Off the Cliff

Not a good year, but there have been no good = bearable years since 2016 (personally and internationally) and no good = excellent years since ohh 2008, personally at any rate. I suspect I'm past the age for good years and now it's all holding actions. My father was younger than I (by a lot) when he said he'd reached the age when he turned first to the obituaries to see which friends had died lately. I don't need newspapers for that, having DW/LJ. It was a bad year that way too, and worse for other people than for me. Though I still miss my aunt a surprising amount, she being the only flesh-person I knew who was interested in the minutia of my daily life and who passed on the minutia of other peoples'.

I know there's no year 0 so we haven't entered a new decade yet. Butif we exclude 2010, this is the first decade in my life that I haven't travelled outside of Canada, and I left Toronto a mere three times, always painfully. I can't see that changing even post-op. In fact the more I read about knee surgery the less appealing it sounds. 'You will be unable to do laundry for four weeks'. Oh great. (And why not? If I have to start walking the day after surgery, will I be unable to walk a block and a half after three weeks, conservative estimation? carrying my laundry on my rollator? If they have me climbing stairs within a week, will I be still be uable to access my basement afterthe same period of time? Hmpf.)

But that's for the future. Hoc facias, siue id non pote siue pote.

So now my s-i-l is talking about cooking a suckling pig. 'But is your oven big enough?' her daughter asks. 'Oh no, we'd have to do it outside on a grill' says L, which ok maybe you can do on an apartment balcony, but suggests more strongly that she thinks she'll be here next summer.

Unless she's intending to cook suckling pig amidst the winter snow.

Went to Starbuck's for my morning latte, not as good as my local but oh well. Local is closed till after New Year's while the owner (s-i-l's grandson's girlfriend) visits family in Vancouver. Came home and fell asleep again. This unwonted somnolence is, well, unwonted. Considered opening my presents but did laundry instead because it was that kind of a day, so I left my prezzies as a post-dinner treat/ cheer-me-up.

But when I got to them after an abstemious repast (mustn't drink if I'm going to keep falling asleep, shouldn't drink if my sinuses are as clogged as they are)-- the day took a happy turn for the better. Incandescens' big squashy parcel turned out to be a thick hand-knitted shawl in my fave shades of wine and deep burgundy, and I'm currently wrapped up in it urm trying not to fall asleep again, because it conduces to comfy coziness and closed eyes and, well, sleep. It has the usual faint perfume of all G's productions, because she washes her hands in Lush soap while making them, and Lush is nothing if not tenacious. But in small quantities it's very Heian, and I appreciate it. So thanks very much, G.

Also there was an amusing present from a coworker, the most recent hire who, mindful of the undepaid life of an assistant, always gives me appreciation gifts at Christmas. Her Christmas bag contained socks (you remember that at a certain age socks become a welcome gift?) of a much better quality than my dollar store ones, as well as a small box of very good fair trade chocolates. And at the bottom was a small heavy oblong thing which- well, you see, whenever people at work say 'Oh thanks so much for helping out when we were short-staffed/ covering me when I got stuck in the subway/ taking care of the garbage and the diapers and the laundry', charmless me can be heard answering 'If you really want to thank me, buy me some gin.' So this time, K did. Bombay Sapphire, my tipple of choice.

Thus to all, and especially me, a good night.

1. Doctor says my dreams haven't really changed, it's just that the current meds put me into more REM states than usual. Well fine. I can only say that last night I dreamed I was editing someone's handwritten Kirk/ Spock fanfic, and several nights ago I dreamed I was having sex with a bicycle. Which is a Robertson Davies reference. From a book I last read forty years ago. Could we please go back to dreaming about babies and not!Japan (except that it really is)?

2. Read the Parasol Protectorate manga last week, am now rereading the books. May I say that Lord Akeldama is easier to take when seen rather than heard? Also googled to find out who Akeldama was, and am disappointed in the results, because a) he must have undergone a personality transplant in his change to vampire and b) I wanted him to be Horace Walpole. Or at any rate, some legitimate, well-informed, butterfly of a dandy.

3. Sun and temps well above freezing raise my seasonally drooping spirits. This is good, because every bit of me hurts in spite of massage on Saturday and acupuncture on Sunday. Did succeed in getting almost all my laundromat laundry done (one duvet cover remaining) in spite of the unspeakable so-and-so who occupied all ten of the cheapest washers today with precisely sorted tiny washes. I know it's the same guy because all the machines stopped at the same time and none of them were emptied after ninety minutes when I came to get my bathrobe out of the dryer.

