Monday, February 17

It's Family Day in BC and Alberta, so we old locals aren't going up to the hills because they'll be crowded. But it's a beautiful sunny day, so I had to get outside. As I ate breakfast I listened to an interview on CBC with Erling Kagge, a Norwegian explorer I had never heard of. He's a walker, the only person to have walked to the North Pole, South Pole and the top of Everest. He's in his late fifties now and has done other things, but he still firmly believes that walking, usually alone, is the best. This gave me an idea. I hadn't walked to the Black Rock in about a year. So I did, and it was great. I took two puffs on my new puffer before leaving the house and for the first time since I started using it about a week ago I think it helped my breathing. It also might be the fact that I was not walking at 6,000feet, which is the approximate elevation of Sovereign and Silver Star, but I don't care. I agree with Erling that walking, often alone, and always unplugged is mentally and physically stimulating. 

Part of an interview with Erling Kagge

Casper the Friendly Ghost with a bit of weed to help him through a hard winter on the wall at the top of the Black Rock

Jay, as usual, gave me my laugh for the week via Kakaotalk. Although, also as usual, there's a bit of black in the laugh. It's a selfie of him on the subway on the way to school. He titled it, "Teaching in the time of coronavirus."

The number of cases of Covid 19 is rising in South Korea and some of them are in Song Do, the area where Jay's last school is. Things are being shut down there and he's concerned for the two men who own the school because they are still his friends. They've worked hard to build up the school and it might be closed, at least temporarily. 

This is the picture Jay sent me today of him on the subway. 

Whistle Blowers

The first sound I heard as I lay in bed this morning after I had reached up to turn on the radio was that of whistles being blown in many parts of China.  When the newscaster  explained why, I felt exhilarated. The term whistle blower has almost been worn out, but to actually hear the sound of whistles, each one being blown by a real human being in memory of a fellow human being who died of the disease that he had had the courage to declare to exist and then been forced to recant in a written statement gave me a thrill such as I haven't felt in a long time. I think I was especially moved because last evening as I continued my feeble effort not to lose the little Spanish I have by reading some news in Spanish I had read a report on the death of Dr. Li Wenliang that included a quotation from him that appeared on a Chinese portal, Caixin, on January 30,

"A healthy society must have more than one voice."

Dr. Li's comments could also be applied to the Republican Party in the USA. 

It may be debatable who is "the most powerful man in the world"; I for one would like to see a Xi Jinping and Donald Trump 'duke it out'. But one thing is sure; neither the US nor the Chinese society is in very good health at the moment.

Keep blowing those whistles.  

The Great Outdoors

As exhilarating as the sound of whistles in the morning is the sight of Montane Spruce at the top of Silver Star. This is a picture of Lynne among the ghosts. These trees spend their first winters bent over like fiddleheads by the weight of the snow at the top of the hills. For the rest of their lives they are as upright as minarets even though huge blobs of snow build up on their branches. 

02,02,2020

Today is the first global palindrome day in 909 years. The only thing it makes me think of is the Monty Python skit about the dead parrot but I don't even know why. I looked up famous palindromes. Given that bats have been mentioned as a likely first cause of the coronavirus that is currently occupying the top spot on all news reports, this one struck me as the most apt:

EVA, CAN I STAB BATS IN A CAVE

The biggest laugh I've had at my own expense lately concerns my house and my tendency to make do. I've always been that way which explains why my favourite Newfoundland expression is, "Leave 'er lay where Jesus flang 'er" 

