Erin's Journals

Just a thought… When life is sweet, say THANK YOU and celebrate. When life is bitter, say THANK YOU and grow. [Shauna Niequist]

Well, thanks to so many of you, we made it through another black circle on the calendar. Three more to come and then summer. And how about this picture sent yesterday by my friend Nancy who went to the bench in Sidney, BC we couldn’t visit because of self-isolation.

There, she left a perfect, beautiful bouquet which we received later. She even looked up the flowers in Lauren’s wedding bouquets and corsages. I mean REALLY? Tell me please you have someone in your life this kind, loving and thoughtful. When even family forgets, it eases the heart to know that there’s someone like her in our lives. And we are grateful.

We’ll do this – just as millions of people are managing their own troubles every day, around the world and in our neighbourhoods. Tomorrow is a #ThankfulThursday here. Like you, I continue to think about the front line workers, as I have been doing for weeks now. They are literally and figuratively the firefighters who run into danger while so many of the rest of us are safe, sheltering and anxious about the little and not-so-little things that keep us awake at night.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling extra anxious these days. The mere act of trying to order groceries online is just running headlong into a wall day after day. We’ll get through this. When isolation ends in 9 days we can only hope we’ll be able to get out to shop quickly and efficiently with gloves and plenty of distance.

We’re staying positive. We have food. We have each other, Rob and I, and Molly. We’re healthy, as are my Dad and sisters, relatives and friends and we have a beautiful place to call home.

Today, you’re going to see some of the view from this home (if the weather holds) and this face, too, if you can join me with Kevin Frankish at 7 pm EDT (4 pm here in Pacific Time) for a live chat as part of his nightly live broadcast. Kevin is, of course, everybody’s favourite former Breakfast Television host. 

It’s all about positivity and he calls it First Aid for Your Mental Health. There’s an episode here from Monday if you want to take a peek, to see what we’re going to be doing. Isn’t it a marvel that we can pull this off? (At least I hope that we can – we’ll cross our fingers.)

Just go to www.facebook.com/kevinfrankish and it should take you there; email me if it doesn’t. Again, it’s at 7 pm EDT and we’ll talk then.

In the meantime, as I was having a day yesterday (and you know why) – I got an email from a friend in Toronto who sent me this screenshot. I looked all day for a sign from Lauren (our medium friend Cyndi asked for one when she was out for a drive and saw three sand cranes – one apart from the other two – plus deer leaping in front of her car). Maybe David sending me this was my message.

I was humbled, amazed and grateful to see that Mourning Has Broken is a Staff Pick on the Toronto Public Library website e-book page. Thank you, David, for passing this along.

In the meantime, keep going.

Don’t let the dark thoughts in; don’t let the dark thoughts win.

Sobriety is hard but you’re worth it and I expect nothing less (she’d say).

And just keep spreading the message of “reclaiming joy,” no matter what.

That’s what I got yesterday. A stretch? Maybe. But today and always, we take what we can, and we are grateful.

Talk to you later today/this evening.

Just a thought… The world changes from year to year and our lives from day to day, but the love and memory of you shall never pass away. [Venny]

29 years ago today, we welcomed a baby girl who forever will be 24.

Today Rob and I will let this beautiful piece speak for us. Cello was one of Lauren’s favourite instruments to play, along with the piano, guitar and auto harp, with which she would accompany herself singing for hour-after-musical-hour in our home during her teen years.

I’ll be back here tomorrow. Take a moment to breathe, be thankful for those kids and grandchildren who are around the house and perhaps under your feet these days (if you’re extremely lucky) and enjoy this link to a piece posted on Facebook. It was one of our girl’s favourite songs and she performed it so beautifully.

How fortunate we were. Hallelujah, indeed.

Just a thought… Believe that all things are mentionable and also manageable. [Mr. Rogers]

Hello! Welcome to another week that is quite likely to feel like a month. We can do this.

To the most important things first: we’ve counted our toilet paper rolls and there are six. We’ll be fine. When we moved in three years ago we installed a bidet attachment in our bathroom, so that cuts down on paper use a whole lot.

I’ve been reluctant to tell you I have a bidet because that may well be TMI and might also subject us to judgment, but we’ve had them now the past four places we’ve lived. To some it sounds overly posh, but for many people (like in Japan) it’s as normal as having a sink. So there you go (just not in the sink).

Got a handy person in your house? You can order them online or get them at your big box hardware store. The heated seat is a lovely option, too. Saves having to get your servants to warm it for you first, as they used to do back in the day of stone toilets, like the ones we saw in Turkey on a trip a few years back. (You remember travel, don’t you?) 

