Ottawa is a beautiful city, easy to live in, to access parks and a green environment with its broad greenbelt.  Driving along the Eastern Parkway alongside the broad Ottawa River to arrive at downtown Ottawa reminds us of the peaceful and tranquil drive around Washington, D.C. although we are far more comfortably familiar with our own.  Washington has the distinction of being a site of many national monuments and public museums and art galleries.  Ottawa doesn't do too poorly in that department, as a much smaller nation with one-tenth the population of the United States.

Along Wellington Street, before the national monuments that are the Parliament Buildings and other government institutions, monuments honouring our war dead, the National Mint, National Gallery, and architectural focuses like the Chateau Laurier and the old Ottawa Railway Station, now a Conference Centre alongside newer ones with window curtain walls leaning over the Rideau Canal, there is much to look at and admire, including the Library and Archives and Supreme Court buildings, the new War Museum.

But at this time of year it is the presence of mature trees that overwhelm the senses, travelling from the Eastern to the Western Parkway, glimpsing the gushing waters of the Rideau Falls and the sites of old rapids reminding us of etchings contained in Picturesque Canada, where the river is dotted with Canada Geese resting on their flight south, and trees have turned orange, red and yellow, that enthrall the senses. 

It's a sleek, tiny creature with bright, inquisitive eyes.  At a distance, easily overlooked if it were not that the tall man holding it had his arm crooked, and a slender leash hanging down, swaying as he walked.  As the distance between us closed my husband recognized the man and realized that he was carrying his little weasel.  We had seen them both on several occasions over the years.  Although the first time had been with another little animal, since gone, and this was its replacement.

Dogs, he tells us, even very large ones come up close to sniff the weasel and none of them exhibit any kind of hostility to it, in his experience.  Sometimes the dog owners are alarmed, calling their dogs off, but he calms their fears.  Dogs obey him, he said, with a grin, where they often ignore whatever their owners direct them to do.  They sit docilely at his feet, and he allows them to smell the little creature who itself exhibits no fear.

He carries it when the occasion demands, when they're approaching a situation he cannot fully anticipate.  Otherwise, the very small, and quite beautiful little animal prefers to wander along on its own, on leash.  The leash is its outdoor companion; occasionally the weasel will insist, and the man will allow it to wander off in the underbrush, leash trailing.  He has not yet had an occurrence that he couldn't control.

And because of its great curiosity, it becomes readily bored, so that they tend to wander off to other exploration opportunities rather than to return to the same woodland trails time and again, which explains the few times we've come across them previously.  Winter or summer, they venture out together; when snow is on the ground the little weasel prefers to burrow through it than attempt to clamber over it.

It has an intense curiosity about everything surrounding it, including me, sniffing my hands in rapid sniffing motions, looking up at me, scrutinizing details about me that I cannot imagine might be of any interest to a creature faced with another of nature's creations when there is such a size disparity.  What might it be thinking?

One more time when I regretted not having my handy little digital camera with me.

I don't generally notice details.  My husband is a great observer, unlike me.  Very little passes beyond his notice.  I attribute that trait in him to his mind, forever curious, and his artistic, creative penchant for details.  As for me, I remain fairly oblivious to much that goes on around me.  Most particularly when I am busy doing something that demands my close attention.

Last time I was at the supermarket doing the food shopping I did notice someone.  A young woman in her early-to-mid 20s.  She was elegantly slim, her burnished hair tied back in an attractive pony-tail showing off the fine contours of her very pretty face.  Casually dressed and with care, she wore tight pants and stiletto heels.

It wasn't what she wore or how she looked that took my attention, though.  I happened to be in the personal hygiene aisle, musing over shampoo labels on sale that day.  She, behind me, was focused on shelves of emollients, creams, beauty products that I never look at.  And it was what she was engaged in that caught me short.  She, on the other hand, was so engrossed in what she was doing that she seemed oblivious to my presence.  I stood there, watching her as she carefully considered the products visually, then lifted one after another off the shelf, to unscrew their tops, break the seals and perform a sniff test.

Nothing seemed to rise to the occasion of her aroma search, so she just kept replacing the opened products and selecting others.  I was fascinated and aghast, but did a mental shrug and moved on.  I've been thinking about that ever since.  That I should have pointed out to her that what she was engaged in was pure vandalism.  She was negating the value of those products by pillaging their sterile condition for her personal satisfaction.

On other occasions I have spoken to people, but not too often, not since it became illegal and widely known that people should not be smoking in the confines of a supermarket, nor for that matter anywhere else where their habit would both disturb and cause damage to others' state of health.  This young woman was doing just that in her own way; destructive and wanton.

In retrospect it seems obvious to me now that this is a routine she must often engage in.  And obviously one that no one else has called her on.  Pity that I wasn't the one to break the mold.

So after all it was a cyst that had somehow developed a decade earlier subcutaneously on my abdominal wall.  And it was that cyst that, for the third time during that period manifested its presence by becoming infected, swelling to alarming proportions (relatively speaking) and causing this latest little episode for which I had little option but to pursue medical care. 

The morning after my failed attempt to have the resulting abscess drained at the Urgent Care Centre when my personal physician who "doesn't do that" referred me to the centre with an inadequate referral protocol, I appeared there again.  I arrived at eleven in the morning, departed after three in the afternoon.  When I arrived the waiting room was only half-full; a half-hour later it was teeming with people all awaiting their turn to be called.  Oddly enough I realized that there were few older people present, most were considerably younger, and some quite young, people in their 20s, teens, children.

When eventually my number came up the receptionist went in search of the fax that had twice been requested of my doctor's office, and there was nothing.  She looked at the scribbled referral on the prescription form my doctor had handed to me the day before and said, unlike her predecessor of yesterday that there was no reason it couldn't be accepted as a proper referral, and a doctor she conferred with concurred.

Duly registered for treatment, I sat again in the waiting room for another hour.  When the sole nurse on duty that day (short-handed they were) called my name she directed me to an examining room saying she would return shortly.  'Shortly', unfortunately turned out to be another two-thirds of an hour.  After her brief examination including taking my temperature, she left, apologizing for the long wait, telling me that the doctor would be with me 'shortly'.

'Shortly' once again became a relative and understated term, but once he did arrive, the doctor answered all my questions good-naturedly as he set about examining then draining the abscess.  A common enough occurrence he said, that people as they aged particularly would develop a cyst, and the cyst would become periodically inflamed then infected as mine was.  He recommended I have it surgically removed, some months hence.

During our conversation he revealed that he was 72 years of age.  A genial, somewhat corpulent, and obviously technically competent physician, continuing to use his brains and the expertise he had acquired over the years satisfied his needs.  He mentioned as well that one of his colleagues at the clinic was 78 years old.  So much for the debilitation of old age in those who decline the presumed excesses of the aging process, when they are able to.