My New Years resolution to leave a bit more space between stimulus and response might be encouraging this trait although I only meant it to keep me from rushing in too quickly to fill every void in a conversation. I rarely rush into action. At any rate, just as the cold weather began my back door lock system showed serious signs of failing. It had been giving hints of doing so for about two years. Jay can attest to that. The key had to be carefully manipulated from the outside but from the inside there was no problem, so I did nothing. But one day in late fall I had trouble unlocking the door from the inside. I finally responded to the situation in a way that was as extreme as my ignoring of it had been. I stopped trying to unlock the door and found some green painters' tape Jay had left. I stuck that over the lock itself lest I forget and try to open the door some time later. Then I taped all around the inside of the door to keep out winter drafts.  I had decided not to touch that door again until spring. It's been a bit inconvenient living with only a front door, especially as the car is parked behind the house and the garbage and recycle are there too, but I'm used to it now. Then two weeks ago the upstairs toilet would not stop running. I looked in the tank and tried the few things I've done before to fix flushers, none of which worked. So I drained it and went to the garage to get the box of parts I knew was there but had forgotten why. I was going to fix it myself until I started reading the instructions. When I Kakaoed with Jay that evening, he was relieved that I had stopped at that point and reminded me of the fact that it was a burst pipe in that bathroom that had caused so much flood damage to the basement room that he had carefully built. That switched me from action to default mode, leave 'er lay. I began using the new bathroom in the basement and set up a potty system in the upstairs bathroom for nighttime. I was laughing with a friend at one point about how I might just keep on making do as the house and I grew older together and various of our parts ceased working. But then I snapped into action, did my physio and found a plumber. My Immigrant Services student's husband is starting up a plumbing and heating company. The back door remains taped shut but that will be fixed in the spring

Moose junction in January after the Christmas decorations were removed and a big snow fell 

Past and Present

My high school friend Maggie Barr, who keeps me in touch with some of our friends from FWCI, emailed me today as she was catching up on my blog. She hadn't looked at it in a while. I'm always surprised to hear that anyone other than Jay reads it at all. It's a bit of a coincidence because earlier today as we were driving down after skiing, Lynne, Priscilla and I were talking about, among other things, how Saudi Prince MbS supposedly hacked Jeff Bezos' private messages after they had shared phone numbers at a dinner party. I appeared to be the most exposed of the three of us to such activity because of my blog. We laughed a lot about the prospect of anyone even reading it let alone revealing the secrets therein. Bezos is a billionaire who has affairs; I'm not. 

Maggie interrupted her reading to send me a correction. l had misnamed the mountain in the picture I took from the dome car on the VIA train as we headed east out of Jasper. She knew the name because she had stayed in Jasper at her aunt and uncle's bungalow camp, Roche Bonhomme. From the window of her bedroom there she could see the mountain Roche Bonhomme after which the camp was named. I had called it The Sleeping Giant because that's what everyone in the dome car said it was called. As they were mostly tourists from Britain and the USA, I should have verified the name before I put it in my widely read and influential blog. 

As I read about this mountain I discovered who had named it. 

Grant Hall is one of the most prominent buildings at Queen's. It's named after this man who was Principal of Queen's College at Kingston from1877 to 1902.  When I was there, I had no idea he had named a mountain in Jasper.  

Fresh snow and sun for last Friday's snowshoe. 

Cold 🥶 

It's minus 21 in Vernon for the second day in a row. As I am still trying to allow for a bit of space between stimulus and response, I will not rush to declare that for someone who lived most of her life in Thunder Bay and Wakefield that's nothing to write home about. And resolution aside, I'm old now and have been living in the Okanagan long enough to have changed in more ways than just trying to think before I declare; -21 to be cold 🥶. 

It was about zero on Sunday when I parked the car after skiing, snow was melting on all the windows. By about 10pm the temperature had dropped to -10 and by morning it was -22. After doing physiotherapy exercises and enjoying a slow breakfast, I bundled up and went out to shovel. There hadn't been much snow overnight, but the plough guy for the clinic next door had hemmed my car in with relatively big, hard lumps, so I had to get my special shovel out of the trunk. It was then that I discovered that 3 of the 5 car doors were frozen shut. Fortunately, the trunk, where that shovel was, was not one of them. I didn't need to use the car on Monday, so after clearing around it I left it and returned to the house to hibernate. 

I didn't return to the car until about 11:00 this morning. The temperature was still around -21, but by then I was able to open the driver's door. I started the car and left it running as I scraped the thick blobs of ice from the windows. As I did so, I thought about sublimation, a word I learned in high school science. That subject taught me some of the best words: nictitating membranes in fish, etc. and exophthalmic goitre; the picture of a sufferer was frightening though. At any rate, I think that sublimation might explain why the driver's side door finally opened after a few more hours of freezing cold had transformed the solid ice around it to gas with no intervening liquid liquid state. 🥶😂. So allowing a bit of space between stimulus and response might work for opening my car doors as well as my big mouth. Now that's growth and freedom. 😹

On a much more serious note, the following cartoon by Bruce MacKinnon in 'The Chronicle Herald' of Jan. 11, 2020 is the best statement I've seen so far of the self interest and mendacity that is behind the tragedy of the downing of the Ukrainian Airlines plane that killed so many Canadians and others. 

