It's all a numbers game ...

On June 3 I will be 68 years old.

Imagine! I never thought I would live past 57, the age when my mother's second heart attack killed her. I feel as if I have been granted an extra 11 years of happiness. It has also been 11 years since I retired.

Who knows? Maybe I will be really lucky and live till I am 86 as my dad did. He too retired at 57 and had almost 30 years of retirement.

Marta is coming for a barbecue and Tammy is going to try to join us ... and I will invite Sarah as well. Are there any other women who would like to join us? Susan? Erin? Our ages will span 5 decades.

I used to think of 68 as very very old ... almost 70 ... and that was ancient ... but once you get there you discover as you did when you were 30 (or 40 or 50 or 60) that you are still young; that the woman inside the sagging body still has a life. Things fall apart as the African writer, Chinua Achebe, says, but life continues, and with it, hope and opportunities for happiness.

More on the Crazed House Guest

As Zeke becomes more confident here, he also becomes more bossy and stubborn.

He reminds me in some ways of Havoc, the Doberman with the crazed owner. Maybe it is just a dominant male dog thing.

Last night's infernal humping session

My den was a hive of activity just now with Zeke growling and attempting to hump Remi who is twice his size and not pleased with the attention, and Kenya growling warningly in the background keeping Zeke just under control. When he broke through the control and began to sound really nasty, I yelled "Hey!" and Kenya got really pissed off so he stopped for a while.

The referee

He will not let me clean his paws before he comes in and I let it go since his owner tells me he will not allow anyone to groom him. But I really do not like all that mud coming in after a rain. Oh well ...

Last night this dog (whom I was told loved his crate in the basement and went into it immediately) refused to go into his crate in the front hall closet, and followed us upstairs. It is impossible to keep him downstairs. Most dogs respond to visual things like baskets on the steps. He just leaps over the baskets and the step ladder I added.

I would have let him into the bedroom to sleep on the carpet with the rest of us but in the afternoon he had jumped up on my bed and refused to get down. Finally after two attempts to get him to lie down on either the dog cushion or the carpet, I had had to lock him out of the bedroom.

So last night I closed the door on his insistent nose and we all went to bed for the night ... Remi and Kenya on dog pillows and Zeke on the runner outside the bedroom door.

I think I know why he is always hungry ... he scoots on the slate floor ... maybe he has worms ... lovely ...

This might account for his ill temper and crazed appearance!

The Referee

Kenya understands that her role is to be a referee. She first establishes that she is the boss dog. Then she protects the puppy and all my rules.

Sometimes it is really easy because the other dogs are submissive.

This time she had to have several arguments with Zeke, a five year old male two thirds her size. Once she had had the arguments ... highly vociferous and lots of teeth being shown on both sides ... Kenya established that she was boss ... although she still will not cross certain boundaries with him.

Then Zeke wanted to prove to the puppy, Remi, that he was dominant, so he mounted him. When Remi resisted, he snarled, and Kenya had to become the referee.

This went on all evening.

Zeke seems to be a sweet dog but he is demanding with people (whining all the time and stealing food) and not very good at establishing a rapport with other dogs.

I had been blaming Kenya for the disruptions, but I am realizing as time goes on that she is doing what is natural and normal. She is the dominant dog here. It is her home. And she is bigger than the others. She knows the rules. She understands that Remi is a puppy. She has the right and duty to keep Zeke in line, and she doesn't do it brutally; she is wise.

I have to trust her more.

She is a referee ... and a fair one.

Zeke and Remi

Earning My Money!

Zeke arrived a day and a half early so his visit coincided with Remi's rather than following it. Not a good situation! Three dogs creates a situation that is a bit like having three kids all of whom think they are the boss of everyone. They form alliances or have alliances established that make for tricky situations.



Kenya was bitchy as hell when she saw Zeke, and would (of course) not share sticks or food ... after all she never shares those things. Zeke's reaction is to stand up to her. So ... two assertive dogs and one galumphing puppy who just wants to play.

