Longing for a No Fly Zone

You know the way salmon always return to the same stream where they were born and fight their way

back up it to spawn and die? Well, instead of salmon think of flies and instead of a fresh, rushing stream think of my apartment.  I am living in the midst of a mass return and die off of flies. It is as gross as it sounds.
When we came to view the apartment as a possible rental for us in January there were dead flies everywhere, hanging from fly strips, on the floors and windowsills, behind closed blinds on the skylights. Many, many flies. The apartment had been empty for a while and my first thought was that perhaps the previous tenants had died in the apartment and their bodies had not been discovered for days. Hey, it happens, but I think the rental manager has to disclose that. She wasn't offering up any tales of dead bodies so I chose not to bring it up but a couple of  small but highly suspicious stains on the bedroom carpet kept the thought firmly in my mind. Trying to see through the fly issue, we agreed to rent the apartment as long as the management cleaned up the flies and checked for any sources such as dead rodents and the like.  An exterminator came and gave the space a thumbs up, no rodents, no human corpses in the walls and so the cleaners came in and did their job. There was a bit of an ongoing dead fly clean up after moving in but I dealt with it, having been assured it was a one time thing.

Fall has now  arrived and with it a wave of dopey, slow moving flies. They fly around the windows outside, banging and banging into the glass or just crawl slowly across the panes. Up to four at a time get trapped between the screens and the closed windows, seemingly desperate to get inside. I avoid opening those windows. They find their way in from who knows where and buzz in the corners of windows searching for a way out. I have killed a dozen and vacuumed up double that amount and that's just this week. Twice a fly has bombed into my head as I sat reading. It's as if they are on their last legs, having lost all sense of direction or ability to manoeuvre. They just seem to know they need to be back in our apartment... to die. There is a particular corner of the living room that seems to be the final rest stop and requires my constant vigilance to keep the bodies from piling up. I keep several fly swatters around the apartment and the insides of the windows are smeared with the aftermath of my attacks. It is a particular type of torment, walking into a room to do something and having that sound, that intermittent buzz and tap of a big, fat fly noodling around a window frame, assault me.  It doesn't last long when I have a swatter in hand.

Making a mountain out of a molehill, you say? Perhaps, but I have lived in many different homes, some of which did have dead animal carcasses under the porch or in the crawlspace and I have never experienced a fly-festation as this. The common house fly is known as a filth fly (think about THAT) and "depending on species, they may seek moist, dark piles of trash, rotting carcasses or manure in which to lay their eggs." That comes straight off the Orkin.com pest control website and does NOT instill a sense of total confidence in me that I do not not have rotting corpses, human or animal in my walls. Or manure. My house is clean, there are no teenagers leaving food to rot under the bed. No compost bucket left to moulder on the counter, I'm pretty tidy. So all I can do now is stand ready, swatter and vacuum poised, to break the cycle of life for the fly kingdom which has decided to come back home, and let them know who lives here now....and hope that the previous tenants really did move out.

Are You A Working Girl?

"Are you a working girl?" he asked. I looked up from staring into a storefront window and took a moment to process the question. A middle aged man, dressed in the blue shirt and pants associated with a "blue collar" worker was looking at me inquiringly. "Are you a working girl?" he repeated quietly. I was killing time on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver while waiting for the BC Hydro office, in it's mosaic tiled building on Nelson and Burrard, to open. It was the first day of my first real full-time, grown up job and I had allowed too  much time to get from my family's home in Richmond by bus. I was due at the office at 8:00 AM and it was only 7:30 so I had decided to walk a few blocks in the beautiful morning sunshine.

This looks like a working girl!

It was 1974 and a perfect September day in Vancouver, like we are experiencing now,  a bright blue sky, a fresh crispness to the air after the summer's heat with the warmth of the sun slowly drying up the morning dew. I was preoccupied with my thoughts of the day ahead. I had never had a job other than babysitting or cutting hair or doing alterations for friends and family. Casual stuff of a teenager's life. Three months earlier I had graduated high school and turned seventeen but wanted my last summer of freedom before I started looking for full time work.  When I was ready a mother of a friend of a friend had gotten me the job as a favour and it was quite a big deal. It was hard to find work in a sea of baby boomers graduating high school and college and  BC Hydro was considered a great employer.  I could hardly wait to get started on my new life. Full time work, a generous paycheck, lots of time off. The world was awaiting me! I was so glad to be done with school, the boredom and monotony of my final years there was sloughing off me like an unwanted sweater on a hot day.

