COOL, PRECIOUS COOL

The first thing I do every morning is get up and lock the cool in.  It’s the most important job of the day.

I can’t remember when this hot streak started (I think my brain is a little baked) but the ‘normal hot’ days have been few and far between.  Mostly it’s been day after day of unrelenting abnormally high temperatures and smoke haze from forest fires over a thousand miles away.  Locally we won in Mother Nature’s where-should-I-scatter-my-thunderstorms-this-year lottery.  Whereas almost all of the prairies are parched, crispy fried, and crawling with grasshoppers, small pockets here and there are green again because they got rain.  We live in one of them.

Also, there are fields that are black again.  That’s what happens when the moisture from above doesn’t fall in liquid form.  A hail storm can bash a crop right back into the ground.  Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on how much hail insurance was purchased for that field.  If you are a farmer there is no need to travel to Vegas to gamble big money.

As this heat wave goes on and on I’ve been trying to come up with some coping skills to get through the torture.  Some things not to try would be building a deck on the south side of the house, or ignoring the weeds in hopes that they will go away on their own.  I try the weed experiment every year with the exact same results every single time.  I think I may be a slow learner.

2021 is not going to be a stellar year for garden harvest.  The peas are done before the end of July and the beans are only half trying.  The carrot and beet crop look plentiful, the corn loves its heat units so the few seeds that germinated are doing great and the potatoes got over watered and then rained on – half the plants are dead.  Who saw that coming in the middle of a drought?

On the other hand, the two watermelon plants I bought on impulse and plunked in the ground think they are in Mexico and are growing like mad.  It’s really hard to tell what’s going on in my tomato jungle but I think there will be quite the harvest there too.  My pumpkins are coming back from the hail shredding their leaves – if Halloween comes at Christmastime we’ll be fine.

That’s life on the outside.  Whenever possible this summer, I’ve been hanging out inside.

This may explain how the weeds got so big on me.

The second thing I do every morning is check the weather forecast.  Well, no, that’s a lie.  First I need coffee, and then I check the weather.  Not just what’s going to happen that day, but how many more days of hideous heat are still to come?  Just so you know, the long term goes as far as mid August with no end in sight.  And as important (and depressing) as those daytime temps are, the night time temps are even more crucial.

You see our house doesn’t have air conditioning, all we have is a very large ceramic tile floor which is a very inexpensive way to cool a house as long as the nights are cool.

 The last thing I do every day is open all the windows and let the cool in.  Ceramics are a fantastic conductor of heat and cold so the cooler the night the cooler the house is the next day. 

While I sip my precious coffee I check out the outdoor temperature.  Anything lower than 15 gets a little happy dance.

 

 

SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR JULY 2021

I remember the good old days ... past summers when other places in the world made the news because they were stuck in a heat wave they couldn’t shake.  While I listened to the news reports about checking on elderly neighbours and drinking lots of water I would always be thankful that I wasn’t where ever the heat was.  I don’t do heat well at all.

If you want proof come and visit me  – I will be the sunburnt puddle of sweaty goo waiting for the sun to go down.  I’m pretty sure Turbo, our Husky/German Shepherd cross is dealing with this heat better than I am – and he’s wearing a full fur coat.

Due to my brain melting I am not quite sure when this blast furnace began but I think we’ve been at it for two weeks.  And during those two weeks we did renovations to our deck ... on the south side of our house ... in a yard that protects us from prevailing winds – even when you’re dying for a breeze.  You know that you are down to appreciating the basic necessities of life when moving air from the south or the east feels heaven sent.  Come to think of it, maybe it was.

As the heat doesn’t seem to want to leave I am compiling a list of things to keep us alive until it snows.

First of all: WATER.  We buy our drinking water and I usually have a 3 bottle rotation going on.  During the deck building period we were up to 5 five gallon bottles on the go over the same amount of time.  True, we had company helping us with the deck project and the drinking, but still.  I couldn’t believe how much water we went through.

 And ice cream. 

And freezie pops.

 And iced tea.

 And Gatorade. 

And propane.  Like heck I was cooking anything inside!

I heartily recommend having A/C in your house.  We don’t, but I highly recommend it.

Sadly we were unable to cool down grandchildren with a sprinkler or pool, which led to the happy discovery of Toonie Tuesdays at the Redvers pool.  It’s amazing how out of touch a grandma can be.

 Water is on everyone’s minds these days as we all wonder when the well might go dry.  We are not down to rationing showers yet (thank goodness because people get to smelling a bit off when it’s this hot) but with no rain in the forecast these things are beginning to worry me.

I admit my worries about dishwashers and laundry and showers pale in comparison to herds of cattle with bare pastures, no hay to cut for winter and no water to drink.  I sure feel for those in the cattle business, this is serious stuff.

