Hallowe'en 2012

Happy Hallowe’en!!!!!  Nothing freaky has happened here yet, but the ghouls and zombies won’t come out until tonight.  I hope to pacify them with small chocolate bars that I bought a big box of at Canadian Tire.  I’m beginning to wonder what I would do without Canadian Tire and London Dugs.  I think I solved my ‘water feature’-for- eliminating-the-sounds-of-annoying-neighbors problem this week by buying an inexpensive c.d. player that was on sale at London Drugs.  Finding a c.d. of the sounds of water was not as easy as I had anticipated, however.  After visiting stores in Vernon and phoning HMV in Kelowna, with no success, I searched on line and discovered a site called ‘Partners in Rhyme’ that had a c.d. entitled, ‘Soothing Waters’.  It’s in the mail.  I can’t wait to try it.  The c.d. only cost $4.95 because what I actually bought, for $15.95, was a download for an mp3 or whatever, which I don’t have.  It was not possible to buy  the c.d. without the download, but the bonus is that it’s on my laptop now, so I can listen to a babbling brook whenever I want to.  In fact I think I’ll turn it on right now.  Just a minute.  Ahh, that’s lovely.  There’s a soft tinkle of bells behind the sound of water flowing over rocks, how soothing.  I think I remember seeing something about this tape being associated with a meditation group when I was looking at the many nature sound downloads that were available.  I don’t think I have enough patience to even think about meditating, but after living with this babbling brook for a while, who knows where my head will be.  As the cold approaches, the neighbors move indoors, but I’ll be ready for a serene spring.

I saw a really good movie last week, which many of you have probably seen already, ‘The Intouchables’.  My Mac wants to correct the spelling, but it’s a French film, and although they changed the title for distribution in the U.S., they didn’t in Canada, although they did replace the ‘les’ with ‘the’.  I think it was a good idea because this is a bilingual country, so it catches your attention and hints at the fact that these two men finally do get ‘in touch’, very touchingly.  Enough!  It’s the story of a rich French quadriplegic and a black man who becomes his care-giver, in spite of or perhaps because of the fact that at first he categorically refuses to have anything to do with touching intimate parts of his employer.  Speaking of bilingualism, Canada is becoming more and more multilingual.  I heard on the CBC this week that Tagalog, the language of the Philippines is now the most rapidly growing first language in households in Canada.  Continuing with the Vernon cultural scene, I went with Priscilla to see Verdi’s ‘Otello’ at the cinema last Saturday morning.  I was drawn to it by the fact that Renee Fleming was Desdemona.  She was wonderful, perhaps a bit old for the part, but beautiful and her voice is easy and soaring.  The surprise for me was Iago.  I know very little about opera, but the man who sang the role, Falk Struckmann, was the best Iago I’ve ever seen or heard.  He had a wonderful baritone voice and his presence on stage was evil incarnate.  The tenor who played Otello was less impressive in every way but girth.  He was huge, but even at that, he was destroyed in the battle between good and evil that enveloped him in the voices and actions of Desdemona and Iago.  Priscilla and I were so moved by the final act that we didn’t leave our seats for a while, and when we did we were alone in the theatre except for about six people who were about three rows behind us quietly trying to take the pulse of an older woman who was slumped in her seat.  She appeared to be dead.  The manager of the theatre was at the front on his cell phone to 911.  There was nothing for us to do so we left, speaking softly about how there are worse ways to go than sitting comfortably in a theatre listening to Renee Fleming sing Ave Maria just before her murder at the hands of Otello.

On that note of the victory of evil over good, I will wish you all a Happy Hallowe’en.  

Fields and hills as we began the last of the Sunday hikes in Kal Park last Sunday

Hikers holding hands around the biggest pine in Kal Park

Scratch marks left by a bear on the above tree

Jay as Harry Potter on Hallowe'en at his school in Incheon.  He thought it was a pretty feeble effort, but I didn't.

Inspired by the photo Jay sent me, I tried to carve a Harry Potter pumpkin for tonight.  The lightening bolt was beyond me.

