We returned home after a month away recently. The fellow who kept our yard open while we were gone did a good job but using a truck with a blade he was limited as to where he could put all the snow we have received this winter and it is a lot. This is easily the snowiest winter since 1997. It took me & my snowblower 4 solid days to get things cleaned up. By the end my right forearm was quite sore. Muscle strain I thought, coupled with some “you’re not as young as you used to be” and a little “you’ve been sitting on your ass a lot lately”. Problem explained, carry on and quit whining. So I gave it a bit of a rest, tried mousing with my left hand and it seemed to be getting better. Until Thursday.
Thursday afternoon I had an appointment with my doctor, a regular thing and since it was a locum I didn’t know I did not say anything about the sore arm. We got home while it was still light so I decided to spend a few minutes chipping ice that had accumulated on the back porch. It was cold and the ice was generally not in any mood to be chipped so my efforts were not yielding great results. I decided to quit, sweep off the little bit of ice that had come free and leave the rest for another day. As i swept the broom back and forth (not too vigorously) something in my right forearm went snap, no noise but I was instantly in pretty severe pain. I spent quite a miserable evening. I had a light supper, some ibuprofen, some acetaminophen and tried to find a position to hold my arm in that let me feel comfortable. We debated going to the hospital to get it checked but after some discussion decided to wait until morning and see how it felt. After a night that passed more comfortably then I had expected It was still very sore Friday morning so I called the clinic and yes there was an opening- come right away. So off we went, Val driving with barely 1 cup of coffee in her system. Well it was a medical emergency. Arrived and was taken in almost immediately. Same doctor comes in and I started to explain the problem. He begins to manipulate my arm and press here and there asking the expected question,Does this hurt? Does this hurt?” Then he started running his thumb along the length of my forearm asking, “Does it hurt here? “Is this where it hurts?” He then mumbled something about a subdural whatchamacallit of the anterior thingamajig. Then the really surprising question, “How do feel about an acupuncture treatment?” “Fine” says I and the next thing you know I had 6 or 7 little needles sticking out of my left leg from the knee to the ankle. Each time he would press with his thumb asking, ” Can you feel this?” Then in would go this really fine needle. It didn’t hurt going in, in fact I barely felt it but then he would give it a little twist until I felt something akin to a very slight electrical shock which invariably made me jump. Every time he inserted a needle he would return to questioning me about how the arm felt and where is the pain now and I would try to give him specifics. By the end of 15 minutes or so I had needles in my left leg , one just above my right ankle, one in my skull and another right beside the nail on my right index finger, that one hurt going in. While this was going on he was talking to himself about the spleen and the large intestine and other organs. He explained that acupuncture is all about balancing the forces within the body and some of the history and lexicon of acupuncture.
All in all it was an interesting experience and my arm did feel better when he was finished. After withdrawing all of the needles he prescribed a course of anti-inflammatory medication and told me to rest the arm for a few days. It is now Sunday morning and the arm is still sore but it is getting better.
ps I did tell him I was going to blog this.
This morning I was downstairs at the computer reading when I heard a terrible banging noise. After few seconds I knew exactly what it was so out I went. After surveying three sides of the house I found it 
and “it” my faithful readers is a pileated woodpecker. The biggest woodpecker in North America and very handsome bird except when he is trying to eat holes in the cedar siding on your house and then he is a damned woodpecker. I was less than 3 meters from him when I came around the corner of the house and he merely flew to the other end of the house where he started banging on the siding again. After a few seconds of therapeutic swearing he flew into the bush and I returned to the basement. Five minutes later he was back beating his noisy tattoo on the side of the house again. Out I went again and he was in exactly the same spot and there were more than few cedar chips lying in the snow. Again I banged on the side of the house and yelled at him. This time he stayed away! They really are neat to see but not when they choose to eat my house.
The last few years I have gotten away from watching a lot of television. The quality of the shows has, IMHO, gone way way way down hill. I have never, in particular been a fan of reality television. it seems to me to be anything but real. But for some reason which I can not explain I have got hooked and the show is American idol Season 7. Not only am I hooked I am really enjoying it. Last w eek I sat through the selection f the final 24 – 4 hours over two nights and I didn’t go to sleep once. Last night I sat and watched the 12 male finalists sing. It was 60’s week.Tonight we got home from SSM just in time for the start of the girl show. I swear I almost grabbed the phone to call in a vote. I sat here with Val commenting on the singers, their choice of song, their voice and the style of delivery. I can not believe that I am doing this.