As our travels ended and for obvious reasons, we didn’t bring booze home from California. Although Rob doesn’t have an allergy to alcohol like I do, he’s stayed solid in his support for me. I encourage him to imbibe when he wants, but he doesn’t want. But we did bring this.

Look at that low price! We bought it last year so that I could refill my little purse hand-sani for a trip to Vegas (whose strip was DARK Friday night for the first time since JFK’s assassination). Who knew this bottle would be more precious than Grey Goose vodka?

Speaking of which, there are lots of online meetings for those who are finding sobriety challenging these days. Now, more than ever, we need connection. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought well, maybe, but then I remember a million reasons NOT to drink, not the very least of which is that it compromises your immune system. Hugely.

I’m really tired of the constant tweets and memes about drinking. I get it. I haven’t lost my sense of humour (as you see by my posts). People want to escape and have an end-of-the-world party in their house every single day (that is, if they’re not stupidly having friends over)! But for God’s sake, it’s tough enough dealing with the everyday stress and anxiety.

I won’t, but I want to say Stop freaking tweeting about your wine/tequila/coronavirus cocktails and panicking over whether liquor stores are essential services. Some of us are just trying to get through this one day at a time.

I had a bit of an anxiety meltdown Saturday trying to find a store to deliver groceries; every one that has pickup (which we can’t do til the 2nd of April anyway – if we venture out then among the COVIDiots who refuse to take precautions) or delivery is several days’ wait.

Yesterday we got two angel drop-offs: Nancy and husband Charles from Sidney brought us five full bags from the grocery store. Right down to my Cadbury mini eggs! I could have cried. And then, there at our door were my aunt and uncle, who dropped off some flash-frozen fish they caught in northern BC last year. OMG! Halibut and chips tonight!

And just as I write this, another friend has offered to do our next grocery run. How lucky we are! We’ve offered the same to our neighbours who are in their 80s/90s and hope to be able to help them when we’re out and about. We all have to do our part and stay safe, keep a distance and yet build connections.

It hasn’t escaped our attention that knowing so very few people where we live (or at least knowing them well enough to ask for help or to expect an offer of it) has not been a good thing for us AT ALL. I always thought that if one of us was left here alone (permanently) we’d have few people to lean on.

Of course, I don’t think a pandemic figured into any of our “worst-case scenarios.” This is going to change a lot of people for good, and hopefully for the better.

I’ll be back here with you tomorrow, and thank you again.

Just a thought… In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep yourself busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive. [Lee Iacocca]

Anger? Nope. Energy? Oh yes!

This is day three of our self-imposed (and extremely necessary) isolation. It’s making my blood boil to read about people coming home from their vacations or winters down south and heading straight to the grocery store. My niece in Kelowna is one of those working to keep stores stocked. Can some people not think beyond themselves – ever?

One bit of wisdom I read said “Don’t act as if you have the virus; act as if I do.”

My angel friends here learned that a woman they had lunch with three weeks ago has tested positive for the coronavirus. She contracted it after they got together, so they’re in the clear (and since we were with them in California in the days right afterwards, so are we), but it simply drives home the fact that this is everywhere – including among us. People who should be self-distancing, and still are not, are playing with fire. And that’s people of ALL ages.

So….what are you up to? I’m keeping busy, while also spending too much time each day reporting bots on Twitter. (I guess this is where the anger, to which Mr. Iacocca’s quote refers, could come in.) They’re often easy to spot: they defend the orange Dear Leader, insult the media who are trying to get correct information to the people he’s lying to, and have a very recent Twitter join date.

The lazier ones of the estimated 30 MILLION bots out there also have no picture (unless they’ve lifted one from a real person out there somewhere) and their handles are followed by a string of numbers. That’s not to say that everyone without a pic and with just a bunch of digits is a bot; I’m talking about the automated spam accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and pretty much everywhere else, many of them created simply to disseminate lies.

I report and/or block them immediately but the spread of misinformation and your basic Faux News talking points – especially in these particularly perilous times – is infuriating.

Sure, there are those who believe Trump never said it was a hoax, didn’t downplay it from the get-go (as in two months ago when he got intelligence briefings) and is spouting hope and optimism instead of the doom and gloom of reality. He lies as often as he sniffs, and that – as you know – is a lot. And the daily attack-the-press conferences are simply rehashes of whatever he’s seen on Faux the night before or that morning.

Can all of this really be happening?

Anyway…back to being online, we’ve had time to do some searching and it appears that we can’t get groceries unless we call upon the kindness of friends or family: the stores that deliver are showing no openings for at least 9 days, which is pretty close to when our self-isolation ends (if we come out of it; who knows what the situation will be in a fortnight?).