He cleaned up the area and packed it, and informed me I would have to return in two days' time to have the packing removed, the wound assessed as to whether a fresh packing would be required, or not.  And then I was released to the fresh air, my waiting husband and our little dog, all of us anxious to set out on our regular ravine perambulation.

I was decidedly unhappy to find myself in the large, crowded waiting room of an Urgent Care Clinic yesterday afternoon, where I spent several frustrating and inconclusive hours awaiting treatment.   Others waiting there patiently to be seen by a medical professional had, like me, no visible sign of medical distress.  Other than the children, harshly coughing, and adults sneezing.  Obviously, like a hospital itself, not the most germ-free of environments.

Ten years ago I had noticed, on my midriff, what looked very much like a spider bite.  It was a small swelling which, over the succeeding days, became progressively larger and more swollen. And, as well, irritated.  Until it also became infected, and at that point painful to the touch. 

Considering it a minor matter, I didn't go the geographic distance to our family doctor located where we had once lived for twenty years, instead choosing to go to a neighbourhood walk-in medical clinic.  Where the doctor there heard me out, looked at the thing, tch-tched, then wiped a knife across it, drained it, bandaged it, wrote out a prescription for anti-biotic and sent me on my way.

Since then, that same kind of episode has twice re-occurred.  On the second occasion, at another walk-in clinic, the doctor did the same thing.  A week ago, from the very same area, another bump began emerging, became enlarged steadily, red and angry, then appeared to be infected. 

This time I made an appointment to see my (new) family doctor (the old one having retired).  This new doctor, a young, stylish woman whose accented patter I can barely decipher looked at the thing, confirmed it was abscessed, and said she doesn't "do" such things.  Obviously no spider bite, but something lodged subcutaneously that erupts occasionally.

She described for me the pattern of treatment that would have to be undertaken, precisely what had been done formerly at those walk-in clinics and informed me that I would have to attend the nearby urgent care clinic to get someone there to do something fairly routine which she doesn't "do".  She scribbled a referral on a prescription pad, handed it to me to show to the clinic.  Then took my blood pressure, and unsurprisingly, it was higher than normal.

Which was how I ended up at the clinic.  The good news is that the clinic is handily close, right in our neighbourhood.  The bad news (for me) was that the receptionist would not recognize the scribbled prescription note as a referral - and this after I'd waited for an hour just to get to the reception desk; a numbered, first-come protocol at that busy place.

The receptionist obligingly called my doctor's office and asked that a proper referral be faxed over to allow them to proceed because OHIP cannot be billed twice on the same day for the same person seeing two separate doctors for one single cause without a proper referral.  A wait of an hour ensued, after which the receptionist placed that call and request again.

At which point I just walked out, infection intact, when after another half-hour wait no fax had arrived.

Another set of stained glass windows are now in the process of being designed.  Usually my husband shows me the first of the cartoons he puts together in the search for a creative design that we will both find pleasing.  This time, nothing of the sort.  He sequestered himself downstairs in his workshop, stretched out a long piece of blank drawing paper to the equivalent size of each window and began the process.  Beside him lay books and magazines opened to inspirational paintings.

Days later when curiosity finally drove me to observe what he had so far created, what I saw rather surprised me.  It was the careful drawing in great detail of a moose, its massive size and antlers dominating a landscape.  It was beautifully crafted, and I told him so.  I also reminded him of my reaction to any paintings I've ever seen that featured moose, and he laughed, admitting that this is why he hadn't bothered consulting me. 

He views the topic as a challenge to his stained-glass creativity and he was anxious to see if he could surmount any technical difficulties he might encounter along the way.  He was consulting various paintings and using them as inspiration for what he was carefully placing on paper.  With the bull moose, he said, there will be a female counterpart on the facing window.  Pairs are often shown together, he explained.

These windows are to be placed atop the first-level windows in the family room, not yet covered with stained glass.  Where the first-level windows have been devoted to the Canadian landscape and birds typical of that landscape, quite unlike more exotic windows that have been installed in the living room side of the house.

This will doubtless represent my husband's major project during the coming winter of 2012-13.

Finally, rescue.  I felt pretty hopeless about the situation, given the lack of success encountered by no fewer than six consultations and efforts on the part of Bell Sympatico technicians to restore my email connectivity.  While all of the technicians with whom I was connected through the technical assistance protocol established by Sympatico seemed genuinely invested in finding the problem, none had succeeded.

Saturday after I spent three exhausting hours on the telephone witnessing one technician who had sounded so confident at the start of the exercise, finally exhaust all his technical resources, my hope for a fix was in the doldrums.  As far as he was concerned everything appeared technically in order, he was not able to rectify the problem because he was unable to identify it.  He apologized and sounded utterly regretful; I felt for him.

On Sunday I tried a few things on my own but nothing worked, and as a result I had no option but to resort to asking the experts for their help once again.  I had just logged on to the Sympatico site, made contact through "livetalk" with one of these professionals and was just on the cusp of authorizing her to take over control of my computer, when the telephone rang.

When I answered the call, the caller identified himself as a Bell Sympatico technician, responding to a written message and further request for assistance I had made earlier in the day online, which had completely slipped my mind.  I felt in a quandary, not knowing how to proceed, whether with his help or that of the remote-connected technician I was about to authorize for control.  The issue was solved when that connection timed out and the man to whom I spoke assured me he could solve my problem.

I was beyond skeptical, but grateful nonetheless to have the attention of someone who professed to be technically proficient, and set about authorizing him control of the computer.  It took this man no time at all - mere minutes - to pinpoint the problem, rectify it and restore my email connection.  Evidently this had all been caused by the helpfulness of a young neighbour whom I had asked for help in setting up an email account on my newly-acquired computer and whose manipulation of the parameters had been a trifle deficient; enough so to disrupt my email flow completely.

Problem finally solved; moreover this technician, who hailed from El Salvador, swiftly installed a new working email program on my new computer, as well, something I had hesitated to undertake myself until the problem with the old computer upstairs had been solved.  I felt immensely grateful to him, told him so, and informed him he had solved an issue that defied the experience of so many others before him. 

And he guffawed when I remarked that that old adage "Jesus saves" must be so, for this was, in fact, his given name.

I had yesterday completed sorting through and deleting the fourteen thousand old emails that in the past several years I had gone through, retained some, and deleted most of that were downloaded to my Outlook email account through Bell Sympatico, and thought, Eureka! it's done and now I can call Sympatico back to have my receiving and transmission of emails restored.  I hadn't wanted all those hoary old emails downloaded, only the files containing those that I had wished to retain which had mysteriously disappeared, and which two previous calls and explanations to other technicians had resulted in nothing but frustration.