4. Must get serious about doing *all* my exercises and *all* my stretches every day, meaning two hours of same instead of one. This has to become a reflex by next May, so that I don't drag my feet post-op when I really must be ready to do all the exercises prescribed. Weight loss will have to wait for the new year, but needs to happen as well. Knees are registering every extra pound these days.

5. Paris was Yesterday draws to a close, in the year 1939 when no one is certain if there will be a war or not. Flanner mentions an exhibit of the art work surrounding the then-defunct Ballets Russes- its curtains and sets painted by Braques and de Chirico, Mirò and Rouault, Matisse and Max Ernst and Modigliani- in what the French then referred to as les beaux jours of the early 1920s, "the days of civilized, uncensored pleasures... when pliticians as well as hedonists thought a permanent, pleasant, peaceful age had been born." The 30s were indeed dirty, but if I try, I can't think of a decade in my nearly 70 years that has been at all clean. Yes, there were the beaux jours of the 60s, but they were beaux only for people like me; everywhere else was another story. Flanner's book ends a page later, with the declaration of war in September. If the present doesn't have the same sense of impending apocalypse, it's only because the apocalypse seems incontrovertibly here.

Evidently I was just having a surprisingly unachy day yesterday, because today cannabis had no effect at all, unless it was responsible for the late-day tum upsets. Sigh.

However, next door has now decided not to move to a small town but to get an apartment in the Annex near the university. Am pleased they'll still be in TO, am dubious about apartments being available in the Annex. As ever, we shall see.

You think if maybe I had a one bedroom apartment, I might lose fewer things in it? The latest desaparacidos are the attachments to my new vacuum cleaner, which ought to be attached to the cannister (or inserted into the cavities designed to hold them) and of course aren't. Nor are they in the room where I last stashed the vacuum (study) or where I last used them (front bedroom). Gremlins, I tells you, it's gremlins what plague the weary-boned mentally fogged aged.

Otherwise it's a theoretically warmish 6°C and I don't have to work, but it's raining coldly and persistently, so once again my sheets haven't gone to the laundromat. Some day, maybe even before our next bout of snow. Succeeded only in depositing my last paycheque and vacuuming/ scrubbing the front hall and livingroom, which I suppose is accomplishment, however half-assed the results. Back still yells about housecleaning postures just as it always has. I'd be down-hearted if not for that article in the Guardian-was-it? by the woman who confesses that pilates changed her (crippled with back pain) life, *but only after three years of doing it*. So I mustn't expect results after a mere year of not nearly pilates level exercise. Drattit.

Wouldn't be the start of the month if I hadn't put on a kilo. But this time I've put on two kilos and am annoyed by it. Half is waterweight, of course- my feet feel tight in their skin- but the rest is I don't know what, though I suspect rice.

Current reading is far too heavy for the backpack, so I rousted out Janet Flanner's Paris was Yesterday, the columns she wrote for the New Yorker in the 1920s and early 30s. But it too is brittle and crumbling and I must find something more recent. I can't remember when I first read it: I want to say 80s but it may have been the late 90s. It's unlike other expat memoirs of Paris in the 20s because Harold Ross, bless him, specifically told Flanner to write about 'what's happening in Paris, not what you think is happening'. Which burst the insular NAmerican bubble right there and forced her to write about French people.

Her foreword does talk more about the expats, which you can't do without name dropping (the community was *small*, like it or not.) She was a friend of Hemingway's, which counts as a black mark in my books, but also Sylvia Beach and Gertrude and Alice, so good enough. But I'm more interested in her reportings of the French art and literature scene than of the American one, which has been done to death by devotees of St Ernest. Even if the main European artists and writers of the time are mere ghostly echoes now, names I may have heard in childhood, like Maeterlinck.

What tickles me, on a more personal level, is that her society notes from 1926 and '27 mention several aristocratic ladies- Herminie duchesse de Rohan, Anna de Noailles, Mathilde de Rothschild- that I put intact into one of my Papuwa/ Eroica fics, having completely forgotten their sources.

Incidentally, the current meds make for vivid if mundane dreams. But a recent one involved an exam for which I had to write several different Eroica fanfics, one of which I cast as a letter written in green ink and properly enclosed in an envelope.

