Saturday, April 26, 2014

Spring


APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

These are the first four lines of T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Wasteland." I know I studied it in undergrad, but all I can effortlessly recall of it now are the first five words and the last three, which are "shanti, shanti, shanti," the same words with which I end most yoga classes.
 
Eliot was a Catholic, explained my English prof, which is why he thought the mild, spring month of April cruel. It has to do with Easter.

Maybe. A random, biased, assessment by someone calling herself "GeekMom" shows what I would call a statistically significant spike in bad things happening in April. 

It does seem that lots of people have passed away this month. In no particular order some were: Mickey Rooney, Peaches Geldof, Jim Flaherty, Herb Gray, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, those five young people in Calgary, those 300 people on the South Korean ferry, the sherpas on Everest  and, just the other night, Bruce's Uncle Bill.


In cruel times like April's, a stroll among the flowers in the Allan Gardens Greenhouse can be just the thing. 






Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen



Friday, April 18, 2014

Detailed Accounts

Our neighbour's cat Chester, peering.

Readers recall from two posts ago that I had two things on my mind: the fact that I needed a new fridge and that I was just coming off of a six-week bout with shingles.

Over the past week I have learned that people are a lot more interested in hearing the details about these things that I would have thought. One colleague of mine whom I happened upon in a vast, Queens' Park hallway would not let me go until I'd shared everything I'd experienced with shingles.

As a service to my readers, then, here is the full story, set out as Qs and As:

Q: Do you get shingles if you've never had chicken pox or because you've had chicken pox?
A: Because you've had chicken pox. It's a herpes virus, and those suckers stick around. 

Q: So what causes shingles?
A: If your immune system gets weakened, the virus will make its move. People over fifty get it just because their immune system is generally weaker. But anything can trigger it. In my case, it was two weeks away from home and one night of drinking too much.

Q: How do you know you have shingles?
A: You don't most of the time until the rash shows up. An early sign - in my case at least - was random, unexplained pains in the general area of where the rash appeared. 

Q: If you think you have shingles, what should you do?
A: Find someone who can confirm that you have it and then write you a prescription for antivirals right away.

Q: Is it painful?
A: Yes, but not the way you'd think. There are distinct stages. And everyone experiences it differently. The virus has attacked a nerve, which can mean just about anything from mild irritation to blindness (if it gets in your optic nerve). The rash - mine was mostly on my lower right rib cage - is the obvious part of the illness - and I managed mine with Tylenol and lavish applications of antibiotic cream. It was like a cold sore, except really big. The worst part was after the surface sores were all but gone. The site pulsed/itched/hurt like nothing I've experienced in my life. I became a bit desperate when it seemed the sensations -- which pain killers did not resolve -- would never settle down, never go away. My tap-dancing injured nerves were most active at night making it impossible to sleep. But, I found that wrapping a tension bandage around my rib cage really helped. And, slowly, over the weeks, the sensations subsided. 

Q: Is there a vaccine?
A: Yes. If you're over fifty, you may want to get vaccinated. 

Q: If you get it, how long does it last?
A: The medical information on the Internet says three to four weeks, but that would only account for the rash. If you've got a significant case of shingles, plan to have it and its after effects around for a couple of months.

As For the Fridge

As proof that the "have it now" culture has completely ruined me, I thought I was only half kidding when I said, two blogs ago, that I was hoping to get my new fridge delivered in a half an hour or it would be free.

Turns out fridges are not pizzas, and, while it's probably too easy to order one over the phone, getting one delivered still takes some doing. Let me share the details of that experience, in the same format as above:

Q: What possessed you to buy a fridge, sight unseen from someone you didn't know and had never done business with before?
A: I believe in the rule of law and understand that the state exists to enforce contracts, even verbal ones made over these new-fangled talking machines.

Q: What?
A: I mean, I had looked on the Internet and had basically shopped for a fridge that would fit in our fridge-hole and that was black. Those two factors limited my choice to two appliance retailers in the city and ONE fridge - a bottom-of-the-line Whirlpool model. One of the retailers had it on sale, the other didn't. So I called the guys who had it on sale.

Q: How'd the call go?
A: It took about fourteen tries to get the salesman to get the model number right, but after that we progressed like a house on fire. Before I knew it, he had my credit card number and my address and I still didn't even knew his name.

Q: What was his name?
A: Eddie.

Q: So it sounds like the purchase went smoothly. What was that you were saying about delivery?
A: Well, here's the thing. This was the week we took Friday and the following Monday off to go to Belleville for Kim and Kevan's wedding. I asked Eddie if he could arrange delivery before Friday. Eddie said something about that not being his department and someone would call me.

Q: That's a sterling example of outstanding customer service. Did you ever hear from Eddie again?
A: I called on Tuesday to follow up because no one had called me. I only knew Eddie's name so I asked for him again. I explained my situation to Eddie and he said he'd get someone to call me back.

Q: And...?
A: I got a call from some guy who did not identify himself saying he would deliver the fridge on Monday and he'd need a bank draft for the balance owing - I'd paid a $200 deposit when I ordered the fridge.

Q: Did he tell you who to make the draft out to?
A: No.

Q: So you had to guess?
A: Yes.

Q: Did you guess right?
A: No.

Q: What happened on Monday?
A: Around noon I got a call from another guy who didn't identify himself asking me if I'd like to have my fridge delivered on Tuesday.