I am dealing with the situation by using a combination of being with them indoors, spending a good bit of time with them outdoors, keeping one inside while the others play outdoors, and generally just waiting for tomorrow morning when I can begin dealing with only Kenya and Zeke, without Remi bouncing around innocuously adding to the chaos.

Later I played with them outside and realized that they likely had to sort this out themselves ... and they have ... I think.

Zeke, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, who does NOT get along with Kenya

Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius

I am not a golfer and any time I have watched a golf tournament I have understood what people mean by the term "as interesting as watching paint dry" ... but this is a good movie about a wonderful sportsman, person and golfer. He gains the respect of all in the golfing world and keeps it by remaining an amateur. At one point he is forced to remind an envious professional golfer of the origins of the word amateur. It comes from the Latin verb to love, and embodies the idea of playing for the love of the sport, not for money. His old friend, a sports writer, predicts ... how very accurately... that once money becomes the reason to participate, a sport suffers.

Our Health Care System: Riddled with Disease

Yesterday I received a phone call that would have brought happiness to most people, but it caused me considerable anxiety. And, as a Canadian, neither response should have been appropriate.

The call was from the Wakefield Medical Centre. They had a new general practitioner who was accepting patients.

Yes I want a doctor 15 minutes from home. I find it very difficult if I am unwell to get to my doctor in Cumberland who is 1 ½ hours away, especially in bad weather. And she is very busy so there is always a wait and I feel a little rushed once I actually get in to see her.

BUT

... and yes, it is a big but ...

I am afraid of the two large local hospitals to which a Quebec doctor would refer me.

My experience with both the Gatineau and Hull hospitals has made me fearful of them.

The orthopaedic surgeon who was incompetent and coldly uncaring, and the technician who was rough and incompetent are NOT balanced by the Gatineau obstetrian who saved Sam's life during Kerry's last delivery or by the anaesthetist at the Hull Hospital who was so kind I'd have married him if he'd asked.

Health care should not be a balancing act for patients.

Canadians should be assured of competent care at any hospital in Canada. Canadians should be able to expect that they can have access to a family doctor. Those are the two basic planks on which universal health care should rest.

The woman who called me sympathised. She recognized that my fears were justified and suggested that I continue with my Cumberland doctor until the health problems that are being investigated are resolved.

The Canadian health care system is liable to crumble.

People cannot find family doctors.
Hospitals are under-staffed.
Cancer tests are being handled incompetently.
Forensic pathologists are careless and incompetent.
C Difficile is rampant and has been covered up.

It is not just the Outaouais.

Health care is a provincial concern but it is a Canadian problem.

Comments Again ... and a day's plans ...

Looks like I may have re-enable the screening of the comments. That last comment did not come from a girl in Kenya. Weird way to get your jollies, eh?

A beautiful day here at the lake ... brilliant sunshine and mist steaming off the surface of the water ...

I have no "must-do's" today so I think I will likely wash the floors I swept and mopped yesterday, work on the mess below, transplant some more lilies, and throw sticks in the lake for Kenya. Or maybe I will just go for a walk in the woods with Sarah, the dogs and a trowel and see about digging up a transplantable root of the witch hobble.

We can use one of the many plant pots littering the area where they had a marijuna grow-op in that part of the woods. All that is left are the mounds. Whoever had the plants left a helluva mess ... empty bags of fertilizer, plastic plant pots, and a length of hose to bring the water from the stream. It looks as if they grew only a few plants for their own consumption, certainly not a major production. Kids? Aging hippies? Dunno.

Lake Happenings

This morning it felt as if winter was setting in. Now, with the woodstove on it feels like a sauna.


I walked Kenya over to get Remi and was delighted by the pair of Canada Geese and their two goslings. We picked up Remi and the geese lost some of their appeal as Remi was determined to be a little vaccuum cleaner sucking up the green goose droppings. Yecch!




