Inertia and Covid 19

Yesterday inertia had me in the shop sanding away until late at night. Today inertia has me sitting in front of the computer screen mindlessly scrolling through YouTube and Facebook. I did manage to take a shower shortly before noon and since then I have done little. It is a beautiful sunny day and the weather is warm. I could go for a walk. There are many things to be done in the shop and I know I’d enjoy them if I could just get myself in there. Despite the lovely weather and the blue sky and sunshine, I’m grumpy.

I also like this guy. 

Alberta had the highest number of new cases of Covid 19 in the country yesterday. IN THE COUNTRY! Higher than Ontario that has three times our population. Higher than Quebec that has twice our population. What is wrong with us? Is it selfishness: you’re not the boss of me and you can’t tell me what to do? Is it denial: I feel fine and my mother, father, sister, brother, friend, feels fine so we’ll just meet at my house for a coffee? Is it a desire to gamble: if you look at the stats only about 1% of the population has it so most of us don’t so I’ll just carry on as usual? Are there really that many of us who believe in conspiracy theories and discount science? I don’t know and it makes me tired thinking about it.

This pandemic is inconvenient. I’m not about to go wandering around the stores just to see what they’ve got. I’m not going for my weekly lutherie lesson. This is the second Christmas since I was 8 years old that I haven’t been practicing Christmas carols as part of at least one choir. I miss seeing friends in ‘3D’. I miss sharing a meal with friends. And here’s an extremely petty one: I’m getting really tired of seeing images on the news of people getting swabs stuck up their noses! But none of this is worth either catching Covid myself or being part of a chain of transmission so complex the people who are doing the tracing can no longer figure it out. So I’ve decided to do what I did my last year of teaching. I made a list of the things that I would miss and another list of the things I wouldn’t miss when I retired.  Seems to me I have a pretty good start on what I don’t like about Covid so what about what I do like?

I like not having to go anywhere after supper. I like not having to rush to appointments. I like being able to wear the same favourite clothes and not having to worry about being presentable for other people. Having less contact with people in general means I have fewer opportunities to be irritated by them. I can, after all, turn off the news. I like having uninterrupted time in the shop (once I get myself in there.) I know our neighbours better now than I have in the previous 34 years that we’ve lived here, and they are good neighbours. There are children around and, while I’m not big on little kids in general, I very much enjoy the energetic girls next door and the three kids across the alley who are a bit older. 

Yesterday the doorbell rang and when Richard went to see who it was he found a water-colour painting of a bunch of flowers in our mailbox done by the girl across the alley. We put it on the fridge.She is the same artist who painted a picture of Odie with a Santa hat and Christmas lights on her patio door. Each time I go out to shovel snow off the pad or put out the garbage I look at Santa Odie and I have to smile. I like spending time at home. 

I like having accumulated enough tools and materials that I can take on most shop projects I can think of. A couple of days ago I pulled out the pyrography set that I haven’t used for a few years in order to add detail to a project. I like having a variety of wood to work with. I’m discovering that all the trouble I was having with the scroll saw was likely due to operator error and I’m enjoying what it allows me to do if I take it slowly. Spending more time in the shop has me thinking about ways that I can rearrange it to make the most of the small space. That will be a huge undertaking but, bit by bit, I’m thinking it through.

Richard and I are pretty happy with each other’s company. We find things to laugh about. We rattle around the house occupied with our individual pursuits and then spend time at dinner and watch our YouTube favourites together. I’m grateful that I’m no longer on the front lines in the schools and I have nothing but admiration for those in health care, education and ‘essential’ jobs who don’t have the luxury of just staying home. Then there are all the parents who are trying to juggle working from home with keeping their children engaged when the children can no longer just drop over to a friend’s house after school, or participate in multiple extra-curricular and community activities. 

I do admit to wanting to slap people upside the head when they do things like move a volleyball team’s practice site from Calgary to Cochrane where measures are more lenient or lie about Covid symptoms and bring the virus into a hospital. The only way out of this is through it so may all of us be thoughtful, kind, and look after each other. Despite my crossness with people, I’m content and I need to take time to remind myself of this. I feel better now and may even go out for a walk. Thanks for reading.