Winter's near

I suited up and gathered the last of the horse chestnuts yesterday.  It’s too bad they’re not a cash crop.  I have boxes of them, which I will have to get rid of bit by bit in the garbage.  For now, they are stacked in the garage across from the summer tires.  I needed my neighbor’s help to get the winter tires on their cheap, heavy rims into the car last Sunday, but he’s young and strong and was willing to help.  I went to Kelowna last Monday to have the Mazda’s fall checkup; they changed the tires.  They said it was a free service, but I paid $110.00 for that, a free car wash, the few other things that they did and the peace of mind I get from meeting the requirements of the warranty.  Now my baby has her ugly, black winter rims, but she’ll get me to Victoria for Christmas, I hope.  This morning as I had breakfast I saw snow on the roof of a car that was parked at the shrinks’ clinic next door and in the hills beyond the church.  When Priscilla phoned, I discovered that it was snowing at her place, just a few hundred feet above me on East Hill, so I’m glad I did the things I did this week and gave the cedars a good watering too yesterday.  Some of them are having a very slow recovery from the drought they experienced when I was ‘back east’ for the three hottest weeks of the summer in August.  Winter is just a few hundred feet away.  And the US election is only 2 weeks off.  It’s been so long coming that I’ll be glad to see the end of it, unless Romney wins, unless Romney wins.  Another reason I’m glad I have a PVR is that I’ve been able to record and then flash through the debates.  Listening to the comments made after the fact by Shields and Brooks and a few other pundits on PBS and CBC is enough for me.  

I’m beginning to think of this blog, ‘The West Commences’ in a less literal, more metaphorical way.  I’m quite established in Vernon now and will stay as long as mom and dad are in Victoria and Jay is in Korea and for who knows how long after that.  My time in the West of Canada is no longer commencing, but I am moving toward the end of my days.  I’ve never liked the expression, ‘The Golden Years.’  And ‘The Gray Days’ is a bit too far the other way, so ‘The West Commences’ will continue as an account of my journey, more in time than space.  There’s a technological aspect to this decision too; it’s easier and less risky than going through the process of changing the title on Google, notifying my friends and relations of the fact and running the risk of losing their attention, which I appreciate very much.  This tendency to work in my mind with what I have and where I am before exerting the effort required to change the material world is not the attitude on an inventor.  In fact it can seem rather complacent and lazy, but it does give one time to look at what is and sometimes find the good and/or the beautiful there before rushing to alter externals.  It’s a bit of a mugs game, trying to place oneself in the perfect spot with the most desirable people.  Where is it?  Who are they?  What am I?

Here I am biking, hiking and keeping in touch with friends.

The last bike of the season to the House of Rose Winery, a rather wet one but fun.

The 2nd last hike, to the Adams River near Salmon Arm

Another shot of the Adams River 

The birds are finally coming to the red tree and feeder.  The car in the background has snow on the roof.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

I was wakened this morning by the thudding of horse chestnuts on the wooden deck outside my bedroom window.  A strong wind was whipping them all over the back yard.  I opened the blinds on a grey day and crawled back under the covers.  When I finally got out of bed and put on the coffee, it was without much enthusiasm. It seemed as if the only thing I’d be doing outside today was putting on the bike helmet and picking up horse chestnuts. I now wear armor for that job, after being struck on the head by a few of the spiky maces last year.  It’s not my favorite task.  Postponing the inevitable, I phoned Cathy Van to see how she’s recovering from knee surgery.  It seems as if all is healing as  well as can be hoped.  Then my phone rang.  It was Mo, wondering if I wanted to go for a bike ride with her and John.  Looking outside for the first time in a while, I discovered that the same wind that had shaken my horse chestnut tree had blown the clouds out of the sky and clear blue was approaching.  I got into my biking gear, helmet and all, and by the time they came to pick me up for the ride, I had most of the fallen nuts in a box.  We rode around Swan Lake and had lunch at a Thai restaurant downtown.  It was a wonderful fall ride and now the back yard is again littered with horse chestnuts.  It’s almost 3:30, so I’m going to dress and go to the library to tutor the 3 Korean students I have.  I’ll be back by 7:30 to finish this.  

