Today the sun sets at 4:32pm. It will rise at 7:36am tomorrow. 

I haven't contacted Bob MacDonald yet, so I'm continuing my scrupulous research on my iPhone. We have gained 5min. on the set side and a whopping 11min on the rise since the last blog. One of my questions for Bob is thus nearing an answer. There's no consistency in the amount of change between morning and evening. This study of mine is idle, of course, but it is helping me appreciate the plight of all scientists. Science requires strict attention to minutiae, patience and an ability to drop what you thought and turn the ship around to take advantage of new evidence. Maybe I should volunteer to work with Bonnie Henry's Covid team. 

But then maybe not. My training period has been just over a month and my only equipment is an iPhone which indicates that it is snowing now in Vernon while a quick look out the window reveals that it is not. 

To the extent that my calculations are accurate; however, there is some good news. Since Winter Solstice, we have gained 55 minutes of sunlight per day. Much of it has been behind cloud, but not all. I have widened the range of my walks from the Black Rock and Polson Park to include two beaches and Kal Park. We have so little snow that you can walk on frozen sand along both Kin Beach and Kal Beach and even dip your boots in the water. 

Biden is busy signing executive orders to overturn the executive orders of the former president who shall go nameless here. It's such a joy not to hear from him that I will follow the lead of Putin who refuses even to name his rival Alexis Navalny.  Covid and its variants continue to trouble the world and the slowing down of shipments of vaccines is making news in Canada. 

As I have lots of time these days I'm indulging my idle interest in how the age we live in fits into the pattern of human life through time on this planet. I remember how, when Jim and I watched the HBO series 'Deadwood', I was levelled by the last show in which the loves, struggles and mendacity in the small western town which had entertained us for hours were trampled to insignificance in an instant by the arrival of the train and the grander schemes from the east. At this and at many other moments in my life I've been fascinated by the simultaneous importance and insignificance of our actions in daily life. I love Stephen Leacock's stories for this reason. They are humane and funny and I see myself and our world in them. So a few weeks ago, when I came upon the book, Why The West Rules -For Now by Ian Morris while sorting books as a volunteer with Vernon Friends of the Library, I paid my $2.00 and took it home. I've been reading it slowly since. Much of it I forget soon after reading, but he writes well. I am enjoying the book and managing to appreciate some of the recurring trends in human history that his years of study enable him to present. Human history is moved by  big wheels and little cogs, but both are ultimately subject to much larger natural forces. Morris believes that individuals are each unique but that in groups they act in very similar ways no matter where in the world or when in history they live. 

Today the sun sets at 4.27pm.  It rises tomorrow at 7:47am

That means that it sets 19 min. later today than it did the last time I wrote this blog but rises only 8min. earlier. Have the days always lengthened more through the evenings than the mornings? Will this pattern continue until we reach the longest day?  These are observations I would never have made and questions I would not have posed were it not for the imposed idleness of age, back pain and a pandemic. For the answers, I will have to either continue my meticulous observations 🤪or send an email to 'Quirks and Quarks' for Bob McDonald to answer. 😂

And so it goes. We have had two days of glorious sunshine. I really enjoy walking in Polson Park, but my back still aches after about 4km. Priscilla, Lynne and I met for lunch in our cars at Kin Beach on Wednesday. I sat in the back of Lynne's car and Priscilla backed in beside us, properly distanced, of course.🤪With our windows open and wine in our glasses, we ate, drank and were merry. We are going to have more such Covid lunches. 

For the first time there's talk of Covid in Vernon, in three seniors' homes. There are cases among both staff and residents but not many so far. There are a few other cases, but the largest spread in the Okanagan is in Big White, the ski area outside of Kelowna. People I know who ski say that there are plenty of cars with Alberta and Quebec plates at Silver Star, and residents of Fernie are worried about the number of people from out of province in their area. John Horgan has approached the Federal Government to see if there's any way BC can shut its borders to people from other provinces that have many more cases of Covid than BC does. That would be difficult to enforce. 

Talking about closing borders, Jay said the other night that that's one of the ways that S. Korea has kept its numbers down. It's a peninsula with its northern border with N. Korea so heavily guarded only a handful of people have made it across alive in decades. S. Korea can isolate itself the way Newfoundland and some island countries can. It's not so easy to control traffic between provinces in Canada. 

