Another Year Has Slipped the Reins

The Christmas decorations are all boxed up, the poinsettias are in the compost, the new year has been rung in and out. It’s 2018. We have survived a year of President Trump's twitters, Prime Minister Trudeau's socks, sexual harassment charges galore, wild fires and torrential rains, and North Korea did not push the big red button...yet.  Just another year of good and bad.  As I have written before, I don’t do New Years resolutions and this year will be no exception.  I am at the bottom of my energy cycle, the battery is drained,  just waiting it out now until spring arrives.  This blog post is being fueled by caffeine and gingerbread cookie, not by enthusiasm. Being honest with you here.

What is the hoopla about the turning of a new year anyways?  Why such a feeling of renewal and resolution for many people all around one slim day, January 1st? It’s arbitrary. It's just another year., actually just another day between one year and the next. People want to know what your plans are for the coming year, your goals.  Well, much the same as last year, folks. Take care of myself and others, be a good person, tackle the challenges with some grace and grit. The same old rules apply. There will be no easy wins, stuff happens with hard work and commitment, small joys need to be celebrated as much as the big ones, losses taken in stride, hope sown, despair weeded out.  That’s about as specific as l like to get as we all know what happens to best laid plans.... they oft go awry, so I’ve heard.  I do make plans and set goals for myself but with an understanding that this year may not be any more helpful in achieving them than the last year was. There is no magic in the change of number on the calendar. A good friend had a challenging last six months and she commented that she was looking forward to 2018 as 2017 was a prime number and she has always disliked prime numbers. That’s as good a reason as any to ring in the new year on a hopeful note.

We humans are so irrational, emotional and so easily swayed by the unexplainable. We go on feelings, gut instincts, lucky numbers, auspicious signs, and our horoscopes in the paper that morning. Anything can cause us to have a good or bad day, feel our luck is turning for or against us. Hitting three green lights in a row, no line up at the coffee shop, finding a twenty dollar bill in the coat we put on can make our day feel like a good one.  Research has shown that people who believe themselves to be lucky are more lucky. Makes no sense but there is some science to it apparently.

So that brings us back to the turning over of a calendar year and the effect it has on us. Some people can hardly wait for the year to end as they feel a new year will bring better luck or more happiness than the one that is finishing, with no actual reason for that other than faith in a new start of sorts.

 The Romans priests before the reign of Julius Caesar manipulated the calendar any way they wanted, shortening and lengthening it to suit their purposes. They could keep people in office or boot them out by changing the calendar.  Now that’s power! We don’t have that ability, sadly, so we must go along with the length of the year given us, why?  When approaching a birthday with one of the weighty zeros at the end I decided to give up the number counting and become ageless, maybe now is the time to become yearless.  It will be neither a good year nor a bad year ahead, just another set of days, the same as we had last week and the week before. This puts the onus for change and fresh starts where it belongs, not on poor overworked January 1 but on us. As for the annual party and popping of champagne and wearing of silly hats that we have all enjoyed at times, let's move that to a day that deserves it, a day that really does something for us - the winter solstice.

Another minute of daylight, now that is something to celebrate!

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Want To Know About The Other Sex? Pick Up Their Magazines

A typical cover for Men's
Health

It started out innocuously enough.  I had purchased a subscription to Men's Health magazine for my husband as he was working out regularly and I thought he might enjoy it. He barely glanced at it. This was back in the day when you actually bought physical magazines and had them delivered to your house.  My ingrained thriftiness wouldn't allow me to let the magazine go unread every month, I would get my money's worth out of it, so I picked it up and started to read. Since I worked out at the gym twice a week I thought that the information the magazine was giving out might just as well pertain to me.
My world at the time was very estrogen heavy, filled with other stay-at-home moms raising their kids. While it was comforting to share what I was experiencing with my female friends who were doing the same thing it could get a bit.... boring. And then along came Men's Health magazine. Bam! I was hooked. Opening the cover was opening the door to another world. A testosterone filled one. The writing was sharp and punchy, even aggressive. A "kick in the pants" style telling men to get off the couch, work out, cook something healthy, dress better, do some personal grooming and how they could please a woman in bed.  They were speaking my language.