I like to read and have as long as I can remember. I tend to read light fiction, crime novels, historical fiction but I am always open to try something a little different. Recently I have taken off on a couple of book tangents. I have never been a big fan of biographies or memoires or essay collections and especially short stories. When it comes to reading off the job, keep it simple, strictly entertaining. Recently a number of books that I probably never would have chosen for myself have fallen in my lap and I must confess that I have enjoyed them all.
One Sunday before Christmas I was listening to Michael Enright on CBC and he interviewed a Swedish author, Henning Mankell. I had never heard of him but by the end of the interview I had made up my mind to give him a try. It seems that he writes mainly mysteries featuring a detective named Kurt Wallander. I mentioned his name to Val and got two of his books for Christmas. They turned out to be very good and since then we have bought one more. Wallander is an introspective Swedish detective who lives and works in a small town in southern Sweden and solves murders. He spends far more time thinking than he does confronting bad guys. Not nearly the level of violence you would find something by Joseph Wambaugh for instance.
For Christmas Hugh and Clara sent me two books, the latest collection from Arthur Black and a newly published piece of non- fiction, by Barbara Kingsolver Animal Vegetable Miracle. She and her family (husband and 2 daughters) moved from Arizona back to a family homestead in Virginia and spent the first year trying to eat only what they could grow and buy from local farmers and gardeners. The story of their efforts is interspersed with recipes using the fresh or preserved produce and essays on agri-industries and their impact on the environment and the crops (both vegetable and animal) that they produce. All in all a very well written book I thought. I finished it just before we headed out west to visit the afore-mentioned Hugh and Clara. While we were there I scored two more books. The first is called The Accidental Airline, The Story of Spilsbury’s QCA. It is a memoir of a BC native who in the 30’s started a business along the coast of British Columbia repairing and selling radios. Through a series of almost serendipitous events the business morphed into one of the early air services on the west coast. Lots of anecdotes about the characters and the aircraft that the author hired and flew. This is not prize winning literature but having spent much of my working life in and around bush planes and bush pilots I did enjoy the story.
Now for the third book and this one wins the prize for the least likely book that I would pick up. It was handed to me by my son Hugh after I noticed it on their bookshelf and remarked on the subject. Hugh has been a voracious reader since he learned how to read and his tastes are incredibly diverse and wide ranging. It didn’t surprise me to see the book on his shelf but I was more than a little dubious when he handed it to me and told me that it “was fascinating”. It is a 900 page tome entitled Peter The Great His Life and World by Robert Massie. Since my suitcase was 10 kg underweight for the trip home I decided to try it. Well colour me surprised, this book IS fascinating. I must admit that my knowledge of Tsar Peter the Great did not extend much past his name. I knew about as much about Russia in the late 17th Century. I had no idea what profound changes Peter made in his country. I had no idea what his world was like but I am learning. Don’t get me wrong I’m not finished this book yet and won’t be for some time. This is a minimum several week project but in spite of my initial trepidation I am really enjoying it! On the cover it says that this book won a Pulitzer Prize. I can believe it. It is very detailed and the descriptions of the people and places that Peter met and visited are colourful and appear thoroughly researched.
All of the above to say that I have once again proven the old adage “Never Judge A Book By Its Cover”. So thanks Val, thanks Clara and thanks Hugh. I may even have to go back and try that collection of short stories by Mavis Gallant that has been gathering dust for a number of years. You never know I just might learn to like it.
You will quickly notice that I have not written anything here in almost a year. It wasn’t planned it just got to be easier not to write than to write. During that time my daughter-in-law has maintained a torrid pace on her blog http://torturedpotato.com/cheeseblog/ in spite of a toddler, a killer commute twice daily and most recently being the latter stages of a second pregnancy. I read her regular posting and am constantly in awe of her writing ability and her general outlook on life and every time I read a fresh posting I tell myself I had better get off my ass and write something. Laziness is no excuse. besides over the past ten months I have had a lot of grist for the mill. I made my first trip in a transport truck, I spent my first night in a Walmart parking lot, we lived through a major road trip across southern Ontario to introduce our Grandson to all manner of family members, we made a major road trip to western Manitoba and only took the wrong road three times and on and on and on. No shortage of topics just a severe lack of “do it”. So I have told myself that I am going to do this. So to my three or four loyal readers fair warning, I’m back.
