muffinandbagels

For the past several months I have taken to wearing a Fit Bit. Not because I expect to get fitter, but because I am curious about the impact of exercise on my heart. When I was scheduled to have an operation to remove cancer from one of my lungs three years ago, I flunked the pre-op screening because of a fibrillation in my heart. The operation had to be postponed while I undertook further tests, but then went ahead.

At the time I blamed the fibrillation on having been at a political fundraising event the night before, at which the hostess, a long time friend, had urged her son, the bartender to ensure that I was kept well supplied with malt whisky. He complied vigorously and I had felt a little strange in the middle of the night.

I was send to a heart guy who explained the ins and outs of fibrillating hearts and prescribed a pill that I take daily and is not covered by my medical plan, at $4.00 per pill. I felt a little weird again while biking last fall, and it was tentatively blamed on too vigorous exercising. So I bought a Fit Bit to try and find how my heart was reacting to exercise, in my case, generally biking outdoors.

It has taken me a while to understand what it is telling me, mostly because it is intended more for the walker or runner than for the cyclist. it posts a number of steps that I am presumed to have taken, that bares no particular relationship to my biking . It also reports some other things, like liquid and food consumption, but you have to enter those yourself, not surprisingly.

What I am following however, is my heart rate, it will display me a graph with a squiggly line that represents my heart rate and goes up and down all the time, but not with a frequency to reflect fibrillation. When I cycle there are more systematic rises and falls in my heart rate, which relate to how hard I am working. There is still some confusion though, the heart rate maximum when I check out the exercise rate peaks at a higher level than it shows in the regular heart rate graph at the same time.

The really confusing thing it reports to me though is my sleep pattern, which only seems to record the amount of sleep I have had since I last got up to go to the bathroom, It appears that I am truly sleep deprived. I am also baffled by how many flights of stairs I have climbed each day. I am still confused about whether I am fit or not, but I am still going to wear my Fit Bit anyway.

Sometimes something that seems incredibly difficult, turns out to be a lot simpler than you thought. For a long time now, and I mean years not just months, we have been irritated by the fact that our telephones gave us a beeping rather than a dial tone. But they still worked. Our local capable of anything guru was round at the week end to cut up a tree that had fallen on my wife’s sunning chair. After he had solved that problem for us we sat down for a beer, and I mentioned the telephone problem. He went and tried the phone and said that the sound we heard was message waiting on our voicemail, I did not think we had voicemail as we use an answering machine, but he said try # 99 which I did and was informed that I had no messages, the beeping continued.

I googled beeping messenger noise and after a while found an option that explained how to remove it on certain varieties of phone, but not on the ones I had. It also had a contact number which unfortunately I did not note down. This morning in desperation I went to the Bell Aliant website and sorted out the right place to call with a problem with your phone, after the usual delay listening to loud music, I got a human being on the line. He wanted lots of detail to establish who I was and what my phone number was, and when I said the problem was that I could not stop getting a “you have a voice mail message”. He said it was impossible as we were not paying for voicemail. We spent ten minutes in continuous and growing more heated argument, but he would not accept that it was anything to do with Bell.

Before sending an irate email to the President of Bell Canada, I had one more try with Google. It had a method to stop the message report, #94!

It worked. It is a pity that the staff at the telephone company do not know their own rules.

While I was making dinner last night, the phone rang. It was Bell Aliant asking how my service request had been handled. On a scale of 1 to 5 there was no minus ten, but they did ask for my comments to be recorded. They probably melted the tape.

From time to time I have commented on the impact of the furry tree rats on our household. It has been related to their demand for nourishment since we stopped offering them the occasional peanut, to their insistence that our ceiling space is their preferred winter habitat. It is their gardening habits that have been most prominent in irritating me recently.

We learned many years age that when you planted tulip bulbs it was good idea to coat them in pepper or plant a daffodil bulb on top, if we did not want them dug up and eaten. The arrival of crocus blossom in the early spring was apparently a dinner invitation to squirrels who tried to eat the flowers before anyone else could admire them. We managed over the years to have a large enough number of crocus for the squirrels to get bored and leave some for us to admire. Either that or they were distracted by the fact that there were by then tulip blossoms for them to destroy.

I have nurtured a hibiscus and fuchsia for many years, bringing them in in the fall and returning them to the garden in June. They are both happily ignored by the squirrels to date. Ten days ago however, while shopping at Sobeys I saw some beautiful small hibiscus plants with spectacular blooms. I purchased one and planted it alongside my older plant. Within 24 hours the squirrels had eaten not just the flowers, but all the buds.