I had had enough of women's magazines showing me how to stay young and sexy to delight my husband while raising brilliant children in an impeccable home. I was more than ready for another point of view.  Raising two boys and married to a man, this stuff was relevant for me. Soon I was picking up GC and Esquire to round out the picture and everyone just assumed my husband was the one who read them. The inner workings of the male body, and the male mind, why wouldn't this appeal? The writing was so good, funny and direct. Interviews with well known athletes, movie stars, politicians, and writers; coverage of scandals and crimes; medical breakthroughs and great nutritional advice, fashion and grooming ...it was all there, but with a male slant. Written by men for men. I became a better gift giver for the men in my life, got styling tips on keeping my husband well-dressed and I found out what was a turn off and turn on for men sexually, at least according to the magazines. I learnt about making classic cocktails, how to get six pack abs and that vexing question of whether to match your sock colour to your shoe or pant (answer:pant).  And the pictures! What's not to like about well-muscled, handsome men in spandex doing push ups? Or one wearing a $3000 suit, glancing at a $10,000 watch.

It was reassuring to see that the media was pushing a physical ideal on men that was just as out of reach for most of the population as the one that the women's magazines were pushing on me. I knew these male models were clocking many hours in the gym every week and living off of chicken breasts and celery sticks to maintain their 42 inch chests and 29 inch waists. I appreciated every ounce of their effort. And, I could follow their work out regime as published in the magazine to try and attain those abs for myself! What's not to love?

Eye candy aside it was the topics and the writing that kept me reading. Advances in prostate cancer research, new information on cardiac health, how men feel about their father and being a father. It was all great stuff and not what was being discussed with the moms at the school playground. It was truly an alternate universe for me that helped me to better care for and understand my husband and sons in ways that Good Housekeeping or Vogue could not.
Eventually though the bloom came off the rose. Just as with other magazines the stories became repetitive. There are only so many ways to pump up a bicep or make a steak salad or groom your facial hair. The subscription got canceled and I now only rarely look at Esquire on my iPad but I have nothing but fond memories of my journey through the world of men's publishing. I like to think it gave my little universe a bit of balance at a time when I felt I was drowning in ways to decorate my table for Easter.  Perhaps in this outraged #metoo world it might do men some good to pick up a few magazines aimed at women and give them a read. You never know what understanding may lay beyond that door.

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Yup, It's November Again

It's relentless outside as I write this, a constant deluge of rain, clouds have descended into the tree tops and the sound of life outside is drowned out by the rush of water all around me. My apartment has many windows and skylights and the effect today is one of living in a glass globe placed under a waterfall. Cascading is the only word that comes to mind.

I had been searching for some blogging inspiration by going through my previous posts, looking at things I had started and not finished and there it was - a post about November, started last November  the 23rd. Today is the 21st of the month and my mood is the same as it was then. Dark and damp. And the forecast for the next seven days is less daylight, more rain. The Vancouver Sun today tells me that the rainfall to date this month is 63 mm or 2.48 inches more than the normal totals. It has been raining a lot.

My father hated November and after he retired, he and my mom often planned a holiday somewhere warmer and drier for this month. I didn't understand it then.  November for me was just a break between a gorgeous, golden leaf-filled October and Christmas, a time to start gift

shopping and enjoying the new tv season. What was the problem?  February had always been my problem month. Cold, bleak and devoid of highlights except for the manufactured silliness of Valentine's Day. But now, I am starting to see my dad's point of view. November sucks.

Is November weather getting worse or is it just me?  I have always been sensitive to the cold, that is nothing new so my home is warm and I keep wool cardigans and throws handy and sheepskin slippers on my feet. The hall closet is filled, almost embarrassingly so with down coats, scarves, gloves and boots. I am prepared for the outdoors.

I just don't want to go out there. I suffer from SAD, Seasonal Affected Disorder, but I'm venturing a guess that most of us that live here feel a touch of the winter blues. For me it manifests as a desire to drink coffee and/or wine, eat carbs and chocolate and stay in bed as long as I can in the morning. My brain turns foggy and my memory is poor. At the end of the day I can't remember what I was supposed to have accomplished with the previous hours. Whatever it was probably didn't get done if it wasn't written down. I use a light therapy box in the mornings and force myself to get outside as much as I can as even a grey day offers some benefit to those suffering from SAD.  Some days it doesn't seem important enough to bundle up and brave it though, I'd rather eat another cookie and find things to do inside. I don't suffer enough to require medication I just need November to pass. It appears it's not the weather getting worse that is the problem.

