It's been almost tropical-feeling today, so warm and though windy, humid. There was light overnight rain, and the cloud cover seemed determined place its lid on the sky, with occasional bursts of sun for brief intervals before the day set itself stolidly into a heavy overcast. But that's it, no more Indian Summer. Tomorrow we're back to an afternoon high of 11C. Compare that to today's 21C...

This unusual mild weather was brief but hugely appreciated. It hasn't stopped the trees from releasing their colourful foliage from bondage to their branches. Now, most of the deciduous  trees in the forest are bare or almost there. And the intense, eye-dazzling colours have given way to desiccated, dark remnants of once-glorious foliage, emptied from the crowns of  trees to the forest floor below.

 

This turned out to be a busy day with more accomplished than we realized would be the case. Yesterday we filled out all the forms required to secure appointments for each of us -- together -- to receive this flu season's vaccine. And because of our age we qualified for the 'super' vaccine. Which our own family doctor was unable to provide for us, since it was explained to us it just wasn't available; supply problems.

Strange this is. Our experience this past two years has been that the municipal health department which steadfastly urged residents to contact them to schedule for COVID vaccine appointments could give us only awkward time-place appointments and none too efficiently. Whereas, by calling our local pharmacies with far less bureaucracy we were able to secure the appropriate vaccines of our choice through the services offered by pharmacies.

 

Our appointment was for 1:40 this afternoon. Although when I was filling out all the 'paperwork' on line the question/offer arose to simultaneously receive the latest bivalent COVID/Omicron variant shots. Through Ottawa public health there was never a choice of manufacture, through the pharmacy there is. Since it's only been five months, not the required six between shots since we had our second booster, we bypassed that offer.

However, while we were awaiting our flu shot at the pharmacy, the matter of the COVID shot came up, and we were advised we could proceed with having it done as well. More paperwork, this time right at the pharmacy and in no time at all we were ushered into the little private booth used for the administration of vaccines and both were delivered to us. While we were 'waiting' afterward as requested before leaving we were given the print-out, and snuck out.

 

To another pharmacy in the same plaza which was advertising vitamins on sale; buy one, get 50% off a second. So that worked for Vitamin D3 and B12 and Aspirin. Two of each. We prefer 2500 IUs of D.

Then Irving went to the bank, and I delivered a few bags of clothing to our local Salvation Army thrift shop. Done!

The puppies were exuberant with gratitude to see us back again, and we promised them a romp through the ravine was in order, instanter. And that's where we found ourselves not long after our return home. No wasting such a magnificent weather day. The leaves down on the forest floor are fast fading to black and swiftly drying to that traditional crisp appearance that creates that crunch so familiar to us from our childhood. 

 

The acrid odour so redolent of fall, reflective of the drying leaf tannin took us back through the past where over so many years we roamed together through woodlands loving the sounds and smells and appearance of this season. We had always, together, valued any opportunity to immerse ourselves into a natural landscape, to walk at leisure and discover manifestations of 'natural' life left behind as ever more of our time graduated to an urban lifestyle.  Perhaps it's not surprising that in our elder years we gravitated to the best of all possible worlds; an urban/suburban domicile adjacent a natural forested ravine.

On a sleep-in morning, following a breakfast of honeydew melon, banana, French toast and sausages, coffee and tea, there was work to be done. So much for a day of rest. No such thing. There's always something that needs to be done. Even if it's only cleaning up after oneself, which explains why beds must be made up, kitchens cleared away, bathrooms put in order, etcetera everlastingly. 

For Irving what took his attention was a planned shopping expedition. He picked up a few items at a grocery, then went on to several big box stores to see what could be had for his latest campaign of ameliorating the mess on our lawn that Bell has inflicted on us time and again. Not only did he select and bring home the items he was interested in, he came home to tell me of what he had seen and that led to a bit of a philosophical discussion.

Omicron knock-offs have been detected in alarming numbers in this city's wastewater. Apart from which and certainly linked to the fact that area hospitals are burgeoning with patients to accommodate, leaving them beyond overcapacity. Most alarming to parents of young children, hospital emergency rooms at children's hospitals are so busy they simply cannot see any more patients, and getting to see a personal family physician is becoming absurdly difficult.