Those calls for assistance from Bell representative-technicians offshore are invariably exercises in frustration, for me and for the people employed by Sympatico.  Their English language-proficiency is likely good by international standards but my ability to accurately and swiftly interpret that language appears rather deficient at best.  That, and the faintness of the connection, requiring me to ask that instructions or recommendations be repeated adding to the general aura of annoyance, though my interlocutors do make a courageous attempt at courtesy and resilience.

My call of last Saturday with Sani Antoni resulted in that massive download and the subsequent discovery that my email functionality still had not been restored.  Yesterday's call proved no more fruitful.  Initially I thought I'd do it differently and log onto Symantec's 'live-talk' session upon which 'Dietrich' confidently introduced himself to me and assured me that my little problem would be speedily resolved.  His instructions to take me through the authorization process to take over my computer failed due to time-outs and he appeared to have given up in frustration, severing his connection with me.

Upon which I felt compelled to sacrifice further precious time, calling the technician-assistance help line once again, at which Moises responded to me, and our conversation was clear, his English impeccable, and he most amenable.  He discovered that the previous technician had left those fourteen thousand emails in my Symantec account and his theory was that it was overloaded as a result, restraining the system from working properly, thus the answer to my problem with receiving and sending emails.

I explained mine was an old computer, creaky and slow, and he exhibited great patience working with it.  He managed to delete all the unwanted emails that had been accumulated, just as I had from my computer; this took considerable time during which he also went into my Misconfig and made a few adjustments there (I had, of course, signed Sympatico's exemption from responsibility) and informed me my computer would work much more expeditiously now.

In his zeal to remove all the accumulated emails in all the folders at the Symantec site he also deleted a folder of junk, but not before I realized that the 'junk' was comprised of over two weeks' worth of legitimate emails that I had been awaiting that hadn't been deposited in my email account for me to view and review as should be done.  In that split second between my realization of this strange phenomenon where some unauthorized glitch had occurred bypassing normal delivery that deposited incoming email to junk stature, Moise had successfully deleted them all.

When all his thoughtful and expert attempts to tweak the system to ensure that my Outlook account would begin operating properly had been exhausted, he finally apologized, said he had done all that he could, that everything technical appears to be in correct order and the only explanation he could think of what that Bell's server was down.  In fact, my husband informed me later that while he was watching a news segment on his laptop a notice to that effect suddenly came on screen and I thought !Aha! perhaps Moises was right.

This morning up I went to look at my email, in the hope that miraculously functionality would have been restored - nothing again.  Not one single, solitary email arrived in my Outlook mailbox.  I thought that if I opened a new identity last night, it might help, but that little attempt to bypass the problem whatever it is, was hugely unsuccessful, as well.

If Bell cannot solve the problem, why am I paying them a handsome monthly fee for service?

Preparing to clean up the kitchen after yesterday's breakfast, a wrench was thrown into the works.  Literally, as it happened.  I noticed, while groping below the sinks, in the cupboard where I store among other things, potatoes and onions that the onion bag from which I was retrieving an onion in making preparations to put a chicken soup on to cook for our evening meal, that the bag was wet.

It was one of those proverbial "uh-oh" moments.  And sure enough there was a leak.  As my husband searched about there, he discovered it was coming from the right-hand sink of the two we have in the counter, and it seemed that the plumbing leading from the sink drain down toward the twin run-offs had been compromised. 

So while the soiled post-breakfast dishes were piled on the counter-top and I wasn't able to run the kitchen taps because he had right away begun uninstalling the affected piping which revealed signs of having been corrupted and finally failed, I set about doing other things in the kitchen that didn't require an infusion of tap water, like preparing to bake date squares for dinner dessert.

It took him little time to drive down to the local hardware emporiums of which we have ample now that commercial interests have broadened and developed in the area, and to arrive back home soon afterward clutching all the plumbing parts he needed to restore the sink to good-as-new condition.

And then the morning began to reflect our normal Friday activities, other than the fact that we were in for an all-day heavy rain, and the prospects for a ravine walk looked pretty dismal.

This little incident is to be tucked away in the annals of our personal 'never a dull moment' archives.

Not that it's anything new being reported in that sense, it's just that the frequency of the occurrence has accelerated.  Poor Old Glory, a sacrosanct symbol of all that America represents, is being held as a despised counterpart of all that is evil in the world.  As opposed, say, to the reprehensible and vicious symbol of Islam - violent jihad - which converts believers into living destructive missiles.

Banaras Khan / AFP / Getty Images Pakistani Muslim demonstrators burn a U.S .flag during a protest against an anti-Islam film in Quetta on September 20, 2012. Up to 50 people were injured on September 20 as police clashed with thousands of protesters, some carrying the banners of extremist groups, demonstrating in Islamabad against an anti-Islam film. 

 

Much, much earlier in our lives when we often travelled to Washington D.C. for recreational visits on annual tours of the many museums and art galleries that proliferated in that world capital of social contrasts we had also, once, visited the rudely modest (for our times, not that of the time represented) abode of the first president of the United States of America, in Virginia.  On the grounds there was an American flag draped over something, I can no longer recall what and where, but accessible. 

There were two young men present in the disparate group that wandered around the premises, both of military age, and both, by their haircuts, either current or past conscripts.  We watched, mesmerized, as one of them in a seemingly trancelike state, adoringly gathered a small fold of the flag, pressed it to his face, and kissed it.  This seemed to us, as Canadians, a repugnant act of an ignorant person; how could anyone venerate a flag to that worshipful extent?  Canadians honour their flag, but at a respectful emotional distance, and with more than a bit of casual oversight.

And there was another young man; impressed in my mind was a very small body of water and seating around it for people to rest.  This young man was at that place on the grounds, seated on the accommodating benches, and quietly weeping, in an excess of emotions evidently caused to swell within him as a result of the venerable place he found himself in.

These were young people whose state of exalted emotions we found unfamiliar and slightly distasteful in their exhibited excess.  These two most certainly became older people who must have continued to feel such a huge emotional attachment to their country and all that it represents. 

It must be extremely difficult for them to view on the nightly news and through their Internet connections, the religious fervor of Muslims who think nothing of desecrating a symbol so vital to Americans' emotional attachments, while themselves rampaging in vile demonstrations of violent umbrage at depictions of their Prophet they hold to be so insultingly demeaning to all that they honour and worship.

I am not a huge fan of Bell Sympatico services.  It was always a trial to obtain the required assistance from them when something went awry with my email service, but it has become increasingly, a harrowing experience to contact them and I do it only when I have no other choice; when everything I have attempted to do on my own to clarify and ameliorate the situation has resulted in failure.

Now, if help is required by a technical specialist - always offshore, geographically located in India where those keen young men patiently listen to the problem and do their purported best to sort out the problem - assail one's ears with sometimes unintelligible speech one's brain races to interpret before responding.  Latterly, the request and requirement to allow them access to controlling your personal computer to solve the issue has proven to be an additional experience better left uncriticized since there appears to be little other option available to the client.