Then I saw masses of the mauve hybrid trilliums we get in my woods as a result of the mating of the purple and white trilliums here. I will post a photo later. As soon as the dogs have had a chance to wear each other out I will return Remi to his house.

Relative Poverty

Marta and I spoke about poverty the other day. She felt that only the really down and out, the hopeless, were actually poor. No one could argue with her that real poverty is different from what many people mean when they say they are broke or poor or feeling desperate about money.

My money worries are miniscule compared to those of someone who has nothing ... someone living on welfare ... a refugee anywhere in the world, but especially one living in one of the camps. My financial state is nothing like the poverty in which almost all Africans and Indians whether from the sub-continent or displaced here in the Americas live. I do not have to worry about starving to death or dying of one of the many poverty-related diseases that plague the really poor.

But concerns about money cause me anxiety.

It is not that I have nothing; it that I own something I value and do not want to lose it.

I have embarked on a project that will give me a home until I can no longer live here by the lake, a home which will in turn, provide security when I am really old and something for my children to inherit when I die. This project is swallowing huge amounts of money, way more than I expected it to ... not because I wanted to create a mansion but because of problems over which I had no control ... building problems caused by the landscape and by the builders I chose. Nature can be hard but at least you can't blame anyone. Human ineptitude and dishonesty are something else. They cause stress. So does wondering where you can find the money to fix the mistakes or complete the essential parts of the job left unfinished.

My pension provides enough to live carefully and when I look after dogs I can afford some luxuries. If the house does not devour more of what is left of my savings than I am prepared to spend this summer, I can manage ... at least until my car dies ... or unless some terrible calamity befalls me.

I am not going to go hungry or cold, but I might lose my home, and with it a good bit of the savings I have invested in it, because it will take time to recoup that investment. If that happened I would have to find affordable housing. If I were in the city I would not need a car. If I were in the country I could have dogs.

It usually helps me to look at worst case scenarios.

This time, however, the worst case scenario not only means I will lose the house on the lake I love, but it will have meant that I have spent a year living homeless, and another year living with construction going on around me and dealing with the problems of building. Over two years of my life have been invested as well as the money — invested in a dream that is still not fulfilled. I am still living in an unfinished house on an unfinished lot. In the past two years I have also spent a lot of money unnecessarily on moving costs, and on transfering my life to Quebec.

The past two years have aged me. I am not as well as I was before all this started.

So yes, I have more than someone who is truly poor, but trying to hang onto it is diminishing me and making me feel poor.

Comments

I have disabled the moderation which I enabled when I began to receive spam. I hope it makes it easier to comment. It will at least make it easier to read comments as they are made, and I won't receive so many notifications by email that I become confused.

I cannot comment on Erin's blog and I cannot read the comments on Kerry's. I am not sure whether that is a fault of my dial-up sluggishness or something to do with their blogs.

I am still feeling my way around here.

I don't like films in which I dislike the characters ...

I have been watching some pretty second rate films recently (as well as good ones like Bleak House), and what I am realizing is that if I do not like the people in the film I find it painful or boring to watch their lives play out on screen.

The Wedding Crashers was the worst one. I disliked everyone in the movie. I found them crass, opportunistic, power hungry, unkind ... and almost every other negative adjective that could be applied to people.

In Look at Me, many of the characters made me uncomfortable, and the angst and anger in this family controlled by a selfish, unlikeable, angry man was hard to watch.

The Upside of Anger also portrayed a dysfunctional family who were unkind to one another and to themselves, but at least in these last two films, you saw a realistic portrayal of real unhappiness, and justifiable anger.

In the first, a young girl is quite rightly upset by her father's disregard, and in the second, the anger (based on something they all thought had happened) made sense. When they discovered at the end that they had based that anger on an incorrect assumption, they return to being decent human beings with normal warts and flaws.