Heat turned up, muscle relaxants taken, bundled in quilts in bed. If I had my druthers I'd stay here till spring. Knees hate me, which is fine. Five more months of this and I won't *care* what happens with the replacement operation, as long as I'm rid of the crunch of bone on bone. Work is all plague all the time- norovirus and hand foot & mouth- except this time it's hitting the adults as well. So is Silliness, the details of which I haven't inquired into because I'm so tired of work Silliness. Several people are overdue for retirement, chief among them me. And my cousin Pierre died the other day, long before he hit eighty. None of my Mathieu cousins inherited their parents' longevity. Maybe because they never lived through world wars and occupations? Except they did, and the deprivations that followed. No explanation then.

I'm rereading The Black Company trilogy and liking it, dare I say? much more than the Severian whatever-it-was. Finished volume 1 and was romping merrily through vol. 2, marvelling at Cook's economical elliptic style. Maybe 40 pages from the end I happen to glance at the book's subtitle: 'vol 3 in The Black Company Chronicles.' That's not economical elliptic; that's me skipping an entire volume. Though I do find Cook's action elliptic: cities come, cities go, battles come, battles go. I blame the absence of a map, because unlike many people I *need* maps in my fantasy to know what's going on. Absent a map, the action is like Cook's: here, there, anywhere.

We have a new baby at work, who for a change *is* a baby. Five months and a bit. I was holding him while he had a mild freakout over his bottle being a bottle and not the boob he's used to. This may be a problem in future. Also he lost a sock somewhere in the room, which is a feat for someone whose only movement is rolling from his back to his front. Turns out to be not so much of a feat in the event. Undressing last night I detected a soft bit of cloth attached to the velcro of my lumbar brace, which is always under my tanktop. Catchy stuff, velcro. Shall bike over tomorrow and leave it in his cubby to delight his Mom on Monday morning.

Today I vacuumed the upstairs for the first time in several months. Am going to have to hire a cleaning service because my arthritic elbows are simply not up to this. Worrying, how much strength I've lost in my upper arms. Though the aches today might just be aggravated by, yanno, holding babies yesterday. Still, maybe I need to research strength training for arthritics, because no one has a cure for elbows.

Third weekend in November. Time to turn my neighbourhood into a parking lot for the Santa Claus parade. Time for cars to be parked illegally on both sides of the street. Residents know not to invite Nonna and Nonno for Sunday dinner on this one day of the year, because there's no place for the oldsters' car. I know not to go to any of the neighbourhood coffee shops because they'll be full of families with small kids either warming up before or thawing out after. If you detour one subway stop over you can get across Bloor but beware all the southern streets that lead up to Bloor: they'll be blocked off and full of clueless drivers who discovered that fact too late and are now backing down, heedless of anyone behind them.

Except none of that happened. It's a normal Sunday in the neighbourhood, not many cars, and no zombie families trudging half a mile from where they parked to where they may, possibly, be able to see the parade, if they brought a ladder. I query a clerk up at Loblaws. Apparently, because Bloor is still a hot mess with the sewer upgrades, and possibly because of the new bike lanes, the route is changed for this year. It's now way to the east, well past Yonge St (the city's dividing n-s street) and going down to Front, at one time where the shoreline of the lake was.

So maybe being unable to bicycle Bloor for the last ten months has its consolations. And though the work is pretty much finished and the road repaved, the bike lanes are still blocked off because the decision has been made to raise them flush with the sidewalk. Personally I think it's a bad idea, but we'll see where the snow and debris ends up this winter. Also where the muscle bicyclists go when they have to deal with ancient slowpokes like me puffing along in the lane, now they can no longer zip into and out of traffic at need.

So ok, knee surgery happening for definite certain this May. Surgeon was mildly supportive of the notion that knee's hijinks are causing at least some of the really crippling muscle pain. Like I could have coped with today's joint stiffness if my glute muscles hadn't scrunched up into a node of pain that made walking extremely unpleasant. Acupuncture may ease it tomorrow, massage may ease it Saturday. But those have proved to be stopgap measures. Only surgery seems the one option likely to restore some of my mobility, so surgery it is.

This becomes more critical as s-i-l floats the idea of them selling their house and moving into an apartment. She does get these ideas periodically (like selling the house and moving to the cottage) and then decides no, this is the perfect neighbourhood how can she leave it. But retirement having happened at last and all that lovely legal money gone, downsizing is clearly in the offing. At which point I lose my support system and must again fend for myself. This would naturally be much easier if I could fricking *walk*.