Jay has been Zoom teaching long enough to actually like it a bit now. But he says they will go back to "mask to mask" classroom teaching this week. 

By the next time I write this blog the USA will have a new president, Joe Biden, in spite of Trump's Troopers' storming of the United States Capitol on Jan. 06. It and the state capitols  are being very heavily barricaded and patrolled now. It's unlikely the insurrectionists will do much damage on Inauguration Day. 

Again I'm reminded of Leonard Cohen's:

"Democracy is coming -- to the USA."

Today the sun sets at 4:08pm

That's 12 min. later than it did on December 22, the day of the winter solstice. But it rises tomorrow at the same time, 7:55am, as it did then. I haven't taken note of these subtle changes before. Of course the source of this information is the weather app on my iPhone, so you should check more reliable sources before spreading it. 

I will never be the recorder of my times that Samuel Pepys was of his in the diaries he kept during the 1660s in England. I'm not meticulous by nature. However, in the slow pace of my present life I am more aware of some details and that is what made me think of Pepys recently. When I read an edited version of his diaries in university, I was awed by the minutiae of his observations of the 1666 fire of London, his honest account of his own life and his comments on the Great Plague of 1665, but I hadn't thought much about it again until recently. Just as the knowledge that plagues in London had interrupted Shakespeare’s career a few times had added little more than local colour to my first readings of his plays.  I had imagined what it would be like to stand on a street and watch a play that rolled by on wagons, each presenting different  scene or act. The fact that this was happening because the actors couldn't perform in big theatres in London because of plague meant relatively little to me. What a failure of imagination on my part. I'm thinking and reading more now about those and other times of plague. Heaven knows I have time, and maybe the fact that I'm no longer young and healthy makes me more sensitive to the horrors of disease. Also, one can tire of looking out the window at the falling snow, beautiful as it is. 

We hear so much these days about how we are living in unprecedented times: Covid 19; the inglorious end of the Trump fiasco; the increasing awareness of the threat we humans are to the world's environment; mass human migrations caused by war, climate change and unscrupulous governments; the Black Lives Matter movement coupled with the rising recognition of Indigenous values and rights. These are turbulent times, but not unprecedented. In the long history of human life on earth, even just in the last 500 years there have been precedents. In Pepys time, 1660s England was returning to monarchy and at war with the Dutch while London suffered from the Great Plague and the Great Fire. Many periods in human history have experienced catastrophe, and it's always the poor and disadvantaged who suffer most. 

Now that's PPE! 

I'm not suffering. My back and knees are making me realize my age. At 74, it's about time. Staying alone at home much of the time is a physical necessity as much as it is a government mandate in this time of Covid 19. I see three of my friends quite regularly, FaceTime, email, message and phone others and Kakaotalk with Jay every evening. I finally saw the physio on December 30. He gave me gentle exercises to do twice a day for my knees. I go for two short walks a day and am trying to fight off the need to take osteoporosis medication by altering my diet a bit, cutting out caffeine and uping my intake of greens and veg. in general. As long as I don't have to give up butter and cheese, I can do it. In fact I am invigorated by making the changes necessary for this new regime. I like having routines. I can go for ages without much change, but sometimes a change is not only as good as a rest it's as good as the addition of rosemary to roast potatoes. I learned that trick a few years ago. It's one thing I'm not going to change. 

My Christmas treats from Jay, May and the girls. May says the jacket is popular in Korea this year. She says the English translation of the Korean name is something like double sheep because it's as furry inside as out. 

Me wearing my double sheep on a walk in Polson Park

I hope that in 2021 we will be able to gather like these ducks in Polson Park. 

Solstice 2020, Vernon, BC  

SUNSET: 3:56pm

SUNRISE: 7:55am

That's a long night after a short, cloudy day of snow so heavy it falls like rain and almost instantly melts on roads and sidewalks. However, it does cling to the boughs of evergreens, making them droop until finally the clump is so heavy it drops off and the bough springs back up. If you catch that moment, you're lucky.  😹 

There's no hope the snow will stop until around midnight, so it will not be possible to see the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter that will occur tonight in the sky to the south west just after sunset. The forecast is for partly clear skies tomorrow evening. I hope to see it then. The last time there was such a conjunction was on March 4, 1226, so I don't think I'll get another chance. I'm not getting a lot of activity and excitement these days. Sitting in a reclining chair with a heating pad at my back watching snow fall might be more exciting than watching grass grow, but not much. That's why the mere idea of observing a planetary conjunction that last occurred almost eight centuries ago has fired my imagination. 