Walking off my nerves seemed like a good way to spend the extra time I had that morning. I can still remember my outfit, carefully picked for the occasion. A long, denim blue corduroy skirt with matching blue sandals (hey, it was the seventies!) and a short white jacket I had made in high school sewing class. Shiny, blow-dried hair and a bit of make up on my face that still carried the baby fat of youth. The early seventies clung to the glory days of the sixties hippie look, disco had not yet hit us all with its curling irons and heavy make up so the term "fresh faced" applied.
So there I was, full of importance about my first job at such a big firm. Was I a working girl? You bet I was! Me and Mary Richards. I said "yes" to the man asking the question. "Do you have any time right now?" came his next inquiry.  The universe walloped me upside the head and shouted "Dummy!"in my ear. So much for my fresh faced look and carefully coordinated outfit.  I didn't look ready for work in an office, I looked ready for work in bed! It never occurred to me that men picked up hookers at 7:30 in the morning on a weekday. I was a girl from the suburbs but well aware of what went on in the dark of downtown Vancouver, I just hadn't factored in the daylight hours stuff. I guess this guy had recently finished a night shift and wasn't ready to go home to bed alone. There were no other women that I could see strolling the streets where I was so I got the offer.


Not wanting to seem foolish or unsophisticated for misunderstanding the man I replied, ''no sorry, I'm busy now." So grown up. He apologized for disturbing me and walked away. Welcome to the adult world, the moment seemed to say. You are tired of high school and boring Richmond and living at home and playing at life?  Well, here it is. I laughed at myself, at my huge sense of self importance that had allowed me to misread such an obvious question. I was still a child in some ways but I felt I had made a tiny step onto the ladder of adulthood. I'd been mistaken for a prostitute! How adult was that?  I looked up into that gorgeous sky and if I had of had a hat like Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show did I would have thrown it into all that blue.

Too Much Information

They are putting a new roof on the building I live in right now and as we live on the top floor all the noise rests on our heads these days. It's making me peevish and when I feel that way I feel the need to let some of it out. My targets today are a couple of parts of the internet that drive me crazy. I love the internet, use it daily for all sorts of things, don't want to abolish it and go back to the old days but it really needs to trim the fat.

What an amazing thing it is when booking a trip to be able to look at restaurants and hotels, compare their pictures and amenities and check out the maps to find out where everything is in relationship to everything else. Truly one of the joys of the internet for me. To fine tune my bookings recently I went to the review sites and that's where the trouble started. For every positive review "Best meal of my life, so perfect!" there is an equally negative one "Don't waste your time and money, the worst!"  Then there are the long, rambling detailed reviews mentioning everybody and everything in glowing terms, most likely written by the owner's mother or next door neighbour. Those have to be ignored. After spending what feels like hours going down the rabbit holes of Tripadvisor and Yelp I finally make a judgement call based on what real truths I felt I could glean from the reviews. Yes, everyone agreed the place was noisy, decor was nice and the menu/room was small. Got it. The rest was crap.

People with an axe to grind take to the Internet, in droves. Those that were satisfied or even happy with their stay or meal or experience don't necessarily write a thing.  They might tell their friends on facebook about it while posting a picture and that's about it. Reviews of anything tend to be weighted to the very displeased  or even worse, those that just want to see their words in print on the web. Make of that what you will.

