How To Avoid Dying in Canada

So, it’s a tad cold in Canada at the moment.  Nothing we haven’t had to weather before.  It happens from time to time north of the 49th, and mostly we live through it.  It’s a matter of knowing to stay inside, or dressing properly if we have to go out.  On the one hand, we complain amongst ourselves about the ridiculousness of living in such a climate.  On the other hand we love the bragging rights it gives us - especially when it comes to impressing people who can’t imagine that 40 below zero even exists.

The lucky Canadians plan winter holidays in a warmer place.  The truly lucky manage to pick their holiday dates to coincide with when Siberia sends Polar Vortexes over the North Pole.  That way we can sit on a beach, under palm trees, and brag about how cold it is at home.  It’s like winning the same lottery twice - we can speak with real authority on the subject of bitter cold, but we actually managed to miss it this time around.  The locals are either in awe of us or don’t believe us.

This year we really took cold avoidance to the extreme and decided to not just go to a southern clime, but to the Southern Hemisphere.  No Mexican beach for us this time around.  No Belizian bed and breakfast.  No Arizona desert sun.  None of that sissy five hour flight in the same time zone thing for us this time; no sirree!  We upped the ante to a three hour drive to a three hour wait in an airport for a three hour flight to another airport where we waited ten hours for our sixteen hour flight to the Land Down Under.  There were also several time zones involved; I lost track.  We lost a whole day of our lives, but that’s okay, we get it back when we go home.

It’s been a few days now.  There are days and nights here, just like at home, and our bodies will eventually adjust to the new rhythm, but in the meantime we notice being exceedingly tired or hungry when no one else is and wonder what time it is at home.  The adjustment to the +40 temperatures is progressing, as well.  Neither one of us has keeled over from heat stroke, so that’s a win, for sure.

We’re working on re-establishing our ear for the Australian accent.  It’s trickier than you think - they use the same words as we do (mostly) but it’s not always easy to catch the right meaning.  Up the difficulty level with softer children’s voices or the speed of tv announcers and we end up missing the gist of what’s being said.  We’ll get the hang of it in time to go home and have to tune back into the Canuck accent.

But while this trip does keep us safe from freezing to death, Australia does present us with its own set of dangers.  The grandsons have been going about singing a little ditty that goes something like this: “Redbacks, Funnelwebs, Blue-ringed octopus, Taipan Tiger snake, add in a box jellyfish, stonefish, and the poison thing that lives in a shell and spikes you when you pick it up.  Welcome to Australia!  You might accidently get killed”

We’ve seen none of these national treasures so far, staying in a modern urban home as we are.  I think what they’re really trying to do is prepare us for next week when we go camping.  It may turn out that we would rather suffer from frost bite over snake bite.

And All's Well ...

Back in the day of Roman Centurions - or more likely back in the day of Hollywood depicting their interpretation of the days of Roman centurions - these soldiers left on duty through the night would keep everyone up to date on their security status by calling out hourly ... "It's three in the morning, and all's well!" 

Actually, if the Romans were doing this the announcements would be in Latin, but you get what I mean.

Think of how reassuring this would be if you were a citizen of a city under siege.  Every hour, on the hour, to hear that someone was in charge and that he was sure that "all was well".  Or, at the very least, you would be informed of what time it was getting to be.  That's so important - to know what time it is ... in the middle of the night ... when everyone else is peacefully sleeping ... over and over again ... knowing that the nighttime is slipping away.  I wonder how many of those centurions were hurled from the ramparts by frustrated insomniacs? 

Nowadays we have digital clocks with illuminated numbers to keep the insomniacs up to date on how much sleep they are missing out on.  It's quieter, but just as frustrating.

I'm not a permanent insomniac, thank goodness.  I go through long periods where I sleep soundly through the night.  They are called summers, when we rise at the crack of dawn (4:30) because of a work schedule in Manitoba for the man of the house, and the fact that I like to get outside for garden and yard work before the heat of the day.  Throughout those periods I am too tired to not sleep. To be perfectly clear, a summer 4:30 in the morning and a winter 4:30 in the morning are two entirely different things.  One makes the day longer, one makes the night longer.

