22:05 - 03/24/2018
Negative
Well, dear diary, it has now been two seasons since last I wrote. Where does the time go?
I guess that coping with an incredibly cold and snowy winter might explain it. At one point, I could swear that my poor little home was shivering. I had to work really hard between balancing the need for warmth (think tapestries) over a need to keep heating costs down to a manageable level. Tricky. We had more snow than usual too. At one point, I think the shovelled walk in front of the house was 3 feet (1 meter) lower than the banks of snow on each side. My back gate was frozen shut and snowed over for about six weeks. No garbage pick-up. Stinky. I kept putting out kitchen scraps and birdseed/kibble for the outside critters, since the snow was so deep that they couldn't hope to forage enough food for themselves. Needless to say, I was housebound and developed serious cabin fever. Some days, even if it was minus 30 C, I would go outside, even if it wasn't safe. My measure of "too cold" is if my nostrils freeze shut when I step outside. That didn't happen, so I was ok.
I really did not travel far from my community though, so I can't tell you stories of adventures in transit. A+ and I went to see the new Thor and Black Panther movies - they were good. We also went to our local museum - the Glenbow - twice. My oldest son, his daughter and her beau gave us passes for Christmas. Yay! We loved the Lawren Harris exhibit so much we needed to go back the second time. I hadn't known he was a theosophist. That gave another entire meaning to the paintings. I also was amazed that his work had been rejected by Hallmark Cards. It was too non-traditional. That's what creativity does. Sigh. My one friend had an extra ticket to a Bertie Gregory National Geographic lecture, She had bought the tickets before her husband died, but none of her children wanted to attend that particular function. My gain, their loss. It was a fabulous talk and a good opportunity to catch up with that particular friend.
Christmas was family time. I did get to see most of my extended family and my sons and their families. The one son I didn't see in person had a birthday shortly thereafter, so A+'s friend drove us crosstown (bus travel would have been brutal) to see him and his fiance all during a whiteout. It's been a very long time since I was caught out in one, but it was no less frightening. Good thing A+'s friend drives for a living. He seemed to know how to cope in those conditions. Number four son, who is still living with me, had knee surgery scheduled in February, but, you guessed it, the weather was so violent on that day, that he couldn't get to the hospital. Sigh. It is now rescheduled to the end of May. I have also been slowly weaning myself off two medications that I have been on since the brain fart. As I've noted before, I think misdiagnosis has been an issue for me. I feel much stronger and have more energy now and the muscle wasting has stopped. Yay!
A+ gave me a copy of John Grisham's "Gray Mountain" for my birthday. I had been looking for a copy for over a year, but couldn't find one. Not even our library seemed to have it. I had wondered why there was such a vigorous public attack on Mr. Grisham's character, just before its release. Can't be because it contained veiled references to the behaviour of the current US president or his connections to the mining community, could it? It was a great read, but it reminded me very strongly of the industry I once worked in for a living. Very bad, sad memories. Oh well. I keep telling myself "this too shall pass". The current political circus, that is - but I keep wondering how much of the damage can be healed after the fact. Some things one can never get back, after all.
Rather than continue to be negative, I'll sign off now dear diary. Maybe next entry will be happier.
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