To confuse things further there is a lot of pressure from places you stay at and events you participate in to review your experience, with a not so subtle pressure in some cases to give the full five star rating. I gave a four star rating to a tour I had gone on in Italy and promptly got emailed by the owner of the company to ask why it wasn't five stars and would I please amend it as it helped them get more business if they had all five star reviews. Makes a woman want to walk away from the keyboard. After every hotel stay or restaurant booking had been fulfilled on my recent trip I received an email, "How was your experience with us? Please review it for us. People are waiting to hear what you thought!" Are they really? Aren't the other fifty or a hundred reviews enough? You need mine? I rarely review a thing unless I feel that there is something the booking public needs to know that is not mentioned on a hotel or restaurant website. On our recent trip we stayed in a brand new hotel that didn't have air conditioning as it was "green" and in an area with a cooler climate. A heat wave occurred during our stay and all the management could do was offer us a small fan to help with the discomfort.  I felt that the "greenness" of the hotel should have been highlighted on the website as it gave the hotel some definite quirks, including no air conditioning, parking, bell hops, room phones and room service. Some people might love that idea and book there because of it but those that love their a/c and having their coffee delivered in the morning should know and go elsewhere so I took to the 'net to say that.

Five years ago I felt that review sites had something to offer me, some honest evaluations of people's experiences but now, just like how Photoshop has made every picture suspect, the spectre of using fake reviews to boost your business or denigrate someone else's seems to hang over every site. I never know whether I am getting the truth or not and it makes me suspect everything. Other than my occasional posts as stated above I will try to stay away from the reviews altogether, despite the bribes being offered by restaurants for the chance to win a free meal for my five star review. I have my dignity, I won't be bought!

Then there is facebook, or as someone suggested it be called Envybook. We all do it, don't we?  We post only the carefully curated pictures of wonderful snippets of our lives, not the real truth of the everyday. These are designed precisely to make our " facebook friends" envious of what wonderful things we do and what a fantastic family, set of friends or pet we have. And it works.  If you want to feel bad about your life go on facebook for a while, see how the rest of the world is living it up.  A friend of mine was having a case of the "everyone has more fun than me" blues after perusing too much facebook material and I told her to start posting stuff herself. Anyone's life can look awesome and exciting when viewed through a narrow lens. Just cherry pick the pictures and add exciting fun captions! "Best kids ever! Love my city! Best hubby in the world! "  The truth need not enter in to it. Your child may have just told you that they hate and asked you for money, but find a pic of the two of you smiling and post away. "Great to share stuff with my fav pal!"  The "likes" will start pouring in and you'll feel better right away.  No recent pictures of fun stuff? No problem, post "memories"! It works just as well to make you feel better about your life and someone else bad about theirs. Ditto for Instagram. You get my gist.

I have a facebook account and use it to promote my blog. I don't post much other stuff and don't follow many people. I have had to unfollow several people as the postings were too much  for me to scan through continuously. Several friends of mine don't have a facebook account and they seem to get through their lives just fine. They keep their life to themselves and if they want to know what someone else is doing in theirs, they call them. Novel thought.

The internet is changing the world, improving lives, connecting people and allowing us to share information in ways that benefit all of us.  The pluses outweigh the minuses, no argument, but please, people...curb yourselves. When I think of all those reposted videos with cute cats or sassy, lecturing three year olds filling the fibre optic cables of the world and using up precious fossil fuels to cool the banks of computers processing it all it makes me cringe. And consider giving up blogging.

The High Life

We now live on the twelfth floor of a small building with only eleven other residents and we are the only renters. Our first taste of apartment life in thirty years. It's anonymous yet slightly claustrophobic at the same time. Everyone kind of knows who everyone else is because there are so few of us. Like living in a big cul de sac, where everyone can keep an eye on who is coming and going if they want, or retreat into their homes and ignore everyone. I see the same four people over and over and others, not at all. I probably ride the elevator with another person only twice a week. We expect to be alone in there and everyone gets startled when someone else appears.  I used to introduce myself if I found another occupant in the elevator but people seemed surprised when I did or they were visitors who didn't care who I was so I stopped. Everyone must know we are the new tenants but no one seems to want to know us. I think they like their sense of anonymity better than feeling like part of a small neighbourhood.  Okay, I'm good with that, a little personal space never hurt anyone.

