AN ACCIDENTAL FRIEND

A funny thing happened the other day.

There I was sitting and scrolling through Facebook, no doubt procrastinating some chore that needed doing, when up popped a friend request.

I have to confess here, when I was new to Facebook my friendship door was pretty much wide open.  If you asked to be my friend the answer was almost always “yes”.  I have since learned to be much more discerning.  I don’t do politics.  I don’t do religion.  Except for my grandchildren I don’t ‘friend’ kids.  I block ads, and have had to unfriend a few folks who don’t understand that being friends means that they should be friendly.  Nowadays my friend list grows much slower than it did before.  This keeps Facebook being one of my Happy Places.

So, when a random, unknown request comes to me the chance of a ‘delete’ response is pretty high. 

I’m not sure why this didn’t happen last week.  Was it because there was nothing on TV and I was bored with no one to talk to?  Was it because Covid has curtailed so much of my human contact that I had a deficit to fill? Or, did I just have a premonition that this was going to be a good thing?

I didn’t answer yes immediately.  First I went creeping on her – this random stranger – and found that she was well educated and lived in Saskatchewan too, which meant that we probably had things in common and that she quite possibly belonged to one of the Facebook groups that I did.  I think it’s the first time I’ve ever accepted a total stranger, but I said “yes”.  I also decided to be totally upfront and asked her if I knew her from somewhere – I was curious, why had she picked me to ask to be her friend?

Her answer completely put my mind at ease – she had hit the friend button by mistake.  I knew at once she was ‘of my people’.  I can name a half dozen people who are my friends because of the exact same move on my part.  Personally I call it the Fat Finger Syndrome.

Now this could have gone nowhere.  We could have acknowledged each other’s existence and just gone on with our lives, but that’s not what has happened. 

Sometimes you just hit it off, you know? 

I think she just might have the perfect amount of nerdiness to complement mine.  We share interests in bird watching and gardening, we both have experience in the role of a Saskatchewan farm wife and I think our second conversation was all about recommending our favorite books and authors to each  other. 

Except for today there hasn’t been a day since we ‘met’ that we haven’t had an ongoing Messenger conversation, and I suppose there is still time.  I’ve been out in my garden all day, and I bet she has been in hers too.

She’s into research and has sent me numerous links on subjects that we’ve been discussing.  She’s even researched me and knows I wrote a book and talked to Peter Mansbridge once.  The Internet never forgets a thing!

She teaches English as a second language and tends to post grammar and vocabulary advice, I tend to need grammar and vocabulary advice, so that works out nicely too. 

Ours is a friendship born in the Land of Serendipity.

It’s not that I’m likely to start gathering new friends in from the unknown because this one time worked out so well, but I have to say that this experience has been the perfect antidote to Covid isolation.  I hope she feels the same way.

 

 

 

A MASTER TASK-MASTER

My Fitbit is so proud of me!

I’m not sure when it became a thing to want to impress electronic monitoring devices, but I seem to have turned that corner.  Possibly I spend so much time alone that any ‘pat on the back’ I earn is something to celebrate, but I have to tell you when I feel that happy, prolonged buzz on my wrist and look down to see the fireworks graphics signifying 10,000 steps I know that the rest of the day is just gravy.

We didn’t start out this way.  I got my fancy watch as a Christmas present in the dead of winter when it’s not easy to come by even 3,000 steps without putting on three extra layers of clothes and braving the elements.  I found out very quickly that the company that makes Fitbit is building and marketing extensions of our consciences.  Instead of a little angel sitting on my shoulder encouraging me to do the right thing I now wear a fancy watch on my wrist that buzzes me at ten minutes to the hour to remind me to “get up out of that chair and do something”!   

It has taken on the roll of a task-master, always bossing me around.  It is amazing to me that an hour can disappear so quickly when I am engrossed in something that I am reading or writing, but I do respect its efforts to help me shape up a bit. 

During that nice spell in January/February I was making both the dog and the watch happy by getting in my 10,000 steps, but when Old Man Winter decided to double down that ground to a halt.  Then I slipped and tried to break some toes – my step count plummeted further.  Once you break your stride it’s really hard to get back to it.  My records (because, of course Fitbit keeps records!) March and most of April are dismal.

About the time my Fitbit was preparing to declare me dead spring happened.  Not that I began taking walks for walk’s sake, but there were now things to do outside.  It’s nothing for me to take three trips around the yard per day checking if any of my perennials are up yet.  We bought some beef calves to feed out over the summer and I am repeatedly invited over to the corrals to ‘see how fast they are growing’.  As well we are installing a water line from the dugout to the garden which required a couple of my afternoon’s worth of work.  Instead of forcing myself to ‘one more mile’ to earn my 10,000 steps fireworks I was being pleasantly surprised with that reward while setting the supper table.

The warmer it got the more time I spent outside.  I put some early potatoes in.  I cleaned up my flower beds.  I moved my seedlings out to my greenhouse, and then back in, and then out, and then back in – and so it went until my heaters could handle the few degrees of frost we were still getting.  I planted a few more things and inherited the evening chores because the man is gone seeding till after dark.  Every day my Fitbit fireworks happened earlier.

On the weekend I planted all the rest of my vegetable garden – fireworks by 3:30.

On Tuesday I hauled (what seems like 14 miles of) garden hose out of storage with the help of four year old feeders who thought I was there to give them chop, and unspooled said hose to set up a watering system – fireworks at 2:15.

Thursday I watered all my perennials and then filled all of my deck planters – fireworks at 12:28.

I have to put bedding plants out in three different gardens next.  There’s no telling when fireworks time will be.

But, to put this all in perspective, I have to give credit where credit is due – if that crazy man’s alarm clock didn’t go off at 5:00 a.m. none of this would be possible.  He’s the master task master.