.  She searched the various offices on line, separately.  Service Canada handles CPP in Victoria from a wonderfully central location at the corner of Johnson and Douglas Streets, for example.  We did everything without leaving town.   

Bill is constitutionally incapable of letting situations drag into the mundane, so we have had some good times and got to appreciate each other more (at least I have him) during this period of family crisis.  We have had some fun.  One day we took a break and drove to Port Alberni, a rather long drive.  We went for a walk in nearby Cathedral Grove.  The rain forest was so wet that the paths were impassable at points.  They are made of well-trampled crushed rock, and consequently, the water stays on top, so we often walked on the porous sides of the trails.  Some parts were completely impassable.  But we enjoyed ourselves just because we were outside and away from it all.  We have also had some good pub lunches.  He has introduced me to Grimbergen beer, a Belgian beer that is dark in color but light in flavor, and to excellent cob salads.  The best was at the Beach House Restaurant on Cordova Bay Road in Victoria.  It had crunchy romaine lettuce tossed in a light dressing, ripe avocado, tomato, grilled chicken strips, two rashers of perfectly crisp maple bacon and many chunks of blue cheese.

We’ll see what tomorrow holds.

My morning coffee friends

Dad's memorial in the dinning room at Shannon Oaks

Dad's obituary

Bill in Cathedral Grove

A man feeding crows on Dallas Road