In Need of a Throne ...

... but just in case you misinterpret, not the one in the euphemistically named Throne Room aka the commode etc.

I am in a bit of a conundrum over my back spasms. After hitting a peak last weekend, I seemed to be gradually improving ... very gradually ... but nevertheless...

However, last night the situation deteriorated, and I was not at all comfortable. In the event, this morning I decided to seek a comfortable and back-restful-and supported position and simply relax by reading and/or playing on the DS in order to give the back an opportunity to begin to heal itself.

Therefore, I propped pillows under my knees, back and head in bed and prepared to relax. Unfortunately, that didn't do the trick; it simply wasn't all that back-comfortable. Then, I tried the floor with much of the same equipment but with my knees supported by a chair. In the distant past, I sometimes found that to be a helpful and restorative position, but not this time. How about the Easy Chair with similar props and supports? Nyet.

I am finding I'm just about as comfortable standing or sitting at the computer — comfortable being a relatively inappropriate and unsatisfactory word in this case, but I'm sure you take my point. In a sense I should be glad that sitting at the computer is as good or better than most most positions, for it affords me the possibility of being productive. Unfortunately, I don't really wish to be productive this morning. No, I wish to be lazy and comfortable.

So ... I'm not sure how I will spend the day's many, many remaining hours. One thing that I can do is share the following Nikki-Dee photo with you. Cuppa had been flooding the internet with all sorts of pics and descriptions, but she missed this photo, and it's one that I particularly like. I think of it as The Princess on Her Throne although it is plain to see that she's plotting some sort of mischief and about to depart said throne in order to commit mayhem.

If only I could find a comfy throne today, I'd stay there for a while. Really, I would. I'd plot no mayhem at all.

Grampa: Greenhouses and Horses

Previously, I told you how Grampa had become a grower on the Warlingham Estate (presumably), and he was never far separated from greenhouses and/or gardening thereafter. Even in his late seventies he worked for a Lady Gordon on the grounds of an estate in Montreal. On the day that he died in his eightieth year, he worked by cutting the grass for the man who lived across the street. That afternoon he suffered a heart attack and died at home several hours later with a doctor in attendance. (Note: so many scratches in the photo that I gave up trying to fix them and left it as is.)



However, I'm sure it was a much happier day when we visited at Christmas in 1947 (above) when I was three months old. Since Dad also followed in the greenhouse grower trade, I find the setting of the photo most appropriate. While I didn't inherit the grower gene, there was a time about ten years ago when I became very interested in gardening and planted a fairly nice perennial garden for several years. In my case, it was about learning and doing something and moving on, but these two forebears of mine made it their life's work.

The next picture has a sign that shows the location of all of the greenhouse photos in this blog (I think). I believe Royalview Nurseries was located in Ste-Thérèse, Quebec, outside of Montreal. That appears to be my grandfather on the far right, and he would have been about fifty years old at the time. I'm pretty sure the middle guy is the owner, Carl Luck. I remember him visiting our place near Toronto in 1963, a year after we had moved there from Montreal., and offering my Dad a job in Ste-Thérèse. I was pleased at the notion of moving back to the Montreal area, but my parents thought that Ontario was a better location for an English family. Perhaps if the job would have been right in Montreal and not in a mostly French town outside of the city they might have thought differently, but I doubt it, and I am happy with their decision.



The next two photos were also at Royalview Nurseries taken when I was two in 1949. I'm disappointed that I couldn't so something better with Grampa's face in the first picture, but it was incredibly dark in the original. I did my best to lighten it, but there was little to work with, and it looks pretty phony.





I often heard my father talk about Grampa's horses, particularly Bob in the first photo, 1917, pulling Grampa in a sleigh along a very snowy Montreal road. Bob's claim to fame was his reaction to the noon hour and five o'clock whistles. When the whistle blew, he would turn directly for home wherever he was.



I don't recall hearing any stories about Barney, shown in this very poor quality 1921 photo. It shows Grandad in the front middle and my father on the side.



I think that's almost all that I have to post about Grampa himself, but I think that I'll share some photos of his birth family in the near future.

Grampa: Flowers and Fords

It was more than three months ago, almost four months (good grief that's a long time!) in fact, when I posted two blogs about my paternal grandfather: On the Estate with Grampa and Some Memories of Grampa. At the time, I had meant to post an additional blog with the following photo and a few tidbits of information from the photo album, but life and other topics karoomed into Grampa's ancient path. But I'm sure he is/was okay with waiting; he's very patient these days, you see.


A note on the back of the photo says that grampa worked in the greenhouses on this estate which also employed 52 other servants. I am guessing that this was his start as a greenhouse grower, and he pretty well stuck with occupation, or it stuck with him, for most of the rest of his days. The photo is professionally done and in a cardboard frame that says J.S. Platt, The 'Primus' Studio, Warlingham on the front. According to Google Maps, a place called Warlingham lies to the south of London, but I can't be sure that it is the same Warlingham (whether the estate is in the same general location as the village or town of the same name), and Grampa seems to be unavailable for comment unless someone out there in cyberland has some expertise in communicating with the dearly departed.

