Making It Up As I Go Along #649

So putting out wicker furniture can cause back injuries.  Last Sunday I thought I dodged the bullet after a hot bath seemed to help after my left lower back spasmed when putting down my wicker love seat on the back patio.  Then things worsened again… I wasn’t able to do much other than lay flat on the Monday… Went back to work feeling a bit better Tuesday.  But then started to develop issues in my hip.   Trying to walk even aggravates that down into my shin.  

Things got to a point where, by Thursday, I could barely walk from the office to my car in the lot due to pain in the shin.  

The weekend has been an improvement with stretching, rest, and more careful posture in walking.  I’ll go to the doctor tomorrow anyway and see what he has to say about it.  It’s odd though.  It feels almost claustrophobic when you can’t walk more than a few hundred yards at a time.  I look out at the trails and woods and no I can’t go out there.  

I am pretty much at my low end of interest for hockey.  My Hockey News subscription is soon up and I’m thinking I may let it go.  Playoffs are on and I have probably watched a total of ten minutes of it… Total.  I just find the games boring this year, the rule enforcement inconsistent and silly, and the analysis of the hockey over simplified and cliched.  Add to that the fact that the Blue Jays are basically on every day, and hockey simply doesn’t draw me in.  

Out of Spite

A week stumbling around the world

Leaves very little to say

Cause who wants to write about being an invalid

On a sunny and warm Spring day?

Write about the sofa time?

That’s a very boring thing

Who’d want to read anything like that

Compared to the fund the outdoors brings

So here I lounge upon my couch

Unsure of what to write

But something must be posted on the blog

So here’s this poem done out of spite.

Making It Up As I Go Along #648

May finally be moving in to real Spring weather.  Sunny and 21 today and was sun and 16 yesterday.  BBQs, baseball on TV, a few flowers poking up out of the ground… Winter may be over.

With that, I’ve jinxed the whole thing.  Today I took my yard furniture out of the computer room and put it back out on the patio.  So a foot of snow may soon follow.

Showing my age, moving wicker patio furniture down the stairs and out to the yard seems to have done a number on my back.  No pops or snaps or anything, but as I lay down the last piece of 20 lb furniture, my lower back tightened quite a bit.  I think it was a good decision to skip softball this summer.  How is one expected to run about a field, jumping, running and diving… When they can’t move patio furniture without injury?  Anyway, a hot bath seems to have helped.  It’s still stiff and tender but not as knotted as originally.  

Glacial Lake

Ours is a glacial lake

Fed by turquoise creek

Flowing over rocky land

Milky water mirroring the world above

But ours is not a destination.

No honeymooners come for the week

Great mountains and brilliant ice flows

Both thousands of miles away.

Yet still our waters are glacial.

A silty tea outside my window

Made so by human hands

Not the inspiration of natures processes

The winter strip of nature

Tearing plants and ancient soils away

Leaving water to flow flilterless 

Carrying remaining silts as winter melts

But without white capped mountains

It’s alien

The turquoise waters only beautiful

In high altitude settings.

So I wish for the day

When the tea settles to the bottom

And leaves me with mud bottomed waters

As a sign of a healthy forested landscape

Where frogs lounge away the summer heat

And muskrat and beaver make themselves at home

My current glacial waters feels void

A watery desert

Cautiously explored by duck and geese

And completely avoided by those smart smart frogs.

Making It Up As I Go Along #647

Sleep has been hard these last few weeks.  Falling asleep being easy enough, but it’s the stay asleep that’s been the trouble.  Unbroken… Not much beyond two hours at a time.  Not sure if it was me crashing with weeks of that or me fighting a spring flu… Or a combination of the two… But I’m off two full and the better part of a third day from work this week.  By lunch time Wednesday I’m feeling more myself.  And I get some sustained sleep this weekend.  But I am left wondering if I’m the only person at the office who does better, from a rest perspective,  working the twelve hour shift rotating from days to nights.  

A frustrating week of the Blue Jays.  2 wins, 4 loses wasn’t the start to hope for.  And the way they lost those games is kind of painful.  But baseball is a long season.  It would be like panicking that a hockey team starts the year losing two of their first three games.  Or that a football team is down at the half of their first game.  Either way, it’s nice to be able to watch baseball again.  

Where Do They Come From?

Where do they all come from?  That is to say… The insects.  It’s the time of year where the house gets some crawly visitors.  In the last two weeks I’ve rid myself of four or five spiders, a beetle, and a wasp.  And today there’s a house fly hanging out on my computer room window, watching the world go by.

So, the spiders… I can understand them.  They’ve likely been hanging around all winter in crevices or dark corners anyway.  There’s that saying that you’re never more than ten feet away from a spider.  Not sure if it’s true or not, but I’d believe it if it’s true.  

But the rest of them?  I suppose a fly could have just followed me in one day when I got home from work.  They seem to go about fairly unnoticed.  And I don’t even mind my window friend.  He’s a sign of spring.  He’s like a seagull for sailors praying for land.  You may not see it yet… But land is close by.  You’re out there spring… You’re close.

The wasp is a bit freaky.  I come home from work one day and go to my bedroom and there he is, hanging out on the window there.  

Where a fly is a window friend, hinting at warm and sunny days, a wasp is a window demon, hinting at the apocalypse.  I mean, you notice if a wasp follows you into the house.  In fact, you notice the wasp well before getting to the door.  You either freeze… And edge slowly towards the door… No sudden movements… Or… You run for it.

The alternative is no better.  Perhaps the wasp was in the house all winter.  Perhaps there’s more of them.  A nest within my walls and this is the first of thousands that found a crack to freedom… In my bedroom.  