When we first moved in at the end of March the weather was cool and I kept the windows closed. The apartment was eerily quiet, only the muted hum and clank of the elevator permeated the concrete walls. Sometimes it was the only sound that let me know there were other people around. I felt removed from life, sitting high above looking down but detached. Living in a house you have the constant backdrop of traffic near by, people chatting on the street, car doors slamming, dogs barking, birds singing. Twelve floors up behind double-paned windows all of that pretty much goes away. That coupled with all the windows everywhere I turned gave me the sensation that I was a lone goldfish silently swimming around in my big bowl, staring out at the world.  My husband was away on a business trip and I was so busy unpacking that I barely got outside. It was just me swimming above and the expanse of the city below and people trying not to know who I was in the elevator.

My closest neighbours.

We have been in the apartment a few months now and the warmer weather finally arrived. Windows in all rooms are open most days and the world has come roaring into the space. Rather than being a lone goldfish I now feel like I have the whole aquarium swirling around me. Horns, sirens, screeching tires, barking dogs, seagulls complaining as they drop crap on my balcony, it all floats up to me in a daily cacophony. That constant hum that comes with any city of decent size. Then there is all the humanity living around me in the other buildings. I have the advantage of not having any building right beside me, the closest is across the street so I watch the small snippets of other lives from a distance. Someone sunning themselves, the guy who always takes a smoke on his small balcony,  a few people tend their BBQs. One woman likes to water her plants without pants on.  Its all quite normal but yet fascinating to think of all those lives being lived around me. Together, yet apart.   At first I had the urge to close the blinds as it got dark every night, to shield myself from other curious eyes but I am used to it now and leave my blinds open in the living area, aware I am both the watcher and the watched.  Part of it all.

The stage lights come on and the play continues.

Life feels a bit loud at times up here, a bit too much of the world inside my space but I know come the fall I will close the windows and the world will go on mute again. Then I have only to step into the empty elevator and descend to the street for a walk to feel a part of it all. It is a street filled with more cars and more people than I am used to as this move has plunged us into a higher density area with lots of apartments rather than only family homes.The average age of the people on the street is younger as in this city the young cannot afford the houses I lived among before so they are here in apartments, like me. There is a different pulse and energy to it all.
Life is about change and this is just one more for us. I'm sure the noise will become like a companion and the ease of apartment living will overtake the loss of a garden and a patch of grass to call my own. I will adopt the nod and smile approach in the elevator and keep to myself, alone but surrounded, a city dweller.

Another Miracle Diet! Who Cares?

Just how hard is it to lose weight after the age of fifty? Really hard. The magazines in my online account are all blasting the same message right now - how to lose weight quick and get in shape for that beach body we are all looking for this summer. Low carb, Paleo, vegan,  liquid meal replacements, low calorie, no white food, "clean" food. It's a steady stream of what and what not to put in our mouths to get the desired result which is less fat on our bodies.  At my age it seems that you have to run harder just to stay in the same place with things like weight control and fitness. Results are hard to come by due to changing hormone levels and slower metabolisms.  My husband is a huge believer in the low carb diet and it has worked very well for him in the past but lately the results are not as impressive. I favour the low calorie, high fibre kind of diet. Again, results are not as impressive as they once were. What to do now?

I can barely remember a time when I was not concerned with my weight. That is a sad thought but true.  I was my mother's plumpest baby, with adorable, squeezable, chubby legs and arms. I grew into a normal sized child until about ten years old when the chubby reappeared. I preferred reading over running and loved potato chips and cookies so the weight stuck around. I wouldn't have made it onto the Maury Povich Show as a freakishly obese child but I did get some teasing and knew that I was not like my skinny sisters who bookended me in the family. Puberty struck and with it a huge surge in height which achieved a much desired result- I slimmed down. That stage was short lived. After high school, began a forty year period of ups and downs in my weight which continues till today.  The fat ever so slowly creeps onto my body and once I awaken to its stealth attack I ever so slowly wrestle it off. It is a slow motion battle between exhausted adversaries who will not give up the fight. No magic diets, no fast and amazing weight drops. Just a grind.