Our freezer is full but I’m missing produce in a big way. Luckily our supply of snacks was limited to a half tub of frozen yogurt and some stale rice cakes. Last night we had quinoa that expired in 2015 (don’t ask me why we moved it with us in 2016 to BC). But at least it appears we won’t be gaining weight these two weeks. Thank goodness our angel Nancy is bringing us a few more supplies today. 

If you’re like me, you find part of the challenge is staying active without breaking self-isolation. How? Well, on Friday I logged 10,000+ steps on my FitBit (thanks, in part, to two lengthy phone calls). I walk while I talk and it’s a great way to add steps; when I sound a little breathy, I explain to people what I’m doing and to this point (at least as far as I know) no one has taken offence. At least I hope not.

Then I sat my butt down, wrote and recorded the script to go around an interview I did with marketing guru Terry O’Reilly for an upcoming podcast series for the Canadian Real Estate Association. So we got that got done. (I’ll let you know when it’s up so you can enjoy it; we’ve done it especially so that it’s not only of interest to realtors.)

Oh, and we binge-watched the entire second season of Barry on HBO on Friday evening. I think that was enough for the first day, don’t you?

You have a gentle Sunday – ours includes FaceTime with our sweet boy and his family who are safe and sheltered in Ottawa. I’ll be back with another journal tomorrow. Glad you’re here – glad we are together.

Just a thought… Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. [Bill Gates]

I don’t think I’ve ever done a Saturday journal. So let’s make it a good one. Or at least try!

First off, some observations from that travel day Thursday that I couldn’t fit into yesterday’s journal. And that was what happened on the Calgary to Victoria leg of the trip.

We boarded our plane in Palm Springs (which had carried just three passengers on the southern leg from Calgary) and were handed sanitizing wipes. A great welcome, to be sure! Seeing flight attendants wearing gloves, picking up trash with more frequency and so on, it came as a glaring contradiction when, on the shorter leg, there was none of that.

Even though many of us were transferring from international flights – as was obvious from the red, peeling skin and the straw sun hats – the domestic part of our trip was treated with no more precautions than any other flight we’d been on in our lives. No gloves, no wipes, no nothing.

I watched with interest (and a little horror, I’ll be honest) as a passenger who didn’t drink the bottled water offered to her in premium seating handed it back to the flight attendant, who kindly offered it to another passenger. That is EXACTLY how the virus gets passed. But there you go.

In response to an email yesterday from WestJet asking about our experience, I made careful note of the fact that the domestic trip we took had none of the overt precautions among passengers (gloves and wipes) that we had seen on the PSP to YYC leg.

It felt a little cruel to be complaining, with the impending layoffs of so many of the truly wonderful people at WestJet. But I had to point it out for the flights and passengers in days to come. And I can only hope they’ll extend the extra care to domestic flights that we were shown on the one out of the US. But why wasn’t it done?

The sense of humour among our terrific flight crew was still intact, even though I’m sure they knew that the ax was coming down soon, bringing thousands of layoffs. The woman on the mic forgot the First Officer’s name and laughed about it; later I told her I understood why she was stressed, and quoted this joke.

Not so funny, but something that made me smile in remembering it happened at Calgary Airport. We were sitting on a bench waiting for our luggage, so we could go through customs and prove that Molly had had her shots before we caught our Victoria flight. An older woman with sun-bleached hair, flip flops and a big frown plunked down on the bench with a tired sigh.

I asked where she was headed and she told me Alberta was her home. They were driving to Strathmore after she and her husband had collected their luggage, she explained. I said we were coming from California, which had just gone on lockdown, and she leaned over to me and told me what Justin Trudeau had done wrong: he hadn’t closed the borders soon enough.

I murmured something about WHO and diplomatic ties and she realized she wasn’t going to get the response out of me that she expected. (To be honest, I’ve been less consumed with Canada’s response than horrified by the US response – or lack thereof – that I’d been immersed in for the past several weeks.)

During the one-hour flight to Victoria, I found myself smiling. I hadn’t stood in my native province even thirty minutes before someone gave me their negative opinion of the PM. Sigh. It’s exactly the way it was when I was a kid in Alberta – only a different Trudeau.

So I knew I was home. And never have I felt more grateful to call this place home in my entire life.

Especially when this was the view that greeted us in our backyard yesterday. (I shot it quickly when DIL Brooke asked how it felt to be home. This summed it up, perfectly.)

I’ll be back with you here tomorrow. We Can Do This.