A month or so back when my old computer collapsed into a state of mechanical failure and I was forced to undergo a total rescue operation I lost all my original settings, my files and whatever had been familiar to me in the process, although I did manage to restore the hard disk and bring up entirely new software programs which I then had to set about reformatting.  While my former data is all still on the hard disk, nothing appears visible until and unless a search is undertaken, which I mostly launched to recapture my photograph files.

I discovered, however, that my Outlook email program had somehow also been affected.  I was no longer able to send or receive, and that launched my original call to Sympatico for assistance.  I wanted to be able to recapture my Outlook files, some of which I wanted to maintain; for example, those which contained years' worth of downloaded blog entries, now nowhere to be seen.  The technician restored my service but not my files.

I called again and this time the technician said he could send all those files back to me, but then disappeared off the line after saying he would call back, but never did.  The third technician I spoke to after a hiatus of some weeks - to whom I spoke because my service, sending and receiving had somehow become suspended again - agreed those files were there (I had seen their presence myself going to the Sympatico site and looking up and signing onto my account) and he would have them returned to my account.  What was returned was the missing files sure enough, along with tens of thousands of emails I had read over the past two years and deleted.

I have been sorting through thme ever since.  And, once again, though he assured me my service had been fully restored, there have been no incoming emails and I haven't been able to send anything out.  So much for Bell Sympatico. 

A weekly feature of our local newspaper has a "real deal" section where products are given comparable ratings and on this past week-end's offering the feature was kitchen gadgets designed to shear corn kernels off the cob.  Four designs were put to the test of discerning whether or how well they worked, from a Kuhn Rikon corn zipper, a Zyliss corn stripper, J.B. Lee's corn cutter & creamer, to a Progressive corn stripper. 

All but one came out a winner; the Kuhn Rikon corn zipper won the contest with its super-sharp blade effortlessly lopping off the kernels

I do, often enough, strip fresh corn kernels off their cobs, when I'm preparing something that requires them.  As, for example, yesterday when I filled fresh tortilla shells with stripped corn kernels over a base of tomato paste, topping them with chopped green onions, chopped red bell pepper, strips of fresh sliced tomatoes, then liberally sprinkled with basil over which went generous portions of aged shredded cheddar cheese. 

Folded over and baked in the oven it makes a delicious, nutritious meal.

Coincidentally, because I still have plenty of fresh corn cobs and because it's a cold, blustery day I'm planning on making a chicken-corn soup with chopped tomatoes, strips of chicken,  and corn kernels, red pepper, onion, cumin, oregano, chili, to warm the cockles of our being at dinnertime. 

As for the kitchen gadget of my preference, I will be using, as I always do, a nice sharp paring knife, although any good quality, sharp knife will do - to remove those corn kernels from their cobs.

There are times when specialized kitchen gadgets are useful, other times when they unneeded, since there already exist plentiful alternates for the job at hand.

Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights.  Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits.  Anatoli Boukreev, 1997

 Some of my earliest memories as a child were that of being aware that I yearned to be in a green space.  That inner appeal never left me.  I have always needed to be out in a wooded area, within nature, finding it complementary to a sense of well-being, enjoying all the benefits that accompany being at one with the great out-of-doors. 

It hasn't, for me, translated into a love of the seaside, but rather an urge to be on a forested trail, or urging myself up a mountainside, or alternatively, paddling a canoe in a wilderness lake.  I have the great good fortune of living intimately with a life-long partner whose values regarding the natural world equal mine.  And of knowing that our youngest child is equally driven to share his life in natural surroundings.

That said, I might never have been able to fully understand - and likely still do not - what drives people with truly adventurous spirits into extreme situations where their physical and mental endurance is put to an incredibly difficult test, challenging geological features and nature's capacity to alter atmospheric conditions at her whim, to surmount those seemingly impossible odds in a bid to own a truly unique experience.

"Honestly, I do not experience fear in the mountains.  On the contrary ... I feel my shoulders straightening, squaring, like the birds as they straighten their wings.  I enjoy the freedom and the altitude.  It is only when I return to life below that I feel the world's weight on my shoulders."
Anatoli Boukreev, The Climb

 This exceptional man, a Russian living in Kazakhstan, had mountaineering in his blood.  He lived to climb, and he successfully summited eleven of the world's 8,000-metre peaks, using no supplementary oxygen.  He climbed Mount Everest four times, becoming a legend in the high-stakes world of high-altitude climbing.  To earn a living, he eventually hired himself out as a mountaineering guide.  And he had a valorous sense of responsibility to other climbers.

For his selfless determination and extraordinary capacity in rescuing three summiteers whose strength and endurance had been tested beyond their capability, exacerbated by an extreme snowstorm hitting Everest after a successful summit during a spring 1996 climb he received due recognition.  Those people whom his resolve saved are now among the living, while others, far less fortunate, died in their attempt.

Anatoli Boukreev is himself among them.  He met his own end in 1997, climbing Annapurna with two other alpine professionals when a sudden avalanche swept Anatoli Boukreev and Dimitri Sobolev to their deaths, likely through suffocation, while the third member of their party, Simone Moro, lived to climb another day.

There, that now at least is done; among the many chores that my enterprising husband sets for himself.  The two new chandeliers he bought with the intention of installing them over the living room at that impossibly high height has been accomplished.  It took time to do, particularly the electrical work, but it is now fully operational, the two new lighting devices doing an excellent job of lighting up the entire room.

 

During daylight hours we depend on natural light filtering through the stained glass windows to give us a fully-lighted atmosphere, the newly-installed fixtures will illuminate the room more than satisfactorily in the evening hours, enabling us to read there at leisure without straining our tired old eyes. 

We had found that the lack of an overhead light source which is how modern-day houses are usually presented did not provide sufficient light, despite the proliferation of table-top lamps throwing their halos of light.

Down came the double-stacked scaffolding, and the constituent parts are once again stored in the larger of the two backyard garden sheds.  The furniture has been put back in place, paintings re-hung, and decorative items put back in their place.  Order once again reigns in that room.

Problem now solved.

Yesterday's intermittent heavy rain events made our little Riley somewhat miserable; no sun to warm his tender little body, and that's a difficult circumstance for a sun-loving toy poodle.  There was enough of a window later in the afternoon permitting us to wear rain jackets and get out for our ravine ramble, a little later in the day than is usual for us on a Saturday.

The woodland squirrels presented themselves, as frisky as ever, for their daily dole of peanuts.  At one juncture we came across Max out for his daily power walk, ski poles in hand, dressed as always in his white open-neck dress shirt and Tilley hat.