I wish I could say I had a strategy to overcome heat and drought but humans have been trying to entice or appease the rain gods since time began without much luck.  I’m not opposed to a nationwide rain dance ... and I’m sure I read somewhere that they are more effective if done in the nude ... but how about we play it safe and apply Covid rules?  Dance nude all you want ... in the privacy of your own home.  Possibly wear a mask – the dignity you save may be your own!

But, good luck on drumming up rain.  You’ll be everyone’s hero if you manage that!

 

THE GREAT AWAKENING

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – in a former life I just know I was a bear.

I mean, their whole lifestyle appeals to me: the wandering around in scenic, natural settings, the not being judged for growling at people who annoy me, and eating everything in sight all summer so I can sleep all winter and wake up skinny.  What’s not to love about that?

What’s got me thinking about this now, though, is the feeling of déjà vu as we are being released from the restrictions we’ve lived with for the past year.  I am positive that I’ve felt this before. 

It feels like the long, drab isolation of winter is easing off.

It feels like the promise of sunshine is once again warming our world.

It feels like the dawn of a new day as we stumble out of confinement, gripping our coffee mugs and squinting while our eyes adjust to the light.

Yep, I am certain that this is how it feels to come out of hibernation.  I have been here before!

It’s interesting to hear people talk about what they are going to do with this new found freedom.  There are those who can’t wait to get on a plane and go somewhere far away.  There are grandparents who just want to go one province over to see their grandkids before they’ve all grown up.  There are those who have been waiting for elective surgery and are praying their delay in treatment is almost at an end. 

Parents are rejoicing that the threat of home schooling will not be hanging over their heads.  Doctors and nurses are can hardly believe they made it through  ... and I won’t say unscathed.

Restaurants that have struggled to hang on are dreaming of just having a regular day with regular staff serving their regular menu to a regular crowd at their regular tables and – hallelujah! – making a regular income.

Employees and employers are assessing what going back to work means after all these months of working remotely from home.  The future of the work world may end up being a hybrid of home and office that works better for everyone.

There are gardeners and bakers out there who would have never learned they had such talents had Covid not forced them to try.

There are the people who kept the food delivery system rolling, and the transportation system moving, and the public safety system in place at grave danger to themselves and the families they went home to every night.  It has been a learning experience for us all to realize what an essential service it is to pick and package fresh produce or drive a bus or stock grocery store shelves.  Be sure to smile and thank them ... won’t it be wonderful to see smiles when we can finally take off our masks?

And, let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands of people who are no longer with us.  This past year has been restrictive and unpleasant but we’re still here to talk about it.  We are the lucky ones.

Yes, as I sit in the warm sunshine just outside my den and wait for my eyes to adjust to the light I reflect all that has gone on during this winter of our discontent and ponder what I will do with these fresh new summer days ahead.

 I will have a ceremonial obliteration of a bottle of hand sanitizer.  I will decommission the last facemask I had to use and press it between two pages of a big book like they used to do with souvenirs because that’s all I want it to be.  I plan to stop and chat with people not from my own household in the middle of grocery aisles less than six feet apart and going the wrong direction ... just because I can.

But one thing I think I will leave off my summer ‘to do’ list.  I will not be showing off my beach body.  For some reason Covid hibernation didn’t work like regular hibernation does.

What happened to the ‘waking up skinny’ part?

 

FAMILIARITY

The proverbial ‘they’ say that familiarity breeds contempt. 

While this may be true, spending time and getting to know others can also be hilarious.  I’m talking animals here, humans are too complicated to be trusted.

I’ve mentioned Turbo before.  He’s a beautiful dog: smart, loving, gentle, tolerant, but he’s not without his quirks.  For one thing, he doesn’t trust doors.  The wide open kind are okay, and the fully shut ones are safe too, but the half ajar ones are to be avoided.  Even if his food dish and water are on the other side he’ll hang back and give us his sad eyes treatment but won’t try to get past it on his own.  He was two years old when we met him – it’s always makes me wonder, somewhere in his puppyhood did he lose a battle with a door?

Another idiosyncrasy is due to genetics.  He’s part Husky and apparently they are very concerned with keeping their pack together. If either one of his humans has failed to return by sundown he lies at the garden doors and watches for them to return.  If they are away overnight he’s a very anxious dog.  I guess this makes sense for a breed expected to pull heavy sleighs around – you would want the whole team there to help with the work.

He’s not much of a hunter though.  Oh, he thinks he is.  Any time the farmer goes out to bring the gopher population down Turbo’s out there like a dirty shirt, running from one hole to another, digging wildly, snorting dirt up his nose, catching nothing and scaring away anything that the farmer might have had a shot at.  Once when we were out for a walk he actually got one.  I don’t know who was the most surprised – me, the gopher, or the dog – but the triumphant march home was like a victory parade at the end of WWll.