We are just a few short days from the longest night of the year, and I seem to be determined to experience it to the max.  I've been practicing for weeks - taking forever to fall asleep and then getting a solid three hours in after midnight before turning the rest of the night into a series of ten minute naps between pillow fluffings and blanket straightenings.  And watching the clock tick my night away.

There's always something to think about.  I've solved the world's problems several times (the answer is to make sure Trump is one of the guys who get to go to Mars - and he is most welcome to take his friend Putin with him).  If that was all there was to my midnight ramblings, I could be back to sleep in no time.  It's the five hundred little things that do me in.

Last night's lost sleep can be chalked up to several things: finishing up Christmas wrapping, planning when best to do the remaining baking, going over what needs to be done before company arrives, sorting out what stays and what goes to the family Christmas celebration, planning a big meal here before that happens, squeezing in a few visits over the next week, and then ... just to make things a little more interesting ... packing for a trip, cleaning out the fridge, making sure the house checkers all have keys, and getting the dog to his sitter.  If I wasn't already tired from no sleep, I would be exhausted just thinking about the next week or so.

It seems like everyone has their own best practice policy for dealing with insomnia.  Some say that deep breathing exercises help, some say get up and walk around for a while. Some read, some watch TV, and I've even had super practical people say that if they are awake they may as well work and get up to wash floors.  I have yet to be desperate enough to wash floors at 2:30; let's hope I never get there.

The one good thing about extremely early mornings at this time of year is there is a pretty Christmas tree out in the living room.  There is something peaceful and soul-soothing to wrapping myself in a blanket, curling up on the couch, and sipping fresh-brewed coffee in the glow of Christmas tree lights.  This annual vigil ties all my Christmases together: childhood excitement, coming of age angst, passing on the magic of Santa to my own children, concerts and carols, welcoming the new, missing those gone.  If there is such a thing that is good about not sleeping it would be having this quiet time to ponder these things in peace.

I don't know that tonight's sleep will be better, but as I ate breakfast this morning I smiled over at twinkling lights on the tree and thought to myself "It's 6:45 in the morning, and all's well with my world".

Note To Self:

In the preposterous hope that this will make a difference in my ability to retain semi important facts I will go through the motions of recording them ... making notes is supposed to help with memory problems.

So, here goes ...

Note to self:  NO Jocelyn!  You do not need more Christmas gift tags!  Even if your offspring were to double their output of grandchildren it would take a full decade before you would run out.  Please stop buying more every year.  Likewise with the icing sugar; three and a half bags of the stuff will see us through 2023 at the rate we eat cake around here.

Note to self:  If you're looking for exercise, Jocelyn, then for sure, head on down to the basement without a written reminder of what you are going there for.  Is it a loaf of bread?  A pail of ice cream?  A pound of butter?  Another can of coffee?  Perhaps it's not food related at all.  Did you, all of a sudden, recall it was time to change the furnace filter?  Are you looking for the Christmas laser light projectors?  Or, since it's the far bedroom you are standing in, feeling perplexed and foolish, was your mission to fetch a suitcase to begin packing?  But, back to the original question ... maybe it was the exercise.  There are a full 18 steps involved - make one trip for each item.  Atta girl!

Note self:  As soon as a water jug is empty put it in the car.  When you are up to two empties make plans to go to town for water.  If that's what you care to do, then go ahead and have yourself that 'shake your head' moment about the very idea of buying water.  Lord only knows why you do this self torture but year end calculations show that you have spent $430.00 on stuff that comes out of the taps for free.  Further, as you drive down the road, you can reminisce about the good old pre-flood days when water quality was not an issue.  But the bottom line here is, if you put those jugs in the car as soon as they are empty, you don't have to turn around at the highway to go back to fetch them.

Note to self:  Now Jocelyn, you are just being delusional if you think you're going to remember where you saw that recipe.  I know.  I know.  Your first impulse will be to say Facebook, and that may well be true, but WHERE on Facebook?  Are you paying any attention to whom it was that shared it?  Have you taken note of what the date is?  Are you ever likely to find it again?  You well know that Facebook has at times shown itself to be very judgemental of who your friends are - one day you get to see every one of their kitty-cat pictures and the next day it's like they've been banished from the Earth.  That will be the day you want to try out that great roasted brussels sprouts recipe.  Trust me; go low tech with this one.  Find an actual piece of paper and write that recipe down.  Now.  Where you put it after that is your own business.  Might I suggest that 'safe place' you have?  That's always good for a laugh.