And then there was Gail, a neighbour of over two decades, though she lives at the foot of the street and we at the mid-mark where the street does a fold-over turn.  From seeing her almost daily as a young mother of two pre-teens, when she had her two golden retrievers, we hardly ever see her anymore.  But there was a dog with her; with her sister who accompanied her, actually, who owns the dog a large poodle-retriever mix determined to see that those pesky squirrels didn't bother her mistress.

Whether it's the effect of no longer daily exercising her body through a pet-required regimen of regular ravine walks, Gail, a tiny red-headed women who stands shorter than my 5', is now almost perfectly rotund, her face a pleasant-looking little balloon of regular features that once sat within a petite face atop a petite and perfectly-proportioned body.

And I wonder what Gail thinks when she sees us, after having queried at the absence of our miniature black poodle, Button...does she perchance muse to herself how old we have grown in that time between our first acquaintanceship and the present?

Now that it was firmly established that there was indeed something quite functionally wrong with my newly-purchased and -installed computer, I have been busy working on its replacement, repeating the steps I had initiated a scant few weeks earlier to transform the-then-new-computer to reflect my needs after having first having undergone the process to activate all its component parts and software.

One might think it would be a breeze to make those personal decisions of what to keep what to discard, downloading one's preferred browser, making connections anew and all those minor details that make up the entire experience of usefulness for a personal computer.  It's an interesting experience, true in a sense, but also one of sheer drudgery.  And, it's surprising to encounter minute and sometimes baffling differences between one unit and another; logically one would think they're all similar since they run off the same software.

Yesterday morning I had a telephone call from the manager of the Staples store where we'd bought the original computer on August 29, and to which it was returned on September 13, one full day after the store warranty of exchange ran out.  The mysterious case of the runaway clock hadn't been solved.  This was unique to the extent that they'd never heard of such a malfunction in their previous experience, even checking back with other contacts.

As a result, he was prepared to offer me two options: 1:  was to return the computer I'd bought and set up to the manufacturer for a complete re-set, and 2:  was the choice, should I agree, to accept the same computer model taken out of its original packing for brief use in making up 'restoration' disks for other customers who had paid for the service.  In either instance, I would lose anything I had downloaded if I hadn't backed them up previous to bringing the computer in to the store.

As I'd had the computer such a short time I would lose a number of photographs, nothing else of any value to me; they were of a nature that they could be readily replaced.  I preferred the second option and that morning my husband picked up the new computer for me along with rescue disks, new keyboard and mouse and I began the dreary setting-up process once again.

Complaints there are none; I was unlucky in getting a mouth-puckering-disappointment of a computer, and the Staples manager did the best he could, under the circumstances.  For which I am grateful to him.

My lovely new computer, an HP Pavilion model, just like my creaky old one that I had been forced to undergo a total System Restore with, and then reconfigure and set up anew, losing all my data in the process, appears to be somewhat less than lovely.  For some inexplicable reason, other than to conclude that it was inoperable right out of the factory gate, the time element never worked properly.  I would set it, and re-set it.  To little avail.

I'd be startled to note that when it was actually midnight, Eastern Standard Time; Canada-US, it would register 5:00 am.  The clock was racing, by not-too-minute increments.  At my age of 75, I feel time is racing in real-time, in my life, I don't really need my computer emulating that.  And it impacted, of course, other parts of the system, so I'd get wonky posting times in my Twitter and Blog accounts.

I just didn't want to give up on it.  So I kept struggling to see if I could find the source of the problem.  Trying out a number of manoeuvres, one of which I was certain would do the trick and tame the racing timer. But it didn't. 

And then, the very day that my fourteen-day window within the return policy for Office Depot/Staples where we bought the computer ran out, the keyboard too began behaving peculiarly.  While I was keyboarding it would suddenly slide over from Canadian English/US to Canadian French.  I desperately attempted to compensate, after checking to see that the settings hadn't changed themselves; they hadn't, but the keyboard strokes just weren't reflected on the 'page' I was writing on.

With huge reluctance, bearing in mind the work it had taken to turn a tabula rasa into a computing device that reflected my needs and priorities, I decided it would have to be returned.  At two in the morning I rushed out of bed to re-check the sale date, and sure enough, the two-week window had passed. 

I remonstrated with myself the following day; so what if I had to manually change the clock every morning?  But then, doing that little chore didn't solve anything because the thing would simply continue racing, insouciantly forwarding itself five minutes each half-hour, steadily progressing in time as the day wore on.

Procrastination took us into early evening.  While having our dinner-time peach-crisp dessert I noted the time on the breakfast room clock: 8:15; running late this evening.  Then took my husband by surprise, remarking we'd better hurry if we meant to get to the neighbourood Staples sufficiently before closing time at 9:00 to explain my little dilemma.

The store manager quietly remarked on the rhino-sized reality that sat complacently between us: expiration of the store warranty for replacement.  But, he said, he would have his senior technician have a quick look at it.  That technician informed me later that though he has been in the business since 1982 he's never seen a computer clock behave like this one did. 

Lucky me, I'm so exceptional.

It is beyond fascinating to read accounts of those supreme athletes who seek out physical and mental challenges that most sane people would never dream of meeting.  Say, for example, the extreme 'sport' of ascending the tallest mountain peaks in the world.  The public reads or hears of horrifying adventures of dismal endings, and of brilliant recoveries, and wonder what truly motivates people to push themselves to the very edges of human endurance.

For some people, ascending and summiting the world's highest peaks represents their reason for existence, difficult though it is for most of us to digest.  We are amazed at their determination in the face of geological and atmospheric conditions that pose grave risks to anyone who assumes they may be capable of surmounting any difficulties that may arise.

For some, like us when we were younger, ascending peaks in the White Mountain Range of New Hampshire, reading signage below, warning to turn back at the first sign of bad weather, augmented by the death toll at that particular mountain, was a sobering enough experience.  Not sufficiently sobering to halt us from our determination to proceed, however, and we did.

 Once, only to find ourselves shivering, well within a sleet storm with no visibility whatever and only the option of descending.  On another occasion, a sudden violent thunder storm just as we were close to the peak, forcing us to turn back.  Just a few of many experiences we had over the years when we climbed Mounts Eisenhower, Little Haystack, Lafayette, Mousalaki, and Clinton among others. 

It had become for us an annual family outing, with our youngest child, now a biologist, urging us on to completion.

Far different for those who attempt the truly majestic, towering and forbidding heights of the world's ceiling.  The dangers they face are enormous.  Most accomplish what they set out to do, but too many never return from their adventure-turned-tragedy.  And it was like that in May of 1996 for a disparate group of climbers attempting Mount Everest, both professionals and their clients, and a national group who had happened to all assemble at the same time for the attempt, when bad weather suddenly set in. 

On May 10 of 1996 nine climbers died.

