I took the dogs for a walk early this morning, before it gets too hot.  It's hazy and smoke has started to blow into the city, obscuring everything.  

I'm so tired and cranky.  Last night I had awful dreams about misplacing small children.  I went to a retirement party, less than ten of us, and it was so hot outside on the patio that I ended up feeling faint and had to lay down on the patio.  Of course this was quite hilarious to some of my co-workers and videos and photos were taken while I lay there.  I sat in the air conditioned house for about fifteen minutes, drank ice water and felt revived enough to drive home.

I just realized that I'm not so much tired as depressed, again.  My feet have been hurting so I've been taking ibuprofen which gives me heartburn, so I take pepcid.  I can take pepcid for a day or two but after that it drags me down.  I was feeling okay until I wasn't and now it has to work it's way out of my system and let my gut back to normal and then I'll be back to normalish, or as close to normal as I come.  

We were shortstaffed on Tuesday and I promptly burst into tears.  I got it together and made it through the day okay but I hate crying at work, even though my co-workers are used to it.  Our shit for brains politicians have decided that nurses should take a 3% pay cut.  The pandemic isn't even over, nurses are worn out and are working short staffed because nurses are not being replaced as they leave;  why not kick them while they're down?  Meanwhile, in the past ten years, these very same politicians wages have more than doubled.  I feel disrespected.

I know I'll feel better soon but I do hate feeling down and weepy.  I need to let go of my expectations and just accept it, sometimes I get depressed and some medications make me feel more depressed.  It's frustrating though.  I work so hard at dealing with my depression and it still bites me on the ass.  

Not much going on around here.  It's still hot, not like Death Valley hot, but hot.  When I was a young woman, I loved the heat.  My friends and I put on our bikinis and went to the lake to lounge around and people watch, sometimes we even went in the water.  I love to swim.  

I took the dogs out last night to the dog park.  We had a few drops of rain and then the heat came back but they needed a walk.  So did I.  We walked through the woods you can see in the distance.  It's always cooler in the woods and the birds were singing away.  Heidi even managed to scare up a squirrel which was exciting, less so for the squirrel I'm thinking.  No animals were harmed.

Our medical director at work, the one we made a huge complaint about, has done a 180.  He's kind and thoughtful with the patients.  He jokes.  He's not an asshole to anyone anymore.  I can only imagine what kind of threats were made for him to change so dramatically but I am thankful.  It makes work so much more enjoyable.  No more dread when it comes to working with him, atlhough it will take a least of year of this kind of behavior before I trust him.  Short term change is easy.  Long term change is much harder.

We're finishing up our plans to visit the coast in August.  On the way home we're going to stop and see my brother and his family, and while we're on the Island, we'll visit my sister and her husband.  I'm looking forward to seeing the ocean again.  I wouldn't want to live there full time but I do love the ocean.  

We're going to pick up Katie soon and take her out.  She's allowed to travel on the buses again so she'll start getting out again.  She's been a trooper during this pandemic but her behavior is starting to escalate again.  She wants to go out.  She misses the world.  Her group home has a plan in place to get her out regularly again which she'll enjoy.

I read this article yesterday and was disgusted, dismayed and revolted, mostly just fucking angry.  What fucking centruy is this?

How to treat disabled people like shit.  That's not the name of the article but it might as well be.  I've learned with Katie, who is nonverbal, that behavior is a form of communication.  These people, these human beings, are self harming for a reason and shocking them is not the answer.   All of the people involved in this school need a throat punch.

We're back to more normal temperatures which I appreciate, as do my plants.  That tall, green plant on the right is a tomato plant that I grew from seed back in March.  I'm impressed at how well they've been doing.  I ended up with five tomato plants in total.

I had a tarot card reading from a lovely lady, which was spot on.  I'm trying to let go of my anger and grudges because I know I do hold onto them.  My two biggest problems which came up were my stubbornness and my defensiveness with ideas on how to deal with them.  My husband would agree with those two being my biggest problems, along with my impatience.  In my defence (yes, I get the irony) I am less stubborn and less impatient than I used to be:)  She also suggested I spend more time on self care and get in touch with the little girl I used to be.  I tried this last night and when I talked to her, the little girl I used to be, I ended up crying quite a lot.  It wasn't a bad kind of crying though, more of a realization of how vulnerable children are and how much they need to feel safe and loved.

This morning I'm going for a massage which will help my back.  It's been so sore these past couple of weeks, along with my right arm.  I try to ignore them but that doesn't really work.

I started looking into my geneology which has been quite interesting.  I found family going back into the 1700s on ancestry.ca, with a free trial.  I found a great-great uncle who was born in New Brunswick and a homestead in Alberta that my grandfather, or great grandfather (can't remember which), homesteaded in Alberta.  On my father's side there were a lot of coal miners;  and on my mother's side, I found a lot of military men in England and Ireland.  

It's the kind of stuff that leads you down a rabbit hole and it's been an enjoyable way to pass a few hours.  It may be slightly addicting.  I didn't realize my family had come to Canada earlier than I thought they had and I also didn't realize how much people moved around even in the 1800s.  I thought it was a modern phenomenom but apparently that's not true.  