There is a clematis that grows on the side of the house, just outside the picture window in the living room. It is not yet in bloom, but the buds are forming. Yesterday evening a squirrel was half way up the clematis and chattering at me through the window, apparently complaining that I had not got it in bloom for him!

Friday morning is our shopping day at Sobey’s, during the senior’s dawn patrol. Unfortunately my wife has a new fracture in her arm, and can not push a supermarket trolley, so I had to do it alone, rising at 6:15 am, a lot earlier than normal. Fortunately we have a very sophisticated shopping list on a spread sheet that can easily be modified as we realise a new need during the week. It was updated on Thursday night, and as I entered the supermarket I remembered it was still on the kitchen table. I did the shopping anyway and more or less got things right.
Once the groceries had been put safely away, I proceeded to the planned activities of the day.
About 20 years ago the concrete steps to our front door had tilted, due to frost heave, to the point that they had to be removed, and they were replaced by wooden steps and a covered porch. On each side of the steps was a wooden grid, presumably to prevent skunks from moving in. Over the years a couple of trees had started to grow under and through the steps and the grid, a fact I could no longer ignore. I discovered that I could remove the grids to get access to the trees, but they suffered in the process and needed repair. Being a complete incompetent as far as carpentry, I went to a local hardware store and asked about buying some replacement strips (which I now are called lathes) for the grids. I was told that they came in bundles of 50, and why did I want to use them anyway. It appeared that I could buy a four by eight foot grid for only $9. That seemed
much more sensible, so I bought two of them. I then realised that 8×4 grids would not fit in our Honda Civic, so I had to call a friend with a pickup who kindly “volunteered “ to come down and pick them up.

We loaded the grids and went back to the store to pick some other stuff up, and then as I was about to drive away, the car shuddered and there was a grinding noise. Another car moving in to the adjacent parking space had not noticed the bike rack protruding from the back of my car. He hd ripped open the panelling on his doors. He was very upset and apologetic, he was 91 and had not had an accident in 65 years, we exchanged insurance information, and I realised that bike rack was dead, After phoning my insurance company, I went to the bike shop to try to buy a new rack, they had one at a reasonable price, but they could not get the old one off. I had not taken it off during the winter as I still bike then, and the attachment to the car had firmly welded itself together, brute force did not work to pull it apart, I finally found a friendly service station who removed the whole thing from the car and by use of heating managed to open up the connection, and replace the important bit on the car. So I could now buy and install the new carrier.

Now I returned home and settled down to trying to paint the new grids, cut them down to size and install them all in more than a days work. Fortunately the man with a pickup also had a very fancy saw which he plugged in and removed the trees under the steps.

It was my turn to make dinner so I felt that my problems were over for the day, until I got the refrigerator crisper drawer jammed on a box of spinach, and an entire box of blue berries spilled and rolled all over the kitchen floor.

I felt fully entitled to my post dinner scotch.

A year ago in March, it was not very nice,
When on a frosty morning my wife fell on the ice.
I rushed her to emergency for assistance for my bride
While her left arm was useless hanging by her side.
After she was x-rayed sadly it was spoken
That in several places her left arm was broken.
They took her into surgery to minimise the harm
And used metal for replacement in her elbow and her arm
It took a while for her to heal and use the arm herself ,
To button up a blouse or to take things from a shelf.
By Christmas it was nearly healed and she could dance and sing
Looking forward to the chance of biking in the spring
Winter went on for ever but in April there was hope
That with May’s arrival with biking she would cope.
We took her bike down to the store, who fixed it up like new
So we could ride together as we liked to do.
The first rides went quite easily around the country side
The two of us together, riding side by side.
But then came a disaster as we rode out of town
I heard a crash behind me as my wife came tumbling down.
She lay there on the roadway, underneath her ride
Tangled in her bicycle her arm clutched to her side.
A lot of helpful people came rushing to our aid
To help her from entanglement. The Covid rules were stayed.
I got her to the doctor and then on up the hill,
For X ray at emergency, while trying to keep it still.
I left her at the doorway, with Covid rules in force
I couldn’t go in with her to stay with her of course.
They called for me to fetch her back in about an hour
I sped up there to get her as fast as I had power.
Yes she had a fracture higher up her arm
Than where she broke it last year. She accepted it with calm.
So now we hope recovery will help her without fail
But don’t be too surprised if you see a bike for sale