Note to self ... or is this just a point to ponder?  A mere existential question, really, about why you can remember every word from a song from 1972 that you haven't heard in at least two decades, but regularily stall out mid sentence because you forgot what you were talking about.  I have read that it's the music accompanying the words to the song that acts as a trigger for our memories.  Does that mean that if I sang everything I said I could tell a complete story without loosing my way?  I wonder which would happen first?  Would I be arrested on some "abuse of music" charge, or just locked up in a padded room somewhere?  Like I said, this is just a point to ponder; weak as my mind is on daily conversations, you can't stump me on anything Neil Diamond, the Beach Boys, or The Guess Who has ever sung.

Now, back to business.

Note to self: go find that new 2018 calendar you picked up the other day and start transferring important data from this year to next year.  Dentist appointments and grandkids babysitting dates, meetings, seminars, and that tax time date with the accountant.  While you're at it scan through the next week or two in case you have commitments booked that have slipped your mind.  Heck, just for the fun of it, glance back over the past month just to see if you missed anything.  Nothing better than finding out you missed an order deadline for something you really wanted.

But, most important for now is to STOP BUYING CHRISTMAS GIFT TAGS.

On the other hand, Jocelyn, you are almost out of wrapping paper.  Are you going to remember that?

                                             The Little Job That Grew

I don't know if I can say I didn't see this coming.  I wasn't looking.  I have no excuse.

Probably, if I had taken even one moment to think about it, that little sensible voice in the back of my head would have said something like "Do you know what you're getting yourself into?"

But that's all moot.  I did not stop to think about it.  The little voice didn't have a opportunity to ask her question.  I am armpit deep into a job that I anticipated being only ankle high.  And I'm not done yet.

The "little" job I volunteered for was updating the home town information for the South Saskatchewan Vacation Guide, an annual publication that strives to educate and inform travellers of all that our corner of the province has to offer.  I had already had one kick at  the can last year when the publishers had asked our local tourism board for fresh event dates for 2017.  When I reviewed the advertisement that was going into print I promised that we would absolutely be freshening up the information for the 2018 edition.  That was this time last year.  Naturally I didn't given it another moment of thought until autumn.  They don't call me the procrastination Queen for nothing.

So, at the last meeting of the season I told the rest of the board that I would happily do the write up.  After all, I am comfortable in the role of writer and they were quite willing to let me run with it.  That was eight weeks ago, and I'm farther behind now than when I first got started.

Around the same time as I began to gather information and photos for this vacation guide project I received an e-mail about information and photos needed to revamp our online presence.  I'm one of the newest members of this board - I don't know if it was my greenhorn status that kept me from realising that this was now actually two projects:  one for a printed magazine and one for a province wide tourism web page.  I agreed to this second job thinking it was the first job.  That was the bad news.  The good news was that both projects were looking for the same info.  The print project wanted more written info, the electronic media could handle lots more pictures.

Which constituted phase two of my project: try to track down high quality photos that illustrate the things I wanted to write about.  I wrote letter to other community groups formally requesting both info and photos to help me out.  No one got back to me.  I asked people who take a lot of pictures to see what they had.  There are good shots in bad light and great vistas taken at the wrong time of year to show off a campground.  And who can believe that we serve Saskatoon pie and ice cream for four months straight and have never bothered to take a picture of a pretty table setting of this treat?

About this time, in my quest for clearer instructions from Sask Tourism my call was forwarded on to a guy named Bob.  My new friend Bob.  Bob, who assumed I had called him about his new pet project - a day trip guide within our area to augment the more general information in the vacation guide.  I had not called him about this, yet another project that would turn out to be job #3.  He sent me an e-mail describing it in detail ... the info he is looking for is mostly the same as jobs #1 and #2, only a little more detailed.  Oh, what the heck!  Since I'm in this up to my waist anyway, what's one more?

