Never Been to Rome

It's about 5 p.m. Rome time. We're been in Italy since about 1:30 p.m.

Our arrival was two hours late because, first, the plane had to be turned around so as to fix the loos that would not flush.

Second, just after they fixed the toilets, and we were again taxiing toward take off, there was a medical emergency on board.

So we had to go back to the gate again.

Being two hours late made us miss the epic rainfall that prevented flights from landing and flooded underpasses throughout Rome (a never-before-seen-downpour - there's a lot of this going on). 

So it is just as well that we were delayed, even though it seemed as if we would spend our two week vacation on the Pearson tarmac.

We are comfortably ensconced in our lovely hotel, about to head down for an orientation session, some sightseeing and supper.

All five of us made it by the way - Carol who travelled the furthest, Kim and Kevan, me and Bruce.

This is going to be awesome.

Photos tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Top Ten Things to do in Northwestern Ontario

In no particular order:

1) Visit Kakabeka Falls. 

I was up north this past week. I flew to Thunder Bay on Monday and spent the night there. At eight a.m. the following morning, a member of my team and I joined up with some colleagues from the Northern Region Office. We were to drive like maniacs first to Dryden, Ontario (about four hours) and then turn sharply north and drive for another hour and a half to the remote and tiny (less than 100 people) settlement of the Wabaskang First Nations community. 

But that doesn't mean we didn't sightsee along the way. 

Enjoy the brief video of the falls on a foggy morning with snatches of conversation in the background about how far people had to portage to get around the falls. It is the very first video I have included in this blog. 

Blocking the view of the falls: me, Amy Leung, Michael Gluck, Joseph Tyance

2) Eat at Bight by the Waterfront in Thunder Bay

My travelling companion/team member, Amy, had never been to Thunder Bay before. So we had to go see the Sleeping Giant. Because we'd gone all that way (about twenty minutes by cab from our hotel by the airport), we had dinner at Bight, where the food can't match the view, but the food is still pretty good.

Bight's pakoras: called an appetizer, really a meal. I couldn't eat them all at dinner, so I took the leftovers back to my hotel room and had them for breakfast the next day.

Blocking the view of the Sleeping Giant: me and Amy.

3) Visit the Suspension Bridge Overhanging a Famously Polluted River in Dryden

After our meeting with the Wabaskang community, we had dinner and spent the night in Dryden before heading back to Thunder Bay to catch our flight to Toronto. This gave us a chance to see the mill site at the centre of the controversy. Long ago an egregious polluter, the plant now is a model of environmental compliance. But some of the the legacy contamination is still there, the beautiful scenery notwithstanding.

4) Get Excited About Entering/leaving a Time Zone

Our travels took us to just the other side of the divide between the Eastern and Central Time Zones. This in itself is not remarkable; we live in a big country. What was remarkable was how much confusion the time change caused. 

For example, we understood we were to meet with the First Nations community at 1:00 p.m. their time, just after lunch. They, however, had thought they had invited us for 1:00 our time, noon their time, so that they had lunch prepared for us to share with them: home made moose sausage and wild rice soup. 

Due to construction delays on the highway and some missteps in figuring out where, exactly, on their reserve we were supposed to meet them, we were about half an hour late by our reckoning and an hour and a half late by theirs. 

So lunch was long over by the time we got there and we had been inadvertently rude to our hosts. I deeply regretted not having the opportunity to try the soup.

Me, Joseph and Amy. We also have a picture of the other side of the sign announcing the entry into the eastern time zone.

5) Get Even More Excited About the Arctic Watershed

I also regret my expression in this photo, but it's the only shot I've got of the watershed sign.

6) Get Your Photo Taken with a Cancer-Survivor Marathon Runner Crossing Canada on Crutches

The gentleman in the middle is Guy Amalfitano. He is from France. He was sick with cancer when he was seventeen and watched from afar Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope. It gave him hope, so now he is running across Canada in tribute to Terry Fox and to raise awareness and money for cancer research. We passed him on our way to Dryden and knew he'd be on the highway on our way back. In a rare stroke of luck, he was actually stopped on the side of the Trans-Canada, so we clamoured out of our vehicle to get this photo. You can find his web site here.