There was a young guy in a wheelchair at the hospital waiting for xrays with me. One of those chatty type women, here with her mother who'd broken her collarbone, four ribs, and both legs in a car accident, was complimenting him on his wheelie skills with the chair and went on to ask what had happened. Fell twenty feet down a shaft at work and broke his spine, is what. So I have nothing to complain of, really. It's just, everything hurts.

Woke at 10 this morning, looked out window, and said 'Thank you, God', because streets and sidewalks were wet but bare even as a thin snow fell. 'Well, if this is the worst of the morning rush hour, I can bike.' And did, blissfully unaware that the storm had arrived later than forecast and this was just the beginning.

It snowed all day and when I came out at 6 the streets were packed down ice and the sidewalks packed down snow. So I walked the bike home. Ah for the days when I used to walk to and from work with no problem at all. I prudently stretched before setting out but that didn't stop my piriformis from curling into a tight aching ball of pain. Is there no cure for lower back pain?

I at least stopped at an infrequently visited Japanese restaurant en route that's been there under various names for at least fifteen years if not longer, and had two glasses of wine as well as quite passable sushi. But it was still a long slog home, even as the bike took most of my weight and kept the knee from protesting too much. Must stretch well tonight, though my experience is that long slogging walks aka exercise actually loosens things up. Whatever. Acupuncture tomorrow, and the rest of the day at home.

What happens when you take your bike in for servicing because it's going to snow?

1) the snow stays on the rooftops but melts at once on the ground and

2) there's a massive subway shutdown *right* at morning rush hour and you get an 8:30 call to please come in to work because half the staff aren't able to make it, so

3) you have to break in on your poor brother's morning plans to beg a ride because all the city's cabs are servicing the affected area in the east end and

4) none of this would be a problem if only you weren't too chickenshit to ride your new bike on the greasy streets or had bought a proper-sized bike in the first place but you were and you didn't so sucks to be you.

No idea why November is always Touchy Tum month, but it is. Last year I lost two kilos to it; this year, much milder, only a single one. But I'll take what reduction I can get.

In spite of touchiness, when the sun shone today I was moved to move things, and put out the beautiful but very unsatisfactory Mandarin-style wooden chair on the front lawn. As an incentive, I left it with the pretty seat and back cushion, formerly from a wicker chair that unravelled a dozen years ago. Not that the cushion rendered the chair any more comfortable or easy to get out of, but it might disguise the general ungivingness of the thing. Then I added a respectable kitchen chair from the back bunker and a large wheeled suitcase that I have no further use for because I'm incapable of travel, and thus freed up enough space in the bunker to stow my useless new bike so that Old Paint can retake its accustomed place in the living room. One can't leave a poor aged velo out on the porch in the coming snow and precipitation.

And by day's end everything had been taken, hooray! Now if only winter hadn't arrived so early, I might try moving some knick knacks as well.

Though it belatedly occurs to me that if I ever have that surgery and the hopeful two weeks of rehab that follows, I'll need a suitcase suitable to a fortnight's stay at the centre. But I shall burn that bridge when I come to it. It's not as if I don't have other bags stashed away.

Walked today, which was my accomplishment. Not far, just up to Loblaws and down to the new coffee shop on Christie. This fights my reflexive 'the poor aged cripple can't go anywhere' attitude and also, as I know even as I don't believe it, loosens the leg tendons that hurt more than the knee.

I even managed to cross Dupont in front of Loblaws on the east side, a dicey corner that raises my anxiety because it's a prime spot for drivers to come racing up Christie and hang a right without looking. Aged neighbour was knocked over in just such a fashion, and I witnessed a stunning collision there where a right turner up Christie met a left turner down Christie in an explosion of metal parts in front of Starbuck's. Me, I was on the opposite side of the street, luckily. Toronto drivers are not patient: they'll ease into their right-on-red turns as you're still crossing in front of them, and become enraged if you don't move out of their way fast enough. I feel safer walking my bike, because it makes me more noticeable as well as letting me walk faster; the walker marks me as a cripple so all but the most brutish drivers (who do exist) must exercise patience; but an unmarked pedestrian moving tortoise-like across the street can be a target for horns and shouts, and I would very much rather not.