It's early December.  My deadline is the end of this week even though the publishing deadline is a month farther down the road.  I have an assortment of pictures and some copy written.  Today I decided I'm far enough along to send what I have out to other board members for feedback, which may well complicate my life further.  On the one hand it's good to have more ideas and insight for a more well-rounded effort; on the other hand more ideas and insight will take more time.  I'm just crossing my fingers that if there is tweaking necessary, it won't be much.

Meanwhile my desk is cluttered with copious notes about what I need to do, piles of paper scribbled with the information going into each project, and lists of photos that need to be sent.  The whole thing has woven itself into such a tangle in my mind I'm going to have to call good old Bob one more time just to see which e-mail addresses belong to which job.

If I dig deep enough I'm bound to find my "List of Things to do Before Christmas".  That's next week's project.

                           
                            These Are the Days, My Friend

It all started out innocently enough.  There was to be a tea and bake sale in the afternoon so I got up early and spent my morning baking goodies.  While I'm not old old yet, neither am I young young. By the time my counters were laden with buns and cookies and tarts my feet were sore and my coffee didn't seem to be cutting it in the power juice department.  Never the less, I had baking to deliver, staying home was not an option.  Thank goodness.

I rummaged through my closet for something besides blue jeans to wear and headed off to town.  My day wasn't over yet.

Teas and bake sales are pretty standard affairs.  Of course there are tables of baking for sale, and raffle tickets as an extra fund raiser, plus another table offering pretty things perfect for Christmas gifts.  The rest of the space is filled with tables inviting people to sit and visit for a while.  Once my baking had been delivered and my tickets had been bought I checked out if they needed me in the kitchen.  I hadn't been asked to help out but I had come prepared to do so if they needed me.  All was calm.  I wandered back into the tea room.

There has been many a day in my life when things don't go well ... flat tires ... 'flu bugs ... burnt suppers ... broken dishes ... forgotten promises.  You know how those days go.  And I almost always stop and wonder, "What did my horoscope say about this day?"  Would I have been fore-warned about my bad luck?  Could I have avoided these troubles?  I'm not really the kind of person who keeps track of horoscopes, and I am the kind of person who tends to think we are better off not knowing what the future holds, but there's always that curiosity there.  "Could I have seen this bad luck coming?"

There is also the flip side of that coin.  There are also the times when a person could completely miss out on a wonderful experience because her feet were sore and she stayed home.  I wonder what my horoscope said about the day of the tea?  Would it have said "Get out there, girl!  This will be a wonderful day for you!"

I was all by myself so I looked for a table where all the chairs weren't already taken and asked if I could sit with those already there.  The table I chose welcomed me. 

We were hardly strangers - we were either schoolmates, or friends, or friends of siblings, or connected by marriage, or neighbours, or friends of neighbours ... or, as in many small town situations ... an intermingled web of all of these types of relationships.  Making conversation was easy.

We talked of many things ... recipes and planning Christmas dinners, which of the dainties on the plates were our favourites, how nice the weather was, health concerns within our families.  Pretty mundane stuff.

But somehow it escalated to hair dos - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and stories began to pour forth.  We all had a tale to tell, each one funnier than the one before.  There was much laughter.  We progressed to the subject of aging and we all offered examples of memory failure problems and how we tried to cope with such things.  I'm not sure when the husband stories came up but a few of these were shared too.  All women bond over husband stories.

 And then we were on to concerts we had attended; some of the performers were given glowing praise and some were so bad that the applause at the end had not been for the show, but that it was finally over.  More stories and more laughter.

The thing about small town life is that while we do know each other for our entire lifetimes, it's not like our relationships are static.  It's more like a case of life ping pong-ing us in and out of each other's orbit; going to school together unites us, marriage takes us different directions.  Having kids in the same classes brings us back together, having different jobs or hobbies creates another gap.  In the end we have a lot of shared history, but there's also lots we can learn from each other.

Time ticked by.  Other tables were emptying and refilling with fresh faces but ours remained the same.  The conversation bubbled on ... happy themes and more sombre moments.  I began to regret that this happy time would soon come to an end.  Who could have ever guessed that this afternoon would have held such fun?