 Victor E. Frankl

Between stimulus and response 

there is a space. 

In that space is our power to choose our response. 

In our response lies our

growth and our freedom. 

This is the verse I will try to keep in my mind in 2020. If by doing so I improve my use of the space after the stimulus, I hope to limit the number of knee jerk verbal responses that I make. As I write this I'm laughing because my knees are  the source of some physical pain at the moment, so this resolution might help them too. Also the silence that will inevitably fill the void might give me a certain gravitas that I have never had. This makes me think of Don MacMillan's expression, which I never gave him the space to direct at me,

"Ya look sa grave,

  Na doot yer wise."

So far this has been a weird winter in Vernon. I spent Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 shovelling slush, doing physio and reading Joan Didion's, The Last Thing He Wanted and MIRIAM Toews', All My Puny Sorrows. I did go to Jane's New Year's Eve party and dinner on New Year's Day with Miriam and Bill, so l'm not complaining. But I was getting discouraged about the weather. Today, however, I went up to Sovereign with Jane and had a wonderful ski. Jane takes lessons and skis with the Masters, so I went by myself for a good run and then had the fun of seeing many people from the VOC who are also in the Masters programme and wishing each other a Happy New Year. As always, it was worth while going up for a ski. Last night I was wakened by wind blowing icy rain against my window and this morning I walked gingerly on ice to the car, but at Sovereign the snow was puffy and perfect. 

Jay's version of, ' Out with the old.'

Jay and his crew at their New Year's dinner

Snow at Sovereign 

Weather

Whether you like it or not, weather is the leading topic of most Canadians' conversations. And now it's expanded to climate and become one of the main concerns of the world. This old planet has seen many changes over its billions of years, but with all the wild fires, especially in Australia and California, the flooding of some Pacific islands and in Venice, I can't help but take the well informed word of most scientists today that since the industrial revolution man has exacerbated the problem to such an extent that it is now up to us to take drastic action. We are living in the Anthropocene which we brought on by thinking we could use the planet to satisfy our extravagant desires. Our children are going to live in the whirlwind of our excesses, so we better do the very best we can now to manage it to the extent possible. 

All that to say that, climate aside, the weather is crap at the moment in Vernon, BC. As I look through the rain mottled window I still see white everywhere, but if I put on my glasses, the slush and dirt on the road are revealed. Two days ago we had a wonderful snowfall, all yesterday slush dropped down on it and I slowly shoveled the heavy mess. Now its raining. 

On the bright side, I've been skiing twice. As always the snow at Silver Star and Sovereign can be counted on. Although even there the visibility has not been great all the time. But on Monday it was perfect and I went to the Star with Lynne and Priscilla. They stayed out longer than I did, but I was happy just being there. Writing these last two words reminds me of one of my favourite movies, "Being There,".  I'd like to see it again. We went to Sovereign on Thursday and I made it to the Black Prince cabin and back. I'm glad about that because this year the young couple on my street that has invited me for Christmas Eve dinner the past two years is planning a ski lunch at the cabin instead, and I will be able to go. I've been doing physio exercises with a fervour that almost rivals Greta Thunberg's enthusiasm for the environment. My aging body, like our planet will never regain its bloom of youth, but with determined effort we both might at least have a chance of carrying on. 

The painting is by Carl C. Rungius, a wonderful painter of wildlife who spent many summers in Banff. I first saw it two years ago when I was hiking there with the VOC. I stuck my copy in the snow and added a tiny old Santa I've had for years. 

Jay, having been recently crowned King of Popcorn at his hagwon's Christmas party, attempts to extinguish a small fire in the popping machine. The photo was captured on the hagwon's CCTV. 
My much more muted exchange of Christmas sweets with Ian, the nephew of my student Norah. He and his mom, Norah's sister, are living with her and her husband this year while he goes to school in Vernon, so I offered to help him with English.