What the Hell - More Joy!
And I don't care who knows!
(following up on last week’s post.)
My first car, except Canadian, with the wheel on the other side. How I abused that clutch.
This Valiant though, had a Hurst shifter, and wow did I LOVE that. Probably just a slant 6, but FUN! 2 door?
There have been many cars since then, and I won’t list them. Yet.
One thing I’ve come to love in Vancouver, that I largely ignored while living here before, was the ships in the harbour.
On any day you can look out and see a dozen or more cargo ships anchored in English Bay, waiting to load or unload. And you can see that, as a seaman, you want to be really careful what company you sign up to. Some of these boats look like they wouldn’t make the trip to Burnaby, much less China.
The big news today is that our tenants, in our house in Nova Scotia, have added a chicken coop on the side of the barn, and this delights me no end! Chickens!
Incredibly stupid creatures, but also entertaining, and free eggs that taste like NOTHING you get from Loblaws.
This month we find ourselves moving between Vancouver General Hospital - cool, clean, and ultimately pretty soul-less, St Paul’s Hospital downtown, very old, brick, with main entrance washrooms where the stalls don’t lock and show signs of being VERY well used by the local homeless community, and Mount Saint Joseph, an out-of-the-way hospital near Main Street and 14th that has a real working-class feel, and reasonable wait times.
(VGH is for Serious Medicine; St Paul’s for the Healthy Heart Program; and Mount St Josephs for tests and such.)
Who knew that hospitals had character? St Paul’s even still has crucifixes in most rooms.
Last week we watched “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” the classic John Ford movie, featuring Doris Day and John Wayne. Wow. There is no-one today making films like that, and it’s a loss.
Book of the week is The Butcher of the Forest, by Edmonton writer Premee Mohamed. A very scary fantasy/horror kind of take that desperately needs a second volume to tie up loose ends.
The weather is warm enough that a sweater isn’t needed. One story is finished and gone, and the second is coming along nicely. (If you have a good ear wax story, please get in touch!)
Pitches are going out in every direction, so fingers crossed.
And, finally, the dietician at Healthy Heart would be pleased that I finally have a regular fruit habit re-established! The Moroccan mandarins from Kin’s this week are truly stunning.
One thing that I’ve been doing is to very consciously not read the news beyond headlines. Trump is terrible. Gaza is terrible. Lots of things are terrible. But I refuse to let that terribleness consume me.
That’s not to say that I won’t fight this rot, but I insist on also enjoying life.
Take some time now for yourself. Unsubscribe from things that you never read, or that just make you angry. Close your laptop and phone and read a real book or magazine. (Both Rolling Stone and Road and Track have some really, really fine writers.)
More to the point, read some things that are long, thousands of words, instead of the 750-1000 word limit that typifies everything on-line.
And this week, pick a writer or someone whose work you like, find them on-line, and tell them so. Really, they’ll appreciate it.
Then find a street that you usually drive down, and walk the length of it. Look in windows. Jostle people. Read the notices stuck to lamp poles. FEEL the city around you instead of being insulated from it. Connect with the real world instead of a screen.