Everything I know about snow shovelling I learned in the wood shop

Bevel up

 Ok this one is probably just weird so feel free to bail now.  I've long heard the expression that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We had a dump of snow over the last few days and today I was out shovelling the remains of it. It was about -7C according to the thermometer but it felt much warmer in the sun. So much so that once I got the top layer of snow off the thin layer closest to the sidewalk began to melt.

On my first pass I was left with harder snow that had been packed down by people walking on it. Rather than going at it again with the snow shovel in the regular orientation, I turned it over and scraped at the crusty stuff that way. It did a much better job of removing most of what was left. It's exactly the same with a chisel. Bevel down you take a finer scooping cut; bevel up you can take a heavier straighter cut. Both positions have their uses. Of course turning the snow shovel over does wear it out faster, but it's a snow shovel!  When it wears out I cut the handle off and keep it if it's made of hardwood and I get a new snow shovel. If it has a metal handle I toss the whole thing. The plastic snow shovels aren't meant to last.

Bevel down

Another similarity: when I skew the shovel I change the angle of attack just as I do when I'm using a chisel or a plane. Maybe when you're a woodworker everything looks like a piece of wood and a cutting tool.

Making bread on a snowy day

It’s Tuesday and normally I’m learning to build ukuleles on a Tuesday. To do this I drive about an hour north. Today it’s snowy and the highways are partially covered. There’s an accident on Stoney Trail so I’ve decided to stay home. That’s the wonderful thing about being retired: nobody is depending on me to make my way through the snow. The roads probably aren’t that bad and, no doubt, I’ve driven in worse but it’s fabulous that now, I simply don’t have to. There are challenges to growing older and there are also great opportunities.

So what am I doing with my bonus day at home? I thought I’d spend every moment in the shop and then I got sidetracked. Wouldn’t it be a good day to bake bread and have the house infused with that smell that was an ever-present one as I grew up? We could buy bread and sometimes do. We both love it and tend to eat way too much of it so we mostly ignore the temptation to buy. The same goes for a bread machine. We have had two. They were wonderful and it was way too easy to make bread that came out flawless every time - well most times, unless you forget to put the paddle in which results in a burned stack of ingredients when you get home and expect a lovely light loaf of bread to have with chili for supper. In an effort to eat less bread and other carbohydrates we gave the machine away about six years ago.

With the onset of Covid we are looking not only for comfort food but also for comfort smells and activities. When I lived in Banff I baked all my own bread. It was a calming thing to do on snowy weekends when I didn’t have to go into work. It also helped to warm up the draughty suite which had only a gas heater in the living room. Mind you, near the gas heater was a great place to set the bread to rise. 

Mum used to put hers over one of the heat registers.I’m not sure I’ve found the ideal place to raise bread so, for the moment, it sits on the counter. With a convection oven and quick-rise yeast making bread doesn’t take nearly as long as it used to and every once in a while I make a couple of loaves. As so often happens I just thought I’d check Google to see what was new in baking pans. The ones I inherited work very well and I’m sure they were in service before I was born. Somehow the loaves I’m making don’t seem to fill the pans as much as I’d like them to. I was wondering if there were slightly smaller pans available. And down the rabbit hole I go.

crust is a bit dark (tastes good though)

There are all sorts of bread pans available most of them the same size as the ones I have. There are steel bread pans with no coating, silicone pans that need no coating, aluminum pans with non-stick coating, bread pans with lids (why would you need a lid), and bread pans that make 4 mini-loaves in a single pan. Or, I could just form the bread into a round loaf and throw it in the oven. We have to be very careful about non-stick coatings, most of which are toxic to birds if they get overheated. Much as I threaten Odie with the soup-pot from time to time, I’d hate for anything to happen to him. So today I’m not buying any new bread pans and the bread is rising in the heirloom pans as have so many loaves before it. Maybe the next time I’ll make a round loaf or a baguette-shaped loaf. For today, it’s two mostly whole-wheat loaves.I’ll experiment with slightly longer rising times and other places to set the bread to rise. The texture of the bread has been dense but not overly so for whole wheat. I’d like to try sourdough again but hesitate because you have to feed it and use it regularly and we really don’t need to eat that much bread. Still the idea is intriguing. Stay tuned.

