Getting Back on Track

We went to my Grandmother's funeral last week. Mark was a Pall Bearer and was scared for some reason that he would fall down. He did not.


Mark was sick before we left on the long drive to Cape Breton, and by the time we were driving back, I was sick too. We both have a long-lived, miserable, energy-draining sort of mild flu. Congested sinuses, headaches, weakness, runny noses, hurty lungs, the usual wonderful assortment.

By the time I started to feel better, after being away and then being too sick to deal with very much, my house was unrecognizable. Visible piles of dirt, dog hair, and dust coated the floor. The kitchen was overflowing with dirty dishes. Papers, clothes, and other assorted debris covered every flat surface. To top it all off, my back had been hurting for about a week and I couldn't lift anything bigger than a cat. Laundry baskets were impossible, and the vacuum would have to wait. I swept, and my back twinged.

Slowly, things are righting themselves. My back is 95% better (even when I lift things), my flu is about 80% gone, and room by room, the house is returning to a somewhat un-embarrassing state.

Life is a series of chaotic events. I keep expecting it not to be, but that's what keeps happening. It's good to be feeling somewhat healthy again though, and when the clutter in my house is dealt with, I will feel even better. Time to go clean.

Another Goodbye

Well, my Grandmother died today.

My poor mother sounded so very sad on the phone. It's my job to tell my siblings, but OF COURSE neither one of them is online or answering a phone.

I think she couldn't breathe any more. She was only really in pain for a short time, thankfully.

I am sad for my mother, and worried about my Grandfather. I guess some sort of funeral will happen. I don't know when.


Death in the spring seems sadder. It's like, we all lived through a cold hard winter, and now that things are renewing themselves, it doesn't seem fair that life should come to an end before the flowers bloom. It's been so many months since flowers have bloomed outside - and just as they are starting to poke their heads through the thawing earth, my Grandmother has died.

She made it through the winter. She should have been here to see the flowers.

Invisible Donuts

So we've been staying in a hotel in Cape Breton for a number of days now, and our stay at this hotel has been, well, a bit weird. This is a fairly remote corner of the country with... ahh... a slightly different culture than we are used to. People here are friendly but boisterous and intrusive. It's kind of like they think everyone here is family, so people take liberties, even with strangers. It all seems very unmalicious though. Does any of this make any sense?

Anyway.

So we're at the hotel. On our first morning here, we straightened away a bit of our clutter and left for the day to visit my grandmother in the hospital. It was a long day and we didn't arrive back at the hotel again until after dark. We walked down the long, quiet hallway to our room and unlocked the door. Every light in our room was off, but there was noise within. We looked at each other and paused. Had they given our room away to someone else? What was going on?

We gingerly stepped into the room and discovered that our tv was on. It had most definitely not been on when we left. We laughed at the vision of the cleaning lady sitting on the edge of the bed amongst our luggage, watching her soaps. We turned off the tv and thought nothing more of it.

The next day we got up and repeated our routine, leaving in the morning and returning to the room after dark. Again, the tv was on in the otherwise completely dark room. We had a great laugh about that as we walked into the room.

My sister wandered over to our pile of snacks, paused for a moment, and then asked us how many donuts we'd been in possession of that morning. Out of a bag of a dozen, we were missing the three donuts we'd eaten that morning, plus one more.

The maid, while watching our tv in our hotel room, had helped herself to one of our donuts.

The maid ate our food.

I am dumbfounded. We cracked up laughing and my sister said she'd write a nasty letter to the hotel chain when she got home. I just keep thinking: seriously? The maid ate our donuts? Seriously?

Wow.

Strength in Numbers

Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.

~Anthony Brandt

The Coal Miner's Wife

Insanity ruled this week.

On top of all the errands and tasks associated with creating a non-profit organization, there have been animal health issues to deal with (everyone's okay) and family issues to deal with on top of that (everyone's not quite okay).

My maternal grandmother, a sweet little woman who has been fighting cancer for years, was rushed to the hospital in extreme pain a couple of days ago. It was touch and go but she is stable for the moment.