 

The other bright prospect in my life arrived yesterday in the form of a big brown box from Korea that was waiting at the front door when I arrived home with an only mildly aching back after a walk of about 3km. It's under the tree now. I'll open it when I have the Christmas Kakaotalk video with Jay and the gang on my Christmas Eve and their Christmas noon. 

Less bright is the unknown whereabouts of my package to Korea, which I sent Express Post on November 26. Ten days later, when I tracked it for the first time, it was about 3/4 of the way there. It hasn't moved since. I was cursing Canada Post and praising South Korea's service. But Jay suggested last night that the hold up might have something to do with the fact that in the box, along with the Christmas treats was his old Xbox and case of games. He said he'd heard of there being difficulties mailing them to Korea. And what had I done?  I get so rattled by official business of any kind that even mailing that box got me double thinking my way into stupidity. Although it was quite heavy, there was no need for me to explain exactly why, but I did. I included the Xbox in the list of contents. My mother always said, "Spare me the details, Jan," if I got too long winded, and Jim insisted that I let him do the talking whenever we crossed borders. I'm slowly getting to see myself from their perspective. I sometimes go on when backing off would serve me better. And I used to think they just didn't appreciate my eloquence and spontaneity. 🤪

2020 was a rather stark year, but we can always look forward to a more flamboyant 2021.

COVID Christmas 2020

Yesterday afternoon Bonnie Henry reluctantly announced that residents of B.C. will have to stay home this Christmas, no family gatherings. You can only celebrate with those who actually live in your house. There is an exception for people who live alone. We will be able to join another household of no more than two people for Christmas dinner. The strict measures will be in force until January 8, 2021 in the hope that the number of Covid 19 cases will not spike in mid to late January, as it's feared they would if people travelled and gathered in large family groups over the holidays. Like Hamlet, we will, "... eat the air, promise-crammed."  Unlike him, we are not capons. I reread most of Shakespeare's plays in 2011, the first year I lived alone in Vernon. I copied some of my favourite lines but haven't thought about them until a few have come back to me lately. Maybe I'll return to those notes as a Covid project. I'm not the least bit crafty, I don't like playing games and I don't want to go back to baking cinnamon buns and croissants because the Ratio Coffee Shop and Hot Bread Bakery, both of which are within easy walking distance of my house, bake the best of these two treats that I have ever tasted. And I can still walk short distances. 

As Jay is back in S. Korea and I fell and hurt my back on the second day of skiing, I was already  anticipating a less festive season this year. I will have Christmas dinner with Miriam and Bill and visit Mo and John for New Year's Eve. Jay and I are in touch every day via Kakaotalk, the S. Korean WhatsApp. It's virtual, but I'm really thankful for it. 

We will have a muted winter  season in hopes of being able to turn up the volume by the summer of 2021. 

Jay and Frank on their last hike

Jay on day two of teaching on line. They have kept almost all of their students and appear to have picked up a dog. 

Not all, of course, but many of my difficulties have been caused by either an excess of enthusiasm or a lack of forethought. Dad, because he had been rushed into responsibility by the early death of his father and the necessity of financially helping his mother raise four children in the Depression, was a very cautious person. In my blissful ignorance, I dismissed his deliberations before every act as a big waste of time that could be better spent actually doing things that would mostly be fine and if not would not take much effort to rectify. When he worried about my rushing into things without much forethought, I would just say, "Sometimes you're lucky, dad." He reminded me of this often as I  got older. And we would laugh. Like many of my generation, nationality, race and social class, I have lived in a golden time of prosperity and peace, in Canada. We've mostly been lucky. We've lived under the delusion that we can micro manage our lives, convinced that even if we follow the odd whim, little that is disastrous will befall us. We continue to be among the least affected by this pandemic. Born in June, 1946, I am, according to Garry Trudeau's 'Doonesbury', one of the oldest of the Boomers. Although none of us has made it to the age we are without experiencing pain and sorrow that have forced us to accept that we cannot control everything, we continue to be blessed. The generation before ours is suffering and dying in care homes, and many of those after us are experiencing serious difficulties in work and family life as a result of this pandemic. 

