Doom Morning

Monday began with a flurry of domestic chores prior to meeting our friends for some cool forest walking. I love our walks, every single time I go walking, no matter what the weather or the pain, my mood is lifted and I feel so, so happy to be alive. I am amazed by how powerful nature is as a healing force.

We took a long walk. I was glad to be taking advantage of the decent weather to walk Her Highness. The rain held off all during our walk. It only began to get quite wet when we got back to our cars.

When we got home, it was lovely to arrive to a clean and tidy home. It isn’t always this way. I tend to let things go and then do a big clean. It is a constant battle to keep the house, my beds, my cooking containers… everything clear of Fir needles. And of course, once I put the vacuum away, all I see are the needles I missed.

When I got home, I started working on our SPACE survey. We are circulating a survey to stutterers and others with communication difficulties to document their problems accessing service providers. This is part of the grant that Aidan and I are working on. But I found that I couldn’t do the work alone as so much of our objectives and methodologies are in Aidan’s head, so we will work on the survey together tomorrow while chatting on Zoom.

After lunch, I read while cozy under the electric blanket, and I watched a bit of the Olympics, but I’m just not feeling the love for them as much as I once did. I’ve been enjoying reading more. So, that’s what I did until it was time for our afternoon walk. When we got back, our usual evening pattern began.

I watched a vampire movie last night. It is my first venture into horror since I was about thirteen years old. I have no interest in horror and science fiction stories, but the movie Sinners has more Oscar nominations than any other movie in Oscar history. It held my interest and I was not diving for the mute button or fast forwarding. It is a very clever movie. The director is extremely present in the way the story is told. It’s a compelling movie.

CBC’s The National is on at 20:00 during the Olympics, so last night I watched it as a chaser to horror and what I saw was far more frightening than the movie. The National does a ‘deep dive’ into stories in its second half-hour, and last night was bout the behavior of ICE agents interspersed with interviews with experts in constitutional law. And holy fuck. I don’t have any interest in the news, so I was horrified by what I saw, especially during the focus on the murder of the two innocents in Minneapolis.

I cannot imagine being an American citizen and seeing federal agents masked and in full war gear bullying people with impunity. If I was an American, I would not live in a big city. I’d want to leave my country or move into a small rural town not in a red state. America is at war with itself. Fuck.

And speaking of war. Last night was very scary. I wake up to pee often and last night, when I woke up early this morning, the moon looked orange when I looked out the window, and when I came back to bed, I noticed that the moon was moving rather quickly. I couldn’t make sense of it. The next time I got up, I thought it must be raining hard, so I opened the window and the noise was very loud, but I couldn’t account for it. And then I noticed another moving moon; this one was white. What the fuck?!

When I finally got up at 4:30, I fed the pets, lit the fire and booted up my computer and our Facebook page was filled with moving images of moving moons. It turns out that the military is conducting exercises very close to us and what I saw were huge flares, and the noise was military planes.

Today is all for me. No SPACE work, no appointments or Zooming, just reading and walking. The brood and I are going to have a fabulous day together.