No good deed goes unpunished

I don't usually make a point of taking pictures of Victoria when it snows, because, unlike many of my fellow denizens believe, this city isn't magically transformed into a winter wonderland. It just turns into Ottawa.

The snow snuck up on us Sunday evening, when Demeter came over for dinner and to watch Masterpiece Theatre. I didn't even notice the snow outside until the Resident Fan Boy donned his boots, and I went to the window. Demeter refused our offers of boots or YakTrax, so we escorted her up the sidewalk, as the right rear wheel of her walker picked up broad white ribbons, then stalled with the resulting snowball.

I found that if I rhythmically swatted the wheel with Demeter's cane - rather like the old-fashioned bowling of the hoop - we made steady progress. Thank goodness the journey only took two blocks.

The RFB and I returned to the colourful glow of the Christmas lights against the snow, and pondered how both elder daughter and younger daughter, of the Hadean childhoods, reject January and February snow, only wishing for it at Christmas.

A snowfall in Victoria is a good time to visit the shops, nearly deserted by those lacking the inclination to brave the weather without winter gear or tires, for that matter.

At midday, as the flakes resumed, I resolved to seize our trusty ergonomic Ottawa shovel, and tackle the sidewalk running the length of our building, much as I cleared the sidewalk outside the Hades house in the vain hope of shaming my neighbours into making passage easier for strollers, wheelchairs, and canes.

It's about the same length of sidewalk as that I laboured on in Hades, so I cleared it again an hour or so later when the snow stopped. A Strata Council member thanked me profusely. Unlike Ottawa, where it's a municipal pastime to complain about the city's failure to bulldoze sidewalks, it's a municipal requirement in Victoria to clear paths and fronting pavements during the occasional instances when we get a brief blizzard. (It's never a real blizzard, but don't tell Victorians that.)

After two brisk shovelings, the body cries out for carbohydrates and salt, so the Resident Fan Boy fetched me potato chips.

It was the dip that did me in.

At 1:48, I awoke in agony, and chewing antacids and swallowing acetamenophen, lay awake until stupid o'clock, wondering if I were having a heart attack. (I've reached the age where this is a possibility.) I gave up, and, since upright seemed a marginally bearable position, plodded miserably to the cold living room to watch stuff I'd PVR'd and peer out between the blinds at the garden, which was steadily disappearing. As I dozed fitfully after 5 am, the RFB learned his office building, along with schools and several other businesses, had been locked. He ventured out at dawn to join the shamed shovellers. (I can dream, can't I?)

Fear of watching

I've been trying to finish watching the second season of The Handmaid's Tale.

It's been on the PVR for months. I think I got something like two thirds of the way through.

The trouble is, I need three things in order to be able to watch The Handmaid's Tale:
1) I need to be alone because the Resident Fan Boy won't watch it, and younger daughter shouldn't watch it.
2) Because I have to be alone to watch The Handmaid's Tale, I need to be in a relatively sunny mood.
3) It has to be during the day, because no matter how cheerful I'm feeling, I'm not going to watch ritualized rape, tortures and executions at night.

Of course, now the third season's begun, and I'm really getting behind.

The thing about The Handmaid's Tale, it's well-written, well-acted, and way too damn plausible. Margaret Atwood always said there wasn't anything in the story that hadn't happened, or isn't happening to women.

While I'm trying to get my nerve up, I thought this 2017 parody, with the cast of Saturday Night plus guest host Chris Pine, might be bearable:



Well, I guess it is. It's still way too damn real.

Face-plant in Chelsea

Elder daughter suddenly appeared on FaceTime on my phone this morning. She wanted to show me her teeth.

Maybe I should explain.

About three weeks ago, elder daughter was in London. She had arrived three days before, booked into an AirBnB in Hampstead, done a London Walk, taken the Chunnel to Paris to meet up with a Belgian friend for a day-trip, and on a Wednesday morning, was on another London Walk in Chelsea. I think it's safe to say that she may have been still recovering from jet-lag, although I'll bet she'll hotly deny it.

She'd paused to take a picture of a rather unremarkable sculpture in front of a Mercedes-Benz dealer, noticed the group had progressed up Cheyne Walk, so ran to catch up. Somewhere in front of Keith Richard's old house, she slid home, leading with the left side of her face and torso. Her fellow walkers helped clean her up a bit with wet-wipes and bandaids.

I believe she completed the walk, but was unable to go "home", because she had a ticket for Ian McKellen's King Lear at The Duke of York's Theatre in the West End that evening.

To say this put a dent in her visit is a understatement. It put several other dents into her, as well.

By the evening she was sporting a burgundy shiner to compliment a road-rashed jaw and scraped knuckles.

A brisk exchange of texts ensued, whenever both she and I had WiFi access, mostly pleadings on my part to get a gel pack and ice, ice, ice.

