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22
Dec
2021
Thursday December 9, 2021
The woman standing in line looked vaguely familiar. But because she was wearing a Covid mask, I could see only her eyes and forehead.
“Holly?” I asked, tentatively.
Her eyebrows shot up. Her eyes crinkled. “Jim!” she exclaimed, flinging her arms around me. (Take that, Covid!)
I find it hard to recognize people with half their face hidden.
In the old days, people used masks to cover other parts of their faces. The Lone Ranger and Batman wore masks over the upper half.
Now it’s the opposite.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: COVID-19, Masks, whole body
Sunday December 5, 2021
After two weeks of reporting on B.C.’s floods, evacuations, washouts, and landslides, the CBC’s David Common was asked for his personal reaction to what he had seen.
He paused to think. I could see him collecting his thoughts, to avoid rambling or repeating what he had already said.
Water, he said. The sheer power of something that most of us take for granted.
Indeed, most of us do take water for granted. We think of water as benign. Friendly. Necessary.
This last few weeks, water has gone out of control.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: water, BC, McLuhan, floods
Thursday December 2, 2021
I had a hummingbird around my house, last week. I shouldn’t have had a hummingbird at all – they migrated south more than a month ago.
But yes, a hummingbird was back.
One of my hummingbird feeders still had some sugar syrup in it that I, out of sheer laziness, had not emptied out. I didn’t believe my eyes when I saw this little hummingbird, wings beating invisibly, poke its beak into a fake plastic flower to sip some of the remaining nectar.
Then he/she/it flew over to my kitchen window. Looked in at me. Nodded acknowledgement. And flashed off to the mountain ash tree where it hunkered down, no bigger than the twig it perched on.
She was back again, the next day. So she wasn’t just an accidental, passing through.
Tags:
12
Sunday December 12, 2021
Things were just starting to get back to normal. Restaurants and drive-ins were open again. Sports events could have fans in the stands. People trapped in Canada for the last 18 months were booking flights to exotic locations.
And then the Omigod variant appeared. (Sorry, the OmiCRON variant). Some old rules were re-instated. Some new rules were imposed.
Suddenly, a return to “normal” -- whatever that is – looked a lot farther away.
I suggest that we’re kidding ourselves if we expect that the world is ever going to go back to whatever we once considered normal.
Tags: Rumsfeld, normal, pandemeic, Omicron
In the old days, people used masks to cover other parts of their faces. The Lone Ranger and Batman wore masks over the upper half. Presumably, if people couldn’t see your eyes, they couldn’t recognize you.