When this happened my poor mother was in the Dominican Republic - my parents were on a vacation they'd been planning for months. They're still there.

I think it's been torture for them for the following reasons:

• Tropical vacation ruined.
• Loved one deathly ill, thousands of miles away, while
• they can't get an earlier flight home, and
• they can't even really get a phone connection out of the country.
  

There they are, sitting in paradise, which is now a prison for them, waiting for the hours to tick down until their regularly scheduled flight, hoping that Nanny's health doesn't deteriorate further while they are waiting, and also hoping there are no flight delays once it's time to fly.

I've been calling my mother multiple times a day to give her updates. She has a lot of trouble phoning out of the country, but incoming calls seem to go through fine, and only get dropped once in a while. Every time we talk, we schedule the next phone call so that she'll be sure to be in her room. Then, when the time comes, I phone her old homestead in Cape Breton, get an update, and then phone the Dominican and relay information.

They'll be home tomorrow morning, and after exchanging bathing suits for snow boots, will be on their way to Cape Breton. I think Mark and I are going sometime next week.


I have memories of arriving at that warm little house as a child and getting to choose from three different kinds of home-made pie to eat. I remember wandering the wild blueberry fields behind the house. If we picked enough blueberries, another home-made pie would be made. It seemed that everyone in town stopped by that house at one time or another, long enough to enter the back door and sit at the kitchen table for a cup of tea or, as appropriate, a drink of moonshine (again, home-made).

It will be good to go back, even under these circumstances. I will enter the door and see my mother and her sisters busy at the kitchen counter, instead of my Grandmother. We'll have tea; we'll talk. Everything will be the same but different.

Photo courtesy of my mother.

Jung Test Comments

Here's the part where I get to make fun of you using your Jung test results (and Mark got the same results as me, for those of you who are curious):

Kristie: it figures.

Chani: You? Judging? I have no comment. (ha ha!)

Megan: Dude, you're just not introverted. You obviously cheated on the test. Minus five points for you.

Angela: I actually couldn't have predicted what you would get. But, doing more in-depth research about it is TOTALLY YOU.

K: It's suitable that you got "Feeling" instead of "Thinking". You're so compassionate - it fits. Disclaimer though: Mark is upset that I wrote this about you, because "it doesn't sound nice". I will try to make him feel better by announcing that K is not dumb. She's just compassionate.

The thing is, out of everyone who told me their scores, we ALL got "Judging" instead of "Perceiving". Does that mean that I can only stand to hang out with other judgemental people? Hmm...

Mastermind

I took the Jung Typology Test today. It tells you what traits make up your personality. The title given to my particular combination of traits (INTJ - Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Judgment) is "Mastermind".

Huh.


It takes less than five minutes - go take the test! Come back and comment, or email me, and tell me what you are. We can have fun making fun of each other.

(Personal note to someone who reads this blog but shall remain nameless: I am indeed an INTROVERT. In fact, I got an 89% in that category. When I say I'm uncomfortable socializing with the vast, vast army of people who are your friends and distant relatives, I'm not just being difficult.)

In other news, I've made a bit of a leap in the animal rescue world. Although I am not a "small dog person" in particular, I do own two small dogs. I also became involved with the small dog rescue groups that are active around here a few months ago, but it really, really hasn't worked very well. The two active groups here are both based like a thousand miles away in another province. (I cut ties with one of them a few months ago and told you briefly about it here). I don't know what the hell the people in charge of these groups are thinking, but I wince every time I hear about some sort of decision they've made.

Like, when we fostered that Shih-Tzu puppy. A family applied to adopt him, but oops, would not be ready to actually own a dog for at least a month. The group approved the adoption (!!) with no input from me, and told (not asked) me to just keep the dog hanging around for another month until the people were ready.