Tutoring is getting organized.  I like the kids and am adjusting to the fact that from the point of view of English skills, the youngest, the boy, is the strongest and the oldest is the weakest.  She has a lot of trouble reading because she doesn’t understand complex verb tenses and her vocabulary is limited and yet she’s in grade 11 and has to do a book report.  I chose some books for her to try, and she’s going to see what her teacher thinks.  But no matter what, it’s going to be a struggle.  I can hardly believe she’s been here since January of her grade 9 year and has never had tutoring before.  Her mother should have done this earlier because she has learned a lot of bad habits from other kids and when you think of the sacrifice her parents are making with the dad working in Korea and the mom here with the two girls all that time, it’s a pity they didn’t start sooner to get more help in English for the oldest daughter.  The sister of the boy is in the middle as far as ability in English is concerned.  She speaks better than I thought she did when I first heard her.  She wears a device to straighten her teeth, which apparently makes her almost as unintelligible in Korean as she is in English, but her actual level of language and her vocabulary are good.  Unfortunately, however, she is studying French for the first time this year, and I’m trying to help her with that too.  It sounds as if all the teeth are going to tumble out of her mouth, along with some pebbles, when she tries to speak that language.  It’s going to be a challenge, but they like me and I like them, so half the battle is over.  I still enjoy working with kids and now that I am living alone I require the structure this teaching and the volunteering I do gives to my life.  It helps me to appreciate the hiking, biking and free time I have and gives me a sense of purpose.

The back yard littered with horse chestnuts again after the bike ride

Why I wear a bike helmet

Some of the last roses of summer

The best of the last roses of summer

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

The glorious fall carries on.  I am spending a lot of the time in the garden.  The days are bright and sunny and the temperature rises to about 20 or 25celcius, but the nights are often near zero, so it’s impossible to ignore the fact that winter is approaching.  I also decided to have some repairs done to the stucco near the foundation of the house and was lucky to be able to contact the woman who had worked on the place about 5 years ago.  Houses in this area shift a bit because they are on clay, but there is a new caulking that she has just learned about that expands and is designed for this kind of problem.  She’s working on that while I get the garden ready for the cold.  I’m finally really trimming the roses.  This process revealed a tree peony that I hadn’t realized was as beautiful as it is.  It’s leaves last all season and turn from green to a dark burgundy red in the fall.

 The birds seem to be having trouble adjusting to the newly painted red tree at the side of the house from which their feeder now hangs, but I’m hoping that they will accept it as the cold forces them to find new sources of food.  A neighbor’s cat is not helping them make this transition.  It sits in a sunny spot near the red tree, in hope of their arrival.  I shoo it away whenever I see it.  So both enemies and friends eagerly await the return of the birds.

I think I’ve finally gone overboard with tutoring and volunteering.  I now have 3 Korean students as well as Jessica, the woman with whom I exchange English lessons for Korean lessons.  I have 2 evenings in October when I will be a volunteer usher at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre and I am going to volunteer again this winter with the Silver Star Adaptive Ski Program.   I don’t know what’s happening with my student at Immigrant Services. She has severe health problems and an abusive husband, so we have not had many classes lately, but I’m keeping that time open.  I had also attended a morning course on how to help elementary students with reading problems, but when they sent me the proposed schedule, I had to withdraw and ask to be placed on the supply list because I couldn’t go at the times they suggested.

I have hit another pothole on the road to surgery on my right shoulder.  The 11/2 year wait I was told I had in March has now been extended indefinitely as the surgeon is no longer doing surgery.  I may try to get a surgeon in Kamloops or just decide to live as I am.  I can do most of what I want to do and am in no pain.