The oddity about that intersection is that there are two nursing and assisted living homes just north of it, and Loblaws is full of the scootered and the walkered. You'd think drivers would be used to it. Maybe the aged just never cross the street? Probably wise. I've heard many a driver leaning on his horn to tell the car turning in front of him 'never mind the pedestrians! I wanna make this light! Run 'em over and get a move on!' Truly there is no hope for this city.

Anent which: was reading reviews of Wiener's Home Hardware, that Annex institution staffed by an eclectic bunch of eccentric oyajis plus a few less charming younger guys. Reviews were 95% ecstatic, including the encomium 'the staff never talk down to me'- a female reviewer. But one guy took hoity-toity exception to the staff's odd sense of humour (almost certainly the long-bearded Dumbledore lookalike, 'the owner I presume' and wrongly, because the third generation owner is a lot younger). "I asked for a bag and he said, What's wrong with your hands?" bridle bridle. I can imagine the conversation that preceded that, because Annex nouveau riche are like nouveau Beaujolais: crude, unfinished, and not as big a deal as some believe.

Parenthetically must add another food that I can't be left alone with: buttercup squash, or kabocha to be precise. Cooked one yesterday, put butter and pumpkin pie spice on it, ended finishing the whole thing by day's end. Mind, it was a smallish kabocha, but still.

Failed in my major plan for the day, which was to take my two and a half year old laptop a) out of its original unopened box and b) up to the guy who says he can put Windows 7 on it.* This involves taking a taxi, since he's in a transit vacuumish area that requires two subway lines and a bus going in the wrong direction, then crossing a wide street on my slow and unreliable legs. But my inflexible knee was not happy with anything today, especially the prospect of getting in and out of a car. So to exercise it I took the walker to the laundromat to wash my new flannel duvet (huzzah!), a bare five minute walk that took me fifteen. Must work out a grip that doesn't engage the elbows, but I think that requires the same 90° angle that I use when walking the bike. I put my laundry in dryer and walked home, ditched the walker and came back half an hour later on my blessed bicycle.

To discover that someone had removed my clothes from the dryer maybe five minutes into the cycle and dumped them, quite wet, in another one. However the laundromat had been midday empty except for three guys servicing the machines, so I must conclude they needed to service the dryer I was using. Still annoying. Then I went off to be Thursday Fourth Body as ever, and walked into someone's crisis and thus ended up working for pay. And since plague hit the Infant section today, cutting the numbers in half, tomorrow my lunch shift is cancelled and I can sleep in. So generally a win all round.

* Calling the guy in the first place was Tuesday's accomplishment, because I've had the number for two years and not been able to bring myself to do it.

And begins with an afterthought request of mine, that perpetually slow and perpetually smelly kitchen drain. Wretched, wretched mistake, as Elizabeth Bennet said.

Now, the downpipe was replaced x many years ago (3,4) by a moonlighting plumber who swore violently at the original iron pipes and substituted plastic for them. B swore mightily at the moonlighter's work. ('They always glue things in so you can't take them apart, I don't know why!') He went to New Canadian for a new drain set which lacked a necessary part; went off to Home Despot for a different drain which- hallelujah!- fitted. (How he went is a mystery, because I don't think he has a car.)

Then he screwed back the porch 2x4s, and warned me that the ceiling was bulging towards the southern edge. His suggestion is that squirrels have or had a hoard there that they forgot about, which seems only too likely. Then he cleared several inches of linden pollen from my eavestroughs, in time for tomorrow's rain.

Lastly he cleaned my kitchen walls with some new preparation that you just spray on and wipe, no water necessary. He told me the name, which I must ask him for again, because it seems the perfect thing for the tile grunge under the fridge and stove.

Then he charged me $165 for the whole five hours' worth. I threw in another $75 because seriously .

I hope he's free come this winter- he implied that work was slowing down after the summer but then someone needs him to prepare a house for selling- because while the kitchen is cleaner than it has been in decades, it still needs repainting.

But the price is definitely right.

I no longer sleep until 10 or 11, because the house next door has begun its renovations, and the thudding whine of drills and the clang bang CRASH of drywall chunks going into the dumpster begins at 9 every morning. But today the drills started before 9 and turned out to be jackhammers ripping up sidewalk down the street, while a large truck blocked access to my block from the south and STOP signs to the north suggested drivers not try going the wrong way down it. This was the day my walker was to be delivered, of course. So I called Highway Robbery North to inform them of the problem, and they said they'd notify the driver, and we agreed that I'd come pick my walker up in person, either via taxi or the kind offices of my bro.