Which brings us to my husband's observation when he was out. At the food stores we frequent all personnel wear masks. Those who shop at those stores for the most part also wear masks. Irving dropped by a few of the big box stores comparing their garden supply products and prices, then ended up at Walmart. There too the store personnel wore masks. But for the most part people shopping there eschewed mask-wearing. Provincial guidelines continue to recommend indoor mask-wearing, but the mandate was lifted weeks ago, freeing people up to chose their own personal COVID-avoidance solutions.

We were both agreed after some discussion, that this is a reflection of a cultural situation. And that culture is perhaps indicative of the people whom Walmart attracts, where relaxation of rules reflect a reflex reaction.

Since today turned out anything but hot at 24C, with a lovely breeze, and mostly sunny, we saw no need nor impulse to get ourselves out early to the ravine, and Jackie and Jillie were in full agreement. It was mid-afternoon by the time we sauntered up the street and into the ravine. And we discovered something else that we hadn't really thought much about. Morning hikes through the ravine appear to appeal to more people in the community than do afternoon hikes.

The result of which was that at the time we were threading through the forest trails, there were scant few others about. And Jackie and Jillie were just fine about that; they're of the impression in any event, that they're the stewards of the forest and all others trespassers. It's likely why they respond so negatively to the appearance of strangers having the unmitigated gall to access their personal territory without permission and they aren't about to give that assent.

Oh, and that shopping expedition occasioned the truck filled with bags of garden soil, grass seed, seed starter, to once again make the effort to return our lawn to its original condition that work crews fouled time and again, fixing Bell connections for Internet that failed repeatedly. On one occasion it was ours, on the other it was our neighbours' and the third time around it was to lay new upgraded cable, presumably in preparation for the 5G rollout. That'll be a lot of work for him to commit to, yet again.

He also brought back cedar mulch to spread over the garden beds and borders. Frustratingly, although we've had so much rain, the garden seems to dry out quickly, too quickly. So mulch-time it is, for a happier garden able to retain moisture for longer periods of time in between irrigation or rain events. Work, work and more work. And the reward is a healthy and colourful, hard-working summer garden.

May will mark five months since we had our booster shot, the very final day of the year 2021. The requisite five-month interval. Time to re-schedule for the second booster. Doing it through Ottawa Health didn't appeal to us, given our previous experiences with them. You feel like a toy in a factory production line, being stamped for export purposes. All the multifarious personnel involved were invariably helpful but the process was pretty off-putting. All the more so when we were scheduled to appear quite a distance from our home, right across the city.

Apart from which, scheduling with the use of the online program they used was pathetic. Initially, with the very first shot the system was unable to handle the volume of traffic and malfunctioned. The frustration wasn't worth the bother. Irving decided to make our appointments by telephone, and that was another story. This time, we decided, it would be different. And so, this morning I registered online with Shoppers Drug Mart.

Through them we could choose the mRNA vaccine we preferred. With Ottawa Health we were given no option. They were 'saving' the Pfizer vaccine for children, even though they get a reduced dose. At age 85 we figured, since children were least affected by COVID, that the priority would be for the vaccine with the greatest efficacy to be reserved for the elderly and health-compromised (though we're neither...). Through Shoppers Drug Mart we made our selection, filled out all the necessary details, and wham! it's done. Less than a km from our house. Individual appointments where the doses will be administered discreetly, not in a warehouse setting full of people being herded about hither and yon. The date and time of our choosing.

Preparation for a June trip. For today, the trip was to the ravine with Jackie and Jillie, on a cool, windy, sometimes-sunny afternoon. Preparations for our afternoon forays now take less time and fussing about. While it's so cool we'll continue to put light little jerseys on the puppies and light jackets for us, but no boots for them now and no cleats for us. We feel a whole lot more comfortable. 