There will be no pictures this week.  I had hoped to be able to include photos taken on Sunday, September 30 at the Vernon Cemetery where I met three cousins that I had never seen before.  They came here from the Vancouver area to celebrate the interring of their mom’s, my father’s oldest sister’s, ashes with those of her husband.  Dad had asked me to go, and I did so happily.  They welcomed me into the group.  We had Scotch and Champagne at the plot and went on to lunch at a local restaurant.  The pictures were taken by my cousin’s daughter.  She sent me some, but they are not in a format that I can put in the blog at the moment.  We were talking about how we had never got together before and how reclusive some members of our family are.  They said that their mom, ‘kept herself to herself,’ and dad is very much like that too.   He’s pleasant with any people he meets, but doesn’t seek their company.  Mom’s always been his social convener. 

September 30, 2012

 I missed the walk in a scenic spot last Sunday, because for the first time since I joined the VOC last season, I turned up at the carpooling place late.  Everyone had gone, so I walked home and had a glorious day of doing nothing but read.  I finished Jim’s novel and now face the decision of what to do with it.  Much of his writing is clear and fluid; the dialogue is especially well written.  Doug and I realized years ago that Jim could catch the accent and tone of people’s speech better than either of us.  At that time, we three were working on a play about WW2 featuring characters like our parents.  We gave up on it, but Jim carried on with a novel and short stories.  The novel is good.  The story moves through two main time periods and three different but linked narratives.  Much of it flows together well, but at moments, he seems to be trying to do too much in one novel.  The rhythm is sometimes broken by long passages of philosophical and literary contemplation and sections in which the main character recalls the past or adds descriptions; these slow the momentum. Although interesting to contemplate, they distract the reader.  It even seems to me that one section could be left out of this work entirely and turned into a separate story.  Now Albert and I have read Wearing Wings, and I must think about whether or not to do something with it.  I would like to edit it, but I’m a bit hesitant because Jim’s last words to me, when I started to answer a question the doctor had posed, were spoken very quietly but clearly, “ You speak very well, Jan, but sometimes you don’t say exactly what I would say.”  I now know, after thinking about it for a long time, that he knew the doctor was going to tell him that he was dying and ask him if he remembered that he had said earlier that he didn’t want any mechanical prolongation of the end.  He must have worried that I would ask the doctor to do something that he didn’t want done.  He was ready to die at that point and his last words to the doctor were, “ Go for it.”  If I edit his work, I will change it, and I don’t know whether he would want me to.  He didn’t ask me to edit it when he was alive, I think because he knew I would want to change things a bit.  But then he didn’t throw it out either, so he must have known I’d read it.  ???????????

We have had and are continuing to have a glorious fall.  On Tuesday, I went on a hike to an area called Rimrocks where you can climb down a narrow chimney into a basin of broken volcanic lava rock.  Once there, you are surrounded by old, cracked, grey/black columns of basalt.  They are streaked in places with red lichen that lends them an almost festive fall splash.  The only other colors were dark green and bright blue sky.  Thursday’s bike ride was quite long and exhilarating and today’s hike was an easy walk around some lakes.  There’s not a lot of fall color here, but the luminous yellow of the poplars is as breathtaking as it always is.

I met one of my Korean students at the library on Thursday.  She’s in grade 11, and I like her very much.  I think we’re going to have good tutorials.  I will start with the other 2 and my own Korean/English exchange either this week or next.

The basalt columns at Rimrocks

The broken rocks in the basin

One of the lakes we passed today

Another lake with a young pine in the foreground, arty, what?

