Still Winter

Looking out my back door: the view two weeks ago, before the rains fell.

The Gym v. Yoga

For all the months since my hip surgery in August 2016, my friend Sherree has been nagging me (gently) to go to the Yoga Centre Toronto. 

They teach Iyengar yoga there, after BKS Iyengar, one of the greats in the yoga lineages.

For most of those months, fearing injury, I demurred.

I finally went three weeks ago for my first stand-on-your-feet yoga class in almost three years.  

The good news: I didn't break anything. 

Now that I am back at the yoga studio, I feel compelled to compare it with the gym. 

At the gym, people seek distraction from the boredom of exercise. In the "membership plus" workout room, there are seven TVs, two suspended from the ceiling, five mounted on the treadmills and elliptical machines. There's loud music. People wear headphones. In between sets on the exercise machines, people stare transfixed by their glowing handheld devices. 

I especially don't enjoy the oblivious conversations between people who have stopped their workout to have long, loud, personal chats right next to me. 

At the yoga studio, people having quiet conversations are softly shushed and told to enjoy the quiet before the class begins. There are no TVs. The class' focus is on the teacher's voice and whatever horrified signals they receive from their bodies.

The gym is full of giant pieces of machinery. The yoga studio has mats, bolsters and blankets. 

The gym is bustling, teeming with kids, old folks and everything in between plus a zillion staff, both paid and volunteer. The yoga studio is quiet, never crowded and while there's a good age range, there are no kids. There is usually only one teacher plus one person working the front desk.

The gym is a wet environment: the pool, the showers, the steam rooms. The yoga studio is dry. 

So they are different, but they serve their purpose. The gym has given me back the strength and stamina I lost after two years of osteoarthritis-induced immobility. The yoga studio, after exactly two classes, has almost completely resolved a chronic pain in my left shoulder that I thought I would carry to my grave.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Changes

Shop window: Saint Mark's Square, Venice

Bruce's Eye

Readers are aware that Bruce's right eyeball went kerflooie just before Christmas last year. The retina in his right eye had torn in multiple spots. After a vitrectomy and the insertion of a bubble of propane gas in his eye, Bruce spent four weeks bent forward and off of work to help the bubble help his retina heal.

After a week, the retina was reattached and starting to heal but Bruce's eyesight was still a mess: blurry, watery, and that damned bubble was always in the way.

Bruce went to the eye doc this week for a status check. The doc said Bruce's vision in his operated eye - with his corrective lenses - is 20/20, the best possible indicator for the best possible recovery, which is still some weeks away.

My Job  

Technically, in a period of just under one year, I have had three jobs. I started as the Director of the Air Policy and Climate Change Branch at the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, then became the Director of the Strategic Policy Branch, which job title I held for about six months and then I became the Director of the Corporate Policy Branch. The change to Corporate Policy was cosmetic: it's more or less the same job.

Now I have a fourth title - and, really this time, a new job. On March 19, 2018, I will become the Director of the Distribution and Agency Policy Branch at the Ministry of Energy. The first item on my list of things to do will be to reform the Ontario Energy Board.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Ancestors and Relations

A sweet relation photo: Bruce's dad and Bruce's second cousin's dog on Christmas Day.

While riding the stationary cycle at the Y, watching 24-hour news stations on a muted flat screen TV, I've seen about a thousand ads for the two commercialized DNA companies, Ancestry.ca and 23andMe.ca. 

Succumbing to the pressure, I sent away for the 23andMe package. I filled the spit sample tube and dropped it in the mail more than six weeks ago and still have not received a report.

I am an impatient person. So a couple of weeks ago I also signed up for Ancestry.ca and have set about learning about my ancestors the old fashioned way, by searching for them in a networked database with millions of digitized records and the searches of others who have relations in common. 

Also a relation photo, less sweet. Kevan MacRow, my brother-in-law in mis-matched gear.

The results - in a matter of mere days - and thanks primarily to the work of three Ancestry genealogists who have generously made their searches public, are that I have records back to my great-great grandparents.

My father's great grandad came from the Isle of Mull in Scotland and died in Grey County, Ontario in 1913. The details of my mother's great grandmother are not so clear, but she was married to a man named K.J. Vader Schmidt in Alexandrow, Poland. My mother's grandmother was born in Zabianka, Poland and died in Dafoe, Saskatchewan, in 1938. My mother's mother, the youngest of nine children, was born in Alexandrow, Poland in 1892 and died in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1933.

I'm glad to have this dim glimpse of the people whose genes I share but who I will never know. 

What is overwhelming about the experience of poking around in the data bases is seeing how many people there are who are connected to me.

It is a fanciful notion that people have family "trees." I assume this trope originated from royalty - the legitimacy of the heirs being determined by their forebears. 

The rest of us belong in a unbounded but finite web of relatedness.  

But, there are dark parts in that web. My mother's father, for example, is a complete cypher. 

The August 24, 1942 Lethbridge Herald, reported on its back page the casualties at Dieppe. Among the wounded was my mother's older brother, Alfred Kurt Lohse. The list notes Alfred had a father, Bruno.

Other than that single record, there is nothing about Bruno Lohse anywhere, so you miss the irony of these two lines of type on the back page of the Lethbridge Herald: at the same time that Uncle Alfred was wounded in the line of duty protecting his country, his father Bruno was cooling his heels as a dangerous alien in an internment camp set up by that same country.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Special Edition: Eyeball Update

After a month off work Bruce is ready to rejoin the economy.

His progress is good. The retina is re-attached. The bubble is shrinking, his vision ever so slowly improving.

His eye doc said Bruce could go back to work full time this coming week if he wanted to, but should probably wear an eye patch.

The patch in the picture is a four dollar piece of crap from Rexall Pharmacy. We're on the lookout for a sturdier model with a better, looser band, and a human-sized googly eye attachment so Bruce can cosplay Mad Eye Moody (even though it's the wrong eye).

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Saturday Morning at the AGO

One week ago today my friend Sylvia and I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario to see the Florine Stettheimer show before it closed the next day.

Nothing I could write would top the New York Times' gushing review of the show, which you can find here. 

From a less reverential perspective, I thought the pictures were charming, fun, sometimes complex in their composition and wilfully primitive, as if Grandma Moses went to Fifth Avenue. They seemed a window on a world of privilege, vast wealth and character untested by any of life's harder lessons. 

Shopping frenzy: spring sale at the favourite dress shop.

Florine liked to put her dog in her paintings.

Detail from Florine's self-described masterpiece: herself, her sisters and her mother high above Manhattan.

Detail from self-portrait.

After we saw everything there was to be seen by Florine, we wandered around the galleries for a while. 

One of a series of large panels in a room on the second floor.

Vast mural, dots of acrylic paint on black ground, simulating bead work. 

Wolves prowled among the post-modern art.

Two hours of gawking at pictures builds an appetite. Sylvia and I went to the AGO Bistro, which used to be Frank's. 

My lunch, pasta carbonara; yummy.

Sylvia's Za'atar-Roasted Portobello

Thanks for reading!

Karen