Once or twice one or another of us would make some mention of it being time to go, but it seemed we were all reluctant to break the spell.  Somehow the topic of conversation moved on to our late '60s school years and the fashions of the day: the tie-dyed shirts, the modified bell-bottomed pants, the bleaching, the embroidery, the platform shoes, the velure fabric.  The words from Mary Hopkin's 1969 hit popped into my mind; it seemed the perfect thing to do - I sang the first line and these wonderful women, my old/new friends joined in ...

Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end! 
We'd sing and dance forever and a day. 
We'd live the life we'd choose, we'd fight and never lose. 
Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days!

The people at the other tables probably were wondering what we had in our coffee that they didn't have in theirs.  Maybe they had been all along.

The truth is whatever it was that settled over our table can't be bottled and it can't be forced.  Call it Karma or Fate or Voodoo, it felt like magic to me.  Long after we parted ways the memories continue to bubble to the surface and I find myself laughing again.  

And the idea strikes me to change the words to Mary's song to the present tense:  "These are the days, my friend!"  Days like that are pure gold.  I wonder what my horoscope had to say about it?

An Untraditional Christmas

Christmas is one of the most traditional times of the year.  The music we listen to, the foods we prepare, the way we decorate our houses, the stories we tell, the family customs we observe - almost everything we do at the end of December has some kind of ritual symbolism attached to it.  Whether you're in it for the Santa scene or the Nativity scene, chances are the way we celebrate the season tends to repeat itself year after year - not in a boring way, but in such a fashion that we feel content with the comforting traditions that trigger happy memories.  Humans seem to need to punctuate their lives with holidays and festivals, and Christmas is the biggest one of all.

Every family writes its own storybook on what they consider important: which treats they love most to eat, the kind of gifts they tend to give, where the celebration takes place, whether their trees are decorated with precious family heirloom ornaments or done in ultra-modern colour coordination with the wrapping paper theme of the year.  Some families keep it small and simple, some have the whole fam-damly for a huge gathering.  Some insist on turkey and plum pudding, some go all crazy by never having the same menu twice.  Some count Christmas's success by how many gifts are under the tree while others spend the day serving others at a soup kitchen.

This might sound like I'm going to get up on my soap box and give a morality lecture about the meaning of Christmas, but no, I'm just saying everyone does it differently.

I've been thinking about this tradition thing quite a bit as we approach the Christmas season this year because there are so many things that will be different in 2017 for us.  This is not the result of any momentous decision to purposely alter how we observe the holiday, it's just a myriad of small things that all seem to be happening the same year.

Like, for instance, I already have my outside Christmas tree decked out in lights.  I didn't plug it in until after Remembrance Day but it's been up and ready since October 25th.  That's right, the Procrastinator-in-Chief is way ahead of the game, not because of any grand scheme, but because it was a beautiful day and I was looking for something to do outside.  It looks magnificent in the hoar frost.

The inside tree will be breaking with tradition, as well, and given my plans for it I could probably go ahead and decorate it right away too.  For a normal Christmas we usually buy a natural tree (bent, crooked, or lop-sided if it's me that picks it out - another tradition) and I decorate it mid December because if I do it sooner it will be needle-less by the big day.  A running sub-plot to the tree decorating performance is that the peanut gallery always wonders why I haul a tree-sized house plant out of the living room to fit another tree in.  2017 is the year I take his advice and I will be decorating the umbrella plant - and with the money I save we will travel to Australia!  Well not quite, but they are related.  I'm keeping Christmas super simple this year because we will be in Australia by New Years Eve.

Another tradition being phased out is the family gift exchange.  We've done it forever - drawn names amongst three generations of family - more to keep us connected across the miles as the family grows than anything else.  This year, after much discussion, it was decided to let it go.  On the one hand relief - it means less gift buying to do.  On the other hand regret - sad to see it go.

In another twist of Fate, the hostess of the big feast this year is of the next generation.  Again with the two hands ... on the one hand, yay, this is a good thing to pass the torch.  On the other hand ... this means Christmas dinner is more than an hour away!  Up until now it was the young folks who had that drive to come to our house.  Talk about a double edged sword!  It's not like we can put some kind of distance caveat on who gets to cook the turkey, and the only daughter-in-law who would qualify might get mighty sick of the honour.