I gather my wits about me… Go to the porch to retrieve my insect catcher… And return to, without hesitation (they can smell fear), capture the wasp within the plastic compartment.

The walk to my patio door is that of a bomb squad member carrying high explosives.  Arms straight out in front of me, watching each step.  Don’t trip… Don’t stumble… Steady… Steady.

And once at the door, I treat it like a blast shield.  Opening the door just enough to slip the insect compartment outside.  Edging it out as far as the eighteen inch stick it’s attached to will allow.  I then close the door as far as I can while still holding the device.  Still thinking to myself… Steady… Steady.

Once in position, a deep breath, and I rotate the stick clockwise… Causing the trap door to fall.

The wasp lazily buzzes off into my yard.  It seems bored and unimpressed.  

I, on the other hand, open the door the extra few inches to allow my capturing device to re-enter the house before closing the door tight with the urgency of a snorkeler leaping into a boat mere inches from the teeth of a stalking Great White.  I sigh with relief and pray that the walled nest thought is nothing more than an overactive imagination.  

No wonder I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately.  Perhaps I’ve been blocking out terror filled dreams of wasps creeping out from some unknown crack behind a bookcase.  Or perhaps they explore me as I sleep.  And the tickle of wasp legs draws me from my dreams… As I drowsily rub that unknown itch against my ear.

So yes… Where do they come from?  And will I find any sleep at all tonight.     

Making It Up As I Go Along #646

After several weeks away from the blog, I’ve returned.  Warmed, reddened, leather faced… All now faded to slightly darker white, smoothed, and refrozen.

So this week will be largely just a run down of what has gone on over the last three weeks.  No added story/poem.

It is -7 degrees right now… With a windchill that makes it closer to -20.  Eight days ago I was in shorts and 30 degree temperatures.  

In the future, I could be convinced to save all my vacation time for March… Head to Florida… And do nothing but take in Grapefruit League Baseball.  Small ballparks and warm temperatures while you realize that home is still semi-frozen and snow covered is pretty close to perfection.  

Kennedy Space Center is pretty amazing.  I knew I’d find it interesting but it was actually more impressive than I expected it to be.  And seeing a shuttle in a museum setting is both amazing and kind of sad.  I think it brings a melancholy feeling to see one this way for several reasons.  (1) It’s a reminder of simpler days.  The type of simple days that comes with youth.  It’s not to say that the 1980s were necessarily a simpler time.  It’s that the shuttle is a reminder of the dreams of space travel for a thirteen year old boy.  And (2) The shuttle is an example of incredible engineering, but also a reminder of failures.  Twice a shuttle exploded.  And the last one was brought down by something as simple as foam heat shields.  Combining these two points rips one from childhood dreams and reminds us of how little control we have over life.

Back to childhood wonder… Anoles (the little lizards that are all over Florida) continually cause me to pause and watch… Wondering what they’re up to and where they’ll go next.  One was perched three feet from me as I ate lunch at Vero Beach.  Another took shelter in a downspout of the house next to where mom and dad stayed.  Overturned flower pots became Anole castles and empty driveways, on sunny days, are as Anole beaches.

I continue to love turtles.  I didn’t see many while in Florida but I think I tried to take a picture of every one I did see.  I still wonder to myself if I should buy a pet turtle.  Lots of travel makes that a hard decision to make, but I think I mostly avoid doing it because I doubt my ability to give the turtle as good a place to live as the ponds they have in the wild.  I know these are pet store turtles and not something captured from a nearby waterway… But I think I’d constantly look at one in his tank and feel guilty for not making his world a better place.  In the end, I’d likely be releasing them into the wild or spending thousands of dollars on a tank that would take up my entire computer room.

Few things are as sad as destroyed forest.  Part of the woods across the street from me has been plowed over in preparation for the new road that will be going in nearby.  Walking through the stumps and fallen trees reminds me of the deforestation of my Wedgewood Park neighbourhood.  I knew it was coming here.  And I know that I live next to a forest by the partial destruction of that forest.  My house likely being on the ground where once a grove stood for happy songbirds.  But still, my walk through the downed trees was hard.  And the sight of the poor Robin, chirping it’s alarm call while perched on a fallen branch made it all the worse.  Another nesting neighbourhood no more.

In Florida, I saw my first armadillo.  They are such interesting animals.  And funny how, in the end, I’ll probably remember coming face to face with an armadillo on the same level of fascination as being up close to the Space Shuttle Atlantis.  You wouldn’t expect those two things to hold equal standing in ones memory… But, there you go.

I continue to miss the four on, four off shift of CPSIC.  I’m quite torn with work when it comes to my old section vs. the one I’m in now.  Don’t miss twelve hour days at the office.  I enjoy heading home at 3:00 in the afternoon.  I like the focus of one task rather than bouncing from this to that.  But I miss the independence of the old position.  And my energy level is much better not bouncing from days to nights.  But I sure do miss those four day weekends.  Four days to be on my own schedule.  To be able to go hike at 11:30 on a Wednesday and to wake without an alarm going off most of the time.  I’ve been on a regular schedule for almost a year now and still, weekends are just too short.

So there it is, and with lots left off.  I have lots of wonderful memories from Florida.  Supper on the pier at Cocoa Beach with mom and dad, cards with them on the coffee table to unwind at the end of the day.  Sitting in ball parks with perfect green grace, palm trees and soaring osprey.  Exploring rocket ships, but also exploring the neighbourhood pond.  And sharing my birthday with mom and dad, in a summery baseball park.  Never have I had such a birthday as that.