A different sort of lunch date

Alberta hit a high in terms of new Covid cases today (406)and with that we get closer to increased restrictions. I was thinking of what I miss and don’t miss about life before Covid. I don’t miss the busyness. Even a retired person can run around frantically trying to do too many things. I very much like staying home in the evenings especially now that the weather has turned wintery. During the summer we enjoyed the occasional yard visit either here or at friends’. That’s not going to be happening now for a while so I guess I’ll be putting in a bit more Zoom and Skype time. I do miss eating out. It’s a chance to get out of the house, have someone else do the cooking and the clean-up, and just chat with each other. While restaurants are open for in-person dining, we haven’t felt comfortable going into a restaurant and with the case numbers on the rise we won’t be going anytime soon. So what do we do instead?


Mostly we get take-out and eat it at home. Today Richard suggested that we get take-out and eat lunch somewhere with a view. We ate our Vietnamese subs in the car at the top of Battalion Park. Even though I managed to get sauce on my down jacket, I enjoyed watching the cars come and go on the newly-opened south part of the ring road and the familiar shopping centre looks very different from above. I think we will have to make a concerted effort this winter to do different things or to do things differently. Who knows, I may even be seized by an attack of tidiness and systematically deal with the various nooks and crannies in the house where overlooked stuff has taken up residence. I know some of you are laughing at that possibility and, if I were you, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Still, these are unprecedented times and unprecedented things happen in unprecedented times. I’ll keep you posted.

A bit of excitement

Today was an exciting day. Well, no, that’s not quite true. I got excited today about an idea. One of the things I loved about teaching was getting together with other teachers and planning. Someone would have an idea and someone else would build on it. Then someone else would tweak it and so it would go. I love that kind of stuff but there hasn’t been very much of it in my retired life and, particularly with Covid 19 causing me to be less mobile, I confess to getting a lot of my mental stimulation from YouTube. Of course, there is a lot of interesting content there and also a ton of crap. Yesterday I decided I was wasting time looking deeper and deeper into my feed trying to find something interesting instead of just shutting down the computer and going and DOING something interesting. YouTube and Facebook are a bit like playing the slots but that’s for another post.

In 2013 and 2014 I became fascinated by mandalas and even provoked the tendon in my arm because I did so much work with coloured pencils. After a while I didn’t draw mandalas anymore. I still liked them but other things took my time. I decided to fish out the coloured pencils and have another go. I got started on a mandala design and enjoyed it just as much as when I worked at them before, but making mandalas isn’t the reason I got so excited.

As you know I’m learning to build ukuleles and as Jake and I work together more we find that we spontaneously build on each other’s ideas. I travel once a week to work with him and in between times we often text about what we’re up to. This morning Jake sent me a text of his work space commenting that it was messy. Well, my bench in the shop is relatively tidy at this moment but my desk is another story. I have the huge box of coloured pencils taken apart and spread over the desk. There are pencils, erasers and various drawing tools to complete the chaos. I decided to send Jake a photo of my mess.

He commented that the mandala sitting in the centre of the mess would make a great design for an instrument's sound hole. Since I blend two or three colours in each of the segments, I didn’t see how it would be possible to replicate the mandala or part of it using traditional inlay techniques and I dismissed it - for about 2 minutes. Then I got to wondering, what if I designed a mandala-like circle to go around the sound hole, coloured it with coloured pencils and used epoxy over top to seal it and to give enough thickness so it could be sanded along with the instrument’s top. The card stock I use is fairly substantial and acid-free. I think my set of pencils is of archival quality and if they’re not I know I can buy ones that are.

