Sea of Flowers

I haven't been writing much. The blog was working fine for the most part, but was acting oddly. A few weeks ago I was unable to write or edit entries in Opera, which was probably more related to the way Opera handles Java scripts than anything in MT. That seems to have gone away with an Opera upgrade and a reinstall of Java.

I began some MT upgrades a coupe of weeks and got stalled on the upgrade path. I refeshed MT templates, which lost some of the features in the sidebars on the blog pages. Then I tried to install MT 5.01 and found that I had to run a clean install. At that point I got lost on the upgrade path until I remembered - basically learned again - some of the server side file structure. Once I figured out which folder was my Web Root, I got the uploaded files in the right directories and CHMOD-ed and got the mt-configure.cgi file reading right. I have to go back and edit some templates to get some content back on line but it's on track again.

My mother died last Friday. She was 82 years old. She has had Alzeimer for several years and has been in a care home since June 2008. She had asthma for many years and she had been having increasing difficulty breathing, late stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I visited Winnipeg in October last year and at the end of January this year. Considering the course that her illnesses were taking, and her pain, confusion, and distress, the end of her life was inevitable, painless and not too soon.

My sisters and brothers in Winnipeg have managed to cope with the issues of my mother's terminal illness and my father's decline and psychological collapse with much hard work and many tears. Dad is in the care home. In the last couple of months before mother died, he was failing in self care and unable to change the course of mother's illness. He was getting disconnected with reality, although I think his love and affection never wavered.

He seems to have become more lucid, but much sadder after the funeral today.

He has mentioned some old stories that I had never heard before, and would not have understood when I had less lines on my face.

His mother had visited from Holland in the early or mid 1960's. My father had not gone back to Holland when his father had died, and he had tried never to look back on his decision to move to Canada. His mother had told him, he remembered, that his mother had reservations about Rosa. She was older than him and "bossy" which was probably a way of saying what we might call needy, as she was always emotionally expressive, and defensive of her self-regard. He said that his mother had tried to say that she was surprised at how well Rosa was doing as a wife and mother, but he had found the remark hurtful and always resented it.

With his memory of his response to his own father's death, he is reconciled to the fact that I am not being demonstrative in my grief and that my grief is quite different than his own.

My brother in law Joe accepted the task of delivering a eulogy at the funeral. I did not myself to get through it without tears or without hinting at family secrets. He spoke well, emphasizing on the positive elements of her last few years. She became a happier person, more "in the moment" more content to take and give a smile and thumbs up and to wish anyone well with "keep up the good fight". I told him that he had found the right picture and captured her strength as a mother.

Since my move to Victoria, I have tried out and adopted some appliances and discarded others.

I started with a new set of Paderno stainless steel pots - purchased cheaply in 2006 when Canadian Tire dropped the Royale sets. I have added another sauce pan and the steamer and double boiler (not Royale but who cares). Capital Iron carries Paderno in Victoria. I expect the saucepans and the dutch oven to last for a while. The coated frying pans are standing up well although I think the coating in those pans will break down long before the pans wear out.

I bought a larger enameled cast iron dutch oven at Capital Iron which has become one of my favorite pots.

I started with some decent knives - some with the Superstore house brand and some of the midrange Wusthof Tridents.. I bought a couple new knives last year - I went to Mac for a 6 and a half inch Santoku and a 10 inch chef's knife. The steel is superb - it stays sharp enough for ripe tomatoes with a few strokes of a chef's steel.

This year I broke off with dragon-boating. It was initially a conflict with the manager of the Club program over a protocol and has become a longer break. Some paddlers paddle dragon boats every summer from May to August. I have enjoyed the evening practices and the frantic transformation of couch potatoes into weekend warriors, but I have let it go.

I paddled Outrigger canoes (OC) through the winter, one or twice a week. In the spring, I paddled in some spring races and some longer races. It has helped me to stay active but I have not trained enough to consider myself a fit or strong paddler. I had hoped to paddle more this summer but many paddlers give up OC for dragon boat or to take canoe or kayak trips. There are a few diehards so we have been getting out about once a week. Dragon boat is winding up and there are going to be some races this fall, so I might get on a team and get into some tougher training.

I have been cycling more this year than last year. I haven't done many evening rides, but I have been getting some long rides in on weekends. I have had some work done on one of my bikes. I had upgraded some components on the Giant in 2004 but made the serious mistake of putting on 175 mm cranks. This may have been contributing to strain on joints, pain and fatigue. It may play a part in the stiffness in my right hip. We will see.

In December last year I agreed to travel to Winnipeg to accompany my dad to the hospital for his surgery for hernia. He had the operation in January. It disrupted his routine of visiting mother in the nursing home for a few days, but he was back at it. He realized that his needs to visit and be with her had been putting a strain on his family - specifically my sisters, who had been picking him or taking him home. He agreed to apply to be placed in a nursing home - on strict condition that it would be the same home as mother. He was surprised when his application was approved quickly. He had been underestimating his frailties.

He moved when a room became available. He is on the same floor in a different wing. He visits mother and tries to anticipate her needs and wants, and to provide care that the staff can't provide. This tires him out, because his ideas of what she needs and deserves are not the same as everyone else's, and he reacts to her smallest gestures. As her behavior is impulsive, this can be frustrating for him.

He says he is happy. He is busy with his efforts to help mother. He turned 80 in June. I visited at the end of June.

My story about my musical year starts with a short term obsession about a song.

The CBC broadcast a story about the popularity of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in Britain on the National (TV news) on the Friday night before Christmas. The CBC was interested because the writer was a Canadian. The story was that two different versions of the song were topping the British charts in the week before Christmas. For the last few years, some kind of Christmas themed piece has topped the charts. There is no Christmas list as such, and the charts continue to track the popularity of modern popular music in Britain, on sales.

The milestones of life ...

Over the last 6 weeks I spent more time than I want to think about trying to get a new Satellite (Model A200, or A200-03V, specifically PSAE3C-03V08C) to run an alternative OS to its pre-installed Windows Vista. The laptop was attractively priced, perhaps because it was pre-loaded with Vista, as much as the fact that it was being cleared out for newer models. I think these models were engineered for XP and thrown on to the market with Vista drivers when Microsoft terminated its OEM licencing for XP installations, forcing computer manufactures to pre-install Vista.

Given the resources of the system - processor and memory - it falls short of what it seems to take to run Vista, and running Vista has other drawbacks.I wasn't sure about changing to XP although that is the route I took in the end. One problem, for me and many users is having to buy XP off the shelf. There is a cost factor, and even if I had owned a valid working copy of XP, I needed to get working drivers for the hardware in the Satellite to complement the install set and complete the installation. Another potential problem is losing the recovery functions that Toshiba builds in with its HDD Recovery Utility.

Back in January, I ran the upgrade to Movable Type 4.1. The developers made a number of moves to make MT more attractive to personal users including changes to let personal users migrate from Word Press and to port Word Press Styles to MT. The management of pictures and content has become easier with the ability to upload and manage "assets" and then use the assets in the blog.

I haven't used it much. I have been busy at work, and spent more my personal time reading and pursuing other things.

Jennie Bristow, reviewing Sarah Moore's Ribbon Culture for Spiked, nails the self-obsessed culture of advertising one's moral quality by fashion accessories. Her review is called Untying the 'ribbon culture'. The moral virtue of wearing ribbons is to show awareness or solidarity with a group of victims. Being a victim has become a way of attracting attention, building political support, explaining the lack of joy in one's life, and selling media product. Cry, cry, cry. Frank Furedi's column about faked victim memoirs, History-as-Therapy, complements the ribbon piece.