Because of Turbo’s feeble hunting skills and the fact that mice like to move in for the winters I decided last fall that we would expand our pet population by one cat.  We acquired Thundercat in late summer – a black, nondescript half-grown kitten - hoping that he would take his job seriously.  The cat set about claiming the house as his own and tormenting the dog with way too much purring and cuddling.  Or  sneak attacks while he was sleeping.  Many times have those sad puppy dog eyes asked me why we needed a cat.  Much as I hate to hurt his feelings I have repeatedly explained about unwanted varmints and his lack of prey drive.

By this spring the newly renamed cat (Turbo’s choice, can’t be used in polite company) had earned his ‘you get to stay’ papers and rated a trip to the vet for the shots to keep him healthy and the surgery to keep him home.  He is never not hunting and there are mouse carcasses delivered daily: I like that in a cat.

In fact, I’ve kind of grown to like him.  So much so that when he disappeared for a day I was quite concerned that a coyote might have made lunch out of him.  It wasn’t just the $100.00 vet bill, I actually liked him.  I looked, I called, I asked Turbo – nada. 

Almost a complete day after his last sighting I went to get in my car to go to town.  I opened the driver’s door and looked across to the passenger’s seat at one very disgruntled cat.  He stood up, glared at me, and uttered a meow that unmistakably translated into “Where the #$@& have you been?” and stomped (yes, stomped!) out of the car. 

Talk about mixed emotions! Joy because the lost was found.  Terror about what 20 hours of an angry cat locked in a car might mean.  Cautiously I stuck my head back in and sniffed.

 Nothing. 

I now love that cat.

 

 

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. 

 

COVID COPING SKILLS

Back in the ancient past – you know, pre Covid – when we took everything for granted, I was a different person.

For starters I was 15 pounds skinnier.  Well, if I’m being honest here, ‘skinnier’ is a misleading word to use.  There have been a few short windows in my life where ‘skinny’ might have applied - 1980 for instance, but you know what I mean – this sitting around with nothing to do but bake has not been a good thing.  I try to look on the bright side: it’s made me a more cuddly Grandma.  On the downside it’s not healthy, super cuddly Grandmas probably have a shorter shelf life.

On the plus side, my bank account has gained weight as well.  The fuel bill is a shadow of what it was pre Covid and my car still doesn’t need a second oil change in over 15 months.  Add to those savings the other expenses we haven’t incurred ... restaurant meals on our way to and from destinations we never went to, things we would have bought when we were there, and our usual DQ indulgence we treat ourselves with on the way home.

I won’t even mention the tropical beach holiday that we were due this past winter.

I’ve always considered myself comfortable with my own solitude, but I now realize there is a limit to this.  There are folks who have to be around others all the time.  They thrive in bustling crowds and seek company and companionship constantly.  This was not me until about halfway through 2020. I revelled in the peace and quiet of my yard and gardens and enjoyed books and listening to music in my very own TV room.  I could spend countless hours typing away on my computer, lost in time.  Then Covid restrictions told me that this is what I had to do.  Apparently when it is my idea it is okay, when it is someone else’s rule it begins to feel like a prison.

We developed mild paranoia over which items might disappear from store shelves.  At the height of the toilet paper insanity I took a long hard look at what my pantry needed.  I went on to buy flour and yeast before that crisis hit, and plant a huge garden.  We still have carrots and potatoes in the cold room and the frozen fruits and vegetables will last us until this year’s crop is ready to pick.  I don’t know which is better – the fact that we were self sufficient or that it gave me something to do all summer. 

 We are an adaptable lot though.  Throughout this past year we have been educated in things we never saw coming.  Thankfully my age let me off the home schooling hook, but I heard lots about it.  The second bout of it went much smoother because of the experience gained by the first time ... and it was only two weeks long like they promised!

I have a couple new talents I never dreamed would be a thing before Covid.  At the beginning of mandatory masks I had trouble figuring out who people were with only half their face showing.  Not any more!  There must be part of our brains that likes to ‘fill in the blank’ and this Covid time has given it the exercise it needed to develop its world class face recognition software.  Now, if I was any good at remembering people’s names I would be unstoppable!

I have also been transformed from someone who doesn’t care to go shopping to someone who just wants to wander through a mall and buy stuff ... like for a whole darned day!  Maybe two!  Partly because after a year of buying nothing but groceries I am down to my last two pair of socks and have been wearing sweat pants all winter because they are so , ahem, comfortable, and partly because I JUST WANT TO GO SOMEWHERE!!!!!

But if I think I’ve progressed, the other half of this dynamic duo has taken a giant step forward.  I admit the ground work has been laid over the past decade: he can handle a cell phone, he texts, and he knows his way around Pintrest and Google.  Last night was a whole new ball game though.  He decided he wanted to watch Battlebots with all four Canadian grandsons at the same time.  He knew he needed a Zoom meeting for that ... and he knew the right people to get it done.  His daughter had to set up the meeting and his wife had to log him on, but it was his idea.  He gets full Grandpa points for that one.

 It makes me wonder what else there is to learn out there if this lasts much longer.  That’s not a challenge, mind you.  I don’t actually need to know.