It is May 8, 2020. Seventy five years since the war in Europe ended. We have seen the old news reels, heard the old speeches and heard Vera Lynn sing “We’ll Meet Again” again, for those of my generation, we also have our own memories of those momentous days when the war came to an end. My home was in the London suburbs, not a particularly popular target for the Luftwaffe, but still subject to bombing by planes that were lost or avoiding the greater flak risk of central London. Like most of the hoses in our neighbourhood we had received significant damage
for the bombing and the V1s and V2s, and by May 1945 there were already builders and decorators at work repairing the damage, paid I presume by the Government. In our house all the interior ceilings were cracked and need to be replaced. This meant that plasterboard replaced the plaster and lath construction that had previously been there. This in turn meant that there was a large amount of discarded wood around, not only from our house, but others on the street. It was decided to have a neighbourhood bonfire to celebrate the end of the war in Europe. Using a hand cart a mass of combustibles was collected and take to a vacant site just down the road. A scarecrow type reproduction of Hitler was hung from a telegraph pole outside our house, with a message on a sheet of paper pinned to his chest, it read “mit me 7:30, watch me burn 7:45″. At 7:30 we duly processed down the road with the neighbours and a magnificent blaze ensued. I have no doubt that the adults carried on a more alcoholic celebration later that night but it would have been after my bedtime.
VJ day came 3 months later, I remember that I was playing with a Meccano set in the living room with the radio on when the announcement came through. I remember going into the kitchen and asking my mother if now that the war was ended would my father still have to go to work! I was a little naive back then.

Back in the days pre Covid, we all would gather round
And over cups of coffee discuss what we had found.
Or in the bar just after work exchange our current views
On weather, personalities and what’s featured on the news.
We had a chance behind our hands to wonder if its true
What Mr X with Mrs Y were rumored wont to do.
Expressing fears that love affairs might just be going on
Not simply sharing training for some future marathon.
But that we are all locked up, at least six feet apart
How can such information we legally impart
Alas the times are changing and sadly it is said
As a victim of the virus gossip is now dead.

As old age crept up on us we sometimes felt forlorn
And lazy so we hired someone to maintain our lawn.
The mowing was just part of it, there was another thing
A fall clean up to remove the leaves, and one in the spring.
The past two years the clean up failed to happen in the fall
When falling snow submerged the leaves in early winter pall.
The clean up crew arrived this week, fulfilled their task, hooray!
Here in time to beat the snow that just arrived today.

We all now know that Covid can do more than make you sick
It creates some other problems that you have to lick
Before they over take you with troubles unresolved
These other complications must be swiftly solved.
I’ll give you an example, hand washing 50 times a day
Creates demand for drying in a fast efficient way.
We decided that paper towels could solve the problem best
And then addressed the problem where the roll of towels should rest.
We parked them by the toilet, while we thought what we should do
They solved themselves the problem . They fell into the loo.
Supplies of paper towels now are not simply found
So we must resuscitate the roll that had been drowned.
Carefully unwrapping the wet and soggy sheets
I hung them over chairs upon the backs and on the seats.
This morning they were all dried out, and despite my many fears
None were stuck on seriously to any of the chairs.
I still don’t have a handy place for storing them, meanwhile
I’ll leave them on a chair seat in a tall untidy pile

Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, 20 centimetres of snow forecast for tonight and tomorrow.
So we went shopping at 8:15 am.
There was a socially distanced line up out side the supermarket, so I joined it so that my wife did not have to wait outside. After 20 minutes I was at the front of the queue, and she went into the store.
Knowing that there was a limit to how long my wife can tolerate shopping, I returned to the back of the lineup, so that I could relieve her after a while. This time it was 25 minutes before I got to the front of the line, washed my hands as instructed, put on my face mask,(a very pretty one made from, a pair of socks), and went in search of her.
As all the shopping aisles are one way only, it took me a while to find her, she had half the shopping done, but unfortunately a rather small cart.
I took over, and then had to wait a while for a very slow male shopper to change his mind frequently, thus delaying every one else.
I tried to be clever and bypass him, but found myself trying to go in the wrong direction down an aisle to the horror of other shoppers.
With the small cart it became rather hazardous to add extra items, but I managed to balance the eggs safely.
Finally I collected most of the items on the list and headed for the socially isolated line up for the check out.
Not wishing to repeat last week’s experience, when I had to sort out the pile of groceries myself, I succumbed to buying bags so that they would be packed for me.
All was run through and the time came to pay the computer screen said I had spent $509.15. I did not believe it and insisted on it being checked.
There was an item called groceries with a price of $300, where it should have been a pound of pears. They made the correction, and I got the pears for free.
It was 9:45 am, one and a half hours from the beginning