I am able repeat two tidbits from oral history about Grampa's early years, one of them pertaining to this estate. Tidbit One: it has been recounted that when he had decided to emigrate to Canada, his Warlingham employer though so highly of Grampa that he said that if was a matter of money, that he would increase Grampa's wages. Apparently, it was not a matter of money. Tidbit Two: it is recorded in the photo album that Grampa set out or perhaps was sent out to earn a living when he was eleven years old. Although I seem to recall being told that he worked and boarded in a department store early on, the only written note declares that he first became an apprentice carpenter. Whether he held other jobs between carpentry and being a grower at Warlingham, I know not. I also don't know how it came about that he moved from the Cambridge area, about 80km north of London to Warlingham, about 20km south of London. It seems like a rather big move for the times, but I guess it pales in comparison with his later trans-oceanic journey to Canada.

Born April 11 1878, I can't be sure of the year of his migration to Canada at this time, but I can say that he seems to have held some sort of job in the forest industry in Quebec's Eastern Townships for at least one season. Also, although I may be repeating myself from a previous blog, my Dad often said that Grampa didn't even need to wear a heavy overcoat in his first Canadian winter. I've never quite understood why that might be so, but apparently it is sooth.

Also, from what I can gather, he never expended much energy in communicating with the folk that he left behind in The Old Country. As one of many children (sixteen, I think) who had go to work at such a tender age, it was told to me that he was pretty disgusted with people having so many kids that they couldn't properly take care of. But his sister, also later also migrated to Canada, and she may be responsible for most of the information that I do have through various pictures and notes in my mother's photo album.

What I can repeat is the information that he remained as a grower/flower designer for most of his life. He seems to have had an entrepreneurial bent, a trait that, apparently, hasn't been passed down. He owned his own greenhouse business in the Snowdon area of Montreal (see next photo). I would guess that he owned this place in at least some of the first half on the forties, perhaps beginning sometime in the thirties. My mother placed a note beside the photo, drawing one's attention to his topiary work outside the shop: chicken to left and basket to right.



He also bought a car/truck fairly early on. My dad often recounted how Grampa's Ford cost $600 and that Grampa was able to purchase it with cash. I have two photos, below, of vehicles although I am somewhat confused by the dates. The first photo with Grampa in the middle is captioned as Grampa's First Truck, 1935 but the second shows my father standing on the running board of another Ford truck in 1923.





It's time to cease this post, but I think there's still more to post at a later date.

Whaddyano?!

I must enjoy while I can. Doubtless it will say 82 tomorrow.

It's the Socks that Kill

For whatever reason, my back is spasming today, so I'm lying low — so to speak. It started last weekend, but didn't get too bad, as far as back attacks go, until last night. In fact, up until then I had thought this one was quite tolerable — relatively benign as it were. But it kept getting a bit worse as the week progressed, and now it isn't good at all. I don't know why it has to get really bad before it can get better, but that seems to be the way of it. It's a sore trial (so to speak) to get up and down, and when I'm up I must move gingerly. When the back is bad, the very worst thing is putting on socks. But I must because it's winter, and my feet are silly enough that I tend to require them even on the hottest day of summer. Yes, I agree, I'm a strange duck.

There's not much to do. I could read, but since I am fairly comfortable in my computer chair, I've decided to do some Tenth Month Nikki-Dee pictures. Perhaps, I could be accused of narcissism by featuring just her and me in this collage, but I don't think so. I just saw a bunch of photos of the two of us that I rather liked and thought I might as well make a collage with a theme. I'll totally leave myself out of the next collage. Promise.

Now, could somebody please help me with the socks?!

About the Brain

I have mentioned receiving a Nintendo DS Lite for Christmas. When Powerpuff was here last autumn, I was impressed with hers, so much so that the family bought me my very own for Christmas. The amazing little device can perform both rudimentary voice and character recognition, and I think that's pretty impressive.

On most days, I will play a game of Sudoku on the DS, and I find that I much prefer playing the game on the machine rather than on paper. Paper is messy, especially when I get to scratching out notations or changing my mind about an answer, but the DS makes it easy to erase neatly and keep myself well organized. And the box will tell me if I've made an error in real time, so I don't have to plod through the whole puzzle in order to find out that I've made a wrong turn. Mind you, the penalties are high for such a warning, for the DS assigns me a 20 minutes time penalty per incident. Sometimes, that's enough to more than double my time.

I have posted previously that careless errors are a bane, and that trend continues. Although I do find that I can now generally force myself to make fewer errors per game and sometimes none, there are still times when I say one thing in my head but enter the very opposite. Why that is, I'm not entirely certain, except to say that I am very poor at checking and proofing. Once I have something in my head, I tend to plunge ahead without further critical examination.

Although there exists a plethora of DS games, the only one that I personally play on the DS is Brain Age. In addition to Sudoku, there are training programs in Brain Age that are designed to stimulate one's prefrontal cortex and keep one's brain young — or perhaps less old. It can test the age of one's brain through three random tasks per test and then score the results by telling you that your brain is 24, 42 or whatever.

