Friday at last yet again. My horrorscope says that if I am fed up with my job, I should consider changing it. I am sort of weary, but I don't want to change, even if I could.

My foot was very sore this week and I have cured it by wearing sandals for three days and being very careful not to stub mu ingrown toenail. Cannot see my chiropodist until the 5Th.

My younger brother called and I promised to call the oldest about our ancient mother and whether we would be capable of taking care of her during our summer holidays in England.

I am part of the sandwich generation with still young children and very old parents, all of whom must be taken care of in various ways. My oldest has left home, but is always here. My youngest is staying until he has finished school and the middle one insists that we should house him so that he can save up to get his own place. He talks of buying his own car, a luxury I can't afford for myself.

As for my mother. She will be 94 at the end of the year. She does not have Alzheimer's, but does have much "hardening of the arteries" and slips in and out of reality. She is miserable in her old folks' home where she knows that she is surrounded by "no one that loves me". She recently referred to her first born in a photograph on her wall as "that man".


The dance studio and garden.

Sintra in Portugal.

This is a decorated tunnel entrance. I could not find any others. It is on the line from Hayward's Heath to Brighton which also has a spectacular railway bridge, which we found and photographed many summers ago. The tunnel was the site of one of the worst train disasters in Victorian times when one train slammed into the back of another due to signaling problems. Maybe the signal box was even in this castellated structure.A hot day at work reminds me that we will soon have to move in the same heat or worse and that the summer in England mercifully approaches. I almost killed a client last night by leaving him very drunk alone in the shower room, where he fell and hit his head. I was relieved that today he seemed fine.Fun to work yesterday and today with MT. I will not see MT until Monday. As usual, Tuesday rewarded me with being my favourite day, although last week was nice with Thursday off and I might aim for that in semi-retirement. Also attracted by the fantasy of opening a second hand book store as a book will soon be "an artifact of the past".

My main focus today has been juggling the needs of two clients at the hospital. Two, or even one year ago, this would have frazzled me, but today I seemed to know what I was doing with a sort of joyful ease. JB had a seizure this morning and could only barely walk, while being very confused as to which hand to hold his too large pants up with. As usual GM had to be transferred into a cab and into a hospital wheelchair at the other end. Then the triage nurse was, at first, sort of reproachful and insisted I stay with JB and GM's appointment was passing. So I got him up to the eighth floor and back to JB and then back to pick up GM and back to emerge to return his wheelchair to them. How smooth it is when you absolutely know what you are doing! I suppose I could not have gotten through it without some reassuring mantras that just pop into my head now. There was a woman in front of JB and I writhing around, (and not breathing "through" at all), evidently in horrible pain. She was rightly triaged ahead of us, although they took JB soon enough. They reproached us for not calling an ambulance. I saw my favourite triage nurse, but she did not see me. She is apparently Irish which came out as she was trying to comfort a fellow Irish woman sitting near us. When we walked in, it seemed deserted and within half an hour, it was a mad house. The paramedics wore pleasing yellow tee-shirts.

Home alone as today I had to drive out to Nobleton to get my teeth cleaned by "Pamela". Will return in October. On the way I stopped at Long Branch railway station and got schedules and cost for transport into the city. Not bad.

Many of the cars on our lane were parked and they are standard, neither rich nor poor, vehicles. Unrepaired, our vehicle will stand out as the most beaten up. Do we care what the Jones's think? Sometimes.

I called DM without much progress, but will call again tomorrow morning expecting some on D's word.

I also called Balfour Books. They were closed and I left a message which has not been answered yet. We are disposing of four boxes of books.

William stirring. I must go and move the car into the parking garage. I will miss that. I have whistled and sung many a happy tune in those echoy chambers and then the car was always snow-free in winter.

This is some memorial for an Australian war disaster, I think. I don't really know. I found it on Panoramico. Click on it: the details make it very special. If my father had drowned at sea, I would find it to be a moving and fitting memorial. I also like it as it is a mixture of sculpture and architecture.

Our great move is getting closer. So far we have thought mainly of books to sell or throw out before we move. Cathy has just booked movers at 129 an hour. The kids will help and that will reduce the hours taken to move. Minimum four hours.

Not a peep from DM's bunch and William is very worried about his school fees due on July 2nd. Will call yet again tomorrow.

Another nice day at work. I realised on Monday that I now look forward to working with both teams.

