The morning light on my dog walk today.

Busy bee.

Western Salsify gone to seed.

 

We're home.  We were supposed to visit Jasper and our friend who lives there but Jasper was ordered evacuated on Monday night.  He made it out but we don't know if his house survived the fire.  I've been crying a fair bit.  Jasper means a lot to us, it's where we got married, where we went to take photos and where we went we needed to get away from bullshit.  The waitress at Papa George's know us and I wonder about her home too.

The highway is closed from the south and both east and west.  We were supposed to travel up the Icefield Parkway to Jasper but that's where the fire came from.  We cancelled the hotels and came home.

 Wildfire Frenzy Forces Massive Evacuation in Jasper National Park - West Island Blog

 Battle river

Sylvan Lake

 We're off on holidays for a week.  Take care.

 

I'm miserable today.  It's hot and it's been hot for the past week and it's supposed to be hot for another week.  Today's high is 35C (95F).  The trees are having a hard time, too hot and not enough water, so they're sending up suckers everywhere and dropping their leaves. The house can't cool off because it's too hot at night.

I'm grumpy and hot.  I ate Smarties for breakfast and I'm watching Schitt's Creek, so that helps, but now my new TV keeps randomly doing weird shit.  

Life sucks today but it will get better.

Just a random day lilly on my walk the other day.

Yesterday, Katie and I had an interview with a news agency in the city, about her having to pay for her incontinence briefs.  Katie has worn diapers her whole life but since she turned eighteen CAIL has paid for them, $217/month.  Katie also lives on something called AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped) which is not a lot of money.  Right now she has enough to cover her daily living costs but with very little money left over each month.  In March her contract, or whatever they call it, was up and she needs to be reassessed to make sure she is still disabled?  Still incontinent?  I called CAIL, a four to six month waiting list to be reassessed because they are short staffed.

There is a whole long story behind this but I'm too lazy this morning to write it out.  There is a reporter who is helping disabled people deal with CAIL and AHS, to get the supplies they need paid for, and yesterday she came over to Katie's house and she wrote an article about Katie.  It says so much about a government that is willing to screw over disabled people while handing out subsidies to oil corporations.

Charlie chilling on my chair.  All of the furniture in our house is covered with dog blankets because I like to keep it classy.

I'm retired now.  I worked for AHS for thirty-eight years, pretty much my whole life and nothing really.  My manager asked me yesterday for a photo of me because the nurse educator wants to post something in our online magazine, which surprised me.  I'm not sending them a photo of me now, tired after thrity-either years.  It was either this photo or one with a snapchat filter and no wrinkles, cause I'm still vain.  I sent her the grad photo.

I worked yesterday and realized that retirement is kind of like a death.  You're gone, life moves on.  People say they miss you but you know from years of working that a retirement, or a death, is like a ripple in a pond.  The surface is disturbed briefly and then returns to its former state.  I'm not needed by my patients, there are lots of good nurses there.  I wonder how long it will take me to let go and move on.

I also realized that your job doesn't really care about you.  Your coworkers care about you but not your job.  I know everyone says this but understanding is different than knowing.  "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Soren Kierkegaard.

Life goals:)

My flowers are much happier now with some heat.  My husband and I have lived in this house for eight years now and I've wanted a patio/deck set for awhile but they're so expensive and I'm thrifty.  And then this one came on sale at Home Depot and it was a floor model so I asked for something off the price, which I got.  They wanted $85 to deliver it and I asked my neighbor if I could borrow her son's truck but he's out of town working on a pipeline.  My neighbor works at Home Depot and told me that I can rent a van there for $25 for an hour and a half, so I did and now I have a comfy place to sit on the deck.  The adirondack chairs were fine but it's getting harder to get up and out of them, don't laugh.

Yesterday it was cooler than it has been all week, so I picked up Jack early from daycare and we went to the spray park where he told me, "I'm on a team".  A bunch of boys had water guns, including Jack, and apparently they had split up into teams.  It's was all good until he got shot in the face and his mouth was open, talking no doubt, and he did not like that.  So we had a snack and drove into Edmonton to pick up poppa.  He's with Gracie now until tomorrow at supper time.

I also learned how to change the air filter and spark plug on our lawn mower.  Next week I'll change the oil.  Thank you youtube.  What else can I learn?  Don't worry, I'm thinking:)

So far I'm enjoying retirement, early days I know.  I will work on Monday though and I imagine I will spend the whole day wanting to go home.  I'm finding I'm not missing work at all, which I thought I would.  We'll see how it goes.  




 

The top flower is a Canada Anemone.  The western salsify has gone to seed and it looks like a giant dandelion.
 

It's been hot as hell here, up to 36C yesterday, in a two storey house with no AC.  Fortunately there is a lovely cool basement to sleep in.  I've been keeping cool, sitting in the pool as well, and yes, Canadians do own guns, water guns.

Retirement seems to be going well.  Yesterday I tried to change the lawnmower blade, twice, but both blades did not fit.  More research required, but I did take a file to the blade and sharpened it.  I also did some mending and shortened a summer dress that was too tight around my legs to take a proper long step.  I also decided to go visit my brother in August, by myself.  I'm hoping we'll both work on repairing our relationship.  

In another surprise this week, my oldest sister sent me a card thanking me for taking care of mum all those years ago.  Mum died in 2013 and I had virtually no support from my siblings at the time, plus I had work and Katie to take care of.  They then had a family meeting, without me, and decided what should happen to mum, without me, her primary caregiver.  I had a lot of anger attached to my grief and haven't talked to my oldest sister since mum died.  This same sister also made my life hell when I got pregnant with my son forty-one years ago.  She's almost eighty now and I've forgiven her but I don't really want her back in my life.  She's not the nicest person.  We'll see.  Families are hard.

I took Miss Katie to a different off leash park last weekend, the one down by the zoo.  It's a huge park, complete with both paved and unpaved pathways along the river; there is even a sprinkling of coyotes, although we didn't see any.

Miss Katie has a list of things she loves most in life:

-babies

-dogs

- horses

-ice cream

-popcorn

Last Sunday she saw a woman with a baby wrap, complete with baby, and the woman had two dogs with her.  I told her that if she had been sitting on a horse, eating popcorn, Katie would have probably died right there and the woman laughed and understood my joke..  We also stopped at the Italtian Centre to buy sandwiches and drinks, so that we could have a picnic lunch.  While we were there, some man asked me if there was something wrong with Katie.  I told him, "No, she's just handicapped."  It seemed like an odd question, but what do I know?  He wasn't rude, just seemed concerned.

Katie had a good time, fresh air, and got to see babies and dogs.  And I actually got a photo of Katie smiling.  It's hard to believe she's thirty-two now.  My baby girl still.

Otherwise, not much going on.  My house is clean and the laundry is caught up and even put away.  My flowers are blooming away and the sun has come out.  Probably time for a walk with a dog.