Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Keith’s Ersatz New Year’s Resolutions
I don’t normally do New Year’s resolutions – I’m more a believer of the “if I need to do something, might as well do it now instead of waiting for later” type of philosophy. But the ol’ Blogger site gives me a chance to come back and review things a while later. So here is my ersatz lists of things I’d like to accomplish over the coming year:

• Do more swimming/walking (this is instead of saying I’d like to lose weight – I’d rather frame things in a positive rather than a negative sense).
• Get a check-up (something I have put off far too long. Considering the recent death by heart attack of long-time friend Mary Melenca, this has increased urgency for me).
• Do the “Big V”
• See that Mom is happily ensconced in a nursing home she is happy with
• Sell the house in Keswick
• Get my drivers license (again)
• Finish writing Core CSS, 2nd Edition and start (finish?) writing book #5
• Look into more writing contracts/magazine writing and teaching (I like doing it, so why not try to do more?)
• Take at least one course sometime this year (things I have in mind range from taking a Genealogy course to computer courses dealing with Linux. I have my dreams. ;-)
• Visit Liverpool with my Cousin Howard and see my Father’s old haunts, and visit the graves of my Grandparents
• Get a better computer for Vanessa (“her” system is easily the crappiest I have, as it is prone to “freezing”, which seems to happen at the hardware level. A perpetual warning to me about buying the cheapest computer possible).

There, that’s my list. There’s probably more, but this is what I can think of off the top of my head. We’ll see where I am in a year.

Okay, Time to Drop the Sad Face
I’ve changed the “ASCII” signature back to my usual smiley. It’s a new year, and I’d like to think we’ve turned a corner psychologically speaking.

Quick Summary of Events Over the Past Few Days

I seem to have misplaced my valued Palm M-100, so I haven’t even jotted down notes of the happenings of the days like I normally do. So, here’s a quick summary of the events of the past few days that stand out in my mind:

Tuesday, Jan 1 2002
Baby Annie was up a couple of times during the night. She’s teething, with two teeth poking out at the front of her bottom set of gums.

Vanessa has a good time visiting the hens and geese in their henhouse. Ariel goes out to a neighbouring farm and gets a new silky hen (her previous pet hen had died a week or so ago).

After breakfast, I called Pierre in Kingston, hoping that we might be able to come over for a visit. Unfortunately, he has many a relative coming to visit, so this turns out not to be possible. I start vacuuming the lower floor of the house, but the vacuum cleaner breaks down from overheating (perhaps not coincidentally, unbeknownst to me a cheeky Iain was putting his feet against the air outflow. A burned rubber smell and some smoke quickly followed after I chased him away). At Hugh’s advice I end up leaving the vacuum either for fixing or burial.

At about 11:30 I call VIA Rail to see if there are tickets available for the train I want to catch in the afternoon. Turns out there isn’t, though there are available tickets for the next immediate train at 12:30. Ahh! Thankfully I’d already packed and Jenny offers me a lift to Kingston train station. We get to the train station and I get my ticket with barely a couple of minutes to spare. Train ride is uneventful (which is good) and I pass my time pleasantly reading my copies of The Economist and KMT.

Get home. Start laundry, tidy up, order pizza, watch Fifth Element on DVD, make the beds, call Erika and let her know I’ve arrived, check email, do some work, then head to bed early. ;-)

Monday, Dec 31 2001
I stayed up with little Annie into the wee hours – she was awake and wanted to play, so I volunteered to get up and keep her amused. I loaded up the fireplace with wood, and Annie gazes at the flames from afar. About an hour later she finally falls asleep on a nice comfy couch pillow I’ve got propped up against my chest. I’m still awake, so I sat up and read for a while, then I make my way to bed.

I half-sleep for a while, and “sleep-in” a bit. Am repeatedly woken up my Jean humming-and-haaing about various things while making breakfast for everyone. They get packed up and head out about a half-hour before we finally make it out the door from Deloro. Erika asks whether or not there is a more direct route from Deloro to Lansdowne than taking the highway south and hitting the 401. There is, a route that takes us on country roads through Westport. It is more direct, and much more scenic, but the twisty roads make for tiring driving, and it ends up taking longer to get there than the highway route.