First attempt

I was off on a rush of possibilities. It’s not the traditional way to make rosettes but it’s still original art. Each one would be unique. What fun it would be to have all those colours at my fingertips when making a design to go around the sound hole! I left the original mandala and started to play with circles about the size of the sound hole in a tenor uke. It’s easier to start bigger and figure out some of the logistics, then I can adapt to smaller sound holes. I decided to use warm colours because they are not as common as the greens and blues of the shell traditionally used in inlay work and I wanted to emphasize, in my own mind if nothing else, the difference between what I was doing and what is traditionally done. I ended up introducing some cooler colours and I don’t much like the first attempt. I’ll let the ideas percolate for a couple of days and then try again. In the meantime I can experiment with an epoxy coating on the first one. I think we can find a way to get this to work and I’m pretty excited about the possibilities. Stay tuned.

Reading over the blog books

During our first camping trip this year and in a peaceful setting, I reread all of my blog posts in book form. I’m happy to say that they weren’t too cringe-worthy. There were more errors than I would have liked but I knew that was going to happen. A strange quirk of the formatting means that sometimes there is no space at the end of a sentence. Some of that may be my sloppy keyboarding but even that doesn’t adequately explain the frequency of the quirk. Some of the pictures aren’t the ones I would have chosen for a full-page spread, and again, that’s the result of choices made by the program as it translates blog posts into books. I’m prepared to live with it.

I’m relieved that there is less repetition that I anticipated, although I never again get to say that the only serious mistake is one from which you learn nothing. I counted that particular phrase in three separate places. I was pleased with the books as a record of the day-to-day events since I retired. It is much more concise than my regular journal and it is easier to find things. I can see doing one of these books every year or two so Richard and I can have them as a reference. It was fun looking back on the travelling we have done and it was nice to be able to put dates to particular holidays. Sometimes I remember the year of a holiday and sometimes I don’t. If you don’t mind the errors, making a book from a blog is much easier than creating a photo book from scratch. Maybe I’ll just have to do a better job of proofreading as I go.

Hike to Larch Valley

Recently we hiked into Larch Valley. We’ve been there a couple of times before but that was probably about 30 years ago. On the last occasion we hiked up Sentinel Pass and down through Paradise Valley. We had no desire to even start the climb toward the pass on this trip. I would have to say that I was one of the more ancient folks doing the hike. The trail was busy but it wasn’t even close to wall-to-wall people. There were many groups of people probably in the 20-30 year-old range. There were a fair number of folks with dogs and one person had a cat on a leash. She was on her way up carrying the cat when we were on our way down. There were several couples with small children and the kids were climbing up the trail with the seriousness of seasoned hikers. There was a couple with an old dog who were going about the same pace as I was and, judging by the hair colour of both of them, they were my age or possibly a bit older.

While I don’t want to go back to being a different age, I do admit to a tiny twinge of jealousy as the younger people passed us chatting without being out of breath and quickly disappearing around bends in the trail. I can remember being able to walk quickly and being a bit impatient with people who were making slow, steady progress up a trail. It’s taking me a while but I’m learning to start out slowly and at a pace I can keep. I’d love to rush off from the trailhead with enthusiasm but that only means that I end up tired, cranky, and gasping at which point the enjoyment is gone. So I go slowly and step aside to let people pass while my hiking companions kindly adapt to my pace.

We noticed one young woman carrying two camera bodies and remarked on her dedication as she passed us. When we got up to the lake, where the trail to the pass takes off, we saw her again. One of her hiking companions stood against the grey blue of the rocks and the yellow of the larches in a sleeveless maroon gown. Turns out she and her fiance were there to have engagement photos taken. I admire their creativity and fortitude since it was a little on the chilly side. Still, the photographer and the couple seemed to be enjoying themselves and I couldn’t help wishing that in 20 or 30 years they will be able to look back on this day with great fondness. 

At home after the hike I was tired and a bit stiff and the larches were past their brilliant best; nevertheless, it was worth getting up at 6:30 a.m. to catch the shuttle at Lake Louise. It was worth the fogged up glasses from wearing a mask on the bus. It was worth carrying the extra layers of clothing even though I didn’t need to wear them and, most of all, it was worth the effort of climbing up into the valley so we could spend the day with friends in the mountains among the larches while whiskey jacks and ravens looked on.