But I was not going to do it today because who knows if they'd got it off the truck in the first place, and if they had, where they'd stored it. I went off to my coffee shop, had a latte, and rolled over to work to be Horrible Thursday's fourth body. And as well, because someone had been double booked again. The consolation in all this was that the blocked block let me get my namagomi out for pickup, though I fully expected the pickup to be in the evening.

Coming home in the 5:30 gloaming (it shouldn't be dark so early but today was a grey day) I found my house locked, when I was sure I'd left it on the latch, and almost stumbled over my walker in the hallway. Seems they'd shown up anyway, after trying to call me at 4:40 on the cell phone I never take out at work (because if I do I forget it) and followed my instructions to ring next door if I happened to be out. S-i-l left it forme and prudently closed the door fully behind her.

The garbage got picked up early too, so all's well that ends well.

Now if only I could find the energy to clear the kitchen of its myriad tchotchkes nd clutter so my handyman can wash the walls on Saturday...

Bright sun, blue skies, brave colours: classic Thanksgiving weekend. Accomplished two things on my perennial Get Done list.

First was to make motions towards getting my kitchen walls clean. Some services do respond to requests even on holiday weekends, which surprised me. So I theoretically have a guy coming to give me an estimate sometime. But as I was doing my exercises this morning the doorbell rang. Canvassers, I thought, not gonna limp downstairs for that. Then it rang again, so I had to. And there was a tall guy with a toolbox who turned out to be the handyman from two and a half years ago, whom I was expecting tomorrow and who face-blind and lenseless me didn't recognize at all. So we went over the things I want him to do- the porch roof, the eavestrough, the bathroom sill, the cloggy kitchen sink- some of which he can't until the hardware stores open tomorrow. On a sudden thought I asked if he washes walls. He does. He may not do it as well as a professional cleaner but he's probably cheaper, and I can leave him alone in the house or just trust him with a key. So I'm tempted just to go with that.

The other thing was to finally, finally, buy a walker: the kind that rolls. Went up to Highway Robbery North yesterday and got the top of the line model which a) folds b) sideways and c) has high grips that I don't have to lean my achy elbows on. HRN charges through the nose, but they took 10% off because I was buying and- callhoo callay- there's no sales tax on this kind of health aid. Thus what would have been a heart-stopping sum became quite reasonable. It will be delivered, assembled and one trusts intact, some time Thursday, which I have off. And then I shall walk as I used to, all around the neighbourhood, because I have something to sit on when my damnable hip starts seizing up. And that might even strengthen some of those leg bits that need strengthening and that 6 months of strengthening exercises haven't.

Of course the internal voice whispers about the road to hell, and how bicycling is always easier and faster, but I hope to circumvent my don'wannas in this lovely season. Since to look on leaves in rust, forty days (if we get even that) is not so much, around the Village I will go to see the autumn foliage blow. Especially as my new bicycle is indeed too small for me. I might have managed it a dozen years ago when my joints were more flexible, I might manage it if I didn't wear huge boaty mcboatface shoes, but as it is, getting my leg over the bar is a precarious exercise. Must do it in front because there's no way I stretch enough to do it backwards.

What I failed to do was order cannabis oil online. I'm still antsy about it and would rather use a topical cream just for starts. There's one place that has it, highly rated, but when you register they want you to send them a picture of your photo ID and a photo of you holding your ID, and I still can't get this tablet camera to take a face-on picture of me. There must be some art I'm missing. Phone selfies are no problem (from that point at least, because my phone tends to lose its camera function) but tablet selfies always have me looking down or rolling my eyes to the ceiling like I'm about to faint.

Because all my winter clothes are black. But since temperatures still bounce around, and will bounce to 20 tomorrow *they say*, there's still plenty of whites.

Had winter jacket on yesterday and furnace on overnight- low, but enough to make for a warm awakening this morning and a lie-in till 11. Today wasn't as cold as yesterday but the chill creeps back now the sun is gone, so maybe will bump the thermostat back up tonight a tad.

Took sheets and towels to laundromat, had massage, ate fried chicken at Popeye's and need never do that again. People who put chili flakes in their mashed potatoes are not my kind of people.