7) Drive Along a Famously Polluted River

As an urban denizen sadly accustomed to concrete encased environs, I was delighted to spend hours watching the beautiful countryside go by. 

Michael's plain language explanation for the variations in the terrain as we travelled was: first, "rocks and trees," (glaciated moraines) then "different trees on sand without rocks" (ancient sand dunes) and then "different trees on clay" (ancient lake bed).

It was all spectacular. The shot above shows rapids along the Wabigoon river, far downstream from where we stood on the suspension bridge by the mill. These rapids are what are almost always photographed when a newspaper, such as the Toronto Star, runs a story about Grassy Narrows.

8) Visit the Centennial Mosaic in Dryden

Included in the park where you can find the suspension bridge is a charming tribute to Dryden's centennial, though I think they might have come up with a better name than "Pieces of Dryden." 

9) Watch Them Tip Trucks at the Dryden Pulp Mill

Even if you have never wondered how they quickly unload tractor trailers full of wood chips, now you know: they back them onto a platform, turn on the hydraulic lifts and tip them 'til they're empty.

10) Limp (not pictured)

On the Friday before I left on my trip to the northwestern reaches of the province, I felt myself coming down with a cold. Resolved to knock it back, I went to the gym every day on the weekend, worked up a sweat on the weight machines, took dry and steam saunas, took a lot of Cold FX and successfully fought the cold. 

I also injured myself on the weight machines, straining the muscles in my lower right leg. The thing about my reconstructed right leg is I don't know what its limits are until I pass them. So I hobbled around like Festus everywhere we went.

Since my return from the north, I have been careful to rest the injured muscle and let it heal. We're travelling to Italy one week from today, and I don't want limping to be on my top ten list there.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Fake News

This child's name is Charlotte. She could be the youngest child of Wills and Kate.
People have told me that the dry leaf in her hand was stolen from another child. 

This past week I set the suppression of my gag reflex to "MAX" and read Devil's Bargain by Joshua Green.

Not much of a book, it's more an under-researched  "tell-some" masquerading as a "tell-all." 

That said, Devil's Bargain does shine light on the execrable political partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. 

Its best four pages set out how Bannon's background (conservative Irish Catholic), education (taught in grade school that Ferdinand and Isabella saved Western civilization from the Moors; taught how to be a predatory capitalist at Harvard Business School), and character (he identifies with the honey badger) made him what he is today: a latter-day Visigoth.

Now that the barbarian has been tossed back outside the gates, two things seem true.

First, Trump has turned to proving that his bad behaviour is even worse without Bannon, so as to dispel those rumours that Bannon was the one in charge. 

Second, Bannon is now past his peak power and influence. One telling sign of this is how his tactic of weaponized news is now being used against him. Devil's Bargain emulates the attack fact format of the Bannon-sponsored book about the Clintons. Also, the other barbarians are on to him. A fake e-mail blew Breitbart's cover. 

Bannon is in genuine peril of being subsumed by the trolls he has tutored. Making stuff up by taking a kernel of truth and distorting it with innuendo and caustic asides is cheap and easy to do.

For example, the little girl in the photo above really is named Charlotte.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Another Happy Anniversary

A year ago this past Thursday, August 17, 2017, I went under the knife to rid myself of the debilitating pain of osteoarthritis. That same day I entered the wholly unexplored country of recovering from hip surgery.

Just After the Surgery

View from the top of the bed: the operated leg set up against a bolster to prevent my foot from rolling out the the side. The slipper on my left foot is to help support my baby toe, dislocated when I banged my foot on my cane during physio.

Another view from the bed. I started feeling cooped up by about the sixth day after surgery.

Bruce called this the fortress of comfy-tude.

I started my physiotherapy immediately, and took three trips to Toronto rehab over the next four months to learn new physio tricks and monitor my progress.

I took the physio seriously and tried some other things on my own - most of which horrified my physiotherapist. I overdid it in the early stages, my mind not truly grasping, perhaps not even to this day, how massively destroyed my leg was.

Back to Work

By early October I was back at work but under orders to walk at all times with my cane.  To amuse myself I played the game "where's my cane?"

I also discovered all the ways the rest of my body had gone to hell from weeks of inactivity. 