This is my mum as a young girl, maybe three or four.  I can't ask her anymore and that's sad.  I still have questions for both my parents but I can't ask them and never thought to ask them when they were alive.  Maybe that's why I'm enjoying this genealogoy search, it feels like a connection to both of them.  Names will come up and then I remember something that my mum said many years ago and it's a connection back to mum.

I'm off today and I'm going to try to take it easy and spend some time in the woods with the dogs because we're all happiest there.

We're having a heat wave here and we're the lucky ones.  The interior of BC set records this past week for heat.  The small community of Lytton got the worst of it.  It hit 49.6C there and now a wildfire has ripped through the village, destroying 90% of the community.  It's going to get worse too I would imagine.

Our house is an oven.  We don't have AC but I did buy a mattress for the basement and Jack and I have been sleeping down there.  The big guy toughs it out upstairs with the dogs.  The dogs are suffering too, panting and generally just draping themsevles across the tile, hoping to cool off even a little.  I've been giving them cold sponge baths which the vets recommend.  No walks.  Too hot.

And still we're the lucky ones.  My work has AC.  I can afford a house with a basement.  To be homeless at a time like this is dangerous.  To be elderly at a time like this is dangerous too as sudden deaths in the elderly have spiked in BC this past week, much like in France in 2003 when almost 15,000 people died due to the heatwave.

I have no answers.  Right now I'm just trying to get through the days until we get a respite but it's obvious that climate change is occuring and we need to deal with it somehow.  It's not going to go away.  
 

It is hot as hell here and it's going to hot all week.  My husband woke me up this morning with a plan to cool off the house.  He told me he was going to get a 50 foot duck and use it to suck the cool air out of the basement.  I didn't think much of the idea because I couldn't imagine a rubber duck that size in the basement.  Did I mention I had just woken up?  He said duct.  That made a lot more sense.

Everybody was hot and grumpy today.  Yesterday we took Jack to Jurassic Forest which is a park with forty animatronic dinosaurs in a boreal forest setting.  It far surpassed my expectations and we went early before it got too hot.  

Today I had Katie.  All we managed was a hair cut and McDonalds lunch.  She wasn't having it either and just wanted to go home.  

Did I mention it's hot?  It's too damn hot!

Jack has been sick.  Not really sick, a cough and a runny nose sick.  He's fine to go to daycare and appears to feel fine, except for his cough.  No fever.

Last night while my brother and his daughter and her boyfriend came over for a BBQ, he played naked in the backyard, enjoying the sprinkler, Jack, not my brother.

Things I learned last night.

I missed my brother and I love him.

I miss having people over.

I love to laugh.

Little boys like to be naked.

Little boys can poop in the backyard while naked.

Dogs will eat little boy poop.

BBQs are the easiest meal to clean up after.

Little boys can vomit enormous amounts in the middle of the night.

You can wash pillows, even feather pillows.  I didn't know.

The smell of vomit lingers.

I woke up this morning groggy from lack of sleep with a cough and a runny nose.  Of course Jack feels fine.  I'm slowly making my way through heaps of laundry because he vomited in two beds last night.  

I'm thankful I can't go to work with a runny nose and a cough.  I'm taking it easy.

I've been busy at work and with Jack.  I took the dogs for a walk last weekend and came across this tree, standing in a small patch of grass and sunlight.

The cat has been enjoying the long days of sunshine.  She has plumped up in the last few years, like me.

I was talking to one of the oncologists yesterday at work and he said he was worried how much busier we were going to be once the pandemic is over.  Breast screening and colon screening have gone down during the pandemic so people will be further along in their disease process by the time they get to us.  I'm guessing cancer deaths will bump up for the next few years until the backlog of people have cleared the system.  

My brother is in town and I talked to him on Tuesday.  It was nice to catch up and he's coming over for a BBQ tonight with his daughter and her boyfriend.  It's been eight years.  We got older and maybe a little wiser.  I guess time will tell.

He is also visiting a childhood friend in Red Deer this weekend.  His friend has colon cancer and the doctor just told him that he only has weeks left.  I'm glad they'll get a chance to say goodbye to each other.  

I'm so tired of cancer.  I had a young woman with breast cancer the other day and we poked her seven times trying to start an IV.  She was crying and I ended up crying too.  I told another patient who has been coming to us for eight or nine years that most of the time I just try to imagine that my patients get better when I don't see them anymore, even though I know it's a lie.  He's a sweet guy.  His doctor told him he had months to live when he first saw him, so he's quite pleased to have proved the doc wrong.

It's hot here and going to get a lot hotter.  The forecast for the weekend and next week is in the 30Cs, up to 36C (96F), which is bloody hot when you don't have AC.  It will pass but it will be unpleasant too.  

Miss Katie gets her second vaccination today which means her life will get back to more normal, maybe going out and her father has said he'll come out to see her next month.  I'm waiting to see if that really happens before I tell her that.  She hasn't seen him in a year and a half and I don't want her to be disappointed.

Our lockdown is coming to an end this week which will be interesting.  No more following arrows on the aisles:)