Front step has come loose again. Concrete patch either couldn't hold out against the rains or got knocked loose by me humping bike down it. I'm convinced this is a portent for continued disaster, eg my new bike when I finally get it will be a bust. But to combat that: have needed new bowls for a while because several of my yard sale/ boulevard bowls have gotten chipped. Alas, I no longer roam the streets where people leave stuff out for passersby. But coming back from the laundry this evening, there was a kind basket of crockery including exactly the right kind of bowl. So now I have an unblemished two more.

Equally, I'm a fan of just one kind of caraway rye bread which is available only at my local super, but they only have it sporadically and haven't had it for months. Today I checked the shelf, as I till do, and there was a single loaf left! They've changed the packaging slightly but not so as to fool a careful glance, and I'd still never seen it in any time since spring, so I am happy. Of course, Fiesta often doesn't put that brand out until close to its best before date, for reasons I don't understand. Once in a very long while you get a fresh loaf, which is heaven, but mostly it's dry, even if there were no loaves out the day before. And that means toast. So I have a toast loaf. And that's fine too. At the very least it's a change from overnight oats for breakfast.

This would have been an excellent day to lie in bed with beanbags about my aching joints, and in fact I did just that until 11:30. But I had to get up eventually and face the sudden humid sticky mug that moved in last night. The walls were wetly tacky with the abrupt change from yesterday's cold dry autumn to today's hot moist July, though this time they didn't actually sweat drops as they did in 2013, and the wooden floors were just sticky.

Severe thunderstorm watch all afternoon while the rain fell in buckets and lightning flashed, but in the end I got home only slightly wet. Couldn't face cooking, which is why I have frozen dinners in my freezer. Michelina's noodles stroganoff are just fine after you grate a little parmesan over them, and if I'd had wine would have been even better. But it's the allergy season and I mustn't have wine until November.

Lovely sleep last night, lovely waking, silver cold September day with a massage to follow. And since I still seem limber (autumn loves me, evidently) I pushed my luck to the extent of raking a garbage pail's worth of leaves and cherry pits from the back pathway and clearing the cellar stairs so that a new washer and dryer, if and when, can make it into the house. Then vacuumed and swiftered* the kitchen floor and did five days worth of dishes and called myself virtuous.

But the real triumph began last night. I have eight drawers in my kitchen full of nothing but junk. Well, also pot holders and corkscrews. But by and large it's a mass of unassorted Stuff accumulated over 30 years, and the thought of it has always made my spirit fail within me. I *know* civilized people keep their cutlery in clean cutlery holders in clean drawers, not in jars on the counter, but I find sorters useless. I still have two of them, mind, but they hold things like bamboo skewers and lobster cutting shears and nut crackers and other knick-knacks reminiscent of the luxurious life at Bedford, now gone forever. I can't even begin to think of weeding them out because, because, you never know when they'll come in handy. (Like that lovely tin Fearless Leader and Riko sent me elegant biscuits in a decade ago, that I finally decided was just taking up space. And now I buy these rice crackers that say 'store in an airtight container after opening' and do I have one? Not any more, and my crackers bend like cardboard after two days.)

So I started a little 'I don't see me doing this' project. The top left drawer is now clean and sorted and the top right one half so, for certain values of sorted that include putting lightbulbs with other lightbulbs and batteries with other batteries and gathering rusty screwdriver heads together in the hopes that a screwdriver will turn up in some other drawer. But I found the knob to the cover of my stock pan, that lost its screw ages ago and so came out, and I found a screw that more or less fits it, so I can use the thing again. And I found a bunch of allen keys, none of which alas are the hex key needed to tighten my bike's brakes, but useful for other things. As for the lobster shears and crab picks and such, they'll just have to go out on the front lawn in the hope some affluent passerby will want them.

*Swifters have two problems. One is the smell of the cleaning fluid. The other is the curving handle, presumably designed so the swifter can be hung on a wall, but which, because I can catch things in places that I couldn't manage if I were actually trying to do it, always grabs my sleeve or my shoulder strap or you name it. Makes me want to scream.

Today's attempt at adulting was foiled by technology. Spent half an hour on the phone with a BMO rep trying to reset the password on my tax-free savings account. First time through, the connection failed just as we got to the last Enter. Every time thereafter the webpage rejected the temporary password he gave me. Once I screwed up the 'repeat new password' entry: this is why they should let you see the password as you write it. Anyway, must go and do this face to face sometime. And then close the account for good.