It was mid-November when Bruce's mother took her turn for the worse. I was home alone taking the garbage to the curb. My left ankle, unused to being used much at all, turned just the tiniest bit on some uneven pavement and for the next five weeks I was a little bit lame in both legs.

But before that, close to the end of October, I wore heels for the first time since the arthritis had grown brutal. I still needed a cane to walk around.

In mid-December, I wore the same heels to Marna's funeral, but by then I didn't need the cane.

All the Clarke men assembled on a couch at the funeral parlour.

The End of Pharmaceuticals

By the first week of January, 2017, I was off daily doses of pain killers for the first time in two years. By April, I was travelling easily - I'm in Ottawa in the shot below - but not 100%. My hip still seemed a bit balky. And it alarmed the security scanner at the airport.

Test Drives

We went to New York in May, my first post-surgery opportunity to really open it up and see how far she could go.  We walked pre-arthritis distances - up to 10 kilometres - each day for three full days. And the hip felt fine.  

The BC trip in July confirmed that I could hike on uneven ground as well as city pavement. As an added bonus, the trip to BC confirmed that my titanium implant no longer triggered the x-ray scanner at airport security.

One-Year Check Up

I'm seeing my orthopaedic surgeon - Dr. Mohamed - on Tuesday the 22nd of August. There are two things in particular I want to say to him. 

First, he told me at my six month appointment in February that it was "common sense" that an artificial hip does not have as much range of motion as a natural hip. For this reason, orthopaedic surgeons fear their patients putting more than a 90 degree bend in their  hips. But, it is also common sense that there is great variety in the range of movement in natural hips. So, I will demonstrate to him that a person with an artificial hip can put her palms flat on the floor while standing. I will also show him how I can crouch down and touch my chest to my thighs. That's one for the medical journals. 

The other thing I will say to him is "thank you for helping me get my life back."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Happy Birthday to Kim

Today is Kim's birthday.

To celebrate, we went to the Eaton Centre. Then we went to Taste of the Danforth. And later today we're going to see Atomic Blonde.

We had pea meal bacon on a kaiser from the St. Lawrence Market for breakfast, and calamari, dolmades, and souvlaki for lunch. Later, we'll be enjoying wine with our popcorn at the movie (because we've got VIP tickets). And maybe we'll have dinner after that.

Tomorrow we're having grilled salmon, kale salad and tomato pie for brunch. 

Food equals love. 

Seething mass of humanity at Taste of the Danforth.
 Food was awesome; crowds were oppressive.

Kim and Kevan in front of the henna tattoo tent.
After I took this picture, I went and got a tattoo.

Kim and Kevan in front of an ice cream truck, but they FORGOT to get ice cream.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Did Not See That Coming

It's not every morning that I open up the Toronto Star app on my iPad and yelp. 

I did Monday because my boss to the third power, Glen Murray, announced on the front page the end of his tenure as a politician.

l'm a big bundle of mixed feelings about this. Without question, Murray put climate change and other environmental issues higher on the political agenda than they had been for decades.

Also without question, he ran the ministry ragged, some times for good purpose, some times not.

Thursday afternoon, he walked around the office, shaking hands, saying goodbye, dropping one last whopper -- he said "we'll still be working together" -- that we'll ever have listen to and pretend we believe.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great long weekend!

Karen 

Summer's Over

Squamish: Tree that perished without a fire, with wildfire smoke.

Just before I left on holiday, the Ontario government announced that it was committing $85 million dollars to clean up the English/Wabigoon river system, or, the way people have more commonly heard it, Grassy Narrows.

Grassy Narrows is one of too many woeful stories in Canada of governments making decisions that did enduring damage to First Nations communities.

In this case, almost sixty years ago, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment gave license to a plant in Dryden to allow mercury to make its way into the river. 170 km downstream, people in a First Nations community that relied on fish in the river for food developed symptoms of Minimata disease.

Steps were taken to stop the problem but, fifty years later, mercury levels in fish in the river are still the highest in the province; hence, the government's promise.

Now, people may think that once a government has made an announcement like this, all that is left to do is write the cheque and move on.

Nope. 

There are lots of things to do, all of which are, of course, completely confidential. You can expect to hear from our friend the Ruler and her Advisors in future posts. 

Whether the posts will be coming from her temporary residence in Dryden, Ontario is something I can neither confirm nor deny at this time.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen