Erin's Journals

Monday, October 17, 2022

Just a thought… Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think. [Socrates (or an old ad for Labatt’s 50 ale)]

You can watch a video version of this journal on my Facebook page, or here on YouTube.

Welcome in. First, thank you for your heartfelt messages about my puppy love confession here last week. Almost to a person on social media, you were compassionate and had some helpful suggestions on Facebook to help ease this longing. Every one of them was appreciated. Oh, by the way, no cats are in our future; they’ve shared our lives in the past, but a family member has allergies. So on we go. Besides, as Rob reminds me, I have travels next month for work and then time away from BC’s wet winter in February.

Speaking of wet, when many Canadians think of Victoria, or Vancouver for that matter, they think rain, right? Wrong. Look at our forecast for this week.

It’s been glorious here in the westernmost part of the country this month. The weather on Vancouver Island has been unseasonably warm and sunny for weeks now with forecasts of sunshine and 20C or more in many areas, day after day. Up island in Gold River, it was 28 on the weekend, which is hot for summer here, never mind the second half of October.

Everything is crispy and dry and it’s hard to really be in the moment and enjoy the top-down days in our little MINI, when we know that something is terribly wrong. How can these days of blue skies and convertibles feel wonderful and awful at the same time?

Fire fears are real; yesterday we awoke to smoke (from Washington state, we believe) so thick we had to close out the beautiful temperatures from our home. We can only hope that people obey the fervent requests not to have fireworks or bonfires on Halloween, which are a thing out here. Of course, there’s always someone. It’s human nature, I guess. Seize the day and all that. Halloween only comes once a year, I’m sure they would say. But how long does it take to rebuild your life if your neighbourhood burns to the ground? And here in BC we’ve seen plenty of that.

You know me; I like to keep things positive. But I pity the people who warn us, who must feel like Cassandra of Greek mythology. She was given the gift of being able to predict the future (including disasters) but was also cursed with never being believed. Or as we call her today: a scientist.

So what do we do? We don’t give up. It’s the same reason why Rob and I are going to get our bivalent vaccine today. It won’t completely protect us from the new immune-resistant variants that are coming our way, but it may ease the effects if we catch Covid a second time. And if we’re really lucky, we’ll get a flu shot today too. Collect the whole set!

As in all things, we change what we can, we protect ourselves and our loved ones to the best of our ability, and we listen to warnings and to science, which focuses on facts, not opinions. Like the good scientists at NASA. I smiled at the recent success of the space agency shooting an asteroid out of its orbit, a dry run should one ever be on a course to destroy Earth. Why worry about a big ol’ rock coming our way when we’re doing such a good job of destroying Earth ourselves? Always worrying about outsiders taking their jobs!

Anyway, I hope this second half of October is good to you, whatever it brings. Me? I’m going to do my best to make the most of these warm and smoky days, remembering that we had a super soggy spring through June, and hope that perhaps Mother Nature is just making it up to us. Yes, that’s it – isn’t it?

Rob WhiteheadMonday, October 17, 2022