This is Post #500

It's a rear-window decal. When the windshield wiper is on, the dog
seems to wag its tail. Humans made this. Humans thought this was a good idea.

When I noted, with some sense of accomplishment, that I made my 100th post, it was July 12, 2014. I was two years away from a hip replacement that I was then unaware I would need. I had not gone to Lima or Paris as part of the global negotiations on climate change. Bruce's mom was brightly alive and Kevan, my brother-in-law, was three years away from a stroke that tried to, but didn't, slow him down.

And I was still working.

My project of serial, broadcast, autobiography started in 2004, when our little Jack Russel terrier Molly was no longer a young dog, but had another seven years in her. Back then I sent out weekly emails with a picture attached, almost always a photo of the dog. I'd miss a week or two here and there, but once I switched to blogging, I posted regularly. Every. Single. Saturday.

I'd expand production by travel blogging as a service both to my readers and myself. I wanted to remember.

I wrote about my hip surgery and the adventures of convalescence. Invisible others from around the world still read those posts.

And I took a stab at fiction, because, why not?

This blog has never had a future plan, no ultimate goal, no end date. I do put thought into it every week. Sometimes I know what I'm going to write. Sometimes I even do research. Sometimes, like this time, I just come to the blank Blogger screen and see what happens. 

That my weekly conjuring act has grown a long tail can't be surprising, and yet it does surprise me. I'm surprised I've created something so public in the course of doing something which in its essence is so private.

I am grateful to all of my readers. This blog is my long-winded, one-sided conversation with all of you. It says, Who-like, that I am here. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Damage

The force of a storm burst asunder the 100+ year old silver maple at the southeast corner of the Allan Gardens last Wednesday. A quarter of its mass fell on the walkway.

With that, the tree's fate was sealed.

First, the tree got the dread "red spot." 

Then a guy with a wood chipper cut up and rendered the smallest parts of the big branches that fell.

The branches still not fallen were the next to go. Another rough COVID haircut.

Now there's just a stump. Soon that will be gone, too.

In the meantime, an enterprising rat/squirrel/raccoon tried as hard as it could to find the tasty part of the insulation on our air conditioner line.

It never did find it, but you can see the little blighter tried his best.

I gave the insulation two weeks to heal itself. When that didn't work out, I searched online to see if there was a less magical solution. I learned self sealing pipe insulation is a thing, readily available at most hardware stores. 

Voila. 

I feel so handy.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Still standing:
the Allan Gardens'
White Sycamore

(M)ask Me Anything

Wearing a mask indoors in public areas became mandatory in Toronto on July 7, 2020.

Bruce and I have been wearing masks indoors in public since the third week of April. Some people have been wearing them much longer than that. Remember the Great Mask Famine of February 2020? 

That was when selfish people were the ones who overreacted to the threat of the virus and secured PPE for themselves, forcing frontline workers to work without proper equipment.

In April, public health sources started tentatively suggesting that wearing a non-medical mask might keep contagious people from spreading the virus. But Theresa Tam, the federal Medical Officer of Health, wasn't sure that meant we should all wear one.

By May, she felt she finally had enough evidence to recommend, in a nice way, that, as locked down jurisdictions opened up, people should wear masks when they left their homes. 

And, sure enough, more and more medical research showed that containing ones' breath served, along with other measures like social distancing and hand washing, to curtail the spread.*

So, by mid-June, important rhetorical questions were being asked about whether or not mask wearing in public should be mandatory. 

Next came a game of political hot potato between Ontario cities and the province about which order of government should do the filthy business of regulation.

"You do it," said the municipalities to the province.

"No, you do it," said the province to the municipalities.

"We're just going to go ahead and do it," said the Toronto Transit Commission, which announced in June that masks would be mandatory on the TTC by July 2.

"OK, you win," said Toronto Mayor John Tory, and now we have a mask by-law.

Following fast on the TTC by-law was news coverage of people opposing mandatory masks.

Welcome to the human race, where people still smoke cigarettes (230,000 Canadian deaths a year), drink alcohol (15,000 Canadian deaths, 90,000 hospital admissions and 240,000 years of life lost) and take myriad other avoidable risks. 

But, you may be thinking, these are not analogous. Wearing a mask is not, like smoking and selfie-taking, a matter of personal choice. Masks are about collective action. OK. Maybe I should put it this way:

Welcome to the human race, where failures of collective action are commonplace. Some humans drink and drive, litter, and prefer to drink water out of disposable plastic bottles when there's no need to. 

They drive fossil-fuel-burning cars, too.

Because, freedom.

Thanks for reading!

Wear that mask!

Karen

A storm came out of nowhere on Wednesday and took down another 
chunk of the silver maple at the south east corner of the Allan Gardens. 
Not the first time that's happened.

*A short list of recent research:

Rothe C, Schunk M, Sothmann P, et al. Transmission of 2019-nCoV Infection from an Asymptomatic Contact in Germany. The New England journal of medicine. 2020;382(10):970-971. PMID: 32003551

Zou L, Ruan F, Huang M, et al. SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load in Upper Respiratory Specimens of Infected Patients. The New England journal of medicine. 2020;382(12):1177-1179. PMID: 32074444

Pan X, Chen D, Xia Y, et al. Asymptomatic cases in a family cluster with SARS-CoV-2 infection. The Lancet Infectious diseases. 2020. PMID: 32087116

Bai Y, Yao L, Wei T, et al. Presumed Asymptomatic Carrier Transmission of COVID-19. Jama. 2020. PMID: 32083643

Kimball A HK, Arons M, et al. Asymptomatic and Presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Residents of a Long-Term Care Skilled Nursing Facility — King County, Washington, March 2020. MMWR Morbidity and mortality weekly report. 2020; ePub: 27 March 2020. PMID: 32240128

Wei WE LZ, Chiew CJ, Yong SE, Toh MP, Lee VJ. Presymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 — Singapore, January 23–March 16, 2020. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 2020;ePub: 1 April 2020. PMID: 32271722

Li R, Pei S, Chen B, et al. Substantial undocumented infection facilitates the rapid dissemination of novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV2). Science (New York, NY). 2020. PMID: 32179701

Furukawa NW, Brooks JT, Sobel J. Evidence Supporting Transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 While Presymptomatic or Asymptomatic [published online ahead of print, 2020 May 4]. Emerg Infect Dis. 2020;26(7):10.3201/eid2607.201595.

Oran DP, Topol Prevalence of Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection: A Narrative Review [published online ahead of print, 2020 Jun 3]. Ann Intern Med. 2020;M20-3012. PMID: 32491919

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2020. Rapid Expert Consultation on the Possibility of Bioaerosol Spread of SARS-CoV-2 for the COVID-19 Pandemic (April 1, 2020). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25769

Schwartz KL, Murti M, Finkelstein M, et al. Lack of COVID-19 transmission on an international flight. CMAJ. 2020;192(15):E410. PMID: 32392504

Anfinrud P, Stadnytskyi V, Bax CE, Bax A. Visualizing Speech-Generated Oral Fluid Droplets with Laser Light Scattering. N Engl J Med. 2020 Apr 15. doi:10.1056/NEJMc2007800. PMID: 32294341

Davies A, Thompson KA, Giri K, Kafatos G, Walker J, Bennett A. Testing the efficacy of homemade masks: would they protect in an influenza pandemic? Disaster Med Public Health Prep. 2013;7(4):413-8. PMID: 24229526

Konda A, Prakash A, Moss GA, Schmoldt M, Grant GD, Guha S. Aerosol Filtration Efficiency of Common Fabrics Used in Respiratory Cloth Masks. ACS Nano. 2020 Apr 24. PMID: 32329337

Aydin O, Emon B, Saif MTA. Performance of fabrics for home-made masks against spread of respiratory infection through droplets: a quantitative mechanistic study. medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.19.20071779, posted April 24, 2020.

Ma QX, Shan H, Zhang HL, Li GM, Yang RM, Chen JM. Potential utilities of mask-wearing and instant hand hygiene for fighting SARS-CoV-2. J Med Virol. 2020. PMID: 32232986

Leung, N.H.L., Chu, D.K.W., Shiu, E.Y.C. et al.Respiratory virus shedding in exhaled breath and efficacy of face masks. Nat Med. 2020. PMID: 32371934

Canada Day

Socially distanced masked Canada Day celebrants lined up for the Toronto Island Ferry.

I've forgotten why I restarted my subscription to the Globe and Mail. Between the CBC, the Toronto Star, the National Observer and all the myriad other publications pushed to me by my newsfeed, I really do get more news than I can -- or should rationally want to -- read in a day.

I do want to remember, though, why I cancelled my subscription this week. What's driving this decision is not the Globe's half-hearted stab at noticing climate change, or its kludgy journalism, or the fact that it employs plagiarists. It's this, from its Canada Day editorial:

As we have written many times before, Canada is not just a fact. It is an act – a perpetual act of creation, maintenance and improvement. Canada was created by people of many faiths and races who had to find a way to bridge their differences and create a transcendent, common citizenship. That’s what the Fathers of Confederation did in the 19th century, when the gap that threatened violence and dissolution was French-English and Catholic-Protestant. In different forms, it is something that every generation since has had to wrestle with, as old fissures close and new fault lines are revealed. [emphasis added] 

To resort to "founding father" jingoistic bullshit in the age of reconciliation with First Nations is at best tone deaf and at worst an affirmation that we should celebrate that Canada was founded on genocide.

I'm sure that this latter thought never crossed the minds of the editors of the Globe and Mail when they wrote their editorial.

And that's why I cancelled my subscription.

Thanks for reading!

Stay safe and stay cool!

Karen

A national monument to the real heroes