"That had happened to a number of climbers at Camp Four that night ...... who hadn't yet attempted the summit and were thus relatively well rested.  But in the chaos and confusion of the moment, Boukreev apparently located few, if any, of these climbers.  And in the end Boukreev discovered ... that everybody he did manage to rouse was too sick, too exhausted, or too frightened to help.
"So the Russian guide resolved to bring back the group by himself.  Overcoming his own crippling exhaustion he plunged into the maw of the hurricane and searched the Col for nearly an hour.  It was an incredible display of strength and courage, but he was unable to find any of the missing climbers.
"Boukreev didn't give up, however.  He returned to camp, obtained a few more detailed set of directions from Beidleman and Schoening, then went out into the storm again.  This time he saw the faint glow of Madsen's fading headlamp and was thereby able to locate the missing climbers.  'They were lying on the ice, without movement', says Boukreev.  'They could not talk.'  Madsen was still conscious and largely able to take care of himself, but Pittman, Fox and Weathers were utterly helpless, and Namba appeared to be dead."                    Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Anatoli Boukreev, an internationally notable alpinist and widely respected, did in the end, manage to rescue all of those stranded climbers, saving their lives through an almost superhuman effort to rouse himself from his own climbing lethargy post-summiting exhaustion.

The stranded climbers were desperate to keep together in the eye of the storm that had captured them, as they desperately searched for Camp Four and the tents where they could take shelter, where the waiting Sherpas would give them hot tea and replenish their oxygen and they would survive the adventure that had turned into a harrowing, life-threatening ordeal. 

"We did decide to huddle up.  We got into a big dogpile with our backs to the wind.  People laid on people's laps.  We screamed at each other.  We beat on each other's backs.  We checked on each other.  Everybody participated in a very heroic way to try to stay warm and to keep each other awake and warm.  This continued for some period of time - I don't know how long.  Time is very warped, but it must have been awhile because I was extremely cold pretty shortly after that.  We were checking fingers.  We were checking each other's consciousness.  We just tried to keep moving.  It was something of an experience that I've never really had before, being what I felt so close to falling asleep and never waking up.  I had rushes of warmth come up and down through my body - whether it was hypothermia or hypoxia, I don't know - a combination of both.  I just remember screaming into the wind, all of us yelling, moving, kicking, trying to stay alive."                                                                          Neil Beidleman - from Anatoli Boukreev's (and G.Weston DeWalt's) The Climb; Tragic Ambitions on Everest.

The ravine squirrels, red, black and grey, have long been accustomed to finding peanuts left in cache places along our daily ravine rambles, taking various trails dependent on the time we have and the inclination to take long loops or shorter ones.  The deposits are always in the same places; notches in tree trunks, tree crotches, woodpecker holes, atop the bridge rails.

Often squirrels will be patiently awaiting our arrival.  Often enough we will see them scurrying forth in anticipation of taking advantage of the daily offerings.  And, increasingly now, grey or black squirrels will race directly toward us, stopping just short of our boot-shod feet to wave their tails in expectation of rewards.  And the rewards are always forthcoming.

The black and the greys and the fearless chipmunks whom we see only in early spring and late fall, don't seem to hesitate to place themselves before us, even with the presence of little Riley who mostly ignores them, just occasionally making a half-hearted run at them.  They simply move swiftly away from him, returning immediately to their previous position, if the peanuts haven't yet been made available to them.

 The red squirrels, infinitely quicker, never come close, never seem alert to peanuts tossed in their direction as the greys and blacks are; they panic and disappear.  Obviously their sense of self-preservation is far more acute than that of their woodland peers.

We've lately wondered where Stumpy is, the little black tail-less squirrel that we've been feeding for years.  He is the first of the ravine squirrels to have directly approached us demanding his due for encroaching on his territory.  And he remains the only squirrel that will take a peanut, retreat a short distance, make short work of it and return to us for another, and yet another.  We haven't seen him in a few weeks' time, although we have seen his counterpart whom we've named Stumpette.

Brief absences like this are not uncommon.  We hope that nothing untoward has overtaken him.  The owls that nested here in the spring and summer appear to have absented themselves over the past month or so, and the hawks also are elsewhere.

When he was a toddler I found the very sight of him an enchantment of ideal childhood.  Tiny, dark-skinned with perfect features enhanced by huge brown eyes, the very picture of childhood beauty. 

He still retains some of those features, albeit grown from childhood into adulthood.  Imran is now in his third year of university.  He wants to specialize in sports physiology.  Which will mean travelling outside Ottawa to obtain that particular degree.

That will be hard on his parents.  They're extremely attached to their two children.  Their firstborn, Lovaleen, now lives in Toronto with her husband and two very young children of her own. And Mohinder and Rajindar travel to Toronto as often as they can manage to visit with their daughter and her new family.

 Imran's parents dote on him.  His father, who has been retired as a result of physical disabilities for at least a decade, depends hugely on Imran's help in all manner of things around the house.  Imran is a good-natured, biddable young man eager to please and interested in everything around him.  He was involved in soccer and hockey leagues when he was younger but the physical stress of the play cost him dearly.

When, in desperation because I wasn't able on my own to get my email on this new computer up and running, I asked Imran to give me a hand, he came right over.  It's a last-ditch thing for me, to ask for help with the computer, unless it's from one of our two sons whenever they're visiting with us, and somehow my need for assistance just doesn't seem to coincide with any of those visits.

Imran is a dear boy and I admire him hugely but on those rare occasions when I've asked for his help and he obligingly assists me, I invariably discover that something has gone awry elsewhere when he has focused on aiding me in a solution to the problem at hand.  Imran thought I should change my browser to one he prefers; Chrome, rather than Mozilla Firefox, and he made that change after impressing me with the superior qualities of Chrome.

He did eventually get gmail up and running for me.  And I discovered that I hate it, much preferring Outlook Express which Microsoft has changed, I believe, to Windows Live.  My attempts on my own to activate Windows Live hadn't been successful, however.  I also found that I detested Chrome, and although I retained it specifically for gmail for the present, I resurrected Firefox and thus solved some of the problems I encountered using Chrome.

Easy solutions?  Sigh.  There are none.  Isn't that what the cow remarked as it leaped over the moon?

We missed one day of our regular ravine walk on Saturday when thunderstorms rolled in one after the other incessantly.  It was heavily overcast and remained that way throughout the day, with the merest of brief intervals between one violent thunderstorm impacting after another.  That, following hard on a night of rolling thunderstorms of terrific ferocity.

When we entered the ravine yesterday for our walk the atmosphere still felt sodden, though it had turned very cool.  Cool enough that we needed light jackets to feel comfortable.  When we came across Max in his usual walk-about we weren't surprised, knowing him now long enough, to see him garbed as usual in his long-sleeved white shirt; suitable for him regardless of the weather, hot-humid or windy and cool, despite his slight frame.