Yesterday we came across a group of about twenty people walking en masse through the trails. Half were young adults, the other half children who were having a wonderful time running about the trails, hoisting sticks and jousting with one another. Obviously a family Easter get-together and the children were happy, playing with their cousins. Their parents looked pleased with their venture as well. Today, nothing of that sort.

We saw a few more wooden 'Easter eggs' dangling from tree branches. One so high up we wondered who might be tall enough to reach to that height to perform the deed; no Easter bunny we've ever seen could manage that. On the other hand, another newly placed egg dangled a mere three feet off the forest floor; even I could manage that one.

Once again, before we left the ravine we came across the two Mallards. The female was busily dipping for food in the swift-moving stream. The male was steaming ahead unconcernedly leaving his mate far behind in the intensity of her search. Any little goldfish, escapees from an aquarium that had been proliferating in the creek for years, would be prime targets.

We took a different route on the way back up to street level, close to the area that has been designated a pollinating meadow where thousands of wildflower seeds had been scattered a few years ago and last year's crop of Black-Eyed Susans was a ravishing wild-garden of colourful yellows and greens.

 

COVID appears to be hungry for sustained notoriety, unwilling to surrender its hard-won place in the panoply of natural disasters plaguing humanity. It has no intention, it seems obvious, in vacating its majestic throne, harrowing and terrorizing humanity. And Omicron, its grandchild, has been meticulously groomed to ensure its enhanced infectiousness carries on its predecessors' tradition.

 

So, now that we've seen a waning of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, and enjoyed a bit of relaxed normalcy, we're jolted back to the reality that this pathogen is craftier, more cunning that mere humans might have attributed to an unseen menace. March break is over. It's been several weeks that Ontario and other provinces relaxed their COVID-protective mandates.

 

What do we hear? Why is it a surprise? We have, after all, seen this scenario played out over the past two years and more, quite a few exasperating times. But, there it is. The health authorities that gave us ample warning that our politicians were a little too keen to be restored to the good graces of the electorate by lifting almost all precautions against COVID infections, must be feeling pretty smug in that 'I-told-you-so' way that we humans cannot resist.

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Infection numbers on the rise. Wastewater tests have shown that for over a week in preliminary warnings that we'd seen be wobbling back to square one. And here we are! Welcome back to more acute measures in avoidance of COVID....

 

We decided to have pizza for dinner last night. I had made the dough and left it to rise in the late afternoon. Making pizza is a shared enterprise in this family. Irving slices and dices the vegetables and the pepperoni, cuts up the anchovies and arranges them over the dough and the tomato paste, herbs and seasonings I've sprinkled over, and Parmesan/Mozzarella I've shredded onto it all. Then, the colourful, finishing touch of the vegetables.

 

Many years ago, when my-then microwave oven gave up the ghost, Irving came home one day with a much-larger replacement. This one had an intriguing-looking 'pizza drawer'. Which we began  using instead of our conventional oven. Pizza bakes faster at a higher temperature in the oven. It takes fully 35 minutes for our pizzas to reach the desired doneness in the pizza drawer, but we're pleased with the results. Just have to wait a little longer....

 

Although when we came down for breakfast this morning the thermometer read -10C under a sunny sky, by the time we were ready to get Jackie and Jillie out to the ravine for an afternoon hike through the forest, it read 1.4C. So I was hopeful that conditions on the trails would be improved over yesterday. I actually felt quite trepidatious when we set out yesterday, knowing how icy the trails would be.

We've both suffered falls over the years in the ravine. And the last one I had in there, on a spur trail with a bad upward angle caused a lot of physical damage. Damage that has become permanent, and which acts up from time to time. I definitely don't want a repeat. It was the awkward way I slipped, twisting and slamming my right side against a tree trunk. I could hear and feel my right shoulder responding to the wrench. It took months before I had reasonable mobility in that arm, and full mobility remains restrained. The aches and pains transferred to my underarms and my chest wall. Not at all pleasant. And from time to time the aches reassert their presence.