There was nothing to redeeem The Wedding Crashers, I am afraid. It was an unrealistic movie about nasty people ... a waste of time.

A Very Rainy Monday Morning ...

A good weekend! Productive and fun.

Still some debris to deal with but the deck is now almost completely clear so my view of the lake is unimpeded, at least if I lift my eyes a bit!

On Sunday I had a lovely time with Lois, Tammy, Carlos, Marta and all the dogs. We ate and drank well, told stories ... and laughed lots. I hope Tammy and Lois will send me photos because I didn't take any.

Marta and Henry slept over. I am discovering that having someone here at night helps me find the peace of mind to sleep better. I dreamed dreams of old friends and lovers in new situations, and my blood pressure dropped to healthy levels despite have drunk a good bit of wine.

I have been monitoring my blood pressure carefully lately and find that only mental stress and anxiety cause it to rise. Wine has nothing but positive effects on it. My doctor, an abstainer and a Muslim, would like me to follow the 1,7,2 rule. Two drinks a day maximum; 7 drinks a week maximum. In other words do not drink more than a glass of wine every day with dinner or drink two glasses of wine every second day. I like drinking wine daily and I feel deprived if I must stop after one glass. I like the second, and occasionally the third, glass. I associate wine with relaxing at the end of the day, and I usually pour the first glass around 5 p.m. and sip it as I prepare dinner. Dr. Mellick (whom I really like) says that the research is showing that the blood pressure of women is lowered by the first glass of red wine and then raised by subsequent glasses. My research is not bearing this out. My blood pressure is highest during the day when I am most likely to be under stress, and lowest once I begin to relax over wine.

I will be going in to the Ottawa Hospital's Cardiac Diagnostic Centre again on June 13. This time they will do a myoview scan as well as the treadmill. It is nuclear medicine and they will inject radioactive dye and watch the progress of blood to the heart while resting and while stressing the heart through exercise. If there are any blockages they should be able to detect them. Apparently heart X-rays are not always accurate indicators for women because their breast tissue shadows things so that they get false positives more often. That is when the myoview is a more precise tool.

Today and tomorrow I will be walking Remi with Kenya and I am looking forward to it, especially if the rain lets up. For someone who is being monitored for two potentially lethal conditions, I am feeling remarkably healthy and fit.

I just realized I went to the dogs a long time ago ...

The air is still blue with the smell of melted chemicals. It is not visually blue ... just olfactorally blue. No. It is not really blue at all. It is an ugly colour smell so blue is wrong. It is acidic yellow green, I think. No ... it's greasy greenish black.

It reminds me of the times back in the early seventies when we lived in an old school house in the Ottawa Valley and my husband regularly burned the garbage.

The kids (our own and those of the neighbours) would roast weiners over a fire redolent with the smell of burning plastic. Just thinking about what they ingested gives me the willies now.

Looking back on that time, I realize we likely were regarded in that very conservative community as some kind of Dogpatch family of unkempt hippies. I didn't attend church. I supported Dr. Morgentaler. I gave a tea party for the local NDP candidate. I wore jeans and had hair falling to my waist. And we were the people who lived in that dirty old school house, you know.

But I digress. Here at the hermitage, so far this morning, I have hauled a couple of bags of garbage I collected yesterday up the hill. After breakfast I will do some more raking down there, and bag and transport more .

I also have to pull up some of the stinging nettle. When four of us were wrestling the old washing machine up the hill, Tom was stung. I will try to get all of it this time. It is a nasty weed.

Then I will see what needs to be done with the fire area. There is a twisted metal sofa frame in it. Likely too big for me to move alone, but I need to get rid of that black ash or I will have dogs with black feet decorating my slate floors all day.

And there will be four, possibly five, dogs here today! That is a lot of greasy black puppy paw prints.