I told them there was a dog in my local pound that I needed to take, as there are no other foster homes available to get dogs out of the pound during cold weather, but I was told that since I had the little Shih-Tzu, I was not allowed to foster for my other group at the same time. My other group would have been fine with it. So the dog, MJ, was expected to rot in the pound or be euthanized while I provided free babysitting service for A MONTH for this potential adoptive family that was not yet ready to adopt.

Then? Then? The approved adoptive family wasn't ready at the end of the month after all, and asked for more time. I suggested that we either ask the people to put him in paid boarding, or move on to another family who was actually ready to adopt, since we'd received multiple applications for this dog. Nope. Apparently there is free dog boarding at my house, and apparently I'm good enough to raise a puppy and buy his food, but not good enough to have input into the adoption process at all.

So yesterday, out of the blue, the president of that group sends out a condescending email to everyone that said a LOT of stuff that I won't get into because this is a blog; not a novel. Okay, just one thing: she chastised everyone for trying to adopt foster dogs out too quickly. The quality of the adoptive homes was fine, and all vet work has always been completed beforehand; it's just that we're adopting them out too fast. Mmkay. Do you KNOW how many homeless dogs there are out there?

It makes no sense to me, and seems quite counter-productive. The awful thing is, EVERYTHING they decree seems to make no sense and seems quite counter-productive. Then, we get long emails like the one from yesterday that make us feel like we're schoolchildren who have been caught passing notes in class. We're told that all the work we're doing to rescue dogs is breaking "the rules" in various ways, and that these "issues" needed to be "addressed" by us all following the long list of seemingly arbitrary rules, despite the fact that everyone in Nova Scotia is scrambling to deal with an influx of small dogs in the rescue system, and that following the (unhelpful) rules means that some dogs don't get rescued.

Yeah, I shared my thoughts with her in an email, then I quit the group, then I started my own small dog rescue group. Everyone that is/was a member of the other group and lives in Nova Scotia promptly joined. They were all pretty fed up with the mean emails/power trips, and some of them had also resigned after reading that latest email from on high.

I didn't really WANT to organize a small dog rescue group, but there are none based in Nova Scotia so it kind of makes sense.

Call me crazy. I know that's what you're already thinking anyway.

Saved by a Shoe Lace

THIS IS A GORE WARNING. DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE GORE.


Okay, now that that's over with, I don't expect any complaints. Chani, I'm looking at you.

The weekend was so very nice, we decided that we would trespass on the property that we're buying (but don't yet officially own). Since it's winter and the property is just a giant forested tract of land covered in a thick layer of snow, we went snowshoeing to see what we could see. Our friend Jay went with us.

It was a great hike! We even saw a porcupine rambling around!


The boys admired all the giant granite rock formations, and we slowly meandered through the woods, occasionally checking the GPS to see where we were.

We found a strange little patch of snow that seemed disturbed and, well, kinda dirty looking. There were tufts of fur scattered around. Oh no!! Further investigation turned up this gem, among other things:


It was a deer. There were bits scattered over a wide area, so we figured lots of meat-eating critters had been in on the feast. A few minutes later we found some clear tracks and decided that coyotes had definitely benefited from the deer's demise. Maybe they caused it too; who knows. Circle of life.


I'm glad I didn't find this stuff when I hiked the property alone a few weeks ago!

We made it further on snowshoes than I had gone before, and really just thoroughly enjoyed ourselves out in the mild winter air. We eventually turned around to make the long trek back to the road, and then a pocket of snow collapsed under my snowshoes and I fell. I looked down at my foot, and discovered that the bindings on my snowshoe had snapped.

It had taken us almost two hours to get this far.

It would be dark soon.

My snowshoe was broken.

At least the coyotes wouldn't likely be very hungry.

The boys pulled me to my feet and put their clever heads together. They made a few jokes at my expense, and then they managed to rig my bindings back together with one of Jay's boot laces that he very kindly donated to the cause of "getting Julie back to the car".

The new and improved snowshoe worked, and we made our way back through the woods.


The trees were beautiful. The giant rock formations were wonderful. The views were amazing, and the hike was well worth it. Nature is cool.