On the train to Sutton Coldfield to visit cousins the following day, she developed a chronically painful shoulder. By the time she was en route to Heathrow, a little over a week later, she was in agony from sore ribs.

She had to wait through the Labour Day weekend to see her doctor. The receptionist told her that they were booked for the day -- until elder daughter mentioned "slight" problems breathing, and the receptionist's voice went up a couple of octaves.

So elder daughter has been on anti-inflammatories for a week, at which point she chose to tell me that her front teeth are no longer symmetrical.

Well, they looked okay, but I told her that her grandmother knocked three teeth loose when she was a teenager. About a decade later, I came out, and so did one loosened tooth. The other two made their exit with my sister.

Elder daughter will consult with her doctor and dentist. I've told her to blame it on her crazy mother. They've met me, after all.

For three weeks, I've had "Brimful of Asha" on the brain, except I find I'm substituting "Face-plant in Chelsea", and "Ev'ryone needs a pavement to fall on; ev'ryone needs a pavement..." My twisted psyche strikes again.

You know it's been a bad month when….

What can I say about this past month?
Nuthin'.
Oh, plenty went on, but I don't want to discuss it.  We're halfway through the year, and I don't like the way it's going.
One bit.

So, let's talk Game of Thrones.
I don't watch Game of Thrones.
Why?
Because I'm squeamish.
However, I know enough about it to find the following extremely funny.  It's from the first American version of Red Nose Day, which I tried to watch, but there were way, way, way too many commercials.  So I missed this, but found it later on social media.

I'm going to bed now.  I'll be taking several Sleep-Relax and pray that the year starts taking a turn.

Gang aft agley

Emotional wounds, like physical hurts, leave me chilled and exhausted. Shock is shock. At times like this, I turn to my tried-and-true therapies: family research, music, and (yes, still) David Tennant. When some warmth and energy return, I might go into detail, but right now, indulge me.

About a month ago, David Tennant received a special recognition award at the National Television Awards, held in London. What appeared on British television screens got posted on YouTube pretty damn quick, but just a couple of days ago, someone got hold of a video focussing on Tennant's reaction to the surprise presentation as he sat in the audience with his wife Georgia Moffett. This is made all the more touching by the recent revelation that Tennant's father Alexander McDonald is terminally ill.

The house not right in the head

I love this house we're sitting this July.  I'm not sure the feeling is mutual.

This is the fifth time we've taken care of this house, a charming bungalow decorated in Arts and Crafts style by the rather tall woman who lives here.  And therein lies the problem.  Having been here five times, the fourth time being six years ago, I know that I will be covered in bruises whenI leave in a month's time.

House-sitting has taught me that houses have different shapes, not all of which are compatible with my trajectory, for want of a better word.  My tall hostess places things high up - it's her home, after all - and on top of that, things like hooks and closet racks are slightly beyond my reach and there are no stools or stepladders because my hostess doesn't need them.

My shins are an appalling shade of green from my re-learning of how to clamber into her large bathtub with the very high sides.  On my first attempt during this stay, I managed to briefly wedge my lower leg between the tub and the toilet, banging my leg painfully as I struggled to extricate my heel while trying not to topple catastrophically into the unusually deep tub which would have involved a long fall with my body being bent, crumpled and possibly snapped into some wildly unnatural positions.

However, last night, I became convinced that the house was out to get me. It was a hot Canada Day -- for Victoria, barely a summer's day in Ottawa, but the thing is, few homes in Victoria have air conditioning, so by the time younger daughter and I got back from celebrating the holiday with Demeter, the house was uncomfortably warm and I still had to get the garbage and recycling sorted into four receptacles and lined along the pavement to await the various trucks in the morning.  By the time I had tracked down the items and worked out what went where (the rules vary from municipality to municipality and are quite different from those in Ottawa), I was sweating.

The house has large windows which can open to admit a host of insects and arachnids from the surrounding garden and the only screen is a narrow one which must be balanced on the sill and gingerly held in place by the sash.  I managed to pinch my fingers the first try and the screen plummeted to the flower bed below.

Next, it was time to haul the four containers out to the curb.  That's when the garden path attacked me.  For some reason, there were several dried-out bamboo spikes cunningly lurking in the foliage and grasses overgrowing the side of the house.  Two of them got me, one piercing my trousers.  The fact that it really, really hurt was probably an indication of how badly injured I was, i.e. not very.  Later inspection revealed a nasty welt and scratch in my thigh which stung like the dickens in the shower.

It was when I sat down at the computer that I realized my glasses were missing.  I'd go search the foliage, but I'm afraid of another ambush.