Hiking accident

Before the Sunday hike this week, I will write about last Sunday’s because although this week’s is supposed to be harder, it will not be more eventful.  Last week there were only 16 of us going to Pinnacles Lake.  I was eager because it’s a hike I had wanted to go on last year but couldn’t.  I volunteered to be sweep because there were so few of us.  There’s a joke in the group, based on a truth as are so many jests, about my being numerically challenged.  So I was carrying the two-way radio when Dagmar fell.  She was heading up a wooded switchback with roots and rocks and fell backwards.  I was first aware of it when a vague dark shape appeared to bounce ahead of me.  I thought at first it was a rock and momentarily feared it was the beginning of a slide.  But the thud was soft and Curtis, the young man ahead of me, quickly moved forward and down into the brush.  He placed himself below Dagmar who was lying on her back, head downwards, body twisted and moaning in pain.  She was bleeding from the top of her head, there was blood under one eye and her face was the color of skim milk.  I did the only thing I know how to do, talk.  She was so afraid of falling farther.  I assured her that Curtis was firmly behind her and that another man was now on the other side of her.  Curtis, who has some St. John’s Ambulance training, slowly tried to assess if there was anything wrong with her back.  Gradually, more people gathered.  You always hear about how a community unites and its members behave admirably in an emergency.  This was the first time that I experienced it.  There were two retired doctors, a nurse and 2 ski patrols in our group and each went into action.  Dagmar was in shock, sweating, shivering and with a very weak pulse, but within 15 minutes it had been determined that she could be moved to a more comfortable position and that she would probably not be able to walk out.  Curtis and I began hiking out to call Vernon Search and Rescue.  It took us about an hour to get back to the cars.  I radioed up one last time to make sure that it was absolutely necessary to make the call and was assured that although she was feeling better after a Tylenol 3, she would never be able to walk out.  So we jumped into Curtis’ truck and began the slow 22km. drive down the decommissioned logging road to the nearest phone at the Gold Panner Restaurant; there’s no cell phone service in the area and the club does not have a satellite phone.  As I had suspected, that call started a chain of events that was irreversible.  First to arrive was a young RCMP officer in an official white truck.  It was a beautiful day, and he leaned his bare and heavily tattooed arm out the window to talk with us.  He never turned that vehicle off for the entire 51/2 hours of what followed.  Nor did he leave it much.  He was just there to supervise, which involved very little.  He had a phone he used to communicate with headquarters and a computer he could swing out of the dash to consult maps, none of which showed the South Fork Road, which is where the trailhead is.  He was followed by the ambulance, which roared past us, lights blazing, and then back, past us again, before being reined in and brought to us by dispatch.  We led them up the South Fork to the parking lot, where the driver of the ambulance jumped out of his vehicle, surveyed the damage sustained by it as he had bounced it over the fairly deep depressions left when the logging company removed the culverts as they left the area, and proceeded to ready the gear for the assent.  He put the tank of laughing gas in Curtis’ backpack, he took a big hard plastic case of equipment himself, and his partner carried another.  They left me in the parking lot awaiting Vernon Search and Rescue.  I radioed up to the gang that they were coming although I doubted they would get there let alone be of much help if they did.  Soon the Search and Rescue people began arriving in ATVs and two impressively equipped vans.  Sure enough Curtis and the ambulance guys came back about 20 minutes after leaving.  The blow-hard driver was so furious he threw the equipment into the ambulance, yelled at his buddy to get in and sped away to rip a few more strips off his poor abused ambulance. They had been called off by their dispatch because that’s the procedure once Search and Rescue takes on the task.  He’d missed another chance to be the hero that he always seems to be in his own mind.  Curtis said that he would never have made it to the site because he was breathing hard by the time they turned around and they were only beginning the real trail by then.  Some Search and Rescue people headed up in ATVs, one pulling a big sled, but it became quickly clear that Dagmar would have to be taken out by helicopter.  I was radioing all this information to the people up there with her.  The Vernon copter couldn’t find a place to land near her, so they called in the Penticton one because it could bring in a swinging basket with a trained rescuer to help her.  The last I saw of her, she was swinging overhead on her way to the hospital.  Fortunately none of her injuries was serious.  She’s black and blue all over and has a broken tailbone. The man leading the hike is an ex army officer.  This week, I, and all the others involved in the affair, have been receiving e-mails of his reports.  I have been mentioned favorably in dispatches for my part in the operation.

I’m looking forward to nothing more than a vigorous walk in a scenic spot tomorrow.

Dagmar dangling in the basket from the helicopter

Biking in the Rockies

Mount Rundle near Banff

On the trail to Banff

The gang near Canmore

Priscilla, Jan and Mo with a bike behind my car