When everyone arrives this afternoon, I will ask Carlos to put the clothesline up ... again. It takes two people, at least one taller than I am, to attach it. I am not sure what the guys were carrying that was big enough to snag the clothesline yesterday, but after they left I discovered my laundry lying in the dirt, and the chicken wire fencing festooned with underwear. Fortunately everything was dry when the line collapsed.

On this glorious sunshine-filled day, I am looking forward to a morning of outdoor chores plus preparing for company and an afternoon and evening with friends. We are going to have ribs, chicken, and sausage. Tammy is bringing salads, and Marta dessert. It will be a great picnic, even if we have to eat indoors to avoid the stench and the black flies!

At least today I won't be cooking the meat over a garbage dump fire.

A Splitting Headache ... Several Actually ...

Sorry I have not been posting lately. The reasons are the same ones that are giving me the headaches.

1. It took me three hours on the phone, another hour to write a letter and get the documentation Hydro wanted faxed, and another hour to take it into Wakefield and fax it because their line was continually in use. Five hours and the problem is still not resolved. My bank took my money, deposited it in a non-existent Hydro account, and then Hydro told me my bill was overdue. So that was one day and one major headache.

2. The following day the dial-up refused to do anything without bumping me off-line. Headache #2.

3. That was also the day I went to the ByTowne to see a movie with Marta. The movie was a disappointment. One of my favourite novels, The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence, had been badly translated into a film. The novel is a wonderful sprawling rendition of a life; the film is an awkwardly patched together attempt to capture what perhaps is unmanageable. The filmmaker's changes to time were disconcerting, as was the incorrect aging of the characters. Hagar was far too young for 90; Doris and Marvin far too young for 65; and the age difference between Marvin and John which was perhaps five years suddenly at one point became a twenty year spread. I am usually not as upset by the liberties taken by film makers attempting to move a novel onto the screen, but this was a travesty. Dickens' novels like Bleak House are also big novels, but the BBC did not ruin Bleak House by trying to fit a 400 page novel into 1 1/2 hours. They made a 3 DVD production. Better to have put The Stone Angel aside as undo-able than to seriously damage the integrity of a fine novel. Headache #3.

4. Today Tom and his crew came to finish up the removal of the cottage debris. They did not finish. They did create clouds of bilious, headache-causing smoke ... and on the May 24th weekend. (My neighbours are likely cursing me.) When I went to get them clean boxes out of the big blue bin, it (the bin) ... 4 1/2 feet high here in Quebec ... came crashing down on my head raising a long ridgelike goosebump on the scalp. Ouch! Headaches #4 and 5.


Not a good few days ... but I hope the air, my head, and my schedule will all be clear by tomorrow morning so that I can prepare for company (faithful blog readers all) and post a morning entry.

Eclectic Mix

Does anyone know what this flower is? Sarah and I saw many of them in the woods. They grow on tree-like bushes and look like Queen Anne's Lace surrounded by strawberry blossoms. They have a bit of an aroma ... neither entirely pleasant nor terrible.

The walk in the woods happened during a break in the weather. It has been cold, damp and windy all week. I have been comforting myself with the knowledge that the rain must be good for the clover and day lilies I planted.

Also on the plus side is the fact that the wind drove the hordes of blackflies away for a bit. When it died down again, I found myself breathing them in and swallowing them.

The last few days I have spent more time snuggling up with Kenya on the couch with a fire going watching movies than I have outside. It is supposed to get warmer and sunnier on Friday.

Movies

Born Romantic ... a feel good movie about some disparate people linked by a desire to find love and dance.

Water ... This film reveals how women are denigrated in the name of religion by people who use religion as a means to their own ends. Set in 1938 colonial India as Mahatma Ghandi's rise to power begins, it deals with Brahmins ... but its message is universal, and the film is excellent on many levels.

Notes on a Scandal ... Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett give excellent performances in this very uncomfortable film about two school teachers whose lives become horribly tangled.

Five Birches in the Woods

Kenya's Walk in the Woods