And because of where Christmas Eve supper is happening this year we will be doing a Christmas sleepover at the grandkid's house instead of the other way around.  The menu for the 25th also is likely to be not-a-turkey.  After all, why stop the "outside the box" thinking?  We are on a roll here.

Well, okay, some things show no sign of changing: I am only barely started with my gift shopping and can only think of more ideas for the people who I've already bought for - that's very normal.  And so is the desire to get on with the holiday baking ... so that we can eat it all ... so I can make some more ... so I can eat some more.  It's very traditional for me to struggle with this every year.

All this thinking about breaking with tradition has side-stepped into considering if this will have some effect on our future too.  I know, it's kind of superstitious, but what if keeping our rituals has an impact on what happens in our future?  Our usual tradition is to watch the fireworks over the Harbour Bridge in Sydney, Australia on our TV; this time we will be there.  In person. 

It makes me wonder, what does 2018 hold for us?

THAT Kind of Day

You know that the day ahead might be a bit challenging when first thing in the morning you can't figure out what's wrong with your hair until it occurs to you that maybe you forgot to rinse the conditioner out.  On the one hand the problem is easy to fix; on the other hand you can't help but wonder if you should go check what your horoscope says.  Maybe it would be a good idea to just crawl back into bed for the day.

There are two ways to look at it.  My sister and I have discussed the random brain farts we have experienced, and how at our age the possibility of dementia lurks at the edges of our consciousness.  Believe me, finding the milk in the cupboard and the salt shaker in the fridge is something you want to blame on an occasional bad day, not a developing pattern.

That morning it was back to the drawing board - rinse the slimy-ness out of my hair, dry it, and carry on with my day.  Although I wasn't too sure what I wanted to tackle: I had a couple jobs lined up but if my powers of concentration were such that I couldn't organize a shower, maybe I should keep it simple for the next 24 hours.

With my 'that kind of day' experience fresh in my mind I happened to be talking to a young mother later in the week.  If there was such a thing as a Bad Day Contest, she took the gold medal, especially if there was a sub category of 'The Grossest Day Ever'.

Her day had begun with a baby with a head cold.  You know what that means - an over abundance of colourful mucus, an aversion to Kleenex, little baby hands that rub gross yuckiness into their hair and all over their clothes, and great bubbly sneezes that make a person gag a little when they have to wipe up the mess.  That was yuck number one.

Which seemed kind of like a merry stroll in the park when confronted by yuck number two.

The dog barfed.  In the living room.  The only room in the house that has carpet.  Put the snotty baby down, toss the dog outside, and go to clean up the warm, gooey, smelly mess. 

Oh, wait!  Look at this!  Why is the  dog barfing?  Could it be a case of worms?  Gross!  Gross!  Gross!  Do not add to the puke.  Do not add to the puke.  Call husband to get dewormer before he comes home from work.

And not just for the dog.  Need to be proactive about a thing like this.  Yuck.  Yuck.  Yuck

After completing an intensive sterilization ritual on the carpet and putting the baby down for a nap she decided to tidy up in the kitchen.  In sorting through the fruit bowl she found an over ripe banana, not enough for banana bread so she went to throw it away only to discover it was REALLY over ripe and had liquefied in the bottom of the bowl.  If she hadn't just had to deal with the mess in the living room this would have been a minor thing. 

But, she had just dealt with hideous dog vomit; the slimy banana just about did her in.

At this point she probably would have run away from home but her vehicle was in the shop being fixed.

The Fates weren't through with her yet, though.  Toward the end of the afternoon she got an email from the playschool teacher reporting that a case of head lice had been discovered in the student population.  Of course!  This was only natural.  The perfect ending to her perfect day. 

Well, not quite.  Right after the dog got her worm pills she also got a flea bath.  You want proactive?  She'd show you proactive!

It left me wondering what her horoscope had said that morning.

As for myself and my day that started out wonky - I decided to tackle doing books in preparation for income tax.  I know a lot could have gone wrong with that picture but it didn't - I'm all caught up, it's a great feeling.  I also have very soft, shiny hair.

The other job I had on my slate for that day was to reinstall a duvet inside a freshly washed duvet cover.  I didn't push my luck that far.