Q: Bummer.
A: Well, it was irritating that they'd completely messed up the Monday delivery, but it gave me the opportunity to find out I was going to have to go back to the bank to change the payee on the money order. I also got the leverage I needed to tell them they better deliver our fridge first fucking thing on Tuesday morning or I was going to flame the "customer testimonial" page on their web site.

Q: So you got your fridge on Tuesday morning?
A: First fucking thing.

Q: And it's a nice fridge?
A: It's a fridge. "Nice" is for curtains and afternoons.

Q: What's the forecast for fridge poetry?
A: Getting rid of the old fridge gave Bruce the strength he needed to blow up the old poem about Satan at the gates of Heaven and it's a whole new ball game now.

***************************************************

Molly's farewell performance is here.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week and Happy Easter!

Karen












Monday, April 14, 2014

Making Your Life

This post is coming to you a couple of days late because I was busy on the weekend witnessing my sister's wedding.

Here's a picture of the happy couple, with emphasis on the word happy.



Earlier in the week, and at the opposite end of the happy spectrum, I went to a meeting with my City Council representative - Kristen Wong-Tam - convened by the members of the condo board.

I was glad that they'd arranged the meeting and had looked forward to it. I like Wong-Tam. She's a good city councillor.

The board hadn't circulated an agenda, so I was wondering what they would talk about.

But I hadn't really needed to wonder. 

Readers know mine is a very colourful neighbourhood. You may also recall that, with the politicized installation of the Sherbourne Street bike lane, we have all been inconvenienced a bit in accessing our properties.

That said, I barely recognized the place as it was described by the board to Wong-Tam. According to them, the quality of our lives had been all but destroyed since the bike lane came in and the street crime made us all prisoners in our own homes and those awful drunks in Allan Gardens ... and so on.

All at once at one point in the evening, I recalled with perfect clarity why it was impossible for me to serve on the Board with these people, felt a great sympathy for Wong-Tam who remained poised, well-spoken and focused as my neighbours heaped one impossible problem after another on her, and yearned to go home where things were pleasant and appreciated, the neighbourhood held no terrors and the bike lane was a good thing because it calmed traffic, had fixed the street and made the city a better place.

I believe - as frequently asserted in greeting cards and other sources of wisdom - that your life is what you make it. You bring your own joy, your own sorrow to everything that happens to you. The people seated next to me at the meeting with Wong-Tam decided to find a well of sorrow in their pleasant, easy and peaceful lives. The eighty-two-year-old father of the groom seated next to me at the wedding feast had just lost his wife to cancer but had a grand time, chatted animately about many things and enjoyed every bite of the fine meal.

You choose.



Thanks for reading!

Molly's next-to-last (honest this time) post is here.

Have a great week!

Karen


Saturday, April 5, 2014

Shingles Jingles


St Augustine lizard

My wish for everyone in the world is that they never, ever get shingles.

Mine popped up on or about March 4, and, while some people never know what triggered theirs, I'm willing to bet mine arose from the combined impact of two weeks away from home capped by that epic bender in Kingston. These knocked my immune system down far enough that the lurking virus broke free.

Anyone curious about shingles will find a mountain of information on the Internet along with sad stories about people whose lives are never the same because of chronic pain or itching that lingers long after the viral outbreak is spent.

I, however, appear to be a member of the lucky 90% and won't suffer to the end of my days from the torturous signals of damaged nerves. 

Yippee.

Now that my holidays and my outbreak are behind me, it's life as usual in these parts:


My first priority today, however, is to get a new fridge. The piece of crap barely six-year-old GE model that came with the house has died. Thanks to the Internet, I already know who I'm going to call and what model of refrigerator I want to talk with them about. Then I'll see if I can get it delivered today. My final gambit will be to see if they will guarantee delivery within one half hour or it's free.

Here's Molly's post.

Thanks for reading!

Karen


  


 






Thursday, April 3, 2014

Bonus Edition: Fun With Phone Apps

While I was in St. Augustine, my friends Kate and Ed introduced me to some fun apps that you can get for your tablet or phone.

The apps are made by one or both of John Balestrieri of Tinrocket, LLC and Robert Clair of Chromatic Bytes, LLC. There are three: Waterlogue - which turns your photos into watercolour paintings; Percolator - which takes digital images and manipulates them into mosaic-like arrangements; Popsicolor - which turns photos into duotones (just like they used to do to those photos in your high school yearbook).

The apps are hugely fun to play with and the images you make can be posted readily to social media. For what I've done below I shared photos from my Mac to my iPad and shared the modified images back from my iPad to my Mac. These apps aren't available for Macs, else all these steps would not be necessary.

Percolator
Readers recall that this was one of the images I made on my iPad a couple of summers ago. It's my rendition of a Hockney.



Here's how it looks after it's been "brewed by Percolator."



Popsicolor
Readers may also recall the very first photo I published on this blog, the found object sculpture of a superhero on the Leslie Street Spit.


Here's how it looks as a Popsicolored image:




Waterlogue
This is a previously unpublished photo of Toronto's most famous dying desert plant: the Allan Gardens agave flower spike.



Here it is in Waterlogue:


Each app - especially Percolator - provides lots of options in how you can play with the image. 

Like I said, they're lots of fun.

Thanks for reading!

Karen