Category: Niblet

Down for repairs–back fairly soon.

Aftermath: The 57-year period since I took my last calculus course.

By itself, politics is thin gruel. It needs to be backed up and fed, regularly, by the arts and humanities, by literature and science, if it’s to have any lasting impact. Without these sources feeding into it, it becomes a kind of dead sea–a stagnant, sterile and utterly uninspired pursuit. It is probably no accident that most of the great politicians have had several different strings to their bows.

In the year 2000, the IKEA corporation took out an ad in the Ottawa Citizen noting (among other things) that about a quarter of their Ottawa customers and a smaller percentage of their Montreal customers would rather clean their closets than have sex. Am I in that number? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count! But I do have a kitchen closet that badly needs cleaning. Its floor area is a veritable slalom course; its shelves are nearly as bad. If I don’t do something about it pretty soon, I might trip and fall. Or, I could be overcome by the stench of rotting potatoes and onions which have reached the intermediate science project stage of overripeness. Either way, it looks as if I shall soon have to take the plunge, IKEA or no IKEA. . .

Better to ask five questions too many than one too few.

You don’t do any better putting emotional issues on a “credit card” because you feel you haven’t time or energy to deal with them now, as they are arising, than you do putting large numbers of purchases you really can’t afford on a real credit card, and telling yourself you will pay for them later. Like the real credit card, the emotional one exacts a huge toll in interest. The longer you let those emotional issues go without attending to them, the more the “emotional interest” builds up, and the steeper will be the price you have to pay to the piper, in the fullness of time. Suffice to say, the denouement will not be pretty!

Let there be spaces between your togetherness, but let there also be togetherness between your spaces.

Excellent day to see birds. Species observed on my walk down Jacques-Cartier included Downy Woodpeckers, Goldfinches, Chickadees, and an Eastern Kingbird. Of note: there seem to be more different kinds of birds around, and they seem to be more willing to be seen, on cloudy than on sunny days. No idea why this is, but in Newfoundland I noticed that whales were the same way.

My hopes, aspirations, and expectations have diminished greatly since the start of the pandemic. I now count it a good day, or at least a promising one, if I can without undue effort locate two matched socks in my top drawer.

Maybe I am a bit more like my dad than I’ve given myself credit for being. He more than once spent an entire weekend working on washrooms for the Los Angeles Dodgers stadium, for which he was project manager. And I find myself spending Canada Day converting and filling in footnotes for the COVID anthology of which I am co-editor. Don’t tell me there isn’t some significant similarity there.

Happy Canada Day to all, whatever you may be doing today.