Painful Irony

"Crosswalk" by Vermont artist Gillian Klein

The springlike evenings that have marked early November may have been some comfort to the Resident Fan Boy as he lay stunned in the street after a cyclist slammed into him. My regular readers (all five of you) may recall my "gremlin" experience of a couple of weeks ago when I was assailed by fears of my husband's untimely demise on the verge of a business trip to Québec City. So, of course, when the crisis came, it was in a crosswalk less than two blocks from our house. The Resident Fan Boy remembers stepping into the street when the signal changed.

 That's all he remembers.

Back home, I was flitting between tasks, and beginning to wonder why my husband was late. I thought, given the balminess of the day, that he had chosen to walk home from downtown Ottawa which takes about 40 minutes. Elder daughter had left to do homework at a friend's, and of course, she didn't know the number. I had instructed her to call it in when she arrived, so when a classmate pounded on our door a few minutes later, I went prepared to say that elder daughter was gone, and as yet, unpinpointed.

But that wasn't why she was there. Her dad, who knows the Resident Fan Boy from church, had been driving his daughter home from hockey practice when they saw the Resident Fan Boy knocked to the pavement. Her father had the presence of mind to pull his car in front of the RFB's supine body, ignoring the honks and rude gestures from his fellow commuters. His daughter remembered we were up the block and hightailed it to our front steps.

I was attempting to keep calm. I didn't know where elder daughter was, and I couldn't leave younger daughter alone in the house. Luckily, the classmate guessed elder daughter's whereabouts and hauled out the ubiquitous cell phone.

 Somehow, I remembered to turn off the mini-quiches baking in the oven, and she agreed to wait for elder daughter at the house, while I led younger daughter down to the intersection where I could see flashing lights. Pounding on the traffic signal, I bounced impatiently on my heels watching the paramedics shift the Resident Fan Boy onto a body board. Several cars sailed through the red lights past the ambulance before I made it across the road.

It was, as I've noted, a warm evening and there was quite a crowd: the ashen-faced young cyclist who gave me a slip with his information; a medical student who had been waiting for a bus across the road; a pediatrician who patted my arm, saying apologetically, "Wrong kind of doctor!" and her husband. Of course, RFB's fellow church-goers were doing their best to reassure me and fill me in. 

The paramedics were asking me questions. "Hasn't he told you himself?" I stammered, gazing at my husband who looked back at me with mildly bewildered eyes, just before they had to tip the board to allow him to vomit. We were gently steered away before younger daughter saw this; she had begun to cry quietly.

Not much to do. Fellow Church-goer offered to drive younger daughter and me home to pick up things and proceed to the hospital. While my husband was loaded into the ambulance (his first post-accident memory), I watched the passing cars in fascination, honking impatiently, cutting each other off, their drivers chatting on cell phones, oblivious to the irony.

My late grandmother imagined Hell would be an airport. I've always imagined it would be an emergency room: bleak, noisy, frightening and dull, all at the same time. I was not overly surprised when the Resident Fan Boy didn't remember the accident, but I fought back the panic as he asked questions I'd already answered.

 I'm the daughter and the sister of physiotherapists. I know the symptoms of brain injury. At one point, they sat him up in a "peri-chair" to make room for other casualties. He crossed his legs and dozed, occasionally waking to complain of the pain in his head (from the road-rashed haemotoma on his right temple), and his dislocated shoulder.

The really frightening part came when the doctor arrived with the results of his CT-scan, and suddenly he was bustled back to bed.

Two "internal bruises" they said.
Transfer to the Civic campus of the Ottawa General Hospital, they said. 
Neurosurgeons, they said.

And, dear God, that's when I had to leave him, because our younger daughter is Special Needs and I had to get her to bed with the best semblance of normalcy I could muster. The nurses and doctor assured me they would take care of the Resident Fan Boy, but oh, I hated to leave him, all hurt and curled up awkwardly on his uninjured left side...

Home to smooth things over and prepare for a night of phoning Emergency at intervals ("slight bleeding to the brain", they told me at 2 am) and a day of getting younger daughter to second set of a battery of psycho-educational tests.

Obama was sweeping to victory in the States, and in bed, watching the older African-Americans, those who remember Little Rock and Selma and MLK, weep quietly during the acceptance speech, I grieved that Resident Fan Boy, a long-time election junkie, was missing this.

As of today, nearly 48 hours after the accident, the RFB is still in hospital getting mightily ticked off, which is the best sign of all I think. With each phone call and visit, he sounds more like himself.

But oh, you drivers, quit with the cutting off and honking and cell phones! And oh you cyclists, wear your helmets and remember you're a vehicle too! And as for us pedestrians? Practise defensive walking, I guess, because even crossing at the crosswalk with the signal is no guarantee...

April Cruel

It's bloody snowing again.

For the past few days, the waist-to-shoulder-high piles of filthy crystalizing snow have been slowly retreating from the edge of the sidewalks, gradually revealing beat-up garden ornaments and six-month-old dog droppings. The yard at my younger daughter's school is an skating rink in the mornings and a large iceberg-filled moat in the afternoon. However, it could still be said that progress was being made. Until midday.