Writing this again after some glitch resulting fom having my eyes glued to the keyboard. I stopped taking beta blockers on Wednesday and am less tired but more shaky and sort of shaky inside as if I was jet lagged and food poisoned. I have not slept really well for two nights,perhaps because i stopped after six day of sleeping pills taken for a bad cold and very hot clammy nights.

We watched "Hollywoodland" last night which dissatisfied at the time, but lingers persuasively in the mind. Excellent everything except the general construction of the script.

Since Friday night we have eaten out at every meal on the street from stalls set up for the yearly "Taste of Italy" festival. College blocked off from Bathurst to Shaw, where the library is. Our new house will have a library just round the corner on Lakeshore and I have collected a fat wad of scraps of paper with things I want to read or listen to.

Good long talk with David again as I drove him home early this morning. Our minds are at about the same pace when he has been up all night and I am just getting up.
I am to ponder what would happen if America reduced tax revenue and doubled the minimum wage.

Above are my pictures for the day from the Settlement also known as Christmas Island.

I saw this dog yesterday as being available at the animal shelter and kept the image to show a client a larger image. I don't know the client's name, but he looks just like one of the characters in "The Never Ending Story". He says he's given up crack and bursts into tears at the memory of his cat which was taken away from him because, they said, he could not take care of it properly. If I was a cat, I would rather live with with a crack addict who loved me and sometimes forgot to feed me, than be taken to an animal shelter where I would be put down if no one claimed me after a few short days.




This is at the Southern end of the Northern line. It reminds me so much of my boyhood and also of dreams I still have of being frustrated by London transport.

Some Like It Hot

I don't usually like doggy pictures, but this one struck me as really cute.

I googled "evenmoresex" this afternoon and got right here. Now if I could just get google analytics to work.

Watching "So you think you can dance" as I type. Very tired at and of work today.

Went to see Dr F. No news from the sleep apnea clinic. Thing on my cheek to be referred to a dermatologist. Switching back from desipramine to Amytryptyline.

Cooked most of dinner, but Cathy washed up last night's and finished the sausages.

So this post is at work while it is all very fresh in memory. I took DF after lunch to the Eaton Centre, as usual, very slowly. He has diarrhoea, but would not listen to my advice to check into milk products, in fact he had a Baskins and Robbins while he was there. He had to detour via washrooms three times. As usual he talked a lot, listened very little and was incomprehensible to most of the salespeople. Nevertheless a very nice woman sold him Giorgio Armani eaux de toilette and a free tee shirt, (he had insisted that they were Oscar de la Renta and that they were sold downstairs in the men's department), then he went off to Shopper's where he pestered the staff with questions and on to Baskins and Robins where his pointing made it clear what he wanted. He is senile although younger than me. Still, it was a nice warm day. Dundas Square was all agog with people staring agog. Actually I was staring and noticed that most people on the street look like they are pretending that there is nothing special to look at except them. I did see some very fancifully dressed women and they made me smile, but they did not smile back. I saw DF and me in a few windows and we did look like a pair of circus tramps. I'm very big, much bigger than I feel and my straw hat gives me a promenade like look, but not the millionaire nonchalantly ambling along, but like some derelict from the Bowery in the thirties.

Another very hot day, although not quite so humid yet. William's air conditioner kept us cool enough last night although it was strange sleeping with our door open and our window closed. Cathy out to lunch with her best friend, Linda, today. All the butter in croissants and the Starbucks egg sandwiches have made me a bit too unwell again. Sad to have to give them up. Also I had stopped losing weight. Blah, blah, blah. It is not surprising that I have no readers. I'm boring even myself.



Holland

Very hot and humid yesterday and today. At last we have succumbed and we are putting in our air conditioners. Our new house will have CAC, my favourite feature on house listings when we were looking. At work the air conditioning was beginning to work, but I was asked by Richard C if I would like to take someone to the hospital and, probably for the first time ever, I declined. I retreated to my little sanctorum and slept fitfully for about twenty minutes. I had a cold all day, which got worse today, but I have slept so much, with a sleeping pill last night, that now I feel a bit better. Yesterday morning I took DF to the dentist again and lost my temper with him, calling him a stupid, obstinate old man when he insisted that he wanted to walk along Gerrard in full sunlight and without the opportunity of taking the College Street car, which I had gotten a ticket for, as we were late. At the dentist I met his wife, the dentist's, who painted two of the finest unrepresented pictures I have ever seen. I was going to show one through the window to Cathy this morning, but ran into an old client opposite the chiropodist's and drove him back to Namirez. He got on great with Cathy. She is such a special person. Some of my previous companions would have wormed out of using up part of our morning to help a homeless person.