He told us of having seen a television program that morning featuring a house in our neighbourhood that had been struck by lightning the night before.  A large, jagged hole punched into the roof.  These houses are supposed to be well grounded, but who knows?  There have been a number of surprises this summer, not the least of which was the collapse, a week earlier, of a portion of the 417 highway near us.  A large sinkhole had claimed a car, its driver managing to scramble out uninjured with the help of other drivers who had rushed to his assistance.

The car remains in the sinkhole as yet and the municipality has had to express-order a replacement for the huge old metal sewer pipe that had disintegrated leading to the washing away of dirt, sand and gravel under the highway to create that sinkhole.  Aging infrastructure and extreme weather conditions make for an exciting combination. 

For those who crave that kind of excitement.

In this house, never a dull moment.  Dull moments are those peaceful times when nothing is being undertaken in the house to alter its appearance, to add something that was not there previously, or to amend something that does not seem to serve a purpose, or to drive me completely around the bend.  Usually any kind of alteration or addition serves to drive me around the bend.

It's not that I'm averse to seeing things in disarray, that doesn't bother me at all.  What does concern me is when my husband goes off on one of his tangents born of a brilliant idea that he always runs by me first to get my opinion/reaction, and irrespective of my lack of enthusiasm he will nonetheless proceed. It's that intention to proceed with things that pose a risk to his health and well-being that tends to drive me to distraction.

If I protest, he waves away my concern, and then I'm loathe to pursue my fears lest I risk contaminating his self-assurance with my own doubts, fearing that this alone could cause him to falter and end up creating a situation where he does come to harm.  Most things he engages in do require physical strength and some kind of calibrated risk that ensures he will exercise care.

As on this occasion when he has decided that there isn't enough light in our living room for us to comfortably read at night in there.  With more advanced age our eyesight is not quite as acute as it once was, particularly mine, and we do require more direct light to be comfortable, reading.

So he has decided to install two ceiling fixtures to throw additional light.  With most ceilings it isn't a difficult task; with 18-foot ceilings it becomes just that.  So they're to be situated just off the second-floor balcony-hall overlooking the living room, just inside the living room ceiling.  And to enable that to be done requires the use of our double scaffolding.  Out it came again to be set up once more to expedite the latest task at hand.

And now he is in the throes of their installation, of the electrical work that must be done, and he's happily engaged, busy doing something that tests his resolve and abilities.

The first basso profundo rumbles rolled in around midnight last night.  And, shortly after that eye-opening threat, down came the torrents of rain.  But that was just the beginning.  From a geographic area that was bemoaning the lack of rain in early- to mid-summer, with drought conditions threatening farmers' crops, we have gradually moved into a more familiar atmospheric place giving us days upon days of pop-up thunderstorms of varying intensities.

Throughout the night thunder punctuated the heavy downfalls ensuring that our late summer gardens were very well hydrated.  No need to concern ourselves with watering anything; the concern being, rather, rot and powdery mildew, a strangle of vines and rain-sodden blossoms totally immersed in an all-enveloping caul of water.

 

Still, there is something very comforting about waking up in the morning to the sound of rain.  Comforting oddly enough to hear thunder also in its continuous presence, presaging ongoing rain.  The comfort resides in the fact that we are warm and snugly dry in bed.  And we feel lazily complacent, have to deliberately rouse ourselves to emerge from that comfort.

I am rarely disappointed in the gardens, since we developed them first, twenty years ago.  When we moved into our house there was so much to do the gardens were the last things on our mind.  We were both working outside the house then and regular house maintenance along with adjusting ourselves to living in this then-new house took most of our energies.

Our daughter, however, who lived nearby in her own house, decided that as her gift to us she would spend the hours it would take to begin our gardens.  The house footprint on the property seemed to naturally invite gardens in a unique twist of placement, and our daughter set about first amending the mostly clay soil to make it more productive, digging in sand, peat moss and bags of black soil and sheep manure, an enormous job in itself.

After which she began buying and planting the perennials she thought would most likely thrive in that micro-climate where the sun came in early mornings and was gone by early afternoon.  She would inform us of how much she had spent and we would reimburse her.  I suggested a little more emphasis on ornamental trees and shrubs and she accommodated.  She seemed to know everything about gardening, and I very little.

In the end, we wound up with the scaffolding of what we have today.  Over the years we have added trees and shrubbery and other types of perennials, but many of those that she had planted are still thriving and giving us great pleasure, from roses to burning bushes.  Eventually, together we developed the gardens in the backyard and they too have added to our enjoyment of our property.

It was her hard work, her natural and acquired knowledge of gardening, and her willingness to set this task for herself that gifted us with the legacy we enjoy today.

It's an understatement to merely say it was a surprise to see her with one of those distinctive Home Depot aprons on, working at our local big box store.  She had been there since the spring, she said.  But what about their business?  Confidentially, not to mention it to anyone, they were in the process of winding up, selling out.

This is a Lebanese-Canadian family that had at one time owned two local Dollar stores.  Each of two brothers and their wives working in each of the stores, several miles apart. Other, extended family members helping out.  The profits from which kept both families nicely afloat.

Until a few years back one was informed that their lease in a nearby plaza would not be renewed, after all.  They had always had problems with lease renewal and worked them out, but this time there was nothing to be worked out.  The pharmacy two doors over with a video rental between them, had decided to remake itself into a super-pharmacy and needed the room and the plaza owners were only too happy to accommodate them. 

They set out to look for a new re-location only to discover that with the vigorous spate of commercial building going on, new franchises had been opening up at a tremendous clip resulting in the presence of several larger competitors whose purchasing power was definitely greater than theirs.

Both families were now putting in equal time in the remaining store they shared between them.  They had converted one-third of their store to a gift section with pricier items and for a while they held their own.  Finally, however, a family council seemed to decide that they worked too hard among themselves for the increasingly paltry take. 

They were tired, their business was clapped out, thanks to the competition; they were, after all, a small independent business relying on customer loyalty and such loyalties tended to evaporate as people moved to other locations, and as others realized that there was a greater selection of items in larger premises that were franchises representing large chains with far greater opportunities to practise economies of scale.

The final irony: that this vigorous woman whom we had known for years, the very face of neighbourhood enterprise, had succumbed to what appears to be the inevitable, and was herself forced by circumstances to add to the family coffers by putting in her time working as a 9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. employee of the very type of commercial enterprise that put her own family business out of commission.

 Again, yesterday, we were fortunate.  For the most part, we seem to be able, somehow, to evade the slight misfortune of being caught in a resolute downpour that no amount of leafy canopy could protect us from, as a result of sheer volume.

Yesterday dawned dark and overcast, and but for a very brief period when the sun managed to evince itself through the conspiracy of clouds, the day remained heavily overcast.  A situation which never deters us from our daily ravine walk.  We tied rainjackets around our waists, tucked little Riley's raincoat into one of our pockets and set off into the ravine which was well soaked from overnight rain.  So well soaked the upturned leaves cradled their fill of rainfall.