Currently, it informs me that my brain 37 years old. I have been scored lower (33 I think it was), but I confess to usually being pegged somewhere in my forties. While that's better than my actual age of 60, I don't fool myself into believing that my brain is 20 years younger than its true chronological age. No, that thing inside my noggin simply doesn't work as well as it did 20 years ago.

When I see younger people playing with Brain Age, I can't help but notice that they are quicker, especially when it comes to memory. One of the tests supplies us with a list of thirty random words, gives us two minutes to memorize them, and three minutes to list as many as we can. The best that I have done is 14 out of 30, but Thesha can easily recall more than 20. I also struggle with the other memory-type test when the DS flashes, and I do mean flashes, numbers in boxes in random order. I then must remember the order of boxes from lowest to highest. While I can usually remember sequences of four or five, I have trouble with six and anything beyond that is pretty well a toss.

The very easiest test for me is the syllable count. It's so easy for me that I can barely fathom why it's in the game at all or that it could not be easy for eveyone. It presents the player with some random phrase such as, A Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and the player must say 11. If s/he doesn't get it right, the DS will simply wait and wait until one does figure out the correct response. It scores on speed, and mine must be pretty fast in the this particular task because it scores me highly. It's very simple for me, and I assume that it must be so for everyone, but perhaps it isn't.

But I'm not terribly fast on any other test. I do well enough on arithmetic in terms of getting the correct answer, but DS doesn't ever rate me as being scorchingly speedy. Even when I feel like I'm going lickety-split, the DS disagrees and pegs me in the medium range. So, it's memory and speed that slow down as we age, or at least that's the case for me. While I can still process logically, it simply takes a little longer than it does for the kids.

It's new stuff that sinks in ever so slowly. My violin teacher notices it. As we discussed certain concepts during my last lesson, she mentioned that when she teaches something new to the kids, they tend to get it right away while the adults tend to stare blankly. And I have seen a similar thing with the daughters. When the A Team was visiting at Christmas, I could see how quickly their brains would fire when playing Cranium, for example. It was almost scary to see them flying ahead with a million possible answers while I was still trying to process exactly what was being demanded of me, never mind trying to think through to the elusive answer. Frankly, it was discouraging and frustrating at times. On the other hand, we played also Cranium with our similarly aged in-laws just recently, and we all seemed to process at about the same pace, and that comforted me somehow.

I'd be interested to hear what changes you notice as you age. Even if you are still much younger than I, you may already perceive some shifts. How do you feel about these changes: depressed, anxious, calm, indifferent, resigned?

Below: a typical night might very well see me wrapped in my blanket and playing Sudoku on my DS after I have tucked Cuppa in and read to her. If the stars align correctly, after playing I might turn out the light and curl up right there in my chair and drift off to sleep. Both the blanket and the Nintendo were Christmas presents, the blanket being picked out by Althegal. As you can see, it's quite unique, as is she. I think of her almost every time I see it or use it.

Barney, the Lost Bassett Hound

Just a week ago this morning, I took this photo through the cottage window. Minutes later an otter came gallumphing down the lane. Well, I at first thought it was an otter or seal because the gait of whatever it was seemed like the way those critters move on land.



But it was a doggie: a Bassett hound with very short legs that made it difficult to go through the snow. Isn't he cute?



He wasn't just cute but nice. A real cuddler.



But he was lost and without even a tag. So I donned my gear and set out to see if he belonged to the neighbours.


It's country up there, so neighbours aren't all that close, and I had to drive. I could distinguish dog tracks in the nearest neighbour's place, but they weren't home and the unshovelled snow informed me that they hadn't been home for some time, so I drove on to the next house, and it didn't belong to them either, but they sent me to its possible owner. Except it wasn't. It was, however, a local lady with deep roots in the area, so she began to call around. Meanwhile I called on several other locals, but no one knew the doggie, and animal control had no reports of a missing dog in our area.

What to do? We were going home the next day, and we're not able to take in a stray dog at this time, especially one who would have to be transported a long way in a very packed vehicle. Well, the local lady was willing to take him in as she searched for his owner whom she thought she would be able to track down. She already had three dogs, one a younger Bassett as it happens, so it wasn't a big deal for her to keep the one extra pooch for a little while.

Except, she couldn't track anyone down. Some folks claimed that they had seen the dog wandering down the road that morning, but nobody knows its origin, and nobody was exactly jumping up to claim Barney (our name for the little guy). I hope that he hadn't just been dumped and abandoned by some city person. I know that happens in the country sometimes, but surely not in the middle of winter to an almost legless dog?! It makes me sad to even contemplate that possibility.

Anyway, we dropped him off at Nice Local Lady's place and had reason to drop by again later that afternoon. He greeted me happily (see photo below) and Nice Lady reported that he was settling in fine and having a grand time with the other dogs. She said that if Barney didn't have a home, he now had one with her.



I hope Barney has a happy life whatever the outcome because he was a very nice, lovable little thing. There he is (above) at her place by my feet as I approached the house on my return visit.