Arrive at Jenny and Hugh’s about mid-afternoon. While Vanessa plays with their kids, I go and do a thorough vacuuming job on the upstairs of their house. Jenny thanks me for my effort, as this is something she had wanted to do prior to the other visitors coming this evening with their kids. In truth I would have done it anyways, more for my own benefit, as I have dust allergies and there are dust bunnies of unusual size everywhere I look.

Around dinnertime various guests and their kids begin to arrive – all relatives of Hugh’s. They gather outside and set off some fireworks in the freezing nighttime temperatures outside. All of the kids have a great time with this. Hugh vows next year to get a single fuse cord to light the fireworks next year, as his fingers were getting numb from lighting each firecracker in turn. ;-)

After eating and drinking punch, the visiting parents leave with their kids later that evening. I put Vanessa to bed, reading her a Rupert story. Soon, both Iain and Ariel climb on the top bunk and I’m reading another story to all of them.

I head downstairs and we sit and chat with Jenny and Hugh for an hour or so, drinking the Veuve Cliquo champagne I had bought for the occasion. I had a nap earlier in the day, so I am the least tired – and I am the only one who stays up until midnight, pleasantly reading a book until midnight.

Sunday, Dec 30 2001
Our only full day at Deloro. A lazy day, for me anyways. David vainly tries to fix his 70’s era snowmobile, and Erika and her mother end up playing dominos for a few hours. There’s a magnificent meal of steak and potatoes, topped off with wine. Later in the evening, we toast the impending new year with a bottle of Inniskillen ice wine that we had saved for the occasion. Unfortunately the consensus is that it was beginning to get corked, a vague musty smell somewhat spoiling the rich apple-y taste of the ice wine. Jean and I sit down for a game of Scrabble. She ends up beating me, but it is a relatively close game, and we both play things “tight” in terms of not giving the other player a lot of room to maneuver.

It’s a cloudy night, so there’s not much point in taking the new telescope out. An almost full moon beckons from a high window, so just prior to bed I haul out the ‘scope and point it at the moon. Both Erika and David get a chance to view the moon prior to a fresh set of high cloud obscures it again. Jean is already in bed, so she misses out. The ‘scope clearly defines the many craters on the moon, and it is easily the sharpest image I’ve seen of the moon with the naked eye. I am kicking myself now for not at least trying to take a picture of it using my digital camera, just to see if it is feasible to do so.

Saturday, Dec 29 2001
We arrive at Deloro after 1pm, just in time to see Jennifer and her David head off for home with their menagerie of animals. Jean is very happy to see the animals go, and says that the house is much less “busy” with only one dog and a pair of cats.

Erika has a quick nap and I look after the kiddies. When she wakes up, it is time to bury Naomi in a small grave that David dug the other day by the riverside. Erika, David and Vanessa are there in attendance – I decided to stay inside, though I could see the goings on from the kitchen window. The poor old pussy cat, who has been put into the deep freeze since the day of her death, is gingerly taken out of the plastic bags that I put her in, and interred. Erika answers Vanessa’s questions as they arise about the nature of death, (our agreed approach is to teach about “recycling”, since neither of us are religiously-inclined) and they all throw in clumps of earth. David ends up having a hard time breaking into his heaped-up mound of soil to cover the cat, as evening comes and the temperature drops.

The moon is full tonight (or nearly so) and bathes the snowy ground in light. I take the new telescope out and train it on a few objects, such as the moon, Jupiter (can easily make out two of its satellites) and the nebula in Orion. It’s cold so that’s all I end up doing. I start out using the computerized astro-guide mechanism, but abandon it due to the cold. Am disappointed that after punching in the date, time and location, that it doesn’t choose the two-best available stars in-view by itself. It’s a pain to go through the stars in alphabetical order (“Alcor, Aldebaren, Algol, Altair, Arcturus,” etc etc). in order to get the two-sighting stars it needs. Will try again when conditions permit – and after reading up on the names of the more common stars I can identify myself (am good on constellations, but not necessarily star names). Am happy with the resolving power of the telescope though.

Soon after, I join David for a hike in the woods, and we make it past the dam and into the conservation area to the landmark known as “the whole” (a low-humpbacked patch of bare rock, now covered with snow). The light of the moon on the snow is magical as we trudge through the snow, with Sucha dog dashing between the two of us. David tells me stories of the trapper who lives in the area, and points out a recently sprung trap (with nothing in it), and mentions the time he freed a wolf from a snare trap (which ended up really pissing-off the trapper).

