What have I been doing?

Friday December 11th 2020

Well its been quite a while since I have been able to just kick back and put my feet up, but that is just what I have been able to do, and I have been reading, and honestly I have missed just reading some good fiction, I have always found that when you get a good book you can almost just get lost in it for a day or two. But because we have always seemed to be busy during the summer, and to be honest I’m quite easily distracted as well, I really haven’t had a chance to just sit and read, so I started in early fall by listening to a few audiobooks, so I could continue working while I listened, while doing some of the more menial chores.

So my usual choice of reading is the normal guy kind of books, you know the type action mystery, the Jack Ryan, Jason Borne kind of action mystery, the real who done it kind of books, and of course with the coronavirus still keeping a lot of people at home with full and partial lockdowns, borrowing books from the library has been nearly impossible, and with our actual home base address being in Hamilton, and each library only servicing their own residents, borrowing books from a local library has never been an viable option, and me being as thrifty as I am, unless I can find a good used book store, I won’t pay the price to buy new. And as I age the old eyes are not as good as they used to be, so well before we hit the road a few years ago I down loaded an app called “OverDrive” and it allows me to borrow books electronically from our home town library in the form of “e-books” and the selection was only limited by the amount of “e-books” each library has purchased. Well when I first discovered the app we were still in our stick house in the Niagara region but the individual Niagara area towns didn’t seem to play well together so I was limited to the resources of our little local library. But because I was still working and didn’t have a lot of time to sit and read I spent some time listening to audio books while I was on the road back and forth between jobs. Now while my Hamilton address gets me into the Hamilton Library it also allows me into the Burlington and Mississauga Library system, so the availability is greater but because of the pandemic “e-books” are still hard to find so I have been placing a lot of holds on different titles, and when they are returned the library sends out an email saying I have two days to borrow the book before I lose my place in line. Well as in real life everything happens at once so we moved into our winter home, it took two weeks to get internet hooked up, and I have had about a dozen books come available all at once. You know the feast of famine thing so rather than lose the opportunity I have been very busy reading.

Now as far as winter goes, so far I think it kind of sucks, remember we sold or gave all our winter stuff away over three years ago. So now we have had a couple of snow falls already, at first I thought to myself that’s nice, it’s pretty, we took some pictures and the sun came out, and it just went away, that was even before the first of December. So now December rolls in and don’t we get a couple days of snow and then some blowing of the snow. The municipal trucks were plowing our street every few hours. Then all of a sudden it didn’t seem nearly as nice or pretty as that first snow fall did, so with just shy of two weeks before the official start of winter I am really missing Arizona big time. So Miss Laurie has purchased boots, I’m still holding out but I did break down and purchase a snow shovel to clear the driveway, again I remember selling our snow removal equipment at garage sales for a few bucks a piece, and now I clearing between 6 and 8 inches of snow off of the SportTrac to venture off to our local Canadian Tire to spend $28 dollars for a mid range snow shovel. So you would be real safe in making the assumption that I have already by the first week of December had enough “Canadian Winter” to do me for the next decade or so.

• 

• 

As you can see the snow was quite deep and real darn heavy, but of course the real treat came at the section of the driveway closest to the street where that dozen passes of the municipal snow plow trucks had left that special ten foot section of really really heavy hard packed snow. It’s that ten feet where most of the old farts have the big (heart attack) one, and as time keeps ticking back I keep falling deeper into that old fart category. Well I survived and of course in true Canadian winter fashion the snow has pretty much has melted and disappeared. So like any true grounded “snowbird” we had to immediately check the temperature of the area where we should been, in the first week of December and are both happy and horrified to see that Arizona is in quite a cold snap. Happy because it was only a few degrees warmer than here but also horrified because if the jet stream has dipped that far south, we know that cold weather is coming this way. We remember the desert nights a few degrees above of below freezing, but we also knew that by mid afternoon in Arizona the temperature will be back to shirtsleeve weather most days … here not so much … just saying.

But back to my books, I have taken on the task of reading my way through the whole Jack Reacher series of books by Lee Child, most of which have been on the New York Times Bestseller list, the author has a great talent for adding a lot of plot twists and turns to keep me captivated and I have been kicking through them at the rate of a book every couple of days, but I am starting to weaken as I find myself captivated and reading into the wee hours of the morning, night after night. But as I mentioned before I have placed a number of books on hold and some of those holds go back a few months. You see before I jumped into this latest series of fiction novels I was reading or listening to books that were aimed around President Trump. Now I know many of you will be shocked by that revelation, but quite honestly I was trying to find out why so many people generally and even some that I would like to think of as friends were so convinced that he was doing such a great job for the American people, because for the life of me I just didn’t understand what the attraction or fascination was. I understood the real desire for a non politician, I even said that before he was elected in 2016, in fact I remember in the fall of 2016 I was in South Carolina on a golfing trip and while speaking to Americans then, that believed he would be great for America. But I sill just seen him as a loud mouth on a mediocre reality show and I truly wondered then what the attraction was, of course the timing was just a few weeks before election day and all the polls were showing him finishing a very distant second behind Clinton.

Well just like most of the world I was amazed when he pulled off a victory and quite a decisive victory at that, and now as anyone in Canada will tell you, we know what happens in the States deeply effects our whole Canadian economy good or bad, and that certainly became very obvious very quick. I was one of the people that was hoping that maybe the whole campaign rhetoric would fade away and we would see this non politician, businessman actually rise up to continue guiding the great America recovery, I mean America was in far better shape in the fall 2016 than it had been in 2008 then Obama had been elected immediately after the financial collapse that had put so much of the world into a tail spin. But what emerged was a man that was so fixated on the size of crowds at his inauguration that he spent the first few weeks of his presidency acting like a talking idiot arguing white was black, and as our lives were getting closer to moving into the coach which meant spending five plus month in the southern states a certain quantity of worry was settling in, I mean he was picking fights with everyone about everything, but we just kept hoping for the best. Well after three years of the Trump administration and having met many people that had voted for him, I was still struggling to understand why? But it was a topic that was a definite flash point to many people for or against, so it quickly became a topic that we tried to avoid to keep peace in our small little world. So I thought to try to make this attraction a little more understandable I decided to read a few book around the Trump organization and then surrounding his rise to the presidency, the problem was the more I read the crazier the whole situation becomes. Going back through his life growing up as a kid right through to present day I read good about the man, and I read bad about the man, it is such a divide that it is amazing how one person could be that polarizing, like real extremes, bankruptcies, divorces, scams, frauds, the list went on and on then all the phsyco analyzing, it was truly a wild ride and at the end of it all, I still didn’t understand what or why. So now it is more than a month after the election and while he lost to Biden he still hasn’t accepted it which I am sure will bring on another round of books for me to read. And what is amazing to many people besides myself is the support that he still has, I understand supporting a party but its way more than just that. But I just received notification of the book by Mary Trump, that I put on hold months ago, so I must make some time to read it right in the middle of my Lee Child series, so I have a couple of weeks to switch back into the Trump mode for a few more books.

So as the coronavirus still rages on in the whole world, please stay safe and well out there!