There's always hope.  I might finally have learned to curb my enthusiasm; although, I'm not going to put money on it. On November 22 I had a wonderful first day of skiing at Sovereign. On the 23rd I went for a second. Right at the start, on an embarrassingly small decline, I got going quite fast and stepped out of the ruts to skate a bit. I felt great until I saw my skies akimbo above my head and felt my back whack the ground with a force that knocked me breathless. I was aware of some pain, but mostly anger. How could I have been so stupid as to start skating when I was already going fast. My good friend Mo was soon by my side telling me to stop cursing myself and stay still as she took my skis off. She helped me up. Aside from a dull ache all over my back, I felt fine. We skied a short distance but soon turned around. Since then, I have seen the doctor, had X-rays and discovered I have four tiny fractures on the spine, around the area where the bra comes and just below. I have gripping muscle pain at times and sit down often with a heating pad at my back, but I only need one or two Tylenol extra strength a day. I can walk about three km and do everything I have to around the house. I have some young neighbours who will shovel when the snow comes. I couldn't get an appointment with the physiotherapist I really like until December 30, but I know two women with back problems who are giving me good advice to follow until then. My doctor suggested I have a bone density test to see if I have osteoporosis. But considering what I've learned from researching the medications available for that on the sites she told me about and talking with women I know about their side effects, I'm not eager to go there. So, in typical Scarlet O'Hara fashion, I'll think about that in the new year. I made a resolution this past New Years to allow more time for thought between stimulus and response, that obviously has not happened. Will this accident finally move me a bit forward along the path to forethought and, who knows, even wisdom? I hope so, but am not betting on that either.  

Jay is having to adjust to this pandemic in many ways. Born in 1981, he is one of the first millennials, as I am one of the first Post WW 2 boomers and my dad, born in 1919, was one of the first postWW1 babies. I don't think they made up fancy names for the generations then. On our daily KakaoTalk thumb chat last night he told me that S. Korea has gone to level 2.5, which means that in-class teaching has been cancelled for three weeks. He went to school early, and they started to implement their system for on line classes. He sent me this selfie of him starting his first class. Can you believe it, teaching on line while wearing a mask? 2020 is a time of change; I hope much of it will eventually be for the better. 

Some inter generational humour

I spoke too soon about Biden winning the US ELECTION. 

Although he did win, Trump continues to deny the fact. He has not yet conceded defeat. He and his red hats still stamp and scream that the election was stolen from them. But enough of fantasy.

The real world is confronting the second wave of COVID-19. It's crashing into parts of Canada that were hardly affected by the first wave and forcing the ones that were back into measures as drastic as those used in March. Even our Bonnie Henry has mandated mask wearing in BC, and she does her best to encourage people to do the right thing, not force them. But here as in most places people readily embrace the individual liberty that is implied by democracy but are reticent about exercising the equally fundamental collective responsibility it requires.

I rarely know what I'm thinking until I take time to consider what I'm doing. This morning I got up around 7:30, dressed, ate an apple, put a mask and hand sanitizer in my purse and drove to Superstore. I had about five items in the cart before I observed that there were more people in the aisles than I had thought there would be so early in the morning. They were all wearing masks. And I had just put ten pounds of whole wheat flour in my cart. Everyone was following the mask mandate and I was stocking up as I hadn't done since March. Until that moment, if asked, I would have said that I was unaffected by this second wave talk, 💦off a 🦆's back. 😹

But at that moment I realized that I had been thinking about it and so had these other masked shoppers. That's why I hadn't felt like having breakfast before going shopping and was buying things in bigger quantities than usual. When I went through the cash at 8:30am, I asked the cashier if there were more people in the store than usual at that hour because I had never been there this early. She said that it was starting to remind her of March. As I pushed my loaded cart out of the store, I passed a mountain of toilet paper on sale that I hadn't noticed on the way in. Superstore had caught the second wave well before I had. 

Meanwhile, back in S. Korea, Jay, May and the girls moved into their new apartment on Monday. They planned and packed and worked as a team. There were a few set backs, but nothing they couldn't manage and now they are settling in. They are quite a crew. Moving is becoming their specialty. The new place is on the main floor, bigger and much quieter than the last one, and the view from the living room window is of trees and a park. 

Packing done

Min and Jin eating their last lunch in the old place. 

May and the girls at the new dining room table in their new home


Jay's morning coffee after their first night in the new home. The nephews are already visiting as you can see from the blanket and softies on the floor.