 

We soon discovered that for the most part there was no improvement in the trails. Those parts that were super-icy yesterday remained that way today, although in other areas the ice had become rotten enough to give us secure footage. Even Jackie and Jillie were slipping on the ice in some places, and they don't appreciate that feeling of insecurity. Enough so that they will seek out more secure-in-appearance areas, bypassing the glossy-ice areas where they can.

We managed to avoid slipping, and had a pleasant, albeit shorter circuit through the trails this afternoon. By then the sun had mostly withdrawn. The forecast is for 14C tomorrow; unimaginable, given today's relative cold. Overnight we're expecting freezing rain, and tomorrow, plain rain. Both the higher temperature and the rain will help the forest cast off the remaining snowpack, so that's good news.

Out of two outlier countries comes early 21st century's history riding on the tails of dictatorial leaders' decision-making that transforms the world in hitherto-unimaginable ways. Who aside from the scientific community, could have lapsed even momentarily out of their comfort zone to think of a plague consuming the world body? And yet this is what happened when a coronavirus slipped from animal to humans, as another dread zoonotic that would take the toll of millions of human lives. 

Nature gone somewhat off course. Yet again, in the wake of other, historical plagues to focus humanity's collective mind on the vagaries of existence. And before the globe could see this pestilence receding, hard on its heels arrived another mass casualty of human-on-human relations defaulting to the forever-resuscitated condition of conflict.

Nature in her vast laboratory devised the unseen, silent dread of a virus whose sole purpose is to invade a living human body whose moist interior becomes the cradle of its countless offspring. A peculiarly offhanded method of ridding the world of humanity's excess baggage as the elderly fall away into the chasm of lonely death.

Nature, cruel in her indifference to all but the pleasure of creating new organisms and watching as they adapt, or fail to rescue themselves from the challenges of survival. Always, in some part of the world the sinister drama of evil stalking the land and reaping its victims, sharing them with a partner in desolation, the Angel of Death.

That is there. Here is peace and tranquility. Where in a civilized society far removed from the baggage of a long history of oppression and benighted discriminatory hatreds, people are permitted to get on with their lives as well as they can manage. Today,for us, dawned bright and beautiful. We only know of the deadly carnage wreaking havoc a world away when we pluck our daily newspapers up from the porch and unfold them over breakfast.

In our world, the sun is shining, eye-blindingly illuminating the thick, heavy snow that fell overnight. Whereas people in Kyiv have been blinded as the sky lights up from the explosions of artillery shells and bombs. There, people huddle fearfully in bomb shelters. Here, a warm and comfortable home shelters us from the winter cold, but the landscape is such that we make our plans to venture out-of-doors in anticipation of entering a forest,delightful recreated as a magical kingdom of snow-frosted beauty.

This has been an unusual winter so far. Not just the manner in which society has been hamstrung from normalcy thanks to the ubiquity of a threatening virus and all the constraints avoidance has visited upon us. The weather patterns, thanks to another anomaly of nature, appear to be reflecting the uncertainty of climate change; inexorable and inexplicable, with its influence on normalcy, or what we have always recognized as 'the usual', patterns of life as we've known them.

 

The difference in this winter's weather is on the incidental side; nothing comparable with the tumultuous weather patterns upheaved by tornadoes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, torrential rains of a nature unprecedented in their ferocity. The modest difference that we identify here with is the paucity of snow that has fallen in a region always known for its heavy snowfalls.

 

We've accumulated just enough snow to cover the ground, little more. Most winters at this time would see a sizeable snowpack. And most Januaries have a brief period of unseasonable mild temperatures we always recognize as a 'January thaw' that melts at least a quarter of the snowpack, before it begins accumulating once again with the refreshed arrival of colder weather, and more snow.

 

The lack of snow this year is obvious in the conditions prevailing in the forest for example, where the trails' covering of snow has hardened, packed down tight with a layer of ice under and over. People on the trails without cleats cling to trees for stability on their ascents and descents of the hills in the ravine.

A horrible accident that occurred a week ago on a snowy hill crusted with ice that the municipality has warned residents through signage is not to be used, took the life of a ten-year-old girl when the toboggan she was sliding downhill on with her older brother and sister hit a metal signpost.