The creek still ran vigorously with its excess of water, and the squirrels were busy after a strange absence of several days' duration, scavenging for peanuts we normally leave in various cache spots.  There was a bluejay close by, with its rusty-hinge calls; we thought it might be a juvenile.  We saw quite a few robins; they seem to gather in small flocks in the ravine at this late-summer time of year.  And there was a hairy woodpecker busy on a tree trunk.

The larger of the deep purple and the pink asters are now in bloom, alongside the more insignificant appearing white ones.  There is plenty of Queen Anne's lace and a bit of chicory still in bloom. 

And overhead, in the sky, there were long, low rumbles whose portent was unmistakable.  Those rumbling warnings became progressively nearer and louder as the sky became more densely occupied with darker clouds.  We took our time nonetheless and it was over an hour by the time we emerged from our ramble.

Up the last long hill, and out onto the street, then an amble down the street to our driveway.  And that's precisely when we felt the first tentative drops of rain.

There we are, then, moved a few pieces of furniture around - no mean task in this house - to provide a corner for my new-old computer desk.  Set up the computer and away we go!

We moved the bureau platet from its place in the corner and replaced it with my newly-finished old desk hauled up from the basement workshop and fitted out with a keyboard slide.  The bureau platte was moved into the dining room, at one end between the pillars.

And the half-round Chinese black lacquer table that had sat between he pillars where we placed the bureau platte was moved into the family room and it too sits between two pillars between the family room and the passage leading to the kitchen. 

A place for everything and everyhting in its place.


I can now post whatever I please whenever I please in the family room.  Rather than go upstairs to the room where the large armoire-computer corner is set up - which will also continue to be used for the time being, when it is more convenient to work from there, but I do now have other options.

Which means, in the evenings I can remain downstairs with my husband, and do my thing on my desktop, while he busies himself using his laptop.  Was a time when we would watch television programs together, but that time has long since past.  Mostly because there's so little worthwhile watching and because now we have no working television at our use.

In the year we've been without a television set in the house we haven't missed one.  We've kept busy doing what we prefer to do; reading books, magazines and newspapers, and working on our computer; my husband using his for viewing the British detective videos he enjoys.

There, I've done it again.  It's a literately Philistine thing to do.  To begin a novel, struggle through at least two-thirds of it, and then abandon it. 

When I read Margaret Atwood's Survival many years ago I liked it quite a lot, and thought she was an excellent writer.  Since then, downhill all the way.  I couldn't get past the first few chapters of The Handmaid's Tale, and now I've set aside The Blind Assassin.

And, I don't feel the least bit badly about not continuing either of them.  The story line, the language and the crude attempts to integrate fantasy with reality could never begin to match the mastery of the Bulgakov classic, The Master and Margarita.

What accounts for her formidable reputation as an elegant and excellent writer?  She's no Doris Lessing, no Umberto Eco, no Paul Theroux, no V.S. Naipaul, no Zhang Wei, no Frank McCourt.  Nor is she the equal of a writer like Neil Bissoondath, Frances Itani, or Rohinton Mistry, let alone Alice Munroe.

Her writing is the epitome of clumsy; her plots zanily uninteresting, careful editing is not her style, an arrogant presumption seems more to her taste. 

Reading her books I feel irritated beyond belief that someone like her is possessed of such an outstanding international reputation, that she is recipient of so much respect, so many awards, both national and international.

Above all, it's a puzzle to me.  Somewhat like the non-objective art of an artist like Mark Rothko; a reputation built on bamboozling the public into thinking there is quality when in fact there is none whatever.

With the end of summer approaching, the atmosphere is also changing, subtly in some ways, more obviously in others.  We're distressed to witness the inevitability of shorter days so soon upon us.  Where once dusk fell after nine in the evening, it now sets almost two hours earlier and we feel cheated.

On the plus side, there is cooler nights even when the days are hot.  That suffocating night-time temperature that gives little relief from the heat and humidity of the day that preceded it has now gone with the height of summer.  And Riley, who so much loves the sun warming his little hide, agitates endlessly to be allowed out into the morning sun to sit there, basking in its warmth.

We hesitate to leave him too long exposed to the raw sun rays because of course, dogs are just as susceptible to sunburn as are humans, despite their haircoat.  His is comprised of hair, not fur, making him even more likely to become sunburned, particularly in those areas where his haircoat is not as thick as other areas.  So we leave him out in the garden for awhile, checking on him from time to time. 

We know he is ready to come back into the house out of the sun and the warming temperature that always bakes our backyard, with its very warm mini-climate when he wags his little tail at us on our enquiries of him.

Since I'm on the cusp of setting up a new computer to take the place of this decrepit old one that is begging for retirement, we thought it would represent a good opportunity to re-position the area that I use nightly to write my opinion blogs.  At the present time one of our upstairs bedrooms has been designated that place where, years ago, my husband put together a huge and weighty computer corner designed and built as an armoire.  It has served me well, and has become cluttered with all manner of odds and ends that I cannot bear to rid myself of.

But using the computer there meant sequestering myself away from my husband, who remains on the first floor in the family room generally speaking, doing his own thing.  Which, since we rid ourselves of our television sets a year ago, means most often using his mini laptop to access hundreds of episodes of mostly British mysteries - alternatively, reading mostly (preferred) British mysteries.  Separating us, in the process by a level in our home.

We thought why not install a desk in the family room, in a discreet corner and set up the new computer there?  To which end we hied ourselves off first to JYSK to have a closer look at those neat-looking glass-and-steel computer desks, and once there discovered that they're neat looking all right, but flimsy in construction and inferior in material.  Which then led us down the street as it were to the local Office Depot franchise to poke around at their offerings, which were plentiful enough to select from.  We chose one with the features we liked, and were told by a lugubrious young salesperson that none were in stock.

We chose a second, more expensive and larger, and when the computer inventory was checked were informed how fortunate we were; two left in stock.  Just take this slip to the front desk, pay for the item, and it'll be brought out front to be loaded onto our car-top carrier.  We went to the front desk, asked for the item to be brought from inventory, intent on paying after it showed up since, as my husband said joshingly, to the clerk, whenever he's at Canadian Tire and something shows up in their inventory as having a few in stock, there aren't any actually.

An observation that did not find favour with the two men behind the desk, old enough to know better.  In due course, the young man who had been dispatched to bring hither the item in question returned with profuse apologies: none in stock, and none would be available through order; production has been stopped.

At home later, my husband suddenly recalled that old heavy, solid-wood pine desk he had in his basement workshop that he often used to place tools on, as a catch-all when they're not being hung neatly in place, during heavy usage.  Down he went, retrieving it from its burden, and then he began refinishing it which took several days' work.  That done, he installed a long, wide sliding drawer under the top. 

Voila!  My new computer desk....