When I was chasing after my own two small children every day I could eat what I wanted and not gain weight, but otherwise I have pretty much mentally tallied every calorie that has gone in my mouth as an adult. That is a tiresome job, people.  A good friend and I have a deep bond over this issue as she, too has "dieted" most of her life.  We are living calorie counters, no app required.  The good news for us is that almost all of our slimmer peers have gone on to gain as much or more weight than we have. Age - its a great leveller. The pretty grow plain, the slim get heavy.

So now instead of being the "big girl" as I felt I was in the skinny era of the seventies, I sit in the middle of the pack even though I am over twenty pounds heavier then when I was in my twenties. My two sisters have suffered a similar fate and I'm betting it's even harder for them to deal with as their inner vision of themselves is probably much slimmer than mine is of me. Once chubby you are always chubby in your head. I can feel you "inner fatties" nodding. I understand.

Me at 18 years old,
Oh, to be so "big" again!

Weight loss is not out of my reach, its just an equation, calories in, calories burned. Simple. But here's where I see the real change for those of us over fifty, beyond metabolic rates and loss of muscle...we just don't care as much.  The media finally has less effect on us and our self worth as determined by our thigh gap (I've never had one - see picture). We want to enjoy life and what we have worked hard for and sometimes that includes a piece of chocolate, an extra glass of wine or some of the demon white flour in the form of pasta or a baguette. No young man with the body of a Greek god is breaking down my door, promising me love if I would just lose those extra ten pounds and then we could run away and make the world envious with our physical beauty. No, that is not happening. I am invisible to young Greek gods now but I am healthy, reasonably fit, not on any medications.  That is what I care about now.

I just read an article in Prevention Magazine about health and fitness expectations for every decade in a woman's life. After sixty, it said, don't worry about those few extra pounds. They are needed to protect you if you fall (padding!) and will come in handy if you get seriously ill. Now that is the best news I've read all year. I will no longer consider myself overweight but rather I am in self protection mode.

Do You Believe in Miracles?

My mother once told me that every marriage was a little miracle. Quite a statement. She was married for almost sixty years so she witnessed her own little miracle. Any marriage of that length has its ups and downs and to be able to ride them out and have a happy enough final decade of marriage that you are bereaved when it's over, well, that's a miracle in my books. Unlike many widowed women, my mother was anxious to get right back into another relationship, she missed her marriage. I know of other older women who were griefstricken at the loss of their husbands but when that passed they had no desire for another one.  None. Life was much easier with only one person's needs to take of and no one trying to control you. I can see that but it does not mean their marriage wasn't a miracle while it lasted. It was.

I was at a celebration of life for my dear uncle on the weekend and he had had a long and happy marriage to my aunt. She predeceased him by more than a year and a half and he longed to be reunited with her even if it meant death. That's a commitment to your marriage! While at the gathering I chatted a bit with my cousins children who are at the beginning of their adventures in miracles. One is married, two are engaged and one lives common law. My niece and nephew recently had marriages of their own. It comes with the age bracket I am in now, children of friends and relatives are getting married for the first time. It starts one to pondering.

I believe that living together and marriage are not the same thing. I have done both so I know what it feels like, and that being said, I admit that living together for a long time with someone with or without the label of marriage is quite a feat. I don't know of as many lengthy common law relationships as I do marriages but that is changing and I will be interested to see if common law marriages last as long as often as the old fashioned kind. We humans can go through some pretty profound changes as we mature and keeping a relationship humming along through all that is challenging. Throw in the destabilizing factor of children and career changes and well, it really is a miracle that the divorce rate is only about 50%.  Are you the same person you were ten, twenty or thirty years ago? Some parts of ourselves never change but our opinions, tastes, interests and health certainly can. The challenge is to keep subtly reinventing a relationship as each party in it morphs and becomes more who they really are. Age strips away some of the willingness to please, to accommodate, to make the glass slipper fit by cutting off a toe. We just want to be ourselves and be accepted as such. Many, if not all couples see rocky patches in their marriages and often it is that fragile but binding thing called "marriage" that keeps them together until they can find their balance again. Sometimes it works and the marriage continues, often it doesn't. When a marriage falls apart it doesn't mean that marriage was a failure, it just ran its course and ceased to be a miracle. For some the marriage was never a little miracle in the making, it was just never going to work.