 

It also hasn't been quite as icy-cold as frequently as a normal winter would be with a number of daytime highs in the -20C range. Of course, when we're out in -10C with a mean wind, or today at -15C and wind, it seems brutal. It feels just like -20C. Today I layered well under my down-filled winter jacket; two undergarments and two thick sweaters over them, along with a scarf. I could feel the cold penetrating. 

 

My face felt ice-stiff with the cold, my mittened hands felt frozen. My feet rarely feel cold in thick long socks and winter boots, but my toes on arrival back home after our ravine hike this afternoon, felt cold. During our hike over the spine of the ravine, Jackie began pouncing up at Irving and me, a signal that he wanted to be picked up. He was cold and wanted to be held. So held he was, until he got edgy when a large dog appeared behind us and he squirmed to be let down, so he could run after the unassuming dog.

 

Irving remarked on my cheeks, how red they were. Like a painted wooden Babushka doll. An old friend from my high school teen years wrote me today that it's also really cold in Toronto. Too cold, she said, to get out for a much-needed walk on the street with her walker. And, she said, she could no longer safely walk through her apartment building hallways because too many people have the 'virus', without informing anyone else or remaining isolated.

 

It seems as though we're on a revolving roller-coaster. Every time we think we're finally making some headway against this horrible virus, we're taken back to square one again because the wily predator is skilled at overcoming resistance to its all-consuming mission in life. A tiny living thing that cannot be seen by the naked eye is powerful enough in its malevolent mission to handily overcome the best-laid plans of medical scientists devising ever-new (and retreaded) means of guiding humanity out of its evil clutches.

We're back to beginnings again. Not quite in lockdown, but possibly leading there. Schools are not to be re-opened until possibly January 17. No more indoor dining at restaurants. My heart goes out to parents living through this nightmare with concerns about their children's welfare, their adjustment to this new reality that refuses to be as temporary as we would like it to be.

Gyms are temporarily off limits so socializing in those venues has been cut to the quick. Small businesses once again face the option of sticking it out, hoping for better days and relaxation of measures to combat the spread of this malicious virus accordingly. People once again facing a reduction in their working hours and consequently, their take-home pay. 

 

There may be more restrictions to come; the premier of the province warns of a 'tsunami' of Omicron. Well, of course, this is no local collapse of orderly, predictable life; it's worldwide. To think that it was just a month ago that Omicron was first detected as a variant in South Africa when the alert to its presence was raised. Just one month for a mutated virus to circulate globally. Shockingly awe-inspiring.

 

Ottawa Public Health has reported 24 COVID outbreaks at long-term care and retirement homes, leading the province to approve fourth doses for those vulnerable people inhabiting long-term care and retirement homes. Many of whom have not yet received that third, 'booster' dose. Hospitals cannot fill all their nursing shifts. There is a dire shortage of front-line staff members to help in the management of the increasing patient caseload. Staff burnout and a perhaps predictable stream of retirements add to the shortage of hospital personnel at a time when once again non-emergency surgeries are being cancelled to free up beds for COVID-19 sufferers.

 

Walking up the street this afternoon on our way to the ravine with Jackie and Jillie, there was no one about. It's a quiet street at any time, but quieter now. We were somewhat surprised yesterday morning when we drove out to do our food shopping, when we noticed that traffic was unusually light. It reminded us of the solemn, fearful quiescence at the time of the first COVID wave, when no one knew quite what to expect.

 

While medical science has a better grip on the virus, and we now have vaccines and some credible treatments for COVID, we still don't quite know what to expect. Irving alerted me to the fact that a vehicle was approaching behind us and I drew Jackie closer on his leash as we continued walking up the street. I heard behind me the vehicle stop and a voice calling out Irving's name.

 

 

A neighbour who lives on the street behind ours, wanting to know how we are. Are we heading to the ravine? The word is that it's very icy in there and people have stopped going in for a natural tour of winter. Well, of course it's icy on the trails, it's why we never take cleats off our boots. And the footing is good, with those cleats. People are fearful of venturing too far from home, of exposing themselves, of tempting fate.