A festive wee poyum

What a lovely sounding language.


My gift to myself

Fu

I think likely the greatest gift I can give myself this coming Christmas is to take some time off. I may be wrong, as my memory fails more often now than years past, but I don’t think I have completely disconnected from work since January or February. Working weekends has been the norm.

But my enthusiasm for the work and productivity have plummeted of late. Each day feels like I’m slogging through large drifts of snow. Which is pretty indicative of the need for a break.

I have no plans for the 4 – 5 days I plan on taking off. I’d love to proclaim a complete disconnect from the screen, but that might be too optimistic. Instead, I’ll likely eat, run, read books, and spend time with family. Hopefully I’ll fit some boredom in there as well.


Great emptiness

Just after dusk in the downtown.

I don’t think I was expecting a Hallmark moment but I think I expected some signs of life.

On Sunday I ended the day a bit early, cleaned myself up, put on pants and decided to go on a Christmas shopping sojourn to the downtown area. Outside of my hobbies of running, food and coffee, I do little in the way of window shopping, so Christmas has traditionally been the time I look through the stores in search of interesting things to buy for the kids. In years past I would spend hours looking through Eslite bookstore and the multitude of other small design/craft related shops that inhabited the central district of our old residence, going elbow to elbow with the throngs of people doing the same. This effort would often necessitate rest breaks in a café or 3.

That’s life in a big urban centre and I would like to say pre-pandemic, but they got that under control from the onset, so it only applies to our experience here.

The downtown on Sunday was like a scene from the Walking Dead with streets devoid of people and no traffic whatsoever. You could say that the new restrictions are having an unhealthy effect on business, but I’ve heard that these restrictions haven’t stopped families from shopping en masse at those big box stores that keep moving farther and farther from the town.

I’ll admit that I have a bias. I hate the experience of shopping in Walmart, Canadian Tire and the like. With an experience largely devoid of warmth, personality and efficiency, I would rather shop online where the prices are much better and the selection far more vast.

I do enjoy the downtown and would love to be able to do all our activities there, groceries included. I’d also prefer to buy local, but how many fancy soaps, coffee cups and fine mittens and hats can one buy? Luckily, my kids love books, and we have a trio of bookstores, of which the previously read stores provide a great selection. It’s a shame that downtown Charlottetown can’t thrive without tourists and expand it’s retail options beyond what appeals to the cruise ships.


Running into winter

We have been blessed with a somewhat mild fall/winter to date and as a result my running season continues unabated. The photo above was taken just before the finish line during the 2018 PEI marathon. I couldn’t deal with the cold that year and stopped running shortly after. The winter also brings the real possibility of falling on the ice and breaking something, a fear that ranks up there with drowning for me. Hopefully sticking to the trails over the winter and my new Altra shoes that I purchased explicitly for running in snow and slush will lessen that risk.

Tuesday past I had an unexpected guest, my son, on my nighttime run on the trail between the entrance at Sherwood Rd. and end point at Covehead or Union road. It made for a nice slow 10k run in pitch black darkness, with no others on the trail but a few hares running about hiding from some plush foxes that I’ve seen other evenings. It’s nice running with Camren, a first, and like many his age his goal was not only to keep up with me but find some way to win in the end. Which he did. The fact that he was sore and wondered how I did this everyday gave some satisfaction.

The new public health rules have had an effect on his life as well. No more swimming or CrossFit. His swimming team, the Bluefins, have had a rough time – first the pandemic killed last season, then both the pool in Charlottetown and in Summerside were unavailable all summer and fall. It would be nice if sports other than hockey got some attention from the local government.

Camren declined an invite to run last night but may be convinced to go again tonight. I’ll see if I can’t sneak a couple more kilometres into our route to push him a bit farther.


A new colleague

Though when it was announced that we were switching to home based learning, I started spewing obscenities, I am happy to have Catriona studying at home. I can’t say the feeling is shared as she doesn’t like my reminders to stop reading Chinese soap operas and study biology.

Hopefully, teachers this semester will have higher engagement rates than 25%, the often touted figure from the last time they tried home based learning. When teachers look at her report from last semester they regularly discount the achievement as many I talked to feel little was learned. I don’t disagree. Many kids need school to flourish and Google Classroom is a poor imitation.

It’s interesting to me how you think you have adapted to the loneliness of working at home, until you have a temporary colleague and realise what you have been missing. This ongoing social isolation, was in part the reason for my anger at hearing the new temporary restrictions from Dr. Morrison.

If I hear one more time the phrase, “we can do it,” or “we are in this together” I am going to puke. The fact is after all this time we still don’t have the pandemic under control. How can we, when you have a huge percentage of people who don’t believe that the virus is real or doesn’t affect them, or have incredibly poor risk assessment capabilities, and/or lack the sense of civic responsibility to care about others? People complain about having mask fatigue! Like washing your hands and wearing a mask is some Herculean task.

What is a Herculean task is to “continue to be patient and kind”, as espoused by Dr. Morrison. I think it’s time to start taking a harder stance against those who refuse to follow common sense public health measures. Perhaps handing out fines like they hand out in Taiwan might be a good start.

This push and pull from a government who wants zero cases and a portion of the public who doesn’t seem to care has real consequences. People get sick and people die. There are seniors I know who are alone, I have a mother-in-law with cancer who we can’t visit, kids are out of school and we, and many others, face risk of severe financial hardship, as there are no government programs available for our family.

It’s time to set aside the politeness so prevalent in Canada and take a more aggressive stance.