However, as compensation, my refund of the yearly property tax increase, which was a mere $300 last year ie less than one month's tax installment, was a whopping $1100 this year ie two months installments and then some. The tax dep't never explains and never apologizes, but I suspect that both this and the reduction earlier on in my monthly installments is due to them miscalculating something badly last year. For sure, property taxes didn't increase any $1000 last year. There'd have been howls if they had. But $1000 falling out of the sky is a welcome gift. I'll take it.

Yesterday was muggy and hot, and I barely managed the three things on my list because of aches. Today began the same, but the wind blew dry air in- hot dry air, but dry- and the laundry I couldn't think of doing yesterday got done and put on the line and dried in three hours, and joints were almost quiet.

Still, it gets dark too early these days. Autumn, sigh.

Finished Purple Hibiscus but did what I never do and read the last chapter when I was halfway through, just to be prepared for the worst. Worst didn't happen, and justice was served in its fashion, but lord that was an enraging read. Mainlined a Ruth Rendell to clear my palate but it turned into Rendell being appallingly naive about several things, including female reactions to assault. So that didn't help. And now I'm back to Halprin, whose magic realism somehow gives me the oogies as well, much as Mieville did in Perdido. Can't escape the fact that this is Dude Lit, however unmainstream it may be.

Really, back to manga is the only solution.

I'm kind of delighted by this horse story found over at incandescens' twitter feed. Go Her Maj!

City's relief for Impoverished Elderly Homeowners (which is kind of an oxymoron, since any house in this city is effectively a money tree) came through this month ie they didn't deduct my property taxes, so I indulged myself by cancelling my 11 o'clock acupuncture appointment at short notice. For which I shall have to pay, but fine. This is the humid achy season when people so disposed (me and the cook and coworker S) are troubled in all our joints. Add allergies to that and you get super-doped me who really didn't want to leave her bedroom, let alone bike the pot-holed streets for half an hour. Who didn't want to wake up before 10, actually, and is sorry she did. And who was rousted from comfort by a real estate agent cold-calling with 'we recently sold a house in your neighbourhood and...' Jackals. It takes three lifetimes living in shanty towns and under bridges to expiate the guilt of having been a real estate agent.

Fast-cooking oats (not instant) make the best overnight oats. Lemon yoghurt takes away most of the oatmeal taste. But no matter what I eat in the morning, my insides rumble disconsolately afterwards, is why I'm not a breakfast person.

My current mission is to clean one kitchen bookshelf of books. This involves, alas, finishing Halprin's Winter's Tale, which I suppose is magic realism and which I don't actually *mind* except for its undefined but pervasive Written By A Guy-ness. Makes me think of Little, Big which I then think I must reread except that life is short. Maybe follow with Love in the Time of Cholera which is also (I assume) Mag.Real, and is also a kitchen book.

Purple Hibiscus also chugs along. There's some hope that Papa the wife beater will get his comeuppance some day, but meanwhile it reminds me why the religion of my childhood is, at the very least, something men should not be allowed near.

Thursday was sunny and dry and I didn't hurt. Friday was grey and humid and I was crippled. Yesterday was sunny and dry and I went for a walk. Today is grey and humid and I'm in the sideroom with hot beanbags for elbows and hips and knees. So it goes.

But yesterday I pumped up my tires (which I hate doing- see elbows, above) and rode those 20 pounds of batteries down to the recycle, so go me.

Elizabeth's Meat and Delicatessan was on Bloor near Brunswick, back in the dawn of time- the 70s- and stayed there for decades until it suddenly closed in 2005. And I mean suddenly: owner simply locked the store one night and didn't come back. The venue became a reasonable pub, but that too closed and was replaced with an El Furniture Warehouse, famous for its entrees all being 5.95. Never been in there because lineups of university kids, and anyway pub food, but I was hungry for meat at 4 pm yesterday (4:30 is my body's idea of the perfect time to eat dinner) and no regular restaurant was serving supper then. So.

Well, even half full it's LOUD because they keep the music turned to blast volume, and so dark you can't read the menu, so it must cater to beer drinkers who know what they want already. I moved to the one table by the window and had their club sandwich and sweet potato fries. The portions aren't large, which is hardly surprising, but also a blessing since most pub food leaves me feeling bloated. I wish it was a bit more stodgy elder friendly, but that's not likely. So if I get cravings, I shall have to train my guts not to get them until 5 p.m. at the earliest.