Watching the young couples around me marry and start down the road of trying to create their lasting miracle makes me think what an optimistic lot we are, us human beings. I mean, really, the divorce rate has hovered around the 50% mark for decades now, higher for second and third marriages. Some of this young love is doomed to fail when it comes to adapting to living with another person and yet the institution of marriage is still there and a whole segment of people are clamouring to get in on it. Gay marriage is a growing market showing again that marriage and living together are different animals. For some people living together is just not enough. And just as surely as the horse gets followed by the carriage, gay divorce will follow gay marriage for many couples. Divorce lawyers are thrilled as a whole new demographic is being added to their practice. Miracles are hard to create, gay or straight.

Marriage is so full of compromise. And what is compromise but a state in which neither party gets exactly what they want. Sort of a fine/fine rather than a win/win or win/lose. And yet we continue to marry and to stay married, and to remarry after divorce. But then people keep opening new restaurants on the site where others have failed so there is that unbridled optimism again. You have to hand to us, it takes a lot to keep us down sometimes.  I am traversing my thirty fourth year of marriage and at this point feel I will stay married until the "death do us part" thing happens but it's not totally up to me, it takes two people to make each little miracle happen. In these times where miracles feel far and few between I will take what I have, consider it miraculous and wish the same for those just saying their vows. Good luck to you,  and believe in miracles.

Finally Surfacing From Moving Madness

Hello again to my few and faithful followers. I have not disappeared, merely been sidetracked by a more difficult settling in period to our new apartment than expected and an unusually prolonged and painful bout of back pain. The two things go hand and hand of course, the moving process aggravates my back and the ensuing pain limits what I can do with the unpacking and setting up of our home. Such is life. Sometimes it hands you an enforced slow down and I am in such a moment right now.

Thankfully, my husband has a good strong back to do the heavy lifting when he is around and the large jobs have for the most part been done.  My initial "to do" lists have been ticked off, chores and errands completed, only to be replaced by new lists. The apartment we rented has not been that well maintained as will happen with rental properties and that has caused me some headaches. The rental manager receives almost daily emails from me about problems and I'm sure she is enjoying receiving them as much as I enjoy sending them. Not very much.

Another nasty leak discovered.

She is doing her best to work through the issues but the whole thing leaves me braindead and tired at the end of the day, popping Advil and laying on heating pads. Not a situation conducive to thinking up witty, creative ideas for blog posts. I'm obviously not as good a multitasker as I thought I was.

On the bright side, literally, the sun has finally come out. It pours through the many windows in my new home and cheers me up as I struggle to get upright some days. I'm exploring my neighbourhood on foot with short walks when I can get breaks from the visits of appliance repairmen and other service people. This last sunny weekend was such a gift, I felt summer had moved in. Ted and I walked to Granville Island and enjoyed a lunch on the deck at Bridges, putting our "to do" list on hold for a while and just relaxing together. Then it was back home to get things done but the pause was rejuvenating.

The birds welcomed us to the neigh-
bourhood with a spray of poop. Yup,
that's how its going.

As I said in a previous post it is not the packing and actually moving of our stuff that is the hard part of a move, it's making a place a home. Making our square pegs fit into round holes takes some effort. It's not rocket science, it just takes time and energy and many trips to Home Depot. Some moves are easier than others in this arena.... furniture fits, electronics work, appliances do what they are supposed to and other times....well, let's just say we are in one of those other times.
These are all First World problems, I am well aware of that, they are nothing to lose sleep over merely details to be dealt with. And they will be dealt with and my back will continue to improve and all will be right as rain soon enough. Oops, didn't mean to mention rain.

If you have opened this post and read to this point, thanks for sticking with me. It has been a year now of blogging for me and I have taken time to assess and review the whole venture while lying on my back in the floor letting my muscles relax.  I have considered stopping blogging at this time and that is still on the table but for right now I will continue and see where it leads me.
Post a comment, send me an email at whatfayesaid@gmail.com  or forward this post to someone who might read it. I appreciate all of it.