Friday, Dec 28 2001
Originally, we planned on heading up to Deloro today, but Vanessa was whiny and fussy, so we decided to stay at home instead, and have a "quiet day". Erika explains that this is not meant as punishment, but instead that Vanessa needs to change her attitude, as Erika didn’t like the idea of a long drive with a whiny child.

It all ends up well though, as Vanessa is invited over to Martine’s down the road for a sleep-over, which cheers her up. We call a baby-sitter and go out to see Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring. We have a pint and some hors d'oeuvres at the pub across the street from the theatre first, talking mainly about what Erika plans to do work-wise in the new year. I had pre-bought tickets for the movie earlier in the day, but we end up having to take a seat much closer to the screen and to the side than either of us would have liked, as they were the only seats available where we could sit together. The movie was lots of fun, though I don’t remember the book having as many conflict/battle scenes (but the last time I read it I was a teenager, so my memory is spotty). The acting and scenes all had the right “tone” – which I think is a triumph given the fact of a half-century’s worth of “goth-ism” has been piled on the tales by later, lesser artists and writers. The movie is a visual feast, the set designs for the elvish town and CGI monsters like the Balrog particularly well done. A satisfying movie experience (though I’d like to view it again in a better seat).

Thursday, Dec 27 2001
I had been dreading this day.

I get up early early in the morning, and catch the 7:30 bus heading to Keswick. I arrive just after 9am, bringing along a carton of milk from the local corner store in order to have some tea.

New digital camera in hand, I go around taking pictures of the place for memory’s sake, and do some cleaning up/fixing up of things for the eventual visit of my Mother and my Aunts later in the day. I also take the time to do some initial packing, primarily of the myriad boxes of slides, plus some of the more valuable/heirloom-type items in the house. I also plug in the Xmas tree and turn on some extra heat in the house so that it’ll be nice and cozy by the time everyone arrives.

I then take a taxi to the hospital to visit Mother. Shortly after noon, we have the meeting with the board of doctors, nurses and various “assessors”. There’s no real surprises: Mother has to go into a nursing home, due to the fact that she needs oxygen all of the time and needs constant checking to ensure that she is alright and is using her oxygen. With Mother present, she co-signs the papers that will place her into the first available room in a nursing home in the hospital’s catchment area, which ranges from King City to Sutton. Am told she will most likely be moved out of the hospital to the first available nursing home the week after New Years. The only partial surprise is that Mom’s condition may improve rather than get worse, though she still requires constant care – enough to move her to retirement home facilities, which provide greater independence, but returning home is not an option. Afterwards one of the nurses asks if I’m alright. I’m a bit shaken, even though I expected all of this, as it means the end of her (and my) old home in Keswick. However, I am truly relieved that Mother will no longer be left on her own anymore, and will get better care than she had at her own home.

I then call a taxi and take Mother home for what proves to be a slightly belated Xmas at her home. Aunts Jane and Audrey are already there, as are Erika and the kids. Much to my surprise there is a plethora of Xmas presents under the tree, which Vanessa happily opens for all of us. She gets the latest Rupert annual from my Mother (I wrapped it earlier this morning on Mom’s behalf), I get a funky calendar, Annie gets a couple of little plush toys – everybody comes away with some surprise or another. Lots of fun!

Erika then goes and fetches a meal for everybody from the local Swiss Chalet. I break out Mother’s china and silverware for what ends up being a grand meal at the old house. Both of my Aunts are real troopers, helping Mother, doing dishes, and giving me sage advice about things. Erika points out that I’m really tense, but I am so thankful that everything went smoothly – much more so than I expected. Kudos to my dear wife for arranging all of this.

It gets dark soon after, and we begin to load people into the Land Rover. I threw in the large box containing the slides, plus the valuables and heirlooms. Mom and I see them off, and soon after I call another taxi in order to take us both back to the hospital. This also goes smoothly, especially as the taxi driver is a real character – the same guy who drove me to the hospital earlier this morning, who grew up in the area and has good tales to tell as we drive to the hospital. (Keswick trivia: Georgina Taxi has a grand total of 8 cabs). I see Mom off at the hospital, and slowly wend my weary way home, arriving sometime around 9pm. I crash out soon after, exhausted.