December never seems to be quite as bad as November, it usually doesn't rain as much. Then, as the winter miracle approaches on December 21st, that being the solstice, not the birth of Christ, my spirit lifts every so slightly. The days start getting longer, praise the lord!  There are also the distractions of Christmas and New Year's Eve to make the days sparkle a bit as opposed to the solemness of Remembrance Day that November holds. November could be enjoyed as the start of ski season, the play-off time for football, the NHL gets into gear, and the Black Friday sales are coming ....but not for me. Here on the great wet coast of BC it's dark, it's damp and I'm pulling the blankets over my head and making cookie crumbs in the bed. Wake me up December 22nd.

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Can a Taste for Opera Be Developed?

I love the Sydney Opera House,
Does that count?

Opera. Does anyone really like it or is it like eating tripe or brains? You are supposed to like it if you have more refined and adventurous tastes than average but in actuality its a tough slog for everyone.  Are people just forcing themselves to like it? Fake it till you make it?  I have heard it brings people to tears and transports them to a higher realm of being but I just don't get it. I mean no disrespect to the people that perform it, they spend a lifetime honing their skills, and full disclosure, I am pretty much tone deaf. I cannot sing on key at all, nor can I hum a melody to a song that anyone would recognize. How I ended up with two musically inclined children is all due to my husband's genes.

When I was twenty I had a boyfriend who had been raised in Europe on classical music and he loved it. He listened to it in the car and at home, watched classical concerts and opera on tv. He loved it like I loved the Eagles or Stevie Wonder so I was exposed to it all the time. My upbringing was filled with radio pop and the hard rock of my older brother's records but I was willing to try and appreciate classical music since my boyfriend seemed so taken with it but after a while the minute he left the apartment or the car, the radio station got changed.  I tried, I really did. I grew in knowledge to be able to tell the difference between the violin playing of Itzhak Perlman and Yehudi Menuhin but I could not savour the experience like he did. When the relationship ended so did my exposure to classical music for the most part, other than the occasional bit I got through movies or being put on hold on the phone.  I tried again years later when my son got interested in classical music and was given an array of CD's for presents. I would slip some Mozart into rotation on my cd changer in the car and give it a go but invariably it ended up creeping me out or boring me so I gave up. Just being honest here.

A physiotherapist who treated me about ten years ago was always regaling me with his love for opera and I felt like an ignorant dummy for saying I wasn't interested in it without ever actually having been to an opera. So I made a decision that I was allowed to dislike something...like tripe, as long as I had tried it with an open mind.  I bought tickets to the Vancouver Opera performance of Carmen, something with recognizable music, not obscure and demanding, and went with the intention to have my mind blown and my tastes changed. This was the real thing, albeit not the Metropolitan Opera or anything of that calibre but it was live and these were professionals. The lights went down, the performance began and my eyes started ping ponging back and forth from the video translation rolling by far above the singers heads and the actual action on the stage.  It was amazing how hard it was to read and follow the story while trying to listen to the singing and appreciate it. Finally I just ignored the translation and let the action and music roll over me. Easier but like watching a foreign film without the subtitles, sometimes I could understand what was going on and other times there was a barrier that I couldn't climb over, nothing made sense. It was slow...and long.

The first time I tasted a sushi tuna roll I didn't like it but I grew to like it very much over time so I figured I had better give opera another chance. A good friend of mine offered to go with me as she had the same curiosity about it as I did so we bought tickets to The Marriage of Figaro.

The wonderful poster by
Edel Rodriguez of
The Marriage of Figaro

A little more lighthearted than Carmen.  Our big mistake was to indulge in a nice meal and a glass of wine before hand. Maybe two glasses of wine. The lights went down, the music commenced and within an hour our eyelids were drooping and our heads were nodding. Opera is long! Despite all the shenanigans on stage and the playfulness of the story we could not keep our eyes open. We stuck it through to the end and exited the theatre shamed by our infantile inability to appreciate "culture".

I have made peace with my lack of enthusiasm for classical music and opera. The door to the magical room where classical music feeds the soul is closed to me and that's okay, let others enjoy it.  The constant struggle the Vancouver Opera and the Vancouver Symphony have with keeping up ticket sales tells me I am not alone. Try to get an overpriced ticket to an Elton John or a Rolling Stones concert and you will see where my generation is spending their entertainment dollars. Opera has been crossed off my list. Now, does anyone know a place that serves good tripe?

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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.