I looked out the window between the knee-icings only to see the large white missiles plopping down and covering the newly exposed mud and khaki-coloured grass. This morning I had a hasty hall conference with one of younger daughter's EA's about an incident during morning recess yesterday, when she inexplicably yelled at her guardian angel and spent the period after recess weeping heartbrokenly while the EA tried to explain that yelling at friends is "bullying behaviour".

Is it? When I tried to find out what happened from younger daughter herself on the walk home from school yesterday, her response was predictable: "I don't want to talk about it." A block later, she said, "I'm feeling brave now." Heartened, I asked again, but she said, "I'm tired of talking about it now." What can you say to a child whose verbal abilities shut down when she's upset, who is probably terrified when the angry feelings well up, and who is convinced that anyone who tries to help her manage these feelings doesn't like or love her anymore? Bullying behaviour? Really?

And it's still snowing. I'm grateful that the internet is rippling with Doctor Who interviews and that David Tennant and Catherine Tate have been making the pilgrimage through the radio stations of London, leaving podcasts to take me out of my physical and emotional self. God help us if the spybots close down the illegal posters of the new Doctor Who; I've never needed it more. One of Mihangel's favourite posters got the axe last week, but he had titles and links all over the place, a veritable homing device for Auntie Beeb's single spies and battalions. Our favourite is a lady who comes out of the woodwork only to post at a specially-set up channel with renamed episodes. If she's found out, she pulls up stakes and posts from somewhere else.

Fanvids rarely get pulled, so here's two more of my favourites, this time with a Canadian content theme. The first is set (by woefully infrequent YouTube poster "MrsCake") to the optimistic, triumphing-over-adversity music of Great Big Sea from Newfoundland, and features, I think, five of the ten Doctors so far:



(Man, that was difficult to embed!) If Great Big Sea embodies the life-affirming possibilities of Doctor Who, then the Barenaked Ladies seem to perfectly match the quirkiness of the mad goings-on. Here's "Moto1261"'s interpretation of Rose's journey with the Ninth and Tenth Doctors which includes my very favourite version of the regeneration between the two:


Hooray for Canada! (Don't know if the posters are actually Canadian, but clearly they are People of Taste.) I'm starting to feel a bit better already. As for my younger daughter, I have to cling to the notion that what seem like regressions or even new problems are actually signs of progress. When she "lost it" a few years ago, it would mean days of recovery. Now, it's fifteen minutes of unpleasantness and grief. It may look like the Slough of Despond out there, but it's no place to live. Somehow, with plenty of backsliding and repetition, we'll all learn to cope...

March goes out like a wombat

Winter is waddling out of Ottawa and taking its own sweet time. Woke up this morning with an iron-grey sky and black thoughts. Pep-talked myself, applied a little dab of the musk eau de cologne that my elder daughter brought back from Provençe. (Never mind the fact that Cologne is, in fact, in Germany; I was trying to cling to items of love and beauty to save myself from myself.) By the time younger daughter and I tackled the long hill to school, it was snowing outright, coating the filthy fossilized remains of old drifts with a creamy wrap, the muddy shards of ice poking through.

On the way home, still trying to stay high-minded, I took photographs of: frozen explosions in the park below younger daughter's school and:
deadly red former evergreens in the merciless grip of a winter's worth of snowplough droppings:

I was just angling myself to take a snap of piles of garbage bags against a backdrop of more frozen waste, when I felt my boot slide out inexorably sideways, and as I tried to regain balance, my other boot slid out in equal inexorability in the exact opposite direction. In agonizing slow motion, I made it to the ground in an ungainly split. I straightened out my legs and lay in the snow atop the black ice and wondered dispassionately if I would be able to get up. Two Russian women whose daughters attend younger daughter's school glanced in my direction from the corner where they were chatting, then resumed their conversation. I managed to regain my feet, figured my left knee, although throbbing painfully on the inside edge, would take my weight and hobbled home, cursing the posh apartment dwellers who never touch the sidewalk outside their building.

I'm now following the R.I.C.E. prescription (rest-ice-compress-elevate) and praying I'll be able to manage the trek to younger daughter's school to pick her up. So far, I'm managing stairs and have even done a load of laundry, gingerly picking my way down two flights, so I imagine I'll be alright, but am glaring sourly at the "to-do" list I'd optimistically posted on my brand-new iGoogle home page this morning.

Expletive deleted. Time for another Doctor Who video. This one, by exceedingly rare YouTube poster "HuaidanSam" combines an unlikely song ("I Wanna Talk About Me" by Toby Keith) with clever cuts and witty associations, resulting in a hilarious and rather sexy fanvid which tells Rose to get her head out of her navel:

There. I needed a good giggle. Time to get the gel pack from the freezer again...