David has almost exhausted me with an hour inveighing against "The Banks" and their "Fractional Reserve Lending". It seems the sixteenth century goldsmiths are to blame. At one point, when he claimed that some group cynically chose the acronym SOMA, because that was the drug which controlled the people in Brave new World, at that point, I said that he was being paranoid and he got more angry. Here is a picture of him fulminating against the money grubbers:

I took two clients out today. DF again to the dentist for 9.30 and KM out this afternoon for shopping again. DF was prattling away and I was neither pretending to, nor trying to listen to his interminable mumbling, when I suddenly hear him repeating over and over, "Are you listening to me?". I told him I was not, but that didn't stop his incomprehensible stream of consciousness all the way there and all the way back. Still I am fond of the old buzzard, although in years he is younger than I am. KM, on the other hand, is very easy to understand, humorous and a little paranoid. We sat in the Eaton Centre at the foot of the escalators watching all the people who weren't us. I had spilled half my lunch down my front and he looked pretty trampy too, which made us sort of invisible in that huge mecca to shopping. I guided him successfully to Converse All Stars and Adidas tee- shirts and he stayed with me until I found exactly what I had hoped to buy in underpants at Sears. He left me on the corner of Yonge and Dundas, I took the streetcar back and later met him in Allen Gardens on my way to the streetcar home. Despite his little paranoid obsessions, I like him. He now always asks for me to go shopping with him.

Tuesday, I once said in one of those surveys that bounce around the net, is my favourite day. Week ends tend to be times to look forward to, but there is always a danger of being involved in more than my usual minimal share of housework. The sheets on our bed get changed, the vacuum might be buzzing away and, although I get to sleep a whole lot more, (during the days), on a comfortable bed, I end up more exhausted on Monday morning than on Friday evening. So by Tuesday, the week is still fresh and I am as fit for anything as I will ever be. Also the name of the day sounds nice. Shrove Tuesday, Tuesday Weld, day of "tue", as in the French familiar for "you".

Finally called Sympatico and reordered security and a faster service. We are paying off the last 340 on the computer. Very nice agent.We jokingly complained about our adult dependants addicted to video games. Still, we are all addicted to something.



Iceland.

Tripped on my way into the parking lot. Cathy says I have to report it for a WSIB form to be filled in. What a bore. Falling was bad enough.








Back to work. I took DF to the dentist. He insisted that he walked faster, he's the one who went half a mile an hour down Dundas, and so we walked to Parliament across the park at first. He does walk quicker, without a walker, but still very slowly. It has been a perfect summer day. Only trouble is he talks incessantly and mainly incomprehensibly. I realised that my mother used to talk continually without editing her thoughts at one long period in her life and I wondered if that is why I sometimes do not listen to people and often fail to hear what Cathy has said, so much so that she suffers from feeling ignored by me. Anyway with DF I sort of tuned him out, but felt obliged to repeat the few words I did understand to make him feel that I was listening. At one point I knew that he was asking me a question, although I only had a vague idea of what it was. The dentist hopes to reconstruct his entire mouth starting tomorrow. I got lunch at the deli where we used to shop when we lived round the corner and very good free trade Ethiopian coffee, which I am drinking as I write. As usual I slept after lunch and again a bit after the one o'clock serving. Tom D woke me and we talked about Shakespeare and Hitchcock. He is a pleasant very natural and unaffected mixture of naive innocent and intellectual. I suppose I am too. He said he loved "the Lady Disappears".

We went furniture snooping today in that fine store on Dupont. David and a very well informed woman helped us and we decided to "think about it". Now we realise that we have two couches from the two youngest children anyway. We had lunch and it was very good at a little diner further down Dupont opposite the Home Hardware where we had almost successfully bought a new door for Matthew's room. I do hope he gets out of the habit of taking out his many frustrations on doors and walls. They are both so fragile here. I myself, back in the tempestuous eighties, once punched a wall in anger and was incredibly surprised to see my fist disappear into the wall. We covered the hole with a small painting. I just phoned Kim who, as I do, had to go and cook dinner, despite the time difference. Our mother is not well, not eating and not thriving. Old age is a crock.

Slept very well although I felt not long enough when Cathy woke for tea in bed at eight. It is now six weeks since my sleep apnea test and I have not heard from my doctor. I have gone back to one betablocker a night and do not feel as sleepy during most days. I still often fall asleep bolt upright in a not very comfortable chair after lunch. I went to two betablockers about two weeks before the wedding so that I would not be embarrassed by the trembling hand. It worked well.