At Work Upstairs

Let’s see: it’s all starting to blur together. A sign that the time off is working. 

Tuesday was hiking day chez nous.  During the transit strike Douglas’ boss has been giving him a drive to and from work but wasn’t able to on Tuesday.  It was relatively mild and sunny so Douglas walked the five miles.  Those long skinny legs came in handy: he made it there in an hour and a quarter.  I have short legs and I’m lazy so my walk to the Rosemount Library was much much slower. I hadn’t been to the Rosemount before. It’s interior–layout and fixtures–is very similar to the Rideau branch I used to visit: small oak book cases, central desk, small non-fiction annex. I left with a couple of book (I might run out, seriously, it could happen) and trundled off to the deli and bought lots and lots of chutney since Douglas has recently decided that he loooooooves chutney. And then there was some reading.

Wednesday was a snow day so shovelling and a short dash to the grocery store. And then there was some reading.

Today’s what, Thursday? So far: a whole lot of nothing.

There was slightly less laziness today as Ottawa weather turned temporarily to spring.  It was Douglas’ day off so after a lazy start, we slushed our way around the neighbourhood.

Douglas got to have his biannual feed of liver and onions at the Newport. I got treated to a Heath bar from one of the three candy stores in the neighbourhood.

We hunted for a set of kitchen tongs while we boggled at the tone of a conversation between a young woman buying kitchen stuff and a young man telling her she couldn’t buy this item or that item. You’d have thought she was feeding fifty dollar bills to a small bonfire in one of the store’s chafing pans rather than thinking about spending fifteen bucks on a garlic chopper.  We couldn’t decide if the BMW parked in front of the store was theirs or not.

We ended up in the toy store buying this fellow for our nephew with a January birthday. We were sorely tempted by a Lego Troll Assault Wagon but set it aside after visions of what his soon to-be-walking baby brother would do with the trolls.

Then home for more lazing around, more tea, and more novel reading.

Heather

One of the few glories of my worklife is the December shutdown which this year has mated with untaken vacation days to bring forth three weeks off. And since it's been a hard 18 months or so (kidney stones, Alzheimer's, layoffs, and an eye-crossing amount of work) I'm hoarding the downtime and spending it all myself in a slow blaze of small pleasures. 

The tiny universe that is Ottawa has conspired to make it a micro-local vacation: no buses therefore no jaunts to museums, no shopping expeditions, no movies, no idle wandering around the downtown. There'll be some grumbling, especially since my library access is somewhat compromised: the one with books waiting for me is a chilly 4 mile walk and the one where I could drop books off and avoid a fine is a chilly 3.4 mile walk. Doable I suppose if I weren't so lazy and so out of shape (see above about the priorities of the last 18 months).

The smart money is on the lazy approach.  So how's it going? Not bad, not bad, considering we're still on weekend time.  So far there's been a higher than usual number of naps, some more or less unconnected whiskey drinking, some book reading (one good book and one mediocre book), and no work of any sort getting done. Sometime this week I'll need to get groceries but for today we're getting by on scratchiti (all the leftover varieties of pasta go into one pot) and leftovers. 

Heather

Is this sad or is this funny?

Heather

Vernon Fisher
Originally uploaded by heyther

One of the blogs I make sure I check every morning is Elizabeth's. I check because I want to read what she has to say and I check because I want to make sure she's still alive.

I started reading it because I liked her novel Zed. I've stuck around because her voice is compelling (though usually NSFW) and she makes me think about what it means for an athlete to move from figuring out how to make it onto the Olympic fencing team without a sponser to figuring out how to live, really live, in a wheelchair with a progressive, terminal, rare, and poorly understood medical condition. 

If you read Elizabeth's stuff you'll learn a lot about goth lolly culture and anime, wheelchair sports (sadly not as egalitarian as you'd expect), despair and cutting, the underbelly of the Canadian health care system, the limitations of home care agencies, disablism, memory loss, rage, and most important, determination.  (If you ask, she'll send you a labour of love and hope: a postcard that takes much effort to put together.)

What's that got to do with the photograph? The man in the wicker wheelchair: that's my great uncle Vernon.  He died the year before I was born. And since my family loves secrets, it was many many years before I learned that he had probably died of ALS and more years before this snapshot came my way. 

When I first got the photograph what I saw was the chair. Now what I see is Vernon: smiling, open, and as mischievous as he was in boyhood photographs. And in an odd, round about way, that is Elizabeth's gift to Vernon: I see him.

Heather

I was listening to a podcast about Folkways records this afternoon and it reminded me of an album I was fascinated by as an adolescent. It’s one of a handful of records that remain from my father’s record collection. The music was recorded in the mid 1950s and the record itself is heavier and thicker than most LPs I’ve handled.

Puzzling ideas of Cape Breton

Week one of vacation has passed in a blur of traveling, visiting, clearing, chatting, and waiting. Not a particularly restful time but needful things were done.

I meant to take pictures but didn’t manage to drag out the camera in time to grab shots of the happy new nephew or the dancing niece or relatives or my old home town.

I spent most of the week clearing out my mother’s house, getting it ready for sale. She moved into an apartment with a better support system in November but the house was still full. It’s a small, post-WW II house, about 1200 square feet with a full attic and a full basement.

Exactly how full? Well, we filled a 12-foot dumpster and the house still wasn’t empty when I left. Somewhere over the last 4 or 5 years, frugality turned into hoarding. And hoarding coupled with memory problems meant that every nook and cranny was stuffed.

Some of it was easy to deal with: twenty years of nearly empty paint cans, broken and ancient appliances, empty cardboard boxes, empty bottles, packages and bottles of stale food, years and years of paid bills and receipts.

Some of it was odd: cracker boxes stuffed randomly amid the linen, caches of sanitary napkins, kitchen objects wrapped in tinfoil.

Some of it was smelly: cheese left on top the fridge, butter left on the the counter, and used kitty litter bagged up in a corner.

Much of it was sad: Bag after bag of fabric and sewing supplies, piles of craft supplies and projects for herself and her grandchildren, hundreds of reference photographs for her paintings. Each object represented a plan, a hope, a possibility. All that hope is gone now and that’s the hardest part. Not the sorting out of family heirlooms and memories but the discarding of projects she’ll never be able to finish.

She still thinks of herself as a person who can paint and sew and still has plans to make more art, more clothing, a new home. But the dementia has taken away much of her visual understanding and her understanding of spatial relationships. She’s only partially aware of this and so her plans go on even though she can’t thread a needle, draw shapes, follow a pattern, or easily manipulate tools like TV remotes or coffee makers.

She was a fiercely independent person and doesn’t and can’t understand why she is thwarted by the objects around her. She’s much diminished. Her bouts of sadness and frustration come and go with her attention span. We hope for a long plateau before the next inevitable set of declines and the next move away from independence.

Heather

I hate buying new footwear. Doesn’t matter if it’s boots, sandals, sneakers, or flip-flops. New shoes of any sort have always meant pain.

I have rather vivid memories of walking home from school with wearing new brown shoes and bloodstains. And the next day making the same journey with smaller bloodstains and bunched up bandages futilely trying to protect the open blisters on my ankles. This went on rather sadly for years with new shoes and old shoes until I figured out that I always needed to put on bandages whenever I put on footwear.

I tend to put off buying replacement shoes to the last possible moment. And then knowing that the shoes only mean pain, I often rush through the process just to get it over. Is the sneaker a palatable price? Yes. Is it a tolerable colour? Good. Does it fit? Seems to. And then out of the store. I went through this ritual one morning recently and thought I found a good match even if the sneakers are too white and are ugly.

I take them home. A couple hours pass and it’s time to put them to the test: bandages, the athletic socks, and the gleaming sneakers. My left foot is very happy, my right foot is not so sure. I head out to try to find some dirt to shuffle through to take the shininess down a notch. I come home in agony. My left foot is now deliriously happy. My right foot wants to be put out of its misery.

After several days spent agonizing over the waste of money and my willful mutant feet, I face the facts and head out to buy another pair of sneakers. I manage to find the next size up in the same style of not entirely hideous and still-on-sale sneakers. They too seem to fit and I trundle home.

Before boxing up the first pair to donate to the St Vincent de Paul and after moaning and groaning about how happy my left foot was in the first pair, I decide to try an experiment. Size 8 on the left foot. Size 8 and a 1/2 on the right. Amazing. They pass the walking to the grocery store and back test.

It’s as if the heaven’s have opened and shown me the way. My feet are different sizes. The mind boggles: all those years with painful blisters and thousands of bandages.

Anyone out there who needs an 8 1/2 left and an 8 right?

Heather

At the doldrums of my workday, I heard Douglas trooping upstairs and I yelled out: “Is there candy?” The usual reply is “NO” and an eyeroll. (Yes, yes, “usual” suggests that when I’m grumbly and bored some part of my brain thinks candy can be magicked out of thin air.)  No response. I stuck my head out to repeat myself cause he might just be ignoring me. He rounded the corner and said “YES”.

When I regained consciousness, he handed me a package with a customs sticker on it that clearly said “candy”.  Elizabeth had sent me candy from her Japan dai boken! And a little card with more stickers.

Japanese Candy

There was a small argument about whether we’d open the packages. But calmer minds prevailed.

Banana Kit-Kat has to be the oddest tasting confectionary I’ve ever had. Each nugget has a yellow, nearly waxy coating that smells very, very banana-like. The banana “flavour” overpowers the interior wafers.

At first glance the Hello Kitty candy looks like wax on a bamboo skewer. It turns out to be a strawberry flavoured coating on top of pretzel-like pocky.

